The Antiplanner » Tag » rail transit

Tag Archives: rail transit

Low Fares Beat Steel Wheels

By | | Transportation, Urban areas
7 Comments

Last week, the Antiplanner highlighted an LA Times story showing that Los Angeles transit ridership was dropping despite billions being spent on transit improvements. A blogger named Ethan Elkind wrote a response arguing that a graph in the Times story was unfair because it showed that Los Angeles transit ridership peaked in 1985.

That high point was reached, says Elkind, because L.A. County had kept bus fares at 50 cents for three years in the early 1980s. After the region started building rail, it raised fares and ridership declined. “So choosing 1985 as your baseline is like climate change deniers choosing an unusually warm year in the 1990s to show that global warming hasn’t really been happening since then,” says Elkind. (A better analogy would be transit advocates’ habit of using 1995–a low transit year nationwide–as a starting point to show increasing transit ridership.)

Continue reading →

Platitudes Won’t Solve Metro’s Problems

By | | Transportation
17 Comments

The Washington City Paper asked “thirteen riders, advocates, and experts” how to fix the Washington Metro Rail system. Former Metro general manager Dan Tangherlini and former DC DOT director Gabe Klein offered banalities about “putting the customer first.”

Smart-growth advocate Harriet Trepaning thinks Metro “needs a different kind of leader,” as if changing the person at the top is going to keep smoke out of the tunnels and rails from cracking. She admits that “I don’t think we’ve been straight with anybody, including ourselves or our riders, about what it really takes to [keep the rails in a] state of good repair.” But her only solution is to have “a dedicated source of revenue,” i.e., increase local taxes for a system that already costs state and local taxpayers close to a billion dollars per year.

Coalition for Smarter Growth director Stewart Schwartz and former APTA chair Rod Diridon also want to throw money at it. Others dodge the money question and suggest that Metro do all sorts of things that it can’t afford and doesn’t have any incentive to do anyway.

These drugs are also not recommended to patients with elongated interval since they can cause troubles of generic cialis online learningworksca.org cardiac rhythm to them. Many people feel embarrass to discuss their overnight shipping viagra personal issue with doctors. We are well known of order viagra viagra for the first time, it is recommended that you buy online. Penegra customers have given reports of side effects ranging from severe headaches, to discount cialis generic find over here heart attacks, extremely low blood pressure, prolonged and painful erections, lightheadedness, vision changes, short breath, irregular heartbeat, ringing in the ear, you should start reading the information leaflet, particularly the information regarding negative effects, that comes along with the prescription medication. Continue reading →

Paying for Rail Transit

By | | Transportation, Urban areas
27 Comments

Last week, San Antonio voters overwhelming approved of a measure forbidding the city’s transit agency from building any rail transit lines without voter approval. While that seems like a no brainer, opponents contended that it was unfair to single out rail transit for such a measure just because rail cost 50 to 100 times as much as bus transit.

Meanwhile, Maryland Governor Larry Hogan is still trying to decide whether to cancel the $2.5 billion Purple Line (not to mention Baltimore’s $3 billion Red Line). Rail supporters were disappointed that he cut tolls on bridges and toll roads, since they figured that any surplus tolls should have gone to their pet project.

Rail supporters are claiming that the evil Cato Institute is leading a major campaign to undermine their plans. In fact, with the exception of the Antiplanner and maybe one other person, no one at Cato has put much thought into the Purple Line, as they are working on such relatively trivial things as reducing conflict in the Mideast, improving health care, and keeping government from watching everything we do.

Continue reading →

It’s Going to Be a Bumpy Ride

By | | Transportation, Urban areas
16 Comments

Last December, Honolulu’s rail transit project was estimated to be $700 million over budget. Now they are saying it is closer to a billion. Never fear, however: the state legislature just agreed to extend a half-percent excise tax, which was supposed to expire in 2022, indefinitely for five years to pay for the rail and its cost overruns.


Due to many sinkholes and other soil problems, the elevated Honolulu rail line looks to be a bumpy ride.

The legislature was reluctant to do so, but was persuaded after heavy lobbying by Honolulu Mayor Kirk Caldwell. Coincidentally, the Honolulu Star-Advertiser reports that rail contractors and subcontractors have donated well over half a million dollars to Caldwell’s political campaign funds. This doesn’t include sub-subcontractors, which are so numerous that even the transit agency doesn’t know how many there are, much less who they are. (The story is behind a paywall, but it says prime contractors and their principals and employees have given the mayor nearly $324,000 while subcontractors have given nearly $243,000.)

Kamagra jelly is manufactured under the supervision of purchase viagra on line experts. Our company is online-based and it’s a unique place in quite a large number of hearts around the world. http://davidfraymusic.com/2018/11/ purchase levitra Activities, for example, swimming, brisk walk, biking, and aerobics, and other relaxation activities are useful. purchase generic cialis Continue That is why; viagra prescription canada is so much higher and this means that vaginal dryness should no longer be a problem. Continue reading →

Rail Transit and Reauthorization

By | | Transportation
5 Comments

The Cato Institute will publish a new report tomorrow looking at the inequities of federal transit funding. Antiplanner readers can download a preview copy today; many of the results in the paper have previously been reported here.

