Search Results for: rail

The Tide Celebrates Ten Years of Waste

By | | Transportation
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The Tide, Norfolk’s light-rail line, has been open to the public for ten years. As noted in this article in the Pilot, it opened 18 months late after a 60 percent cost overrun.

The Tide light rail in downtown Norfolk. Photo by Dean Covey, Virginia Department of Transportation.

The article claims the light-rail line carried its first million rides “five months ahead of original projections,” but that’s a transit agency lie. The original projections estimated that the rail line would carry 10,400 riders per weekday in its opening year. That would be about 1 million riders in less than four months. In fact, it carried less than half that, just 4,900 riders per weekday in its first year, and took eight months to reach 1 million riders. Continue reading →

The Failure of Dallas TOD

By | | Transportation
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The Dallas Area Rapid Transit (DART), the transit agency serving Dallas and a dozen other cities, is proud of the fact that it has built the longest light-rail system in the country. It is almost as proud of the many transit-oriented developments (TODs) built near light-rail stations. Of course, it never mentions that many if not most of those developments were subsidized through below-market land sales, tax-increment financing, and other government assistance.

Apartments and condos surround the Las Colinas light-rail station in Irving, Texas, yet that station attracted only 137 round-trip riders per weekday in 2019.

To transit advocates, such subsidies are justified because they boost ridership. But is there cause for such justification? How well have transit-oriented developments worked in promoting DART ridership? Continue reading →

The Oddity of Public Transit

By | | Transportation
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“An oddity of American public transit,” says Strong Towns, a semi-New Urbanist organization dedicated to compact cities and transit, “is the prevalence of commuter rail lines designed to do one thing and one thing only: bring 9-5 office workers to and from downtown.” The Facebook post then links to an article in Governing magazine titled, Taking the Commuter out of Commuter Rail, which claims the huge decline in commuter-rail ridership is an “opportunity to reinvent the suburb-city service.”

CalTrain is a classic example of Type 1 commuter rail, having once been operated by Southern Pacific. In 2019 fares covered 75 percent of its operating costs and it used less energy per passenger mile than a Toyota Prius. But as of June its ridership was down 88 percent. Photo by Runner1928.

Before critiquing these ideas, it is important to point out that there are really two kinds of “commuter-rail” operations; call them Type 1 and Type 2. Type 1 is traditional big-city commuter trains, which were usually started by private railroads in the nineteenth century and were taken over by government agencies in the 1960s and 1970s. These brought suburban workers into downtown Boston, Chicago, New York, Philadelphia, and San Francisco. This is the commuter rail that Strong Towns and Governing are writing about. Continue reading →

Not a Good Time to Waste More Money

By | | Transportation
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Illinois has the highest pension debt of any state in the union; a phenomenal $317 billion as of 2020. Overall, the state’s financial health is second only to California for being the worst in the nation.

What better time could there be to start planning construction of a high-speed rail line from Chicago to St. Louis? Considering that high-speed rail is one of the reasons why California is in worth financial shape than Illinois, building a new high-speed rail system would be enough to make Illinois number one! Not that any state should aspire to be the worst fiscal condition.

The state has apparently forgotten that it has already spent nearly $2 billion on a project to increase frequencies and speeds on the existing Chicago-St. Louis route. It would be useful to know if those improvements made any difference to ridership before spending a lot more on the corridor. But there is no way to tell because, despite the fact that it began the project in 2010, the trains today are no faster nor more frequent than they were before. Continue reading →

How to Save Taxpayers’ Money

By | | Transportation
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Seattle taxpayers pay some of the highest taxes in the country so that Sound Transit can build $75 billion worth of light-rail and other transit facilities. Some of those taxpayers must have been overjoyed to read a Sound Transit press release saying, “Local taxpayers to save more than $500 million through USDOT financing assistance.”

Those same taxpayers, however, may be wondering: are they going to get that $500 million back in rebates on the taxes they have paid to date? Is Sound Transit going to reduce future taxes to take this savings into account? Or will Sound Transit just throw a big party with an open bar and invite Seattle taxpayers to attend? How about none of the above.

Early this year, Sound Transit admitted that the cost of two planned light-rail lines will be as much as 70 percent more — than originally projected. That’s $6.2 billion. The agency faces a $6.5 billion shortfall in funds, which plans to deal with by delaying completion of several promised light-rail lines to as late as 2041 — 44 years after taxpayers began paying for them. Continue reading →

Should Private HSR Have Eminent Domain?

By | | Transportation
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Eminent domain — the power to force people to sell their property — can significantly disrupt a society. People at risk of losing their land at any time will be reluctant to invest in improvements, which in turn will limit the nation’s productivity. For this reason, the Fifth Amendment says that eminent domain can only be exercised for “public use” and only with “just compensation.” Even then, people debate what is a “public use” and many who have been forced to sell their property don’t believe the amounts they are paid are “just” if they are significantly less than the unwilling sellers would have asked for in a free exchange.

