Search Results for: rail

A Tale of Three Private High-Speed Rail Plans

By | | Policy brief
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Federal funding for high-speed rail is dead, at least for the duration of the Trump administration. But at least three private high-speed rail lines are under consideration, and backers say they will not seek any federal funds (other than, possibly, loans) to complete those projects. How likely are these projects to succeed?

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

Texas Central

The Texas Central proposes to build a new high-speed rail line between Dallas and Houston, the nation’s sixth- and seventh-largest urban areas and two of the fastest-growing regions in the country. The company says it plans to use Japanese Shinkansen trains to travel the 240 miles between the cities at top speeds of more than 200 miles per hour, resulting in an end-to-end journey of ninety minutes. Continue reading →

30. Interlude, Part II: Rail Historian

By | | Iconoclast
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Membership in PRPA inspired me to go to a rail restoration conference at the California Railroad Museum and to become active with rail history groups all over the country. One person I met, Benn Coifman, was a student in transportation engineering at UC Berkeley. On the side, he had designed a variety of railroad fonts, including both lettersets such as the unique font used by the Great Northern’s streamlined Empire Builder as well as graphics of such objects as locomotives and railcars. He soon added an SP&S 700 to one of his graphic fonts.

I even inquired about getting a master’s degree in the history of technology at a major university, thinking I could become a museum curator of some type. After visiting the school, however, I decided I was no longer willing to put up with all the red tape involved with being a student that I had accepted as a necessity two decades before.

After the 700’s triumphant return from the Washington Central, the Sacramento Railroad Museum invited PRPA to join them for a railfair they were planning for 1991. One way to help pay for such a trip would be to sell space on passenger cars. The 4449 had a fleet of ex-Southern Pacific cars that it used for such trips. Except for our crew car, we didn’t have any passenger cars, but the Pacific Northwest Chapter of the National Railroad Historical Society did, so we met with them to plan the trip. Continue reading →

Front Range Commuter Rail: A Terrible Idea

By | | Policy brief
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The Colorado Department of Transportation (CDOT) has issued a request for proposals to plan a commuter-rail line from Ft. Collins to Pueblo, a population corridor just east of the mountains known as the Front Range. CDOT estimates building this line would cost between $5 billion and $15 billion, depending on speed. The agency expects to build all-new tracks within the existing BNSF and UP rights of way, which it says the railroads are willing to allow.

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

The Colorado legislature gave CDOT $2.5 million for passenger rail studies, and CDOT wants contractors to provide a “clear vision” for a referendum that could appear on the November 2020 ballot. Part of that vision would include an eventual extension to Cheyenne on the north and Trinidad (population under 10,000) on the south. No doubt some of the money spent on studies will find its way into campaign war chests. Continue reading →

Does Rail Transit Stimulate New Development?

By | | Policy brief
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Transit agencies often justify their multi-billion rail projects by claiming that rail transit stimulates new development. This claim has, in fact, been refuted by research funded by the Federal Transit Administration and conducted by transit advocates. Despite their support for rail transit, the researchers reluctantly concluded that “Urban rail transit investments rarely ‘create’ new growth, but more typically redistribute growth that would have taken place without the investment.”

Click image to download a PDF of this policy brief.

In other words, development along the rail line is a zero-sum game: more development there meant less development somewhere else in the urban area. Total tax revenues in the urban area aren’t increased by light rail, except to the extent that taxes are raised to pay for it. Continue reading →

Northwest High-Speed Rail Cluelessness

By | | Transportation
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A couple of days ago, the Antiplanner noted that cities fail to learn from each other’s experience with rail transit disasters. It turns out that states don’t learn either, as the state of Washington is considering creating a high-speed rail authority and giving it millions of dollars to study a high-speed rail line from Eugene to Vancouver, BC.

Of course, such an authority worked so well in California, where costs have more than doubled, the project has been delayed for years verging on decades, and proponents’ claims that fares would cover operating costs are so unlikely as to be laughable. If it doesn’t work in California, which has the densest urban areas in the United States, how can it possibly make sense in the Pacific Northwest, where populations and densities are much lower?

The article is accompanied by a photo of a Siemens prototype high-speed rail car. My 66-year-old eyes can’t read all of the writing on the side, but if Siemens were honest it would read, “Connecting cities at half the speed and ten times the cost of flying.” Continue reading →

Honolulu Rail Disaster

By | | Transportation
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Recent audits of Honolulu Authority for Rapid Transit (HART) by the city of Honolulu and state of Hawaii provide a backroom view of how the rail transit-industrial complex is scalping taxpayers. Honolulu’s rail line, which was originally supposed to cost less than $3 billion, is now expected to cost well over $9 billion, thanks to poor planning and HART essentially letting the foxes (in the form of outside contractors) guard the chicken house (the public purse).

