Search Results for: rail projects

FTA Funds Tacoma Streetcar

By | | Transportation
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Sound Transit, which has tens of billions of dollars to build light rail in the Seattle area, announced this week that the Federal Transit Administration granted $75 million to an extension of the Tacoma streetcar line. This was a surprise since the administration’s policy has been not to fund any projects that don’t have signed grant agreements, and by that criteria the Tacoma streetcar doesn’t qualify.

The existing 1.6-mile Tacoma streetcar opened in 2003. Projected to cost $50 million, it ended up costing more than $80 million, or about $50 million per mile (about $66 million a mile in today’s dollars). The project is political pork: built to make Tacoma taxpayers feel like they are getting their fair share of the billions going to build light rail. This is why Sound Transit never calls it a streetcar, instead calling it “Link,” the same name it applies to light rail in Seattle. But the Tacoma line uses the same equipment and trundles along at the same slow speeds as the Portland streetcar.

The Tacoma streetcar has never collected a fare, yet in 2016 it carried fewer than 3,200 riders a day. That’s more than streetcars in Atlanta, Charlotte, Cincinnati, and the District of Columbia, but fewer than Seattle or Portland (which admittedly are longer lines). The new project will extend the existing line by 2.4 miles at a cost of $215 million or about $90 million a mile. Continue reading →

Wave Bye Bye

By | | Transportation
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As predicted, Nashville voters have rejected a multi-billion-dollar light-rail plan by a margin of 64 to 36 percent. Some people are wondering “Now what?” But the reality is that no major changes are needed to Nashville transit except to figure out a way to back out of long-term obligations in the face of declining ridership.

Less predictable, it appears the Fort Lauderdale Wave streetcar project also died yesterday. The project, which was promoted by Broward County, received federal, state, and local funding. But when construction bids were opened last October, they came in much higher than expected. Skeptical members of the city council got the county to agree that the city could withdraw from the project if it didn’t appear it could be built for less than a 25 percent cost overrun.

The county put it out for bids a second time and the low bid was $2.2 million over the 25 percent threshold. As a result, the city commission voted yesterday to save its money. Continue reading →

The Key to Transit: 240,000+ Downtown Jobs

By | | Transportation
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An op-ed in last Friday’s San Antonio Express-News argues that San Antonio is “one of the least-suited big cities in the world for building rapid transit.” This is because, though San Antonio is the nation’s seventh-largest city, it’s jobs are so spread out that transit just can’t work for most people.

According to Wendell Cox’s report on downtowns, in 2008 transit carried more than 10 percent of people to work in just five metropolitan areas: New York, Boston, Chicago, San Francisco, and Washington. These also happen to be the only metro areas that had more than 240,000 downtown jobs. Transit in Philadelphia, which had just under 240,000 jobs, carried only 9.3 percent of metro-area jobs. San Antonio has only about 60,000 downtown jobs, so is less than a quarter of the way to needing an improved transit system.

Note that Cox is counting jobs in metropolitan areas, which include all the land within the counties surrounding the cities, whether that land is urbanized or not. Most data cited by the Antiplanner is for urbanized areas, which only includes the urbanized land (roughly, land developed to more than 1,000 people per square mile). Transit’s share of commuting will be slightly higher in an urban area than in a metro area. Continue reading →

Is Texas Running Out of Farmlands?

By | | Regional planning
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An op-ed in the San Antonio Express-News warns that “asphalt is the last crop,” meaning once a farm is paved over, it can never be farmed again. “Every 10 years, Texas loses approximately 1 million acres of prime agricultural lands to development,” the article warns. Written by Bob McCan, who chairs the Texas Agricultural Land Trust, the article encourages farmers and ranchers to put their lands into conservation easements.

In case McCan hasn’t noticed, someone should tell him Texas is a big place. According to the USDA National Resources Inventory, it has nearly 138 million acres of private agricultural land, not counting 14 million acres of forest land, 3 million acres of federal land, and more than 2 million acres of “other rural land.” Fewer than 7 million acres of the state have been urbanized and only about 2 million more have been developed into such things as small settlements, rural roads, and railroads.

Of the 138 million acres of ag land, farmers grow crops on only about 24 million acres. The rest is range and pastureland. That 24 million is less than it was a few decades ago, but more because the per-acre yields of most crops are growing faster than the nation’s population than because any acres have been paved over. Continue reading →

Rejoice in Transit’s Decline (plus new book)

By | | Transportation
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“Urban transit was developed for a kind of city that no longer exists,” says an op-ed in USA Today, “one in which most jobs were downtown and most residents lived near downtown.” For people who can’t or don’t want to drive, ride hailing makes much more sense than mass transit, so we should be happy to see transit (and the taxes we pay to subsidize it) decline.

The article also reveals the title of a new book that will be out this fall: Romance of the Rails: Why the Passenger Trains We Love Are Not the Transportation We Need. This book will provide the background needed to understand transit and intercity passenger trains today. Continue reading →

Uber/Lyft Find New Ways to Destroy Transit

By | | Transportation
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Lyft has a growing service called Line that could make the long-unfulfilled dreams of carpool advocates come true. Users who request a ride through Line are paired with drivers going to the same general destination — a true example of ride sharing instead of the ride hailing that describes most Uber/Lyft rides. Rides might take a little longer if the driver picks up other carpoolers, but the cost is only 40 percent of a regular Lyft ride. The service is available in 19 cities to date and has proven particularly successful in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, and Miami.