Most states — no one is sure how many — have decided that railroads are a “public use” and have granted railroads the power of eminent domain. This raises questions like:

  • What is the definition of a “railroad”?
  • Can anyone call themselves a railroad and begin taking other peoples’ property?
  • Does a railroad have to be operating to exercise this power?
  • Does a railroad have to have rails to be a railroad?
  • Can a railroad take peoples’ property even if they don’t have money to pay for it or to finish building the rail line?

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These and similar questions are addressed in Maryland and Texas courts where private companies that have proposed to build high-speed rail lines have demanded the right of eminent domain even though they don’t actually operate any trains and don’t even have enough money to build the proposed lines. The issue is slightly more straightforward in Texas than it is in Maryland. Continue reading →

Sex Scandal Reveals Opposition to AirTrain

By | | Transportation
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In 2004, a sex scandal led the Portland media to reveal to people that the city was run by a light-rail mafia. Since then, I’ve told people in other cities that, if their region builds rail transit, they better hope for a sex scandal so they can find out where their money went.

Artist’s conception of proposed LaGuardia AirTrain provided courtesy of the office of the soon-to-be ex-governor.

New York City residents are lucky: a sex scandal there may derail a wasteful 2-mile-long “people mover” (automated guideway) project that the Antiplanner critiqued a year ago, noting that it “will cost $2 billion, make traffic congestion worse, dump 87,000 metric tons of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, and probably isn’t necessary due to the pandemic.” The project was supported by Governor Andrew Cuomo, who this week agreed to resign due to sexual harassment claims. Continue reading →

The Failure of Transit in the Post-COVID Era

By | | Policy brief, Transportation, Useful Data
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Nationwide transit ridership in June was 50.3 percent of June 2019, making this the first month since the onset of COVID-19 that ridership recovered to half of pre-pandemic levels. Yet transit remains well behind Amtrak, which carried 63 percent of pre-pandemic passenger-miles in June; flying, which was at 74 percent; and driving. June data are not yet available for driving but May driving was 96 percent of pre-pandemic miles.

Click image to download a four-page PDF of this policy brief.

Transit is doing poorly compared with Amtrak and driving because it is most heavily dependent on commuters. The 2017 National Household Travel Survey found that commuting and work-related travel make up less than 20 percent of personal driving but are 40 percent of transit ridership. With many people working at home during the pandemic, transit has lost a large share of its market. Continue reading →

Transit Would Get 62% Boost in Federal Funding

By | | Transportation
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Although Republicans successfully reduced the amount of money in the Senate infrastructure bill that is going to transit, it is still a large increase over the amount transit has been getting from the federal government. Transit agencies received about $14.4 billion from the federal government in 2019. Under the Senate infrastructure bill, this will increase to about $23.3 billion a year, or roughly a 62 percent gain.

Under the bill, transit is guaranteed $14 billion a year from the Highway Trust Fund alone. This is more than 20 percent of total spending out of the trust fund compared with 18 percent in the 2015 FAST Act. Since the trust fund isn’t collecting enough money out of fuel taxes and other federal highway user fees to even pay for the highway share, transit’s share of the fund will all be deficit spending.

Transit will also get $1.6 billion a year for “fixed guideway capital investments,” which doesn’t come from the Highway Trust Fund. Also known as New Starts, the vast majority of this money will be wasted on obsolete rail transit projects such as light rail and streetcars. The rest will be wasted on dedicated bus lanes for bus-rapid transit. Continue reading →

Amtrak Infrastructure Boondoggle

By | | Transportation
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If Congress passes the infrastructure compromise reached by the White House and 17 Republican senators, Amtrak will get $66 billion. Amtrak won’t have complete freedom to spend this money however it likes: instead, according to Senator Charles Schumer, $30 billion is for Northeast Corridor backlog and modernization; $16 billion is for other backlog needs; and $12 billion is for new services outside of the Northeast Corridor, “including high speed rail,” as if $12 billion could buy any significant amount of high-speed rail.

Last month, Amtrak revealed that it needs $117 billion to bring the Northeast Corridor up to a state of good repair, so the $30 billion in the infrastructure bill is little more than a down payment. Thus, Congress is continuing its usual pattern of short-funding needed maintenance so that it can fund new projects. After all, if all of the money in the bill went to the Northeast Corridor, senators and representatives in the rest of the country would have little reason to support it.

One of the Northeast Corridor projects funded in the bill is new tunnels under the Hudson River, which are expected to cost $3 billion a mile, more than just about any other tunnels in history. When Slate writer Henry Grabar asked Amtrak CEO William Flynn how he could justify such a high cost, Flynn responded that he didn’t think it was that expensive. Grabar concluded that Amtrak didn’t care about the cost. Continue reading →