Search Results for: rail

Making a Good Idea Bad

By | | Transportation
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Back when I first began studying light rail, one of my first questions was, “Why rail when buses can work just as well for a lot less money?” That question is becoming less valid today as transit agencies have done their usual job of making something affordable into something grossly expensive.

Proposed Charleston bus rapid transit line. Graphic by Low Country Rapid Transit.

A case in point is Charleston, South Carolina’s proposal for a bus rapid transit line. Local backers have the audacity to call it South Carolina’s first mass transit system, as if Columbia, Greenville, Charleston, and other South Carolina cities haven’t had bus systems for decades. But the real problem is that they want to spend $625 million on a 21-mile line, or about $30 million per mile. Continue reading →

Name Honolulu’s Train

By | | Transportation
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After wasting billions of taxpayer dollars, transit agencies love to give their transit lines cute names like Link, MAX, BART, and DART. Following this tradition, the Honolulu Authority for Ridiculous Transit (HART) agency has decided to name its new rail line the Skyline. This is a rather lame name, however, so it seems like we should think up a better one.

The name Skyline immediately brings to mind the fact that the elevated rail line is going to spoil views wherever it goes, so my first thought was a name like Viewblocker. But names like these have nothing to do with Hawaii, and it seems like any name for a Hawaiian rail line should be evocative of its location. The name should also hint at the insanely high cost of building the line, the incompetence behind its planning and construction, and the fact that it is likely to become a white elephant with few riders. Continue reading →

Transforming Regressive Taxes into Profits

By | | Regional planning, Transportation
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Just once, I’d like to see a regional transportation plan that didn’t try to transform the region into some planner’s fantasy of how people should live but instead tried to serve the actual transportation needs of the people who lived there. Unfortunately, given that the federal government is giving out tens of billions of dollars for “transformative” projects, we are mainly seeing plans whose only real transformations will be to make some rich people richer and most poor people poorer.

Click image to download a 13.0-MB PDF of this 346-page draft regional transportation plan for Baltimore.

I bring this up because of an op ed earlier this week by two Baltimore-area politicians promoting that region’s $70 billion plan which, they promise, will produce “transformative changes to our transportation system.” More than half of the capital projects in the plan will be for urban transit, including the Red light-rail line that had previously been rejected as a waste of money as well as another, even more-expensive light-rail line. Continue reading →

$2 Billion and Fourteen Years

By | | Transportation
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What does $2 billion and fourteen years buy? In 2009, Congress appropriated $8 billion for high-speed rail, and the Obama administration gave Illinois more than $1 billion of that to speed up trains between Chicago and St. Louis. The state of Illinois provided its own funds, bringing total spending up to $2 billion. Now, fourteen years later, Amtrak is proud to announce the results: the top speed of trains in the corridor will increase from 90 to 110 miles per hour.

New locomotives purchased to pull the not-so-high-speed trains in the Midwest. Photo by Pi.1415926535.

Don’t get too excited. Although 110 miles per hour is 22 percent faster than 90 miles per hour, trains in the Chicago-St. Louis corridor will average just 5 percent faster, or 2 miles per hour, than under the old schedules. Under Amtrak’s old timetables, the fastest of five trains in the corridor averaged the 284-mile trip at 55.7 mph while the slowest went 52.0 mph, with the average of all five being 54.0. In late July, the new schedule the fastest train to 59.6 mph, the slowest to 53.9, and the average of all five to 56.8. Continue reading →

Disaster or Timely Adjustment?

By | | City planning
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The commercial real-estate market is tanking with vacancy rates approaching 20 percent, observes high-tech consultant George Sibble. This is a problem for all of us, he warns, for two reasons.

First, he says, the defaults that are likely to result from this will be much greater than the defaults that caused the 2008 financial crisis. Second, cities depend heavily on commercial real estate for tax revenues. Despite his arguments, I believe this is more of an opportunity than a serious problem. Continue reading →

Another Day, Another Anti-Auto Screed

By | | Transportation
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“Parking ruined everything,” says self-described urbanist blowhard Dante Ramos in The Atlantic. Apparently, parking is the reason why housing is so expensive, your favorite architectural styles are no longer being built, and why your favorite delicatessen was torn down last year.

All of that is hogwash, of course, but since Ramos is singing to the choir, he doesn’t even try to prove any of these assertions. Instead, the article is filled with ridiculous comparisons, such as, “In a typical year, the country builds more three-car garages than one-bedroom apartments.” Yes, that’s because the demand for family homes is a lot higher than the demand for one-bedroom apartments. Continue reading →

I Couldn’t Have Said It Better

By | | Transportation
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Last week, I submitted a draft review of plans to expand St. Louis’ light-rail system to the Show Me Institute, Missouri’s state-based think tank. The region has the biggest light-rail system in the Midwest, yet it is a complete failure. Buses and rail together carried fewer riders in 2019 than buses alone carried in 1993, the year before the first light-rail line opened. Doubling light-rail miles in 2001 and another significant expansion in 2008 both resulted in an overall loss of riders. Yet Metro, the region’s transit agency, wants to build more light rail.

My draft report was more than 13,000 words long including an 800-word executive summary. While writing it, I was disappointed but not particularly surprised to find that local media failed to report any significant opposition to Metro’s billion-dollar plan to add 17 miles of new light-rail lines. So I was pleased to watch the above video, in which local reporter Sarah Fenske charged that it was “crazy” to build light rail when the local bus system was “failing” low-income riders and not getting people to their workplaces. To my chagrin, Fenske pretty much summarized in 35 seconds what my long-winded report said in 13,400 words. Continue reading →

The Face of Public Transit

By | | Transportation
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This is Daquan Rogers. He is a 27-year-old Minneapolis light-rail rider who has a history of transit crimes including being arrested last month for brawling aboard a light-rail train. Following the arrest he was released pending his court case.

On May 20, while standing on a light-rail platform, he got into an argument with 41-year-old Eugene Snelling. A horrific video shows Rogers pushing Snelling on to the tracks between two light-rail cars. Snelling died and Rogers was arrested in what was considered to be a homocide case. Continue reading →

Soaking the Rich Fails in Los Angeles

By | | Housing
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To help fund the $1.3 billion that Los Angeles’ city council believes it needs to house the homeless, the city decided to impose a “mansion tax” of 4 percent on the sales of any homes or commercial properties above $5 million and 5.5 percent on sales above $10 million. This was projected to bring in $900 million a year, funding most of the homeless program.

This home is currently on the market in Los Angeles for an asking price of $5.667 million. Many homes of this size are available for under $1 million in Houston and San Antonio and few are asking more than $2 million.

The reality is far different because planners, as usual, failed to take into account how their regulations and taxes would influence human behavior. In the month before the tax went into effect on April 1, 126 homes sold for more than $5 million. In the month since? Just two. Continue reading →

More Delays, Less Delays, But Always More Costs

By | | Transportation
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Maryland’s Purple Line, which was originally supposed to open more than a year ago, now won’t open until 2026. But that’s supposed to be good news, because two months ago the state said it wouldn’t open until 2027. The bad news, other than the news that it is being built at all, is that it is at least $1.46 billion over budget.

That’s kind of a breathtaking number — $1.46 billion — at least for those who understand how much money that really is. For one thing, this cost of this one light-rail line would have been more than enough to construct all of the light-rail lines built in Buffalo, Portland, Sacramento, San Diego, and San Jose during the 1980s. At that time, light rail construction was costing around $10 million to $15 million a mile, or about $30 million to $40 million in today’s dollars. The Purple Line is costing more than $210 per mile, or five to seven times as much. Continue reading →