Search Results for: rail

Railroad Land Grants: Boon or Boondoggle?

By | | Transportation
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I wrote several posts for my other blog, Streamliner Memories, that are relevant here as well. Recent news stories have asked why projects like the California high-speed rail and Honolulu rail line are so expensive. The answer is that the politicians who support these projects don’t care about the cost because someone else will have to pay it. Or rather they do care but for them the cost is the benefit — the more they spend, the more might be turned into contributions to their future political campaigns from grateful contractors.

This 1939 report from the Department of the Interior lists 105 railroad, wagon road, canal, and river improvement land grants made by Congress in the 19th century and how many acres various transportation companies ended up receiving for those grants. A few of the grants, including the massive Northern Pacific grant, were still open with the grantees hoping to get several million more acres. Click image to download a 4.7-MB PDF of the report.

We saw an early example of this in the First Transcontinental Railroad and later railroads supported by large federal land grants. Railroads weren’t the only transportation projects supported by federal land grants: there were also canals, wagon roads, and river improvements. As it happens, I live near one of the wagon road projects that turned out to be a giant scam in which a few people got more than 860,000 acres of federal land for doing little more than driving a wagon across the state of Oregon. Continue reading →

Honolulu Rail: $9.9 Billion to Go Nowhere

By | | Transportation
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The Honolulu Authority for Rapid Transportation (HART) now says it will cost $9.9 billion to not finish its rail project by 2031. As recently as a year ago, HART insisted it would be able to complete the project by 2031, a mere 12 years late. But now it admits that it has a $1.4 billion funding shortfall that will prevent completion.

The rail line was supposed to go from Kapolei, a community of 21,000 people known as Oahu’s “second city,” to Ala Moana Center, Hawaii’s largest shopping mall. Even now, HART’s website claims it is essential for the rail line to go to Ala Moana “because of the Ala Moana Transit Center, which is the City’s largest bus transit center.” Rail passengers would be able to transfer there to buses that could take them to Waikiki, the University of Hawaii, and other destinations. Continue reading →

70% of Seattle Light-Rail Riders Don’t Pay

By | | Transportation
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Sound Transit, Seattle’s light-rail agency, has a goal of collecting enough fares to cover 40 percent of operating costs, yet it is collecting just 5 percent. That’s partly because of COVID-depressed ridership, but mainly because the agency makes almost no effort to collect fares. As a result, the agency estimates that 70 percent of its passengers are riding without paying.

Not getting much use: a Sound Transit ticket machine. Photo by Evan Didier.

Like other light-rail systems, Seattle’s operates on an “honor system,” meaning people are expected to pay before they board, but there are no turnstiles to keep them from boarding if they don’t pay. Like other light-rail systems, Seattle’s used to have “fare inspectors” who would hand out tickets to people who didn’t have proof of payment. But then someone pointed out that minorities were getting most of the tickets (maybe because they were most likely to not pay?), so this was deemed inequitable. Continue reading →

Lie Rail Supporters Keep On Lying

By | | Transportation
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The Antiplanner has previously written that light rail should be called lie rail because everything its advocates say about it is a lie. The latest proof comes from Capital Metro, Austin’s transit agency, which now admits that light-rail projects voters approved in 2020 are going to cost at least 78 percent more than originally projected.

Capital Metro persuaded voters to support light rail by claiming it would reduce congestion when in fact it will make it worse by taking lanes away from autos and dedicating them to empty tracks carrying empty light-rail trains.

The original projection, of course, was one of many lies told about the project. Almost every light-rail project ever built has cost far more than the original projections, overruns so systematic that Oxford researcher Bent Flyvbjerg says they are “best explained by strategic misrepresentation, that is, lying.” Other lies included overestimated ridership numbers and the claim that light rail is “high-capacity transit.” Continue reading →

The Myth of Rail Mobility

By | | Policy brief, Transportation
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Now that the war in Ukraine has revealed that Europe is even more dependent on foreign oil than the United States, Americans can smugly sit back and say, “If only those Europeans acted more like, you know, Europeans, they wouldn’t be in this fix.” Because, as everyone knows, Europeans travel mostly by electric public transit and high-speed trains, so they aren’t dependent on oil to get around by car or airplane.

