Search Results for: streetcars

Transit Agencies Go Insane

By | | Transportation
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Earlier this month, the Federal Transit Administration published its annual report on funding recommendations for transit capital improvement grants. Each year, I review the accompanying list of projects being planned or under construction to see how much construction costs have grown since the previous year. This year, however, transit agencies seem to have learned a lesson from the pandemic and have curtailed their wild spending on pointless projects.

Sound Transit is building light rail on what was once freeway lanes across Lake Washington. Photo by Sound Transit.

Just kidding. In fact, they are spending more than ever. In the 1990s, light-rail lines that cost $50 million a mile ($100 million in today’s dollars) were considered extravagantly expensive. A decade ago, the average light-rail line cost about $125 million a mile ($160 million in today’s dollars). Last year, average light-rail construction costs had risen to $278 million a mile (about $310 million today). Continue reading →

Re-Imagining Public Transit

By | | Transportation
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A recent op-ed in the Baltimore Sun written by several elected officials proposes to “re-imagine public transit” in the Baltimore area. In particular, they want to revive the Red Line, a light-rail line that was cancelled in 2015. Among the strikes against it were that it would increase congestion and would carry so few passengers that, under FTA rules at the time, it wasn’t cost-effective and therefore wasn’t eligible for federal funding. (The rules have since been changed, but that doesn’t make it any more cost effective.)

Imagining the Baltimore Red Line.

The fact that Maryland’s governor approved the DC-area Purple Line at the same time as he cancelled the Red Line has stuck in the craw of Baltimore transit officials. Since then, the Purple Line has suffered numerous delays and cost overruns, but that doesn’t worry Baltimore’s mayor and the county executives who wrote this op-ed. Heck, they probably see cost overruns as a good thing as they would bring more money into their communities. Continue reading →

The Value of VMT

By | | Transportation
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Before the pandemic, there was a mindset among urban planners that driving was bad and the ultimate goal of all of their policies was to reduce vehicle-miles traveled (VMT). That’s why they wanted to build obsolete urban transit systems like light rail and streetcars instead of freeways. That’s why they wanted more people to live in high-density housing projects instead of low-density suburbs. That’s why they wanted to reduce the amount of parking available to residents, shoppers, and others.

Photograph by B137.

So far, the pandemic has not awakened them to the folly of this mindset. Driving has fully recovered and in much of the country people are driving more miles than ever, while transit is little more than half what it was. Instead of acknowledging these changes, cities and regions are writing plans that never mention the pandemic and relying on pre-pandemic data to justify their policies. Continue reading →

$5.15 Billion a Mile for Caltrains

By | | Transportation
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Caltrains announced last week that the cost of the last 1.3 miles of its commuter-rail line into San Francisco would cost $6.7 billion, a 34-percent increase from an estimate made in 2015. The only rail construction that has cost more per mile is New York City’s Eastside Access project.

The planners of San Francisco’s Transbay Transit Center had taxpayer money to burn so they put a huge city park on top of the station. Photo by Fullmetal2887.

The city is constructing this based on the ridiculous notion that all rail lines should connect together. Currently, the Caltrain commuter trains from San Jose terminate near the site of the historic Southern Pacific train station in San Francisco, while the BART line from Oakland goes to what was once called the Transbay Terminal but now (after a $2 billion upgrade) is called the Salesforce Transit Center after the cloud computing company that paid $110 million for naming rights. Continue reading →

Drawing the Line Between Urban & Rural

By | | News commentary
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Is urban sprawl overrunning the countryside? To answer this question, it is important to define the difference between urban and rural. The Census Bureau is proposing to change its definition, but I don’t believe the proposed change makes sense.

Is this urban or rural? Under the Census Bureau’s old definition, it is urban, but by its new definition, it is rural. Photo by Visitor7.

