Tag Archives: commuter rail

When Denver’s Regional Transit District proposed a tax increase to build six new rail lines in 2004, it promised it would build the lines without cost overruns by 2014. But soon after the election, it “discovered” that the lines would cost far more than projected — ultimately, about 67 percent more. With the money it had available, it wouldn’t be able to finish all of the lines before 2042.

This commuter train in Westminster, Colorado goes 6 miles to downtown Denver. Longmont wants RTD to extend the train another 35 miles even though RTD’s analysis shows few people will ride it. Photo by Xnatedawgx.

Further analysis by RTD found that most of the lines would end up costing taxpayers about $6 to $10 per ride, but one line, which went northwest of Denver to Longmont, was extra expensive and projected to carry so few passengers that it would cost more than $60 per rider. RTD decided to defer that line and build the rest. Continue reading →

The Antiplanner called Minnesota’s Northstar commuter train a “flop” in 2016. It took the pandemic to do it, but it looks like the state has finally agreed and is now considering plans to shut the line down.

Minnesota’s commuter train was a failure before the pandemic and an even bigger failure after. Photo by Jerry Huddleston.

The line, which cost more than $300 million to start up, was supposed to carry 4,100 riders per weekday, which seems absurdly small for the price. Yet it peaked in 2017 at just 2,800 riders and fell to 2,700 riders in 2019. Since the pandemic, it hasn’t recovered to more than about a sixth of that. The state estimates that the costs of running this service would fall from $12 million a year to $2 million a year if it replaced the trains with buses. In 2023, fares covered less than $325,000 of that $12 million in operating costs. Continue reading →

I’ve heard there is an election somewhere today, but it doesn’t sound all that important. What is important is that the state of New Mexico recently released a report on the “Cost Effectiveness and Operations of the New Mexico Rail Runner Express.” The most positive finding in the report is that, since hardly anyone was riding the train before the pandemic, the loss of ridership during the pandemic had little impact on the rail line’s finances. Taxpayers provided nearly all of the line’s financial support before the pandemic, and they continue to do so today. The report calls this “financially healthy,” and I suppose it is in the sense that bank robbers are financially healthy until they get caught.

Click image to download an 888-KB pdf of this report.

Such financial health will be small comfort to the state taxpayers who spent some $400 million getting the train running and are on the hook for spending well over $40 million a year operating it. The line carried 1.35 million riders in 2009, the first year it went all the way from Albuquerque to Santa Fe, and ridership declined in almost every year since then. By 2019 it was down 45 percent to 744,000. Operating expenses more than doubled during that time but fare revenues declined until they covered just 7 percent of operating costs. Continue reading →

In 2012, the Charlotte Area Transit System (CATS) proposed to operate commuter trains between uptown Charlotte and the suburb of Mount Mourne. In 2011, it predicted (based on 2009 prices) that start-up costs for the 25-mile Red Line route would be about $452 million, slightly more than the cost of Charlotte’s first light-rail line (which was $444 million). While the commuter-rail route was almost three times as long as Charlotte’s first light-rail line, it was projected to carry fewer than a third as many riders: 5,600 per day as opposed to 18,100 per day.

Map of proposed Red Line commuter train.

Due to the high cost and small number of riders, the Federal Transit Administration refused to provide any federal funding for the project. At the time, the FTA’s cost-effectiveness rule limited federal funding to projects that cost less than about $25 per hour saved by transportation users, and the commuter train wasn’t projected to save enough hours to get the cost below this threshold. Continue reading →

In 2004, Denver’s Regional Transit District persuaded the region’s voters to support a sales tax increase to pay for six new rail lines that together would cost about $3.5 billion to build. The agency claimed to be surprised when costs doubled soon after the election. Since then, the $7 billion RTD has spent on rail capital improvements was only enough to build five lines, while the sixth line, which was supposed to connect Longmont and Boulder with downtown Denver, remains unbuilt.

A Denver commuter train connecting the airport with downtown. Photo by Jarrett Stewart.

While all of the rail lines were idiotic, there were good reasons to delete the Longmont line. First, the Boulder part of the line was duplicated by a bus-rapid transit line that has probably been the most successful of the projects funded by the 2004 tax increase. Second, RTD’s own analysis found that the line to Longmont would be so expensive and carry so few passengers that the cost of carrying one rider would be more than $60 compared with under $10 for most other FasTracks lines and no more than $22 for any other line. The line was projected to cost a third as much as all of the other lines put together yet carry only 7 percent as many passengers. Continue reading →

The Regional Transportation Authority of Nashville is asking members of the public how the agency can make its commuter train more convenient to riders. The train, once called the Music City Star but since renamed the much less evocative WeGo Star, was supposed to carry 700 round trips a day in its first year but the closest it came was in 2018 when it carried 581 round trips a day.

In 2021, this fell to a mere 69 round trips a day. The transit agency, which also calls itself WeGo, spent $4 million operating the line but earned less than $142,000 in revenues, which works out to an operating subsidy of more than $108 per rider. The agency claims ridership is currently up to 200 round-trips a day, but even if that’s true it still represents subsidies of around $35 per rider. Continue reading →

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 →

Denver’s Regional Transportation District (RTD) has hired HDR to “study the feasibility of implementing a ‘peak service’ rail schedule between Denver Union Station and downtown Longmont.” HDR has never seen a rail project it didn’t think was feasible. Among other things, it lied to Atlanta, Cincinnati, Salt Lake City and several other cities about the economic development benefits of streetcars in order to get them to hire it to help build new streetcar lines.

The green line is the existing bus-rapid transit line while the circuitous orange line is the proposed rail route to Longmont. The thick grey lines are other rail transit routes that are nearly all in service today. If Longmont were really a worthwhile destination, the logical thing for RTD to do is extend the bus-rapid transit line to Longmont. But Longmont officials were promised a train and they demand to have a train.

Now RTD wants it to study a commuter-rail line to Longmont, a city northwest of Denver. In 2004, RTD persuaded voters to approve FasTracks, a plan to build six new rail transit lines. One of those lines was to Longmont and RTD convinced Longmont officials to support the 2004 ballot measure by promising them a train. Continue reading →

The cost of electrifying commuter trains between San Francisco and San Jose has gone up to $2.44 billion, according to Caltrain, which runs the trains. What’s interesting is that Caltrain says this is an increase of $462 million over the “initial estimate.” That would make the initial estimate $1.98 billion.

A new Caltrain electric-powered passenger car being delivered to California. As part of electrification, the entire fleet of locomotives and passenger cars must be replaced. Photo by Martijn van Exel.

However, I have a 2015 document from the Federal Transit Administration that puts the cost at $1.758 billion, or $222 million less than the supposed “initial estimate.” This estimate is in “year-of-expenditure” dollars, meaning it is adjusted for inflation. It’s funny how initial estimates creep up over time to make it seem like the cost overruns aren’t as great as they really are. Continue reading →