Search Results for: rail projects

Durham: Forward into the Past

By | | Transportation
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Duke University has until tomorrow to agree to donate land to the Durham light-rail project, or the project may die. As a result, project supporters have been trotting out advocates who claim that light rail will benefit the community.

Interestingly, none of those benefits have anything to do with transportation. In particular, some leaders of the black community think that light rail will help revitalize their neighborhoods. In fact, at best it will do nothing for those neighborhoods; more likely, it will lead to subsidized gentrification pushing black residents out.

Ironically, the neighborhood they hope to benefit is one that was previously damaged by past urban-renewal projects. Somehow, it hasn’t occurred to the black leaders that the local government’s plan to tear down existing homes and building expensive transit-oriented developments will be more likely to harm than help the current residents of the neighborhood. Continue reading →

Brightline Noise

By | | Transportation
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There’s lots of noise coming from Brightline, the company that is operating private passenger trains between Miami and West Palm Beach, with a goal of eventually reaching Orlando. Yet underneath the noise it appears nothing is really happening.

First, last September, Brightline bought XPressWest, a company that has gained permission, but not much funding, to build a high-speed rail line from Las Vegas to Victorville, California, because apparently a lot of people in Victorville (population: 121,000) have to get to Vegas really fast. Brightline supposedly paid $120 million for XPress, but it isn’t clear what it got for that money since XPress didn’t really have any assets other than building permits; most likely Brightline paid the $120 million in some sort of securities.

Second, a couple of months later, Richard Branson’s Virgin Group purchased a “minority interest” in Brightline. Branson has a lot of nice things to say about Brightline and Wes Edens, the co-founder of Fortress Investment Group and the lead supporter of Brightline. Continue reading →

Honolulu to Cover Up Overruns with PPP

By | | Transportation
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Oxford has added a new word to its English dictionary: hammajang, which means something is “all messed up.” The word comes from Hawaiian pidgin, which is appropriate considering how messed up Honolulu’s rail project has become. Originally expected to open this year at a cost of less than $3 billion, the current projected cost is more than $9 billion and, since they don’t have funds to complete it, it probably won’t open until 2026 at the earliest.

The latest news is that the FTA has subpoenaed the Honolulu Authority for Rapid Transit (HART) for inside documents to find out what is going on. Meanwhile, HART wants to form a public-private partnership to build the last four miles. The private partner would raise the funds for construction and, when it is completed, would operate the entire 20-mile rail line. In exchange, the city would pay the private partner hundreds of millions of dollars a year for 30 years.

No one thinks the private partner will be able to save taxpayers any money or operate the trains more efficiently than HART itself. Instead, this scheme will save HART from having to raise the funds to finish the line itself. The city can’t afford it; the state can’t afford it; the feds won’t pay any more than they have already promised. So get a private partner to borrow the money — a debt that won’t appear on HART’s books — and simply repay the private partner out of future tax revenues. Continue reading →

She’s No Alexander Hamilton

By | | News commentary, Transportation
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The Antiplanner might be behind the times, but has anyone else noticed that it is the Democrats who are playing the role of Alexander Hamilton — the conservative who wanted to centralize government and concentrate power in New York banks — while the Republicans are playing the role of Thomas Jefferson — the civil libertarian who wanted to keep economic and political power decentralized? I always wondered why Lin-Manuel Miranda picked such a conservative historical figure to be the hero of his left-leaning musical.

Now we know. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Green New Deal is going to cost tens of trillions of dollars, but she just blithely says we’ll pay for it “the same way we paid for World War II”: “The Federal Reserve can extend credit to power these projects and investments and new public banks can be created to extend credit.”

That’s not how we paid for World War II. Instead, we borrowed money from banks and people that had money. Alexander Hamilton knew just creating a bank doesn’t suddenly give it credit; instead, there has to be assets or income backing up that credit. Continue reading →

The Money Pit

By | | Transportation
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Last month, the Department of Transportation announced 2018 “BUILD” grants totaling $1.5 billion. BUILD, which stands for Better Utilizing Investment to Leverage Development, is the successor to TIGER, which stood for Transportation Investments Generating Economic Recovery. TIGER was a part of the 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act and should have ended after the economy had recovered. But Congress had so much fun spending other people’s money that it simply renamed the program and kept it going.

The 2018 BUILD grants include 91 projects in 49 states — only Hawaii got left out — including such things as highway expansions, bus-rapid transit, port facilities, and autonomous vehicle services. Regardless of what they are, virtually all of the projects are local and should have been funded locally and not out of federal deficit spending.

One project the Antiplanner is familiar with is the Coos Bay rail line, which goes west from Eugene, Oregon to Florence, and then south along the Oregon Coast to Coos Bay, then east to Coquille and (at one time) Myrtle Point and Powers. The Myrtle Point/Powers rails have been torn out but the rest of it remains. Continue reading →

Chicago-St. Louis HSR Is a Dud

By | | Transportation
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When President Obama announced that high-speed rail would be a part of the 2009 economic stimulus program, Illinois immediately applied for federal funding for a high- (really moderate-) speed rail route from Chicago to St. Louis. According to the application (54 megabytes), the state would double track the existing line, owned mostly by Union Pacific, and run trains at up to 110 miles per hour. It would also increase the frequency of those trains from five to eight per day.

