Search Results for: rail

Deconstructing Commuter- & Light-Rail Data

The American Public Transportation Association has posted its second quarter ridership report, showing a 2.0 percent decline in ridership in the second quarter and a 2.9 percent decline in the first half of the year. This isn’t really new information since the FTA issued its version of the data in early August. However, APTA’s numbers provide independent confirmation.

According to both APTA and the FTA, all major forms of transit are declining except commuter rail. So why is commuter rail increasing? A close look at the FTA data show that, between FY2014 and FY2018, commuter rail numbers declined in Boston, Chicago, Philadelphia, and Los Angeles, but increased in Seattle, New York, and Denver. The increases in New York and Denver, however, were more than offset by declines in bus ridership.

New York commuter trains (including New Jersey Transit) carried 10.4 million more trips in FY 2018 than 2014. However, New York MTA alone lost 72.6 million bus trips in the same time period. New Jersey Transit lost another 5.5 million. It is unlikely that people substituted commuter train trips for buses, so this suggests that ridership is dropping most in the urban core, which would be consistent with the idea that ride hailing is cutting into transit. Continue reading

Watch Romance of the Rails Live

Today, the Cato Institute releases Romance of the Rails with a forum that starts at 11:30 am Eastern and continues to 1:30 pm. The Antiplanner will introduce the book, followed by comments on the book from Art Guzzetti of the American Public Transportation Association; Jim Mathews, of the Rail Passengers Association; and Marc Scribner, of the Competitive Enterprise Institute. If you can’t be in Washington DC this midday, watch it live here.

I don’t know if this is my best book yet, but it was the most fun to research and write. With so many railroad history books out there, I didn’t think I would be able to write something that hadn’t already been written a hundred times. In fact, I think a lot of the history in the book — and the book is more than half history, less than half policy analysis — will be new to even many ardent rail fans. Continue reading

Light Rail Is Criminogenic

The Guardian reports that a movement has begun in Baltimore to shut down the city’s light-rail lines because of the crime they spread. The liberal Guardian makes this out to be a racial issue, but actually it is just a safety issue.

Architect Oscar Newman discovered several decades ago that some designs are criminogenic, meaning they attract crime, while other designs deter crime. While criminals are more likely to be poor, Newman showed that poor people of all races were much less likely to engage in or be victimized by crime if they lived in areas that were non-criminogenic.

Newman had noted that poor people living in some neighborhoods suffered from lots of crime while the same class of people living in other neighborhoods experienced almost no crime. To find out why, Newman compared design features with crime reports on thousands of city blocks. His work was successfully replicated on a much larger scale by later researchers. Continue reading

Portland Plots Its Next Light-Rail Line

Transit ridership is declining and the Trump administration is refusing to giving away federal funds for new transit projects. But Portland’s TriMet transit agency is already buying properties for its new $3 billion light-rail line.

Metro’s Joint Policy Advisory Committee on Transportation — which is the real power at Metro, not the elected Metro council — has approved the route for the rail line that is supposed to go from downtown Portland to Bridgeport Village, a shopping mall on Interstate 5. The plan calls for bike paths, sidewalks, some new highway bridges (which aren’t included in the cost), as well as 12 miles of light-rail route.

The official projected cost for the project is $2.6 billion to $2.9 billion, but as an analysis by the Cascade Policy Institute shows, the final cost of previous light-rail projects all ended up being as much as 40 percent more than the estimates that had been made at the draft environmental impact statement stage. Metro issued a draft EIS for the project in June. Continue reading

Light Rail Average Cost Is $202 Million/Mile

Here’s a fun question to think about: what will be the last rail transit project built in America? Will it be one of the projects currently on the Federal Transit Administration’s current list of grant projects? Or will some other city come up with a doofus proposal after all of the projects on the current list are either done or, better, cancelled?

For fiscal year 2019, the FTA proposed to fund just ten projects, including eight new construction projects and two improvements to existing transit lines. One of the eight new projects, Portland-Milwaukie light rail, is actually already finished and many of the others are partly finished.