The first of four state audits (summarized here) says that the city hastily signed contracts committing itself to the project before all environmental and financial reviews were completed. The audit doesn’t say so, but the city did this to prevent opponents, who were marshaling legal and political forces against the project, from stopping it. Continue reading →

Can High-Speed Rail Make Housing Affordable?

By | | Housing, Transportation
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UCLA management professor Jerry Nickerson thinks he has found a solution to California’s housing affordability problems: high-speed rail. Based on years of data, he has concluded that some Japanese who work in Tokyo and other expensive cities make long commutes on high-speed trains to more affordable cities elsewhere in the country.

What a fantastically dumb idea. There are hundreds of thousands of acres of undeveloped private land right next to the Los Angeles and San Francisco-Oakland urban areas. Most of these acres have little agricultural value and those around San Francisco are currently being used as pasture or range land, meaning they support a few head of cattle, while many of the undeveloped acres around Los Angeles probably don’t even support livestock.

So, to protect these lands from development, California should spend $77 billion to $100 billion or more building a high-speed rail line to the Central Valley, which has some of the most productive farm land in the nation, so that houses can be built on that farm land rather than on the range lands around Los Angeles and the Bay Area. Continue reading →

37 Railroads Fail to Meet Deadline

By | | Transportation
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The Department of Transportation was thrilled to announce that four railroads met the December 31 deadline for installing positive train control. That would be great news if those four railroads were the four that carry about 75 percent of rail traffic in this country, namely BNSF, CSX, Norfolk Southern, and Union Pacific.

But it wasn’t. Instead, they were the North County Transit District (in San Diego County), Metrolink (in the Los Angeles area), Port Authority Transit-Hudson, and the Portland & Western (over which Portland’s TriMet operates a commuter train). That means 37 railroads — including seven class I railroads (the above big four, Canadian National, Canadian Pacific, and Kansas City Southern), Amtrak, two dozen commuter railroads, and a handful of short lines — failed to meet the deadline and received waivers to not do so.

The December 31 deadline is actually three years after the original deadline, which was in 2015. While DOT says that 71 percent of the route miles that are required to have positive train control have it installed, why has it taken so long to complete the system? Continue reading →

Ft. Worth Rail Boondoggle Opens This Week

By | | Transportation
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The Fort Worth Transit Authority, also known as Trinity Metro, will open TEXRail, a new commuter-rail line from downtown Ft. Worth to the Dallas-Ft. Worth Airport, at the end of this week. Built at a cost of more than a billion dollars, the line is expected to carry an average of 4,000 round trips per weekday in its first year. It probably will fall short.

When the project first appears in the Federal Transit Administration’s New Starts reports, for 2014 (but based on 2012 data), it was supposed to be 38 miles long, cost under a billion dollars, and attract nearly 10,000 weekday riders (5,000 round trips) in its first year of operation. By 2016 the cost had risen to well over a billion despite chopping off 11 miles west of downtown Ft. Worth, leaving just 27. This pushed projected first-year ridership down to 8,300 weekday trips (4,150 round trips).

Now that the money has been spent and it is too late to do anything about it, the transit authority is projected TEXRail will carry 8,000 riders per weekday, probably low-balling the 8,300 figure in case ridership falls short. And it is likely to fall short, as the Trinity Railway Express, a 34-mile commuter-rail line from Ft. Worth to Dallas, carried only 7,400 weekday riders in 2017, a number that has dropped by nearly 1,000 since 2014. Continue reading →

The “New Normal”: Transit Is Off the Rails

By | | Transportation
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A wheel fell off one of the cars on a Boston commuter train Tuesday morning, leading to delays and frustrated commuters. The main injury was to the reputation of Keolis, the French company that has a $2.7 billion contract to operate Boston commuter trains for eight years.

Keolis may not be entirely at fault, however, as the Boston transit system has been neglected for years and has a multi-billion-dollar maintenance backlog. “It’s a really unfortunate situation that we inherited with this incredible dis-investment in the system,” says an MBTA official. “The good news is, we have tripled our expenditure to about $900 million a year.” The article quoting the official doesn’t say how they are spending $900 million a year, but given the context, he must mean maintenance and capital replacement. However, this is hard to verify considering MBTA hasn’t posted an annual budget since 2016.

Whatever they are spending on maintenance, it may be too little, too late. Boston transit ridership has been dropping, down 2 percent in the most recent quarter and 13 percent since 2014 (according to the most recent National Transit Database update). As an MBTA officials observes, “This type of ridership trend is in line with a national trend.” Continue reading →