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

The myth that rail transit and intercity passenger trains are dominant forms of transportation in Europe is one that I’ve addressed before, but it is repeated so often that it is worth examining again using the latest data. These data show that passenger trains are not an important source of mobility in most developed and developing nations, where rail travel is heavily outweighed by highway travel and, in most countries, air travel. Continue reading →

Don’t Build High-Speed Rail in Earthquake Zones

By | | Transportation
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The recent earthquake off the coast of Japan derailed a high-speed train and forced East Japan Railway to shut down the rail line. Fixing the line, the company admitted, may take “a considerable amount of time.”

Highways are generally more resilient than trains. They usually provide alternate routes if one route is damaged and roads are easier to fix than railroads, especially high-speed rail lines that must be built to high-precision standards. Fortunately, no one in the United States would build a high-speed rail line in an earthquake zone, right?

A Century-Old Love of Rail Monopolies

By | | Policy brief, Transportation
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In the mid-1990s, the United Kingdom privatized its government-owned railroads. That privatization proved to be a disaster, and now the country is renationalizing the trains.

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

Except none of these things are true. Britain didn’t really privatize its railroads in the 1990s. What it did do turned out to be pretty successful but, like many transportation systems, failed to survive the pandemic. What it’s doing now isn’t really nationalization but merely rebranding of the system—in effect, rearranging the deck chairs. Continue reading →

Honolulu Rail Has More Rail Problems

By | | Transportation
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Honolulu rail transit tracks, which as still under construction, are too close together in some spots, which could lead to derailments. This is different from last year’s problem, in which the wheels of the railcars were found to be too narrow for some of the tracks.

Honolulu’s high-cost, low-capacity rail line under construction. Click image for a larger view. Photo by Anthony Quintano.

No one yet knows how much it will cost and how long it will take to fix the new problem. But fixing last year’s issue significantly added to the delay and cost of the project, which is currently not expected to be finished until 2031, eleven years later and at more than twice the cost that was originally projected. Continue reading →

Railroads for Passengers or Freight?

By | | Transportation
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Congress’ decision to give Amtrak $16 billion for adding new passenger service has reopened an old debate: which should get priority over the rails — passenger or freight trains? That debate came out in hearings held by the Surface Transportation Board over Amtrak’s proposal to restart passenger service between New Orleans and Jacksonville that had been shut down in 2005 due to damage from Hurricane Katrina.

In 2016, Amtrak ran a test train to Florida to generate support for the Gulf Coast route. Resistance from the freight railroads has prevented Amtrak from reestablishing this service. Photo by Gracebeliever77.

CSX and Norfolk Southern, the railroads over which Amtrak would operate, says the passenger trains would “unreasonably disrupt” their freight trains in the area, many of which serve the Port of Mobile, Alabama, one of the fifteen largest ports in the country measured by tonnage. Unlike most West Coast ports, the Port of Mobile sees more tonnage exported than imported, and much of the freight in both directions goes over CSX and Norfolk Southern tracks. Continue reading →

Marxists for High-Speed Rail

By | | Transportation
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American high-speed rail advocates must be thrilled that Marxist-communists, as represented by The International magazine, have endorsed high-speed trains in the United States, which they describe as “trains against capitalism.” To build high-speed rail, the article says, we must “return to the path blazed by the Soviet Union, and make use of its tools: central planning and public spending.” Because these tools worked so well there!

This steam locomotive was built in the Soviet Union in 1956, a decade after most U.S. railroads stopped buying steam locomotives. American locomotive manufacturers built better and more powerful locomotives than this in the 1930s. Soviet locomotives tended to be smaller and less powerful than American ones because most Soviet rail infrastructure was lightly built and couldn’t take the weight of more powerful locomotives. Photo by Andrey Korchagin.

The article praises the Soviet Union for building “one of the greatest systems of railways the world has ever seen.” This reminds me of a statement by University of Washington Russian Studies professor Daniel Chirot,” who once said that, by 1980, the Soviet Union had built the “finest nineteenth-century industrial economy the world has ever seen” (I’m quoting from memory but you get the idea). Continue reading →