Search Results for: streetcars

Why Bus-Rapid-Transit Has Become Popular

By | | Transportation
5 Comments

Am I ahead of my time or simply out of step with the times? When I began studying light rail, I quickly realized that buses could do everything light rail could do except cost a lot of money. I was especially heartened when Kansas City, whose voters had rejected light rail in something like eight different elections, spent about $3 million a mile (about $4 million a mile in today’s money) installing two bus-rapid-transit (BRT) lines and got 30 to 50 percent increases in ridership, which is more than some light-rail lines get.

So I should be happy about recent reports favoring BRT.

  • As noted above, the World Bank reports that “Bus Rapid Transit takes cars off the road and moves people quickly, providing the benefits of metros at a fraction of the cost.”
  • An article in Research in Transportation Economics found that the values of homes within a 20-minute walk of a bus-rapid transit station increased by 5 to 7 percent and the total increase in property values was six times the cost of the BRT projects.
  • Jarrett Walker reports “good outcomes” from a new BRT line in Portland, specifically a 30 to 40 percent increase in ridership.

Continue reading →

Let’s Spend More Money on Something We Have to Give Away to Get People to Use It!

By | | Transportation
9 Comments

Kansas City voters sensibly rejected spending money on light rail at least seven times. But that common sense apparently didn’t extent to streetcars, which are an even dumber idea than light rail as streetcars are slower than buses, far more expensive, and can’t get out of their own way if one breaks down.

Photo by Jason Doss.

Despite these disadvantages, Kansas City opened a 2.2-mile streetcar line in 2016 that it declared to be a great success. It carried almost 4,800 weekday riders in its first full year of operation, which is about as many as a mediocre bus route but more than streetcar lines in Atlanta, Charlotte, Cincinnati, Dallas, Little Rock, Seattle, Tucson, and Washington. Continue reading →

Interstate 95 and Induced Demand

By | | Transportation
3 Comments

Kudos to the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation for constructing a temporary replacement for a collapsed overpass in just 12 days, something that many predicted would take months. The replacement is just six lanes wide rather than the eight on the original overpass, but that leaves room for the department to construct a permanent replacement.

Some people are drawing the wrong lessons from the response to the highway collapse, however. According to Joe Cortright, the fact that there was no “carmageddon” during the 12 days the highway was closed proves that we don’t need highways at all. According to what Cortright calls the “science of ‘induced demand,'” building new roads simply leads to more driving and, conversely, closing roads leads to “traffic evaporation.” Continue reading →

I Couldn’t Have Said It Better

By | | Transportation
3 Comments

Last week, I submitted a draft review of plans to expand St. Louis’ light-rail system to the Show Me Institute, Missouri’s state-based think tank. The region has the biggest light-rail system in the Midwest, yet it is a complete failure. Buses and rail together carried fewer riders in 2019 than buses alone carried in 1993, the year before the first light-rail line opened. Doubling light-rail miles in 2001 and another significant expansion in 2008 both resulted in an overall loss of riders. Yet Metro, the region’s transit agency, wants to build more light rail.

My draft report was more than 13,000 words long including an 800-word executive summary. While writing it, I was disappointed but not particularly surprised to find that local media failed to report any significant opposition to Metro’s billion-dollar plan to add 17 miles of new light-rail lines. So I was pleased to watch the above video, in which local reporter Sarah Fenske charged that it was “crazy” to build light rail when the local bus system was “failing” low-income riders and not getting people to their workplaces. To my chagrin, Fenske pretty much summarized in 35 seconds what my long-winded report said in 13,400 words. Continue reading →

Transit Agencies Go Insane

By | | Transportation
3 Comments

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
7 Comments

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
7 Comments

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
1 Comment

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
6 Comments

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
7 Comments

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 →