Search Results for: rail projects

Does New York MTA Have Enough Money?

By | | Transportation
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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?

By | | Transportation
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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

By | | Transportation
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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

By | | Transportation
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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

By | | Transportation
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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

By | | Transportation, Urban areas
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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

By | | Transportation
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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 →

Sanity in the Valley of the Sun

By | | Transportation
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The Phoenix city council is considering delaying or even killing some planned light-rail lines because it is concerned that city streets are falling apart and too much money is being spent instead on an insignificant form of travel. The council considered but rejected a similar proposal a couple of months ago, but since then two councilors who opposed the proposal have been replaced and at least one of them is inclined to favor streets over rails.

As of 2016, light rail carries less than 0.2 percent of all travel in the Phoenix urban area. The 2016 American Community Survey says that the same tiny percentage of commuters take light rail to work, which is unusual as transit’s commuter share is usually much higher than its total share. Phoenix light-rail ridership in the twelve months ending in June, 2018 was down 4.4 percent from the previous twelve months. Transit ridership for Phoenix as a whole is down 5.6 percent for the same time period.

Phoenix is one of many Sunbelt urban areas in which rail transit makes no sense at all. Aside from the Antiplanner’s argument that buses can move more people than light rail, rail systems only make sense where there is a high concentration of downtown jobs that a hub-and-spoke transit system can serve. According to Wendell Cox’s calculations, downtown Phoenix has only about 26,000 jobs, which is just 1.4 percent of jobs in the metropolitan area. Continue reading →

How Do You Define “Viable”?

By | | Transportation, Urban areas
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Among the many wacky proposals for rail transit in this country is a plan to run commuter trains some 50 miles between Las Cruces, New Mexico (population about 100,000) to El Paso, Texas (population around 700,000). Such a project, if it did anything at all, would be most likely to drain jobs from Las Cruces to El Paso. So it is surprising that the main proponent of the project is a New Mexico transit agency, the South Central Regional Transit District (SCRTD).

SCRTD hired a consultant to do a feasibility study that — surprise! — concluded the train was feasible. Of course, to reach this conclusion, the study had to make some heroic assumptions:

  1. That the federal government would be willing to put up a large share of the capital costs, which it doesn’t want to do.
  2. That the state government would also be willing to contribute to the capital costs, which it doesn’t want to do.
  3. That BNSF would be willing to host commuter trains on its rail line, which it doesn’t want to do.
  4. That surveys of people who say they would be happy to ride the train (without telling them about the fares) really mean anything.
  5. That someone will be willing to subsidize most of the $15 to $20 cost per trip, when anyone who already owns a car could drive the distance for well under half that amount.

Continue reading →

The Consultant Report on Why Seattle’s
Latest Streetcar Line Is Late Is Late

By | | Transportation
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Construction of Seattle’s latest streetcar line is late and over budget, so the mayor halted construction and hired a consultant to find out why. Now the consultant report itself is late.

The city knew that the problem had to do with the fact that construction turned out to be more complicated than the city anticipated. Now the consultant says that figuring out the problem turned out to be more complicated than the consultant anticipated.

Seattle shouldn’t have had to pay a consultant $146,000 to figure out the problem. The problem is simple: streetcars are stupid. They are obsolete technology. When invented in 1888, they averaged 8 mph. Now, after 130 of technological improvements, they average 8 mph. The tracks intrude into the streets, creating problems for other utilities and cyclists. When one breaks down, the others can’t go around it. Continue reading →