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Smoke on the Water

By | | Transportation, Urban areas
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“On behalf of the Board of Directors and all Metro employees, I offer my deepest condolences to the family of the passenger who died yesterday following the incident on the Yellow Line,” said chairman Tom Downs of the Washington Metro Area Transit Authority yesterday. “Please know that once the cause of this incident is understood, we are prepared to take the actions needed to prevent this from happening again.”

But WMATA isn’t prepared to prevent this from happening again, and that’s the problem. We know it isn’t prepared because it has had this problem before and didn’t solve it then.

“Smoke poured into Metro subway tunnels again last night,” reported the Washington Post back in 2007. At the time, officials claimed the source of the smoke was “baffling,” but the article provided some clues to the answer. The problem seemed to lay with smoldering fiberglass insulators, which “can last for years if they are in dry areas but only several months if in wet areas.”

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Cost Overrun; Revenue Shortfall

By | | Transportation, Urban areas
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To almost no one’s surprise, the Honolulu Authority for Rapid Transportation (HART) has announced that the rail project it is building will cost at least 10 to 15 percent more than estimated, while the revenues from the general excise tax that is supposed to pay for the project are, so far, $41 million less than expected.

A 10 to 15 percent cost overrun isn’t large as rail projects go, but this is an expensive, $5.2-billion project to start with, so 10 to 15 percent is $500 million to $780 million. HART officials blame the cost increase partly on the lawsuits that, unfortunately, failed to stop this waste of money, but even they say that the delays only increased costs by $190 million. Since the project isn’t even supposed to be completed until 2019, there is plenty of time for overruns to mount up to be far greater than projected today.

Rather than make the sensible move and simply cancel the project, the city is debating how to pay for the overruns. One idea is to divert to rail $200 million in federal money that is now being spent on Honolulu buses. Another idea is to extend the excise tax, which was supposed to expire in 2022, for a much longer period of time. Either way, they would take money that would have been spent on something productive and devote it to a complete boondoggle.

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$80 Million a Mile for a Piece of Junk

By | | Transportation
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The latest cost estimate for the proposed 4.5-mile Arlington, Virginia streetcar has risen to $358 million, or $80 million per mile. This puts it in the same ballpark as light rail, as current light-rail projects in Dallas, Minneapolis, Phoenix, Sacramento, and Salt Lake City are costing $50 million to $80 million per mile (though the average for all current light-rail projects is nearly $110 million).


A model of the proposed Arlington streetcar. Local taxpayers will be lucky if the rail supporters in the Arlington County Department of Environmental Services will be satisfied playing with the model instead of forcing taxpayers to build the real thing.

What would Arlington get for all this money? Proponents, such as Arlington County manager Barbara Donnellan, still call streetcars “high-capacity transit” even though streetcars have about the lowest capacity of any transit system imaginable. Heck, minivans can probably move about as many people per hour as streetcars.

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So Much for TOD

By | | Transportation
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Transit agencies are quick to claim that new rail transit lines generate all sorts of new developments, particularly so-called transit-oriented developments, meaning high-density, mixed-use housing. But an objective study of Minneapolis’ Hiawatha light-rail line from economists Sarah West and Needham Hurst found that “neither construction nor operation of the line appears to affect land use change relative to the time before construction.”

Unfortunately, the paper itself is behind a paywall, but it is summarized in this article from the Minneapolis Star-Tribune. An earlier version of the study is also available.

Hurst’s and West’s findings are obliquely affirmed by a recent article in the Journal of the American Planning Association that finds that people living in transit-oriented developments may drive a little less than other people, but it’s not because of the presence of rail transit. Instead, “Housing type and tenure, local and subregional density, bus service, and particularly off- and on-street parking availability, play a much more important role.” Another way of putting it is that people who choose to live in places with limited parking probably didn’t want to drive much anyway.

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Megaprojects Invite Corruption

By | | News commentary, Transportation
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FBI agents posed as transit-oriented developers willing to bribe the mayor of Charlotte to get his support for a streetcar line, light rail, and related projects. The now-ex-mayor Patrick Cannon gladly accepted bribes in exchange for lying to investors and pushing city planning agencies to fast track the developments. When on the city council, Cannon had opposed construction of a streetcar line, but mysteriously changed his vote when he became mayor.


Who did developers bribe to get this project completed?

The Antiplanner isn’t enthusiastic about police entrapments, but this case brings to light one of the seamier sides of rail transit. These projects cost so much that they make some sort of corruption, if only in the form of campaign contributions, mandatory. The FBI sting has to raise questions about other rail projects and developments, especially considering the current U.S. Secretary of Transportation was the mayor of Charlotte just prior to the one who was stung.

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Crash at O’Hare

By | | News commentary, Transportation
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Investigators have narrowed down the cause of Monday’s Chicago Transit Authority train crash at O’Hare Airport to either “operator fatigue” or a failure of the rail line’s automated safety systems. Neither explanation is very reassuring.