In 1900, the line between urban and rural was pretty easy. If land was in an incorporated city, it was urban. If it was outside the city limits, it was rural. The main transportation of the day was streetcars, and if you couldn’t get somewhere on a streetcar, it wouldn’t be developed. If a developer built a new streetcar line outside the city and developed that area (which is how most suburban streetcar lines got built), the city would quickly annex the newly developed land. Continue reading →

Engines of Equality

By | | Transportation
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A recent article in the New York Times is off-target when it calls automobiles “turbo-boosted engines of inequality.” The article points to some genuine problems, but those problems are not the fault of automobiles. Nor is “accessible public transportation” the solution, as the article claims in its conclusion.

The most egalitarian transportation since the first warlord tying a horse to the first chariot made fast transport accessible only to the elites. Image from 1985 Yugo brochure scanned by Tony DiGirolamo.

The truth is that automobiles are the most egalitarian form of transportation since walking. Horses, intercity trains, streetcars, you name it, were always used mainly by the relatively wealthy and were inaccessible to the poor, especially in cities. It was only when Henry Ford developed the moving assembly line that mechanized transportation became available to the vast majority of people. Continue reading →

Hybrid Streetcar Begins Operations in Tempe

By | | Transportation
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Leave it to the transit industry to take a good idea and distort it beyond recognition or wisdom. That was my reaction when I learned that Tempe, Arizona began operating a hybrid streetcar last week. The three-mile streetcar line cost $200 million, or $67 million per mile.

For a mere $200 million, Tempe now has a streetcar that doesn’t work as well as a bus route that would have cost only about $3 million dollars. Photo courtesy of Valley Metro.

For rolling stock, Tempe elected to buy vehicles that cost $6.5 million apiece. At first glance, they look like other so-called modern streetcars, but have batteries that allow them to operate where there are no overhead wires. This makes them, according to their manufacturer, “the Prius of the modern streetcar market.” Continue reading →

New Trolleys for Philadelphia

By | | Transportation
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The Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority (SEPTA) is buying new vehicles to replace 130 light-rail cars. Normally, my suggestion when rail systems wear out is to replace them with buses, but in this case it’s worth a close look.

One of SEPTA’s 40-year-old light-rail cars. Photo by jpmueller99.

The 130 cars are expected to cost $800 million, or a little over $6.1 million apiece. That’s a lot more than a bus, which typically costs under $500,000 if Diesel-powered and under $1 million if electric. But buses have an expected lifespan of only about 15 years, while SEPTA’s light-rail cars are 40 years old. The railcars are also a little larger than buses, having 50 seats compared with an average of 40 seats on SEPTA buses. Still, the railcars cost more than $3,000 per seat-year, while even million-dollar buses cost only $1,666 per seat-year. Continue reading →

Transit’s Zombie Future

By | | Policy brief, Transportation, Useful Data
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March transit ridership pushed up above 60 percent of pre-pandemic numbers for the first time since the pandemic began, according to data released by the Federal Transit Administration last week. Ridership was boosted by the fact that March 2022 had two more weekdays than March 2019. Since April 2022 has one fewer weekday than April 2019, ridership is likely to dip back down below 60 percent in April.

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

Transit is still lagging well behind other modes of travel. Amtrak carried 68 percent as many passenger-miles as in March 2019 while the airlines carried 88 percent. Domestic air travel was probably above 90 percent, but data sorting domestic from international travel won’t be available for a couple of months. Miles of driving in March will be available in about a week but are likely to be more than 100 percent of March 2019 miles.

Continue reading →

Old Technologies for New Starts

By | | Policy brief, Transportation
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As part of the president’s proposed 2023 budget, the Federal Transit Administration plans to give out an unprecedented $4.45 billion on new transit capital projects, sometimes called New Starts and Small Starts. For comparison, in 2022 it gave away less than $2.5 billion. The difference, of course, is due to passage of the infrastructure law, which massively increased federal subsidies to transit.

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

This increase in spending and the projects that the FTA proposes to fund demonstrate that neither the transit industry nor the legislators funding it are responding to changes resulting from the recent pandemic. Transit was already declining before the pandemic, and the pandemic led to a much larger decline, much of which is likely to be permanent. Transit’s response to the decentralization of downtowns and cities should be to rely on smaller vehicles. Yet the New Starts proposals all presume that downtown job numbers and transit ridership will rapidly grow and thus more spending and larger vehicles are needed to accommodate that growth. Continue reading →