Search Results for: rail projects

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 →

Top Ten Lies in Transportation Projects

By | | Regional planning, Transportation
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Bent Flyvbjerg, who specializes in studying megaprojects, has a new paper describing the “Top Ten Behavioral Biases in Project Management.” Each of these biases are ways in which planners lie to themselves, the public, or both. His basic thesis is that these are not just cognitive biases, or accidentally poor judgments, but are political biases, that is, deliberately poor judgments.

According to the San Diego Association of Governments (SANDAG), 8,000 people turned out to witness the opening of a $2.1 billion waste of money. Photo by SANDAG.

While the paper is interesting and I have no doubt that strategic misrepresentations and other political biases take place, I have to wonder why they do. The reason I am surprised is that the general public seems to be completely innumerate when it comes to government spending. Continue reading →

Midwest Rail Plan: A Disaster in the Making

By | | Policy brief, Transportation
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In 2009 and 2010, the Federal Railroad Administration gave the state of Illinois $1.39 billion to improve tracks between Chicago and St. Louis to allow passenger trains to go up to 110 miles per hour, saving one hour of travel time. The agency also gave the state $370 million to buy 88 passenger cars and 21 locomotives to operate more frequent trains in this and other Midwest corridors such as Chicago-Detroit.

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

Pretty much all of that money, along with about $500 million in state funds, has been spent. Yet, more than a decade later, Chicago-St. Louis passenger rains are no faster and no more frequent than they were in 2009. The same happened in other Midwest corridors, including Chicago-Detroit, Chicago-Twin Cities, Chicago-Omaha, and St. Louis-Kansas City, where collectively $1.6 billion was spent yet speeds and frequencies remain the same. So far, of the equipment ordered to serve these corridors, only four passenger cars and one locomotive have been delivered. Continue reading →

More Rail Follies

By | | Transportation
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Speaking of faulty railcar wheels (which I wrote about in Monday’s post regarding the Hawaii rail debacle), Washington’s Metro has been forced to drastically reduce rail service due to wheel problems that are causing its trains to frequently derail. The National Transportation Safety Board discovered that Metrorail trains have suffered dozens of minor derailments since the 7000-series of cars were put into service in 2015.

A Blue Line train derailed last week, and investigators found that it had actually derailed twice before that same day. Many other trains were delayed as it took two hours to evacuate the 187 passengers on board. In a press conference early this week, National Transportation Safety Board officials said that the derailment could have been “catastrophic” if the wheels had hit the third rail that powers the trains.

As a result, Metro is taking the 7000-series cars out of service for at least a week while it tries to determine what to do about the problem. Since those cars make up 60 percent of the system’s operable fleet, that means reducing service from as frequently as every five minutes to as infrequently as every half hour. Continue reading →

AmeriStarRail Responds

By | | Transportation
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Ten days ago, I published an open letter to AmeriStarRail, a company that proposes to take over Amtrak service in the Northeast Corridor. Below, without further comment, is AmeriStarRail’s response (with my questions in italics).

Dear Antiplanner,

Thanks for your detailed questions about AmeriStarRail’s proposal to improve Amtrak’s Northeast Corridor service and our bid protest. I saw your Open Letter to ASR on your blog and I wanted to provide these clarifications:

  • the 76 trainsets with at least 12 cars each would be a total of 912 cars
  • ASR did not propose to spend $5 billion improving NEC tracks. We will pay user fees for the tracks and stations. The $5 billion is for trainsets only.
  • AmeriStarRail submitted a proposal to an Amtrak RFP with a bid price of $1 for 76 trainsets and $1 for a Northeast Corridor Trainset Maintenance Center

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Here are our answers to your questions: Continue reading →

China’s High-Speed Rail Debt Trap

By | | Transportation
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China’s high-speed system is caught a debt trap, having to borrow money to repay the loans taken out to pay for rail construction. Although a few lines claim to be profitable, most are not. As a result, says an article published by New Delhi think tank Observer Research Foundation, since 2015 interest payments on China State Railway debt has been greater than high-speed rail revenues.