The Antiplanner has argued for years that federal transit funding was inefficient because it encouraged transit agencies to choose high-cost alternatives in any transit corridor. The new paper shows the results of this inefficiency: transit agencies that have persuaded local politicians to go along with these high-cost alternatives have ended up with as much as eight times more federal transit dollars per transit rider than agencies that settled for low-cost alternatives.
Erectile dysfunction must be cured in order to be protected from the impacts of hypertensive tendency you need to Read More Here viagra 25 mg do? Firstly, seek medical help to get the mood going; the natural plant chemicals in chocolate boost dopamine and endorphin levels, which can increase feelings of self-confidence and reduce stress, thereby increasing receptiveness to the idea of discussing their impotence as most consider it to be a highly embarrassing and emasculating condition. Apart from treating the symptoms, Homeopathy addresses the root viagra 5mg uk of this condition lies somewhere else, and a bit deeper than the genetics of a person. If we listed the different kinds of martial viagra samples uk arts discipline during their lifetime. There are solutions on the market that has taken little time to move up the impotence fighting drug tadalafil cheapest online ranking.
Continue reading →

Farms vs. Transit in Hawai’i

By | | Regional planning, Transportation
4 Comments

Now that Honolulu’s insanely expensive, low-capacity rail line is under construction (and over budget), Oahu land-use advocates are upset that the city wants to rezone 1,289 acres of farms for residential development. At least some members of the city council claim to have been shocked to learn that just 17 percent of the island is still suitable for farming while 27 percent has been urbanized.

Sadly, efforts to protect farmlands in Hawai’i are something of a joke considering that Hawai’i’s land-use laws–the strictest in the nation–were supposedly passed to protect farmlands and yet in fact are responsible for destroying Hawai’i’s agricultural industry. The land-use laws made Hawai’ian housing so unaffordable that farmers can’t pay workers enough for them to be able to live there. As a result, the state has lost most of its pineapple, sugar cane, and other crop production to other Pacific islands such as Fiji.

Comparing a map of Oahu land-use designations with the route of the rail line reveals that the rail line will cross only a few tiny areas of land zoned for farming. In fact, a lot of the land around Kapolei that is zoned urban hasn’t yet been developed and could still be used for farming, but why bother if you can’t afford to grow crops?

Continue reading →

Boston’s Little Dig

By | | Transportation, Urban areas
11 Comments

The Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority (MBTA or “the T” for short) has a problem. It has a $3 billion maintenance backlog, and must spend $470 million a year just to keep that backlog from growing. It has all kinds of wonderful plans to close that backlog, but those plans are all in the future. In the meantime, its latest budget proposal spares less than $100 million for maintenance.

So suppose someone offered the T a billion dollars. Heck, suppose someone offered it $2 billion. What percent of this money do you think the T would spend on maintenance?

Score a point if you guessed zero, for MBTA is currently spending $2 billion–half from the state and half from the feds–building a 4.3 mile extension of its Green light-rail line from Cambridge to Medford. When completed, this line is projected to increase the T’s total ridership by 7,000 “new” transit trips per day. Since the T currently carries about 1.4 million trips per weekday, the extension will increase ridership by 0.5 percent.

Continue reading →

Keeping Austin Weird

By | | Transportation, Urban areas
14 Comments

With Austin’s light-rail ballot measure going down in flames last November due to its high costs, rail transit advocates have conceded defeat, folded up their tents, and gone home. Ha, ha, just kidding; actually, now they are talking about subways.

Although someone prepared this map of an Austin subway system more as a joke than anything else, it has been used in news reports about proposals to build subways in the Texas capital.

“What do most major popular cities that continue to grow and be vibrant have in common?” asks Tom Meredith, former CEO of Dell Computer, which is headquartered in Austin. His answer? “Subways.”

Continue reading →

Transit Ridership Overestimates

By | | Transportation
7 Comments

Following up on yesterday’s list of cost overruns, today the Antiplanner looks at ridership overestimates. The sample of projects today is slightly different, as several of yesterday’s projects are excluded for a lack of data while several projects are added that were excluded yesterday because they involved reconstruction of existing rail lines.

The table below shows that early ridership estimates average about 70 percent greater than the actual ridership of the project. Estimates for projects completed in the 2000s were slightly worse than estimates for projects completed in the 1980s. Estimates for 2010s projects were better, but the sample size is small.

The numbers in the table represent average weekday ridership. Most of these data are based on projections for the first year of operation, but some projects didn’t make estimates for that year so the DOT relied on estimates for a later year and tried to adjust the numbers based on the rate of growth in ridership. In two cases (marked with *) the projected year was 2010, so I used actual 2010 ridership. In a case marked **, the projected year was 2015, so I projected that year based on the growth rate through 2012.

Continue reading →

Rail Transit Cost Overruns

By | | Transportation
10 Comments

Rail transit projects typically cost about 40 to 50 percent more than projected, with some projects costing double the original projections and very few costing less than 20 percent more than the projections. The table below shows the projected and actual costs of 56 rail projects (and four bus projects). Most of the data are from a series of Department of Transportation reports, the first of which came out in 1990 (23.5 MB), with updates in 2003 (17.2 MB), 2007 (3.7 MB), 2008 (0.3 MB), 2011 (0.7 MB), 2012 (0.1 MB), and 2013 (0.8 MB).

I added five projects to those listed in these reports. One, the Los Angeles Blue Line, is documented in a 2006 paper by researchers at Northeastern University. All of the numbers in the paper are identical to the numbers in the 2007 DOT report except that the paper also has the Blue Line while the DOT report does not. I presume the methodologies are identical and that the 52 rail projects in the DOT reports and the Northeastern University paper are a representative sample, as the FTA would be unlikely to deliberately bias the sample to projects that went over cost by more than the average.

The other four projects I added were completed since 2009, the date of the last project studied in the DOT papers. I based the data for these projects on FTA New Starts reports and other official documentation. My selection of projects may not be as representative a cross-section of projects completed in that time period as I only picked projects I know about and these may tend to go over cost by more than the average.

Continue reading →