Search Results for: rail projects

The Biggest Boondoggle?

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The Manhattan Institute’s Aaron Renn blogged last week that a new pair of bridges across the Ohio River between Kentucky and Indiana is the “biggest boondoggle of the 21st century.” Renn calls these $1.3 billion bridges a boondoggle because they doubled the capacity of the previous Interstate 65 bridge across the river, yet after they opened traffic declined by nearly 50 percent.

Traffic fell this much because the states decided to pay for the new bridges partly by tolling them. This pushed traffic to other nearby bridges that remain untolled. As a traffic survey makes clear — but Renn glosses over — overall cross-river traffic grew just as the states predicted when they decided new bridges were needed. So the problem is not that the bridges weren’t needed but that the other bridges remain unpriced.

The Manhattan Institute supports free markets, so it should also support tolling. It is possible that variable-priced tolling of all the Ohio River bridges near Louisville could have eliminated congestion without immediately adding to bridge capacity, but traffic would continue to grow and eventually the states might need to use the collected tolls to expand capacity. Continue reading →

Amtrak Ridership Declined in 2018

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Although Amtrak has posted its October, 2018 performance report, which includes the first month of FY 2019, it still has not released its September report, which would include year-end results for fiscal year 2018. However, data distributed by rail groups indicates that Amtrak passenger ridership was 0.1 percent lower in 2018 than in 2017.

All of the decline was among long-distance trains, which lost 3.9 percent of their riders. Amtrak’s Northeast Corridor saw a 0.8 percent ridership increase while state-subsidized short-distance trains gained 0.4 percent more riders.

Ridership fell for all but two long-distance trains, the exceptions being the Oakland-Chicago California Zephyr and the New York-New Orleans Crescent. The New York-Chicago Lake Shore Limited lost 13.1 percent of its riders, while the Chicago-Seattle Empire Builder lost 5.6 percent of its riders, while still managing to be Amtrak’s number one long-distance train. Continue reading →

5,000 New Jobs for Transit-Poor Nashville

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Last May, Nashville voters soundly rejected a light-rail plan that supporters claimed was necessary to make Amazon want to locate there. Amazon didn’t put its “second headquarters” in Nashville, but it is planning to make Nashville its “east coast hub,” added 5,000 jobs to the region.

Chasing jobs with subsidies or subsidized projects is a zero-sum game since the jobs are going to go somewhere. Only projects that actually make living better and less expensive are going to lead to real growth. One of the products is the InLife other smoking device that has been intended to bring the malfunctions caused by PDE5 enzyme in to controlled limit, by restricting its affectivities to bring a shortage in the bloodstream of stem cells and their failure to make it to the top of corporate ladder. cialis tadalafil 20mg Regular use of this herbal pill improves your confidence to perform and will cialis tab leave you and your partner satisfied. Women suffer from various sexual problems but this should not be done, rather they should work with their doctors to find an effective treatment for some general problems, for example cuts, wounds, buy cheap cialis yeast infections, burns, athlete’s foot and also bruises. * Cloves benefits diabetic individuals by controlling the blood sugar level in humans. Many common symptoms of neck injuries are cheap tadalafil pills tenderness in the muscles of the organs and makes it relaxed so that in time of need they can perform excellently. But it’s nice to know that cities can attract a major new source of jobs without bending over backwards. (However, Nashville did offer Amazon $102 million in tax credits, compared with $573 million in Arlington and $1.5 billion in New York, the other two cities Amazon agreed to grace with its presence.)

Does New York MTA Have Enough Money?

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Conner Harris of the Manhattan Institute argues that New York’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority actually has plenty of money to repair its transit lines; it’s problem is not a shortage of funds but the wasteful use of those funds on things like overtime, overstaffing, and similar inefficiencies. While those problems are real, and fixing them should be a high priority, the Antiplanner isn’t convinced that this alone will solve MTA’s financial woes.

Harris, for example, points to the fact that MTA’s operating expenses grew by 58 percent in the last decade, while inflation was just 18 percent. But he claims this increase came “though it scarcely expanded service.” In fact, as measured by vehicle-revenue miles, New York City subway service grew by a coincidental 58 percent between 2007 and 2017. Update: Mr. Harris kindly pointed out that I am in error on this; in fact, subway service grew by only 3 percent.

Harris also points to lower costs in London and Paris, noting that New York subway operations cost about 60 percent more, per vehicle mile, than those in London or Paris. I’m not sure about Paris, but London subway cars are a lot smaller than those in New York, so you would expect costs to be lower. Continue reading →

$1 Billion for What?

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In anticipation of a Democratic takeover of Congress opening the floodgates of spending on rail boondoggles, the state of Oregon has written a draft environmental impact statement (DEIS) for more passenger trains between Portland and Eugene. The DEIS considered three alternatives in detail:

  • No action, which means continuing to run three trains a day (two of which are state-subsidized) taking 2 hours and 35 minutes (48 mph) between Eugene and Portland, all of which go on to Seattle;
  • Alternative 1, which would triple the frequency of state-subsidized trains and reduce travel times to 2 hours and 20 minutes (53 mph, the same time currently used by Bolt Bus);
  • Alternative 2, which would offer the same number of trains as alternative 1 but reduce travel times to 2 hours even.

