Search Results for: rail

Tax Netflix to Fund Transit?

By | | Transportation
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New York’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority will soon go off a fiscal cliff, partly due to reduced ridership but also due to bad management. But never fear: New York legislators have a solution. They propose to tax Netflix and Uber to raise money to keep the subways and buses running.

One of the most expensive transit projects in the world, the Second Avenue Subway is expensive partly because the MTA spent more on consultants than it did on actual construction. MTA Capital Construction photo by Rehema Trimiew.

Taxing Uber makes kind of a warped sense, like taxing jet airliners in order to subsidize Conestoga wagons. But taxing Netflix? Just what does Netflix have to do with urban transit? Next thing you know, someone will propose taxing people for working at home because, you know, homes are “stealing” riders away from transit. Continue reading →

Transit Agencies Go Insane

By | | Transportation
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Earlier this month, the Federal Transit Administration published its annual report on funding recommendations for transit capital improvement grants. Each year, I review the accompanying list of projects being planned or under construction to see how much construction costs have grown since the previous year. This year, however, transit agencies seem to have learned a lesson from the pandemic and have curtailed their wild spending on pointless projects.

Sound Transit is building light rail on what was once freeway lanes across Lake Washington. Photo by Sound Transit.

Just kidding. In fact, they are spending more than ever. In the 1990s, light-rail lines that cost $50 million a mile ($100 million in today’s dollars) were considered extravagantly expensive. A decade ago, the average light-rail line cost about $125 million a mile ($160 million in today’s dollars). Last year, average light-rail construction costs had risen to $278 million a mile (about $310 million today). Continue reading →

Promise Rapid Transit, Deliver Streetcars

By | | Transportation
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On November 2020, in the midst of the pandemic, Austin voters foolishly agreed to raise property taxes in order to build 28 miles of light rail at a projected cost of $5.8 billion. To avoid congestion, the downtown portion of light-rail lines would go through a four-mile-long tunnel.

Artist’s impression of light rail running near downtown Austin.

No one reading this blog will be surprised to know that, in the short amount of time since then, projected costs have nearly doubled to $10.3 billion. Early this week, the city’s transit planners announced a new plan that would build fewer than half as many miles of light rail. Continue reading →

Metro Transit Spends Millions on Transit Security

By | | Transportation
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Minneapolis-St. Paul’s Metro Transit is going to spend $3 million a year hiring private security to deter crime at six of the region’s light-rail stations. As the Antiplanner recently documented, light rail attracts more crime than any other form of transit and the Twin Cities’ light rail attracts far more crime than any other light-rail system in the United States.

Patrons of the Twin Cities’ light-rail system suffer nearly twice as much crime as those of the next-highest system and at least six times as much as those of all but three other systems. Click image to download the Antiplanner’s report on Minnesota transportation in a post-COVID world.

Light rail attracts crime because fare enforcement is spotty and potential criminals figure that, if they can ride the trains for free, they can get away with other crimes as well. The Antiplanner recommended that Metro Transit install gates at every light-rail station, similar to those used for heavy-rail lines, but Metro Transit rejected this idea. Continue reading →

Enabling Homelessness

By | | Housing
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More than 5,000 people are homeless in Oregon’s Multnomah County, most of them in Portland, and Oregon has the fourth-highest rate of homelessness in the nation. According to community-service worker Kevin Dahlgren, the problem is that the bureaucracies and non-profit groups that work on the homeless issue spend their time enabling people to remain homeless, rather than trying to rehabilitate them so they can get a job and housing.

