Search Results for: rail projects

Wisconsin’s High-Cost, Low-Speed Rail

Wisconsin was the fourth-highest (after California, Florida, and Illinois) recipient of federal high-speed rail money, receiving $823 million to initiate Milwaukee-to-Madison service. The state’s application proposes to use this money to operate six trains a day between the two cities as a continuation of service from Chicago to Milwaukee.

The proposal does not call for high-speed (faster than 125 mph) or even moderate-speed (faster than 80 mph) rail. Instead, the top speeds will only be 79 mph until even more money is spent improving signaling to allow for “positive train control” (which insures trains will automatically stop when necessary even if the engineer fails to stop the train).

With three stops between Madison and Milwaukee, the average speed will be just 58 mph. That’s a bit higher than the current Badger Bus, which averages 42 to 52 mph depending on which bus you take. But the rail route is longer than the bus route, which means the train will take longer (1 hour 40 minutes) than the fastest bus (1 hour 30 minutes).

In addition, the bus stops in the middle of the University of Wisconsin campus in Madison, while current plans call for the train to terminate at Dane County Airport on the edge of town, with transit connections to downtown and the university. This gives even the slower (1 hour 50 minute) buses a huge competitive advantage.

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High-Speed Raildoggles

A day after proposing a spending freeze (that everyone from Glenn Beck to Paul Krugman thinks is stupid), Obama gleefully announced $8 billion in federal grants for high-speed rail. But Obama knows full well that the final cost will be much, much more than $8 billion.

How much more? The Antiplanner once estimated $550 billion in capital costs (not counting cost overruns). BNSF CEO Mark Rose guesses $1 trillion (he must have included cost overruns). Oregon Congressman Peter DeFazio compromises at $700 billion.

“The thing is unimaginably expensive,” admits DeFazio. But, he adds, $700 billion is “the same amount of money that Congress gave in one day to Wall Street!” In trying to make high-speed rail sound cheap, he is hoping you won’t remember that Congress didn’t give Wall Street anything; it was almost all loans and most, if not all, will be repaid. That won’t happen with high-speed rail.

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Surprise: Another Light-Rail Line Is Over Its Budget

“Norfolk leaders want an audit to figure out why its light rail project has gone $108 million over budget,” reports the Associated Press. The city doesn’t need to spend money on an audit. The reason for the overrun is obvious: It’s a rail-transit construction project.

As if that isn’t enough, the line was planned by Parsons Brinckerhoff (PB), the company that planned most of the rail transit lines that have gone over budget in the past 50 years. PB also planned and helped build the Big Dig, another urban-planning project that went way over budget.

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High-Speed Rail: Planning Disaster of the Teens?

In a recent post, the Antiplanner pointed out that the United States is in competition with China, or more accurately, the Western model of democratic capitalism is in competition with the Eastern model of authoritarian capitalism. Now, China has announced the opening of the world’s fastest high-speed train service, capable of reaching speeds of 245 mph.

Fast for a train.
Flickr photo by Datemarker.

Naturally, this has treehuggers saying China will leave United States “in the dust” and the rest of the world behind as well. But let’s get real: in the United States, we use a technology known as jet airplanes that move people twice as fast as China’s high-speed trains.

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Rail Disasters of the Oughts

Although the Antiplanner spends a lot of blog posts ranting about rail transit, the truth is that all of the rail disasters of the last decade together did not cost nearly as much as certain other government planning disasters that the Antiplanner will cover later this week. Yet new rail transit lines can impose huge costs on local taxpayers, property owners, and — often — transit riders.

The sad fact is that rail transit takes so long to plan and build that just about any line that opened in this decade is really a result of planning that began in the 1990s or earlier. But for the purposes of this list, I mainly considered lines that opened after about 2004. This list is roughly in reverse order of the amount of net waste generated by each line or system.

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High-Speed Rail EIR Inadequate

A California judge ruled yesterday that the environmental impact report (EIR) written for the California high-speed rail project is inadequate and must be done over. Shortly before the ruling, Quentin Kopp — a powerful politician who formerly chaired and still sits on the rail authority’s board — called the lawsuit “frivolous” and predicted that it would be thrown out.

But Judge Michael Kenny concluded (750KB pdf) that the high-speed rail proposal was too vague. As a result, the EIR contained “an inadequate discussion of the impacts of the Pacheco alignment alternative on surrounding businesses and residences which may be displaced, construction impacts on the Monterey Highway, and impacts on Union Pacific’s use of its right-of-way and spurs and consequently its freight operations.”

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Light Rail Is Deadly, So Give the Feds More Power

The Federal Transit Administration (FTA) has published data verifying the Antiplanner’s conclusion that light rail is just about the most dangerous form of urban travel in America. Not necessarily dangerous to the riders; just to anyone who happens to be nearby. Of course, we always blame the accidents on the people who get hit.

So what is the FTA’s conclusion? That it needs more power to regulate transit safety. We heard the same thing after the Washington MetroRail crash that killed nine people: just give the FTA power to regulate transit safety.
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That’s a pretty dumb idea considering it was the FTA that funded all those rail projects in the first place. Unlike subways, light rail sharing the right-of-way with cars and pedestrians is inherently dangerous, like putting a vicious dog in a room with nursery school children. Having someone monitor the dog is not going to help much if the dog is faster than the guard. A real solution to safer transit is to stop building light rail. Then no one would be needed to regulate it.

Glaeser Looks at High-Speed Rail

In a four-part article on the New York Times Economix blog, Harvard economist Edward Glaeser scrutinized high-speed rail and concludes that the benefits are overwhelmed by the costs. Part one focused on construction costs and concluded that true high-speed rail would cost about $50 million per mile.

Part two compared the costs with the benefits to users and calculated that, even using the most optimistic ridership numbers, the costs would be at least three times the benefits. Part three added in environmental benefits, and even with generous assumptions about those benefits concluded that total benefits still fall far short of the costs.

Part four asks whether high-speed rail would cause cities to become more centralized or if it would simply lead to more sprawl as distant towns effectively become suburbs of major cities. Glaeser takes the questionable position that centralization is a good thing, and he questions whether high-speed rail would contribute to that supposedly desirable outcome. But he concludes that, even if high-speed rail makes cities more centralized, the benefits of such centralization would still fall short of the costs of the rail projects.

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DC MetroRail: An Accident Waiting to Happen

The “failsafe” train control system that was supposed to prevent the June 22 accident that killed nine subway riders in Washington DC appears to be breaking down throughout the MetroRail system. Although Metro’s general manager claimed that the agency tested all of the circuits and had not found any problems, the Washington Post has uncovered documents revealing problems with at least four of the region’s five rail lines.

The good news is that reporters are finally becoming skeptical about the supposed utopian virtues of the transit industry. A FoxNews reporter found a DC bus driver reading a book while driving in traffic. DC bus drivers are some of the highest paid public employees in the nation, many earning well over $100,000 a year. But I guess that isn’t enough for them to keep their attention on their jobs.
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Meanwhile, the reporters in Portland who revealed TriMet’s expensive health insurance plans attempted to interview transit union officials for their responses, but the officials didn’t have time. They did, however, have time to make a youtube video responding to the “lies” in the news reports. They blame the lies on “right winger” John Charles, former head of the Oregon Environmental Council, current head of the libertarian Cascade Policy Institute. Isn’t it wonderful how we can just dismiss someone because they are a “right winger”? It makes things so easy; you don’t have to think about the issues themselves.