Search Results for: rail

Rail Supporters Can’t Tell the Truth from Fiction

By | | Transportation, Urban areas
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Portland’s regional planning agency, Metro, has put a measure on this November’s ballot to tax all firms with 25 or more employees in order to pay for the region’s latest light-rail scheme. Fortunately, or unfortunately depending on your point of view, the scheme appears to be foundering on the weight of lies told by Metro and the measure’s supporters.

To start, Metro wanted to call the tax a “business tax” even though it would be actually a 0.75 percent tax on payrolls. In other words, it would be an income tax on employees, but it would be invisible because it wouldn’t show on paystubs as a withholding like most income taxes. Portland’s transit agency, TriMet, has used this kind of a tax to pay for its operations and always called it a “payroll tax.” But Metro wanted to call it a “business tax” on the ballot title because it believed Portlanders would be more likely to support taxes evil businesses than poor downtrodden employees.

When challenged, a judge ordered Metro to take “business tax” out of the title but didn’t order it to use the term “payroll tax.” Despite not getting the ballot title they wanted, opponents have raised hundreds of thousands of dollars to fight the measure. This includes large contributions from major employers including Nike, Daimler Trucks, Comcast, and Tillamook Creamery.

As of September 28, opponents had actually outraised supporters. Contributions to the pro-rail campaign came from rail contractor Stacy & Witbeck, the International Union of Electrical Workers, and engineering consulting firm David Evans & Associates. The Evans firm is the company that got the contract to write the environmental impact statement for building a light-rail bridge over the Columbia River and then spent the money lobbying the Oregon and Washington legislatures to build the bridge. Continue reading →

Post-Pandemic Propaganda for Rail Transit

By | | Transportation
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Writing in the September Trains magazine, which isn’t available on line, transit advocate Malcolm Kenton argues that rail transit agencies can thrive in a pandemic and post-pandemic world by shifting strategies. But he doesn’t mean shifting business strategies to attract more riders; he means shifting propaganda strategies to attract more tax dollars.

“Transit advocates will need to tell a different story that de-emphasizes ridership as the key measure of success and focuses less on attracting higher-income riders,” he says. “Instead, the pandemic reveals how dependent we all are on effective transit even if we never set foot on a train or bus, and even if trains or buses carry much less than their capacities.” Continue reading →

SunFail: Orlando’s Commuter-Rail Disaster

By | | Policy brief
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Central Florida politicians face difficult choices about the future of SunRail, a commuter-rail line out of Orlando. One question is whether to finish the originally conceived project by improving 12 miles of tracks and building a new station for a cost of about $100 million, which is expected to add 200 riders per day. A second question is whether to build a new extension to the Orlando Airport, which is expected to cost about $200 million.

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

Beyond new construction, a major problem is how to get anyone to ride the trains, as ridership is well below expectations and 2018 fare revenues only covered 5 percent of operating costs. A final question is how to pay to continue operating the trains, which lost more than $40 per passenger in 2018. The state has been subsidizing operations but wants four county governments to take over. Continue reading →

High-Speed Rail: Yesterday’s Tech Tomorrow

By | | Policy brief
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One of the candidates for president in this November’s election is known by the nickname, “Amtrak Joe.” The Democratic-controlled House wants to triple federal funding for intercity passenger trains. A member of Congress from Massachusetts has proposed spending $205 billion on high-speed rail.


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

Given the growing momentum behind these ideas, it is instructive to take a look at how well the last frenzied spending on intercity passenger trains worked. In 2009 and 2010, President Obama persuaded Congress to dedicate $10.1 billion to high-speed rail projects around the country. To this was added at least $1.4 billion in other federal funds and at least $7 billion in state and local funds. After ten years, some of those projects must be working, right? Continue reading →

49. Romance of the Rails

By | | Iconoclast
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Shortly before the Cato Institute published Gridlock, Knopf published a similar book called Traffic by a writer named Tom Vanderbilt. The two didn’t cover exactly the same ground: Traffic focused on the physics of congestion while Gridlock focused on the institutional issues around transportation. But I noticed that Traffic received far more reviews and mentions in major newspapers and magazines than Gridlock.

American Nightmare, my next book, got even less attention. Part of the problem, I was told, was that book reviewers didn’t take Cato seriously as a publisher. I wanted to change that, so I asked Cato’s book editor, John Samples, and Cato’s marketing director, Bob Garber, how I should write a book that would sell better.

“Tell stories,” they said. People like stories. Gridlock and American Nightmare both delved deep into history, the latter going back a thousand years to look at housing and property rights. But the stories these books told were impersonal. Continue reading →

Light-Rail Disasters

By | | Policy brief
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Now that the COVID-19 pandemic has reduced ridership in many transit systems by as much as 90 percent, it almost seems nostalgic to look back to a time when transit ridership was only dropping because of low gas prices, ride hailing, and inept transit agency management. Among those ineptitudes documented in recent Antiplanner policy briefs were Los Angeles Metro’s insistence on building light rail despite its proven track record of losing five bus riders for every rail rider gained and Portland’s insistence on sticking with light rail despite the fact that doing so reduced the capacity of the transit system to move people through downtown Portland.

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

This raises the question of whether light rail has worked anywhere in the country. Transit agencies in seventeen urban areas that had no rail transit in 1980 have built light rail lines since then. This paper will look at each of these systems to see whether they have contributed to or detracted from their regions’ transit systems. I’ll also include Cleveland and Pittsburgh, both of which upgraded older streetcar lines to light-rail standards after 1980. Continue reading →

46. More Rail Transit Disasters

By | | Iconoclast
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When Congress created the transit capital improvement grants or New Starts fund in 1991, it required that each proposed project be “justified based on a comprehensive review of its mobility improvements, environmental benefits, cost effectiveness, and operating efficiencies.” Initially, the Federal Transit Administration measured “cost effectiveness” in dollars per new rider: the annual operating cost of the project plus the amortized capital cost divided by the projected number of annual new riders.

While a useful measure, the FTA made no effort to enforce it. While transit agencies calculated that bus projects (such as bus-rapid transit) typically cost about $5 per new rider and rail projects typically cost $20 to $100 per new rider, the agencies routinely selected the rail projects even though they clearly weren’t cost effective.

In 2003, U.S. representative from Oregon, Earl Blumenauer, convinced Congress to carve out a portion of New Starts for what he called Small Starts: smaller transit projects that would only cost a couple of hundred million dollars. He specifically expected that the money would be used for streetcars. Continue reading →

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 →