The homeless crisis is making parts of Portland unlivable, yet the social service groups “are part of the problem,” says Dahlgren. Instead of getting people permanently off the streets, Portland and other cities are now giving away tents, blankets, and other materials that allow homeless people to remain on the streets. What they should be doing, says Dahlgren, is “ending homelessness by empowering, not enabling” homeless people. Continue reading →

Free Markets No More

By | | Regional planning
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The Niskanen Center is supposed to be a free-market group. It is named after Bill Niskanen, who was Ronald Reagan’s chief economic advisor until he got fired because he was too free-market oriented for Reagan. His research on how bureaucracies work influenced me when I was working on Forest Service planning in the 1980s, long before I met him in person. After I went to work at Cato (where he was chairman of the board), I learned his father had run Pacific Trailways out of Bend Oregon, and I enjoyed visiting with him about the history of transportation.

Click image to download a 4.2-MB PDF of this 22-page report.

After Niskanen passed away in 2011, Cato Institute senior fellow Jerry Taylor, who I remember as being so laser focused on free markets that we had many arguments over the whether it was better to be a pure libertarian vs. a pragmatic one, started the Niskanen Center to bring market tools to environmental issues. Continue reading →

We Don’t Want Your Stinkin’ Jobs

By | | Transportation
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“Yes, but it creates jobs!” has long been the last refuge for scoundrels promoting expensive boondoggles, so it is no surprise that it is now being used to justify continued spending on the California high-speed rail project. The most recent release from the California High Speed Rail Authority says that they now expect the project to cost up to $128 billion, but that’s okay, because it is putting 10,000 people to work.

That argument might carry some weight if we had a high unemployment rate. But right now, the United States is suffering from a major labor shortage. Each person working on the California rail line is one less person helping to move goods to markets, build homes, and so other essential work. One more strike against high-speed rail: it contributes to the increasing costs of everything. Continue reading →

Phoenix’s Irrational Transportation Plan

By | | Regional planning, Transportation
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The Maricopa Association of Governments (MAG) wasted billions of dollars of taxpayer money because it failed to follow the most basic rules of planning, says a report released today by the Arizona Free Enterprise Club. The standard “rational planning process,” which is described in just about every introductory planning textbook, calls for planners to identify a full range of alternatives, evaluate those alternatives, pick the best one to accomplish their goals, and monitor the implementation of the plan to ensure that their original assumptions were correct.

Click image to download a 8.9-MB PDF of this 38-page report.

Maricopa regional transportation plans, including plans issued in 2006, 2014, and most recently 2021, fail to do any of these steps. By failing to consider a wide range of alternatives, MAG ended up writing a plan that didn’t make sense for the 21th century. By failing to evaluate alternatives, it ignored low-cost solutions that could do more to accomplish the plan’s goals. By failing to monitor previous plans, it repeated the same mistake over and over in long-range plans written about every five years. Continue reading →

Brightline’s Folly to Vegas

By | | Transportation
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Brightline says it has raised enough money to start construction on a 200-mph rail line from Victorville, California to Las Vegas. The company projects the line will cost $10 billion, or about $45 million a mile for the 218-mile route.

Brightline in Florida. Illustration by All Aboard Florida (Brightline’s original name).

Brightline has $1 billion in private activity bonds to start construction. But I would be surprised if Brightline has managed to find private investors foolish enough to give the company the other $9 billion needed for this line. The company says that it expects to attract 12 million people a year heading to Las Vegas or Los Angeles out of their cars and buses, or almost 30 percent of the 42 million traveling by highway today, but that seems highly unlikely. Continue reading →

East Side Access Project Opens Today

By | | Transportation
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Today, more than a decade late and after spending $11.2 billion, the Long Island Railroad will begin running trains to Grand Central Terminal. This 3.5-mile project, known as the East Side Access tunnel, cost a mere $3.2 billion a mile, which is a trifle compared with the Second Avenue Subway, the next segment of which is expected to cost $4 billion a mile.

Architect’s vision of what new LIRR platform will look like in Grand Central Terminal. Source: STV Inc.

Meanwhile, New York transit has a $26.6 billion capital funding gap over the next two years. One result of this is that more than a quarter of the region’s transit vehicles are beyond the end of their expected service life. Continue reading →