Uber has announced that it plans to expand its app to offer a comprehensive transportation service. Users say where they want to go and the Uber app will give them options of Uber rides, bike sharing, rental cars, or even mass transit. All rides would be paid for through the Uber app, so Uber would get a share of revenues from any public transit agencies that participated.

Even if public transit is one of Uber’s options, these kinds of innovations will continue to whittle away transit ridership. People who now ride transit will be tempted to use Uber to pay for their rides, thus saving the trouble of dealing with ticket machines or exact change. Once using the app, they will also be alerted to alternatives to transit, and some will select those alternatives in place of the transit they were using. Continue reading →

One More Reason to Kill the TIGER

By | | Transportation
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The Department of Transportation announced half a billion dollars worth of TIGER grants last week. While some of these projects may be worthwhile, others are clearly wasted.

TIGER, which stands for Transportation Investment Generating Economic Recovery, was created by Congress in 2009 to help the nation recover from the Great Recession. Since that recession is supposed to be long over, the Trump administration wants to abolish the program. But members of Congress want to keep it because they see it as a form of pork barrel.

The good news is that none of this year’s TIGER grants are going for streetcars. One is supporting a bus-rapid transit project in Atlanta and a couple more are supporting transit centers in Eau Claire, Wisconsin and Immokalee, Florida. Such infrastructure improvements are wasteful, especially when the money could be spent on repairing existing transit infrastructure (in Atlanta) or operating more frequent service (in the other two cities). The Atlanta BRT project is particularly questionable because it wasn’t on either the city’s or the transit agency’s lists of funding priorities; as one local web site says, the $12.6 million for this project is “a lot of money for a route that no one has heard of before and that never saw any public engagement.” Continue reading →

Let’s Start Scrapping Streetcars

By | | Transportation, Urban areas
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Good news: Washington DC is thinking of scrapping its streetcars, which have been in service for just two years and whose ridership is still so poor — about 3,000 weekday riders — that the city is afraid to start charging fares.

Bad news: City officials are only thinking of scrapping the streetcars and not the tracks; instead, they wants to replace the streetcars with brand-new ones because it’s so hard to get spare parts for the ones they have. Each new 30-seat streetcar would cost roughly ten times as much as a 40-seat bus, but cost is no object when you are playing with other people’s money.

The modern streetcar craze, which was only partly fueled by federal funding (Portland, Tacoma, and Washington purchased their first streetcars without federal support), provides a lesson for the writers of Trump’s infrastructure plan. They hope that giving local, not federal, politicians the authority of where to spend money would result in better decisions. In fact, local politicians are just as willing to waste money on gleaming new urban monuments as federal ones. Continue reading →

Just the Infrastructure We Don’t Need

By | | Transportation
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Here’s the great thing about driverless cars: They will need no new infrastructure because the people designing them are making them work with existing infrastructure. All they ask is for cities and states to fill the potholes and do other basic maintenance.

Here’s another great thing about driverless cars: Most congestion results from slow human reflexes, and simulations show that congestion will significantly decline if as few as 5 percent of vehicles on the road are driverless. So, even if you don’t have a driverless car, you will benefit from others being driverless.

So what the heck is Bexar County (San Antonio) Commissioner Kevin Wolff thinking when he proposes that the county use federal infrastructure dollars to build new interstate highway lanes open only to driverless cars? On one hand, they don’t need special lanes. On the other hand, separating them from other traffic eliminates the congestion relief benefits they can provide. Continue reading →

A Poster Child for Government Waste

By | | Transportation
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The Maryland Transit Administration suddenly shut down the Baltimore Metro last week, forcing commuters and other riders to find alternatives with less than 24 hours notice. The state said an inspection had found unexpectedly excessive wear on the rails that could have caused a derailment, and it plans to keep the line closed for a month while it fixes the problem — and then to close it again this summer for further work.

Productivity of United States Metro Systems
Thousands of Trips Per Year

Trips/mileTrips/stationSubsidy/Trip
New York Subway3,2115,6991.64
NY-NJ Path2,0496,7941.60
Boston1,6153,2312.66
Los Angeles1,3492,8757.82
Philadelphia-SEPTA1,0201,35816.05
Washington8522,7381.96
Chicago9001,6454.56
Atlanta6931,8936.08
Oakland5103,1053.48
Miami3689335.18
Baltimore3598726.92
San Juan3225139.17
Staten Island2713912.34
Philadelphia-PATCO2778193.23
Cleveland1683563.11
“Subsidies” equal operations & maintenance divided by fares. Source: 2016 National Transit Database.

The coincidence that the shut-down took place the same day the White House announced its infrastructure plan led the Washington Post to call the metro the latest poster child for the need for more infrastructure spending. In fact, it is a poster child for less infrastructure spending, as it should never have been built in the first place. Continue reading →