The state predicted that ridership would more than double from 521,000 trips year in 2008 to 1,210,000 trips in 2014, the first full year of operation. By 2018, the fifth full year, ridership would further increase to 1,339,000. (The application is actually inconsistent about how many riders were carried in 2008; page 33 says 521,000 while page 59 says 881,000. According to Amtrak, it was 476,000.)

So how well has that worked out? According to Amtrak’s FY 2018 performance report, ridership on the Chicago-St. Louis trains had grown to 586,200 trips in 2018. That’s 23 percent more than Amtrak’s number for 2008, but 56 percent short of the projected ridership. Continue reading →

Korea Shuts Down High-Speed Airport Train

By | | Transportation
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Korea recently decided to terminate its AREX (Airport Railroad Express) train service from Seoul to Incheon Airport. This service began in 2014 as one of the projects for getting the country ready to host the 2018 Winter Olympics. International passengers could leave the Incheon Airport (which serves Seoul) and take a KTX (Korea Train Express) train about 100 miles direct to PyeongChang, where the Olympics took place, on a new high-speed rail line built to that region.

Korea’s KTX trains were based on French TGV designs; the first ones were built in France while later ones were built in Korea under license to and using many parts imported from France. Wikipedia photo by Subway06.

After the Olympics ended, however, ridership on the airport line dwindled. The 44 trains a day (22 in each direction) carried an average of 78 people. Since the trains had well over 300 seats, they operated just 23 percent full, and were most heavily used on weekends while weekday trains were nearly empty. If all of the train passengers were air travelers, they accounted for less than 1.5 percent of people arriving or departing from Incheon Airport. However, it is likely that many of the rail passengers were airport employees, not air travelers, which means the train probably carried around 1 percent of airline passengers. Continue reading →

Why Public Transit Is Crumbling

By | | Transportation
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Someone over at the Nib has a lengthy explanation of why public transit is crumbling. Apparently, it’s due mainly to the Koch Brothers and the Antiplanner. While it would have been more realistic picturing me on a bicycle than behind the wheel of a car, I am nonetheless flattered; yet the reality is a little bit more complicated.

The article — okay, it’s a web comic — suggests that transit can somehow transform cities into clean, healthy, crime-free paradises. Light-rail lines, the authors suggest, fall short of this dream because they generally don’t have a dedicated right of way and therefore “aren’t fast or reliable and don’t carry enough passengers to reduce traffic.” Thus, they explicitly endorse “rapid transit,” meaning bus or rail lines that have their own dedicated rights of way.

While transit had an impact on American cities before the automobile became ubiquitous and more recently has had similar impacts on cities in developing countries that still have low rates of auto ownership, there’s little evidence that dedicated transit lines can transform auto-oriented cities. Indeed, heavy investments in transit have had negligible effects on cities other than by increasing the tax burden on their citizens. Continue reading →

VTA Faces $25 Million Deficit

By | | Transportation, Urban areas
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The Santa Clara Valley Transportation Authority (VTA), which the Antiplanner has sometimes called the nation’s worst-managed transit agency, is facing a $25 million deficit next year, which will probably lead to service cuts. As the Friends of Caltrain (the commuter rail line that connects San Jose to San Francisco) note, the elephant in the room is whether VTA should go forward with its plans for billions of dollars of capital projects when it can’t afford to run the system it already has.

Friends of Caltrain doesn’t specifically say so, but the real elephant is VTA’s plans to extend the BART line to downtown San Jose. VTA is “97 percent complete” building a 10-mile line from Fremont to Berryessa (a neighborhood in north San Jose). This line, which is costing $2.3 billion, was supposed to be open at the beginning of 2018, but thanks in part to a scandal over a contractor’s use of used parts in construction, the opening has been delayed until late 2019. (An update from Friends of Caltrain says the VTA board was willing to look at capital projects, but still did not specifically mention BART.)

Extending the line another 6.5 miles to downtown San Jose is expected to cost another $4.7 billion, or more than $720 a mile, mainly because much of it will be underground. VTA expects to ask the Federal Transit Administration to cover $1.5 billion of this amount, leaving local taxpayers to cover the rest. If this project is ever completed, BART riders arriving in downtown San Jose are likely to find a stripped-down transit system that probably won’t take them where they want to go if it is more than a couple of blocks from the BART station. Continue reading →

The Antiplanner’s Library
Trains, BRT, People — But Don’t Count Costs

By | | Book reviews, Transportation
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Christof Spieler was on the Houston Metro board of directors for eight years, so he thinks he understands transit. Unlike many transit advocates, he is willing to admit that some transit projects, such as Nashville’s commuter train, Cincinnati’s streetcar, and even the St. Louis light-rail system, are failures. “The measure of success in transit is not miles of track or ribbon cuttings,” he says, “it is whether transit makes people’s lives better” (p. 1).

But while his book is called Trains, Buses, People, it almost completely ignores bus service unless that service uses dedicated lanes. Instead, it reviews transit service only in the 47 cities that have or are building either rail transit or dedicated bus lanes. Cities that don’t have these things are ignored. For example, the book devotes several pages each to transit in Austin, Dallas-Ft. Worth, and Houston but leaves out San Antonio, even though San Antonio transit carried more trips per capita in 2017 than transit in any of the other three Texas urban complexes. Continue reading →