While the Trump administration’s official policy is that it will not give out any new construction grants, the process has several stages before projects reach the construction phase, including project development and engineering. The administration has added at least ten new projects to the development or engineering phases. The current list has a total of 66 projects. Continue reading

Miami Having Wrong Debate over Bus vs. Rail

On July 19, Miami-Dade’s transportation planning organization will decide whether to spend $300 million on bus-rapid transit or $1.5 billion on rail. As noted by the Antiplanner a year ago, this continues a debate that has been going on for years.

It’s a stupid debate because buses can move far more people for far less money. It’s even stupider because the $300 million bus-rapid transit plan is also a waste of money as Miami can’t generate enough transit traffic to effectively use dedicated bus lanes. The heart of the debate has nothing to do with transportation and everything to do with politicians’ egos.

“People in the south understand that if they settle for a bus, they’ll never get a rail,” said one politician. “Nobody wants buses.” Let me give you a clue: nobody except contractors and politicians really wants rail either. More than 90 percent of Miami-Dade commuters drive to work and less than 6 percent take transit (less than 1 percent of which uses existing rail). Continue reading

Europe’s High-Speed Rail Not Sustainable

France opened two new high-speed rail lines last year, but they may be the last for awhile because the country is running out of cash to pay for them. A recent review by the European Court of Auditors seems to question whether any more high-speed rail lines should be built anywhere in Europe.

The audit reviewed 30 high-speed rail lines and found:

  • Construction costs averaged 25 million euros per kilometer (about $46 million per mile);
  • Much of this money was wasted because trains run at an average of just 45 percent of the design speed of the lines;
  • Cost overruns and delays are the norm rather than the exception: overruns averaged 78 percent and several lines have been delayed by more than a decade;
  • Benefits in many cases are negligible: many of the lines cost more than 100 million euros ($116 million) per minute of train time saved.

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The auditors cite an academic study that concluded that high-speed rail was a “success” if it carried 6 million passengers its first year rising soon to 9 million passengers. But this study wasn’t based on the profitability of the lines; instead, nearly all of the benefits it calculated went to business travelers who saved time by riding the trains. The study assumed that time to those travelers was worth 40 euros ($46 dollars) per hour. But if it is really worth that much, why aren’t the trains priced that high? Continue reading

Nashville Light-Rail Post Mortem

It’s been a little over a week since Nashville voters rejected that city’s light-rail plan, and the pundits are wringing their hands in despair. Many of them have a common set of assumptions:

  • Rail transit is the only real transit — buses don’t count — so voters who reject rail are rejecting transit itself;
  • Transit relieves congestion, so it is surprising that voters in a congested city would reject spending more on transit;
  • Transit is morally superior to driving and both are subsidized, so the fact that subsidies to transit passenger miles are roughly 100 times greater than to highway passenger miles is irrelevant.

Nashville is “gridlocked,” says Wired magazine, so voters should have supported the plan. But no one except out-of-town reporters really believed that spending at least $5.4 billion building 29 miles of light rail would do anything to relieve congestion. Continue reading

Voters Leaning Against Nashville Rail Plan

An April 12 and 13 survey of likely Nashville voters found that 62 percent, plus or minus 4 percent, say that — if the election were held the day of the survey — they would vote against the $9 billion Nashville transit plan. Since early voting has already begun for the election that is officially scheduled on May 1, the plan’s proponents may not have a chance to turn that around.

Early polls showed that most people supported the plan. I’d like to think that a January conference I spoke at helped turn things around. But the sex scandal that forced the unexpected resignation of Nashville’s mayor, who was the plan’s biggest proponent, probably had more to do with it.

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Does Light Rail Help the Working Class?

Weak transit hurts working class,” claims an article in the Portland Tribune. “Communities of color, lower-income communities and English language learners have moved farther from city centers due to rising rents, and into high-crash corridors,” reports the article. “These community members are injured and killed in pedestrian crashes at a higher rate than white, higher-income urbanites.”

What the article doesn’t say is that the reason why low-income people were pushed out of their rented, single-family homes near the city center is because Portland’s urban-growth boundary prevented the construction of affordable new single-family homes on the urban fringes. This forced middle-class families to buy single-family homes in the city, evicting the renters.

Those renters then moved into high-density transit-oriented developments built along Portland’s light-rail line. Since those developments tend to be built on busy streets, the streets are more dangerous to pedestrians than the local streets where their former single-family homes are located. Thus, Portland’s transit dreams are the cause, not the solution, to this problem. Continue reading