On one hand, taxpayers are paying more than $200 million a year to pay Chicago train and bus riders some of the highest wages in the nation, only (it is alleged) to have them fall asleep at the metaphorical wheel. On the other hand, the Chicago Transit Authority wants to spend $2-$4 billion “increasing the capacity” of some of its rail lines when it can’t afford to maintain the rail lines that it has now. Back in 2007, the agency said it needed more than $16 billion to bring its rail lines up to a state of good repair, and since then it hasn’t found more than a small fraction of that amount.
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Many people from medium-sized urban areas who visit Chicago wonder why their city can’t have a rail system like that–a system that is deeply in debt, has a huge maintenance backlog, and is suffering from declining ridership. The truth is that rail transit doesn’t work anywhere in the United States except possibly Manhattan, and even there it is questionable.

Another High-Cost, Low-Capacity Transit Line

By | | Transportation
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Panama City is opening a new rail transit line this month, but the Antiplanner’s review of the project found a significant flaw: though it cost as much to build as a heavy-rail line, it’s capacity to carry people is less than a light-rail line. The city says it can move about 15,000 people an hour, which is not very many considering that the city estimates nearly 100,000 people enter the city during a one-hour period on weekday mornings. But the 15,000 is at crush capacity, and I estimate a more realistic number is about half that.

As with the Mumbai monorail, I have to ask: if you are going to the expense of building a heavy-rail line, why are you providing the capacity of a light-rail line or less? One answer is the city expects the low-capacity trains to be full, thus giving the impression that the project is a great success.

I’ve never been to Panama City, and early responses to my review suggest that the bus-rapid transit alternative I propose wouldn’t work on Panama City streets. But I suspect it would cost a lot less to modify a few of the streets to allow more buses that could move a lot more people than the rail line will be able to handle.
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Courts Approve High-Cost, Low-Capacity Transit

By | | News commentary, Transportation
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The Ninth Circuit Court dismissed objections to the plan for Honolulu’s 20-mile, $5 billion rail line. Though proponents call it a high-capacity rail line, in fact it uses trains whose capacity is actually lower than light-rail–which term really means “low-capacity rail.”

A line with three-car light-rail trains can move about 9,000 people per hour. The maker of the Alstom trains Honolulu wants to run claims they can move 15,000 people per hour, but that’s at crush-capacity. At crowding levels that Americans will accept, the capacity is probably less than 7,000 people per hour.

By comparison, the Antiplanner estimates double-decker buses can move 17,000 people per hour on a city street and more than 100,000 people per hour on a freeway lane. Buses are faster too: Alstom trains in other cities average just 20 mph.
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Another City Gets Conned into Building a Stupid Rail Line

By | | Transportation
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Mumbai opened a monorail last week, the first 12 miles of what is planned to be an 84-mile system costing a total of US$2 billion. A high-density city like Mumbai may be one of the few places in the world where rail transit makes sense. But the Mumbai monorail has a design flaw that makes it as stupid as the most idiotic rail lines in the United States (of which there are many candidates).


Not only are the monorail trains small, their average speed is just 20 mph. Wikimedia commons photo.

That flaw is that the trains are no more than six short cars long, and can run only every three minutes. Even at crush capacity, the system can move only 7,400 people per hour. That’s a tiny fraction of what a real high-capacity rail system can move. New York’s Eighth Avenue subway line can move 30 ten-car trains per hour, and each car has a crush capacity of 240 people, making it capable of moving 72,000 people per hour. Americans won’t accept crush-capacity conditions, but even at American levels of crowding, New York subways can move at least six times as many people per hour as the Mumbai monorail.
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New Starts Hearing

By | | Transportation
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At the New Starts hearing last week, the Antiplanner testified that the federal government has given transit agencies and local politicians incentives to waste money on expensive transit projects that increase congestion, use more energy than the cars they take off the road, and harm transit riders. Members of the House Highways and Transit Subcommittee then proceeded to prove my point by asking FTA Administrator Peter Rogoff a long series of questions that were all some variation of, “When are you going to send more money to my district?”

Los Angeles-area Representative Grace Napolitano did ask one interesting question: if rail transit does so much to increase property values, why aren’t transit agencies paying for rail lines by imposing some sort of tax, such as tax-increment financing, on those enhanced values? It wasn’t that she disbelieved that rail transit enhanced property values; she just thought that cities could build even more rail lines if they took advantage of this great opportunity.

The Antiplanner didn’t get a chance to respond during the hearing. But in follow-up comments, I pointed out that the enhanced property values are entirely illusory. First, rail transit doesn’t lead to regional economic development; all it might do is shuffle that development to different places around the region. Thus, if property values along the rail line do rise, that means values somewhere else in the city or region are depressed.

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