The article (all but the last four paragraphs of which is used as the narrative for the above video) was written as a warning that “Poorer countries trying to emulate HSR must be mindful of the pitfalls.” But it is equally valid as a warning to richer countries, where construction costs are higher and where the value of passenger rail is lower due to extensive networks of intercity highways and airports. Continue reading →

The World’s Finest Railroads

By | | Policy brief, Transportation
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The United States has the most efficient and productive railroads in the world. Not coincidentally, the United States also has the most private railroads in the world. Other than Canada, almost every other country that has railroads has nationalized them.

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

Private railroads operate with very different goals from those that are owned by the government. Private railroads seek to maximize profits, and to do so they must be as efficient and productive as possible. Government-owned railroads seek to maximize political popularity, and to do so they must favor actions that are highly visible and often are highly inefficient and unproductive because economic costs translate into political benefits. Continue reading →

No Light Rail for You, San Jose

By | | Transportation
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After last week’s shooting, restoring light-rail service to Silicon Valley will take “weeks or months, not days,” says a representative of the Santa Clara Valley Transportation Authority (VTA). In place of light rail, the agency was providing “bus bridges” to serve light-rail routes.

On Monday, however, VTA announced that it would discontinue such bus bridges. Instead, it “is directing all resources to the regular bus network that serves the majority of our riders who rely on public transit the most.” In other words, light rail serves mainly high-income workers who aren’t riding anyway because they are working at home. So those who were still riding light rail before last Wednesday must hustle to find alternate transportation such as riding buses that don’t necessarily parallel the light-rail lines.

If these light-rail lines were so important to the region that they had to be built, it seems like they would be important enough to keep running buses serving their customers while the rail system is out of commission. VTA is tacitly admitting that it was a mistake to build them in the first place. Continue reading →

What Would Billions for Rail Buy Us?

By | | Transportation
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Last year’s Moving Forward Act, which was passed by the House but not the Senate, would have included $29 billion for Amtrak over six years, about triple what Amtrak has been getting. As the Moving Forward Act proposed to spend about $1.5 trillion and Biden’s vague infrastructure plan is supposed to cost $3.0 trillion, some people assume that plan will include about $60 billion for Amtrak and high-speed rail.

That wouldn’t be enough to complete the California high-speed rail project, must less build a real national high-speed rail network. As I’ve noted before, the cost of such a network would be in the trillions. High-speed rail supporters hope to get projects going in a couple of states that will make members of Congress from other states demand high-speed rail money for their states or districts.

What will travelers get out of all this spending? The 328 million Americans in 2019 traveled almost 15,000 miles by automobile, 2,300 miles by commercial airliner, 164 miles by public transit (of which 50 miles is by bus), and 19 miles by Amtrak. The official number for all bus, including transit, intercity, charter, school, and so forth, is 1,100 miles per capita, but I suspect the real number is 400 (350 for non-transit buses). Walking and cycling are officially 100 and 26 miles, but this only includes trips that have destination such as work or shops; when recreation and exercise trips are included, they are probably at least double that. That brings total per capita travel to about 18,000 miles. Continue reading →

Applying Value Engineering to Transit Projects

By | | Policy brief, Transportation
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In 1997, Tidewater Regional Transit—which served Norfolk and Virginia Beach, Virginia—proposed to build an 18-mile light-rail line between the two cities. Virginia Beach voters, however, rejected the plan. So, in 2000, the transit agency (which since 1999 had been known as Hampton Roads Transit) decided to build 7.4 miles from downtown Norfolk to the Norfolk-Virginia Beach city limit. In 2003, the project was estimated to cost less than $200 million and attract 10,500 riders a day.

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

Few places were less suited to rail transit, which is mainly designed to bring lots of commuters into job-rich downtowns. Although the Hampton Roads area has nearly 1.5 million people, it doesn’t have any large job-filled downtowns. According to Wendell Cox’s analysis of central business districts, downtown Norfolk had fewer than 25,000 jobs in the mid- to late-2000s, and fewer than 800 of them took transit to work. Continue reading →