Search Results for: rail

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 →

The FasTracks Failure

By | | Transportation
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In 2004, Denver voters approved spending $4.8 billion building six new rail transit lines, and the first line opened ten years ago. This was soon followed by four more to the gushing praise of various outsiders.

Inside Denver, however, people are beginning to realize that the whole thing was a miserable failure, suffering massive cost overruns and never attaining its ridership projections. The West line, which had its tenth anniversary last week, never carried as many passengers as were projected in its first year. It’s too bad that the reporters who are questioning this now weren’t asking the same questions in 2004. Continue reading →

Transit Carries 70% of 2019 Riders in March

By | | Transportation, Useful Data
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America’s transit systems carried 70.3 percent as many riders in March 2023 as in the same month in 2019, according to data released yesterday by the Federal Transit Administration. I reported last month that transit also carried 70 percent in February as in 2019, but that was due to a minor error that crept into my spreadsheet. The actual number was 68.5 percent, so transit is still gaining slowly compared with the pre-pandemic era. However, March 2023 had two more business days than March 2019, while the two Februaries had the same number, which is probably responsible for some of March’s improvement.

The Transportation Security Administration reports that 97.8 percent as many passengers passed through airport security in March 2023 as in March 2019. That’s down from the 100.3 percent in February. The actual number of passengers increased from 58 million to 72 million, but that’s just seasonal variations. Continue reading →

Nashville Transit Junkies Demand More Money

By | | Transportation
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Spending billions of dollars on on transit infrastructure, as proposed by a group called the Transit Alliance for Middle Tennessee, would be a complete waste. The group was formed to support the city’s 26-mile, $5-billion light-rail proposal that was rejected by voters five years ago. Now that the pandemic has proven that Nashville doesn’t need any transit infrastructure, the group is reemerging as an “advocate for action.”

The group wants “multimodal transportation,” which to them means bus-rapid transit on dedicated lanes, light rail, commuter rail, and maybe even heavy rail and monorail. For some reason, the group doesn’t mention cars, trucks, bicycles, pedestrians, scooters, and local buses, all of which make Nashville’s existing transportation infrastructure pretty multimodal. Continue reading →

How Not to Revitalize Downtown

By | | City planning
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The city of Portland announced yesterday that it received a $2 million federal grant to get it to ban gasoline (and, presumably, Diesel) delivery vehicles in a sixteen-block area of downtown Portland. That means all supplies to offices in that area will have to be transferred from petroleum-powered vehicles to electric vehicles before they enter the zone, thus driving up costs.

Here’s the cheery view greeting coffee drinkers looking for the Starbucks in the downtown Portland area that will be ruled off limits to gasoline-powered delivery vehicles. Source: Google Street View.

The good news is that three of those 16 blocks are city parks and eight are government buildings, so only five blocks of private office buildings will be affected (not that anyone should cheer about a policy that makes government cost even more than it already does). In addition to offices, I count at least four restaurants and coffee shops plus a beauty salon that will be annoyed by the new rules. At least one other restaurant has already “permanently closed,” probably due to recent rioting, and this new rule may be all that is needed to push some of the others out as well. It’s also worth noting that there are plenty of parking garages in the area, so none of the bureaucrats who are making these rules will have to have their lives disturbed by them. Continue reading →

Another Billion-Dollar Boondoggle for San Jose

By | | Transportation
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San Jose’s transit system is a mess, partly because the region decided to spend billions on light rail even though it is completely unsuited for such transportation. But in addition, the Valley Transportation Authority (VTA) is simply poorly managed. For example, in 2021 the agency spent $249 per mile operating buses and $536 per vehicle-mile operating light rail, when the national averages are only $158 for buses and $389 for light rail.

In 2019, fares paid by VTA riders covered just 9.1 percent of the agency’s costs. As if that wasn’t pathetic enough, by 2021, this had fallen to 3.4 percent. At the same time, the share of Silicon Valley workers taking transit to work fell from 4.8 percent to 1.1 percent. More Silicon Valley residents who live in households without cars drive alone to work than all of the ones who take transit to work. Continue reading →

Transit and the Collapse of Downtowns

By | | Transportation
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Transit advocates cheered when, in 2018, a census of downtown Portland found that 42 percent of the 102,000 people who worked downtown took transit to work. What they didn’t want to hear is that less than 10 percent of workers in the Portland area worked downtown, and transit only carried 3.4 percent of non-downtown employees to work. As demographer Wendell Cox says, “transit is about downtown.”

Long an icon of downtown Portland, Jackson Tower is facing hard times. Photo by Steve Morgan.

While I’ve reported on the impacts of telecommuting on transit, just as important is the decline of many downtowns due to the pandemic and the inability of many cities to solve problems of crime and homelessness. Portland’s downtown is doing so bad that the owners of Jackson Tower recently defaulted on their mortgage, which a representative of the owners blames on “the deterioration of downtown.” A court has appointed a receiver who may end up selling the graffiti-marked building at foreclosure. Continue reading →