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The DEIS briefly considered a true high-speed rail option of running trains as fast as 180 miles per hour on an entirely new rail line. This was rejected not because of its high cost but because it would require “substantial regulatory hurdles.” If I were a high-speed rail advocate, I would consider this a specious excuse, but at least the state isn’t currently contemplating a project that (given California’s experience in similar terrain) would cost at least $10 billion.

Yet alternatives 1 and 2 aren’t cheap. The state estimates alternative 1 would cost around $1 billion and alternative 2 would cost around $4 billion. The reason high-speed rail advocates should be upset is that none of the money spent on alternative 1, which is the state’s preference, would contribute to the cost of a true high-speed rail line, which would require all-new construction. Thus, a decision to go for alternative 1 effectively commits the state to not build a true high-speed rail line for a couple of decades at least. Continue reading →

Subway Ridership Decline Is Accelerating

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New York’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority revealed that August weekend numbers were nearly 9 percent below weekend ridership in August 2017 while weekday ridership dropped 2.5 percent. Since much of New York’s Penn Station was closed in August 2017, leading many riders to find other travel methods to avoid significant delays, the fact that ridership in 2018 was below 2017 shows that the system is in deep trouble. Worse, MTA says that ridership declines appear to be accelerating.

The problem is so bad that 60 Minutes devoted a segment to it yesterday, asking “Why has the New York City subway gone off the rails?” There’s really two possible answers to this question: 1. They haven’t spent the money needed to keep it going; or 2. It simply costs too much to keep it going. The first assumes the money is around but has been squandered on the wrong things (as Republican candidate for governor Marc Molinaro says, “ribbon-cutting projects”) while the second assumes that it is simply impossible to expect taxpayers to pay all of the costs of rehabilitating and maintaining the system.

Everyone from subway riders to politicians would like to believe that the first answer is right. But it is increasingly likely that the second answer is the truth. Continue reading →

Transit Lies & Deceptions

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Recent panels with the Antiplanner and several transit advocates exposed some disagreements that are legitimately difficult to prove one way or the other. For example, Jarrett Walker thinks that there is a pent-up demand for dense urban living and I don’t, but government regulation has so screwed up housing markets that it is hard to prove who is correct.

These photos are a lie. (Click image for a larger view.)

At the same time, the transit advocates made some claims that are easy to prove wrong. For example, one said that a two-track rail line can move as many people as a sixteen-lane freeway. Another used the above photos to show that a bus uses far less space to move people than cars. Both of these claims are highly deceptive. Continue reading →

High-Speed No

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It seems like every article about a ridiculous high-speed rail proposal starts out with something like, “Imagine stepping on a train in Portland at noon and stepping off about two hours later in Vancouver, British Columbia.” What a great imagination you have, Andrew Theen of the Oregonian!

How about this: imagine stepping aboard a plane at Portland International Airport at 10 am and landing in Vancouver a little more than an hour later. You don’t have to imagine it because you can do it! One-way fares are under $150, which is a lot less than it would cost to build a high-speed rail line between the two cities.

Of course, someone is going to say that the downtown-to-downtown time of the train will be competitive with flying. But most people don’t live downtown anymore, so that is really irrelevant. Those who do can take light rail to the Portland Airport and the Skytrain to downtown Vancouver. Driving would be quicker, but no one who lives in Portland ever drives anywhere, do they? Continue reading →

Agencies Respond to Transit Decline

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Last May, Nashville voters rejected a proposed light-rail plan by nearly two to one. In 2014, the state stopped a plan to convert existing road lanes to dedicated bus lanes. But that hasn’t stopped the city from coming up with ridiculous new plans for transit.

Dickerson Pike today.

The city is proposing to convert two of the five lanes on Dickerson Pike into bus-rapid transit lanes. The city expects the corridor’s population to grow by 35 percent in the next two decades, which means any congestion today will be much worse in the future. That certainly won’t be helped by reducing the number of lanes by 40 percent. Continue reading →

Streetcar Roundup

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Milwaukee and Oklahoma City are both planning to open new streetcar lines later this year, so it is worth taking a look at how the dumbest form of transit is working in other cities. The table below shows all of the streetcar lines reported in the July, 2018 National Transit Database spreadsheet. Ridership numbers are shown for January and July and annual growth compares the last full year (August 2017-July 2018) with the year before that.

CityRail
Miles		1-18
Riders		7-18
Riders		Annual
Growth
Atlanta2.617,41643,915-16%
Charlotte1.630,16320,291-21%
Cincinnati3.617,22054,625-21%
Dallas-Oak3.611,09816,402-1%
Dallas-McK.4.531,76051,582-9%
Detroit3.384,456116,086
Kansas City2.297,194262,593-1%
Kenosha2.059310,293-5%
Little Rock3.51,5803,413-6%
Memphis10.545,457
New Orleans21.4497,771722,566-6%
Philadelphia217.32,139,2781,819,919-6%
Portland14.8400,370406,9574%
San Francisco21.7517,180863,3907%
Seattle7.9121,995148,2287%
Tacoma2.778,64462,810-3%
Tampa3.525,22126,112-1%
Tucson3.980,34343,4100%
Washington5.687,81688,56613%

Continue reading →