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Light Rail & Low-Income Transit Riders

By | | Transportation, Urban areas
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When Denver’s Regional Transit District (RTD) opened its West light-rail line last April, it naturally cancelled parallel bus service. But, for many people, riding the light rail cost a lot more than the bus. This effectively made transit unaffordable for some low-income workers, who now drive to work.


Click image to download a 2.6-MB PDF of this report.

A group called 9to5, which represents working women, formally surveyed more than 500 people who live near the West light-rail line, and informally interviewed hundreds more. It found that the light rail had put a significant additional burden on low-income families. In one case, someone who was commuting to work by bus for $2.25 per trip now has to pay $4.00 per trip to take the light rail, a 78 percent increase in cost. 9to5 points out that the cost of gasoline to drive the same distance would be about $1.25.

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Why Is This Even a Question?

By | | Transportation
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Denver’s Regional Transit District (RTD) has a tough decision to make. Should it spend under $300 million on bus-rapid transit and get an estimated 16,300 to 26,600 daily riders? Or should it spend $600 million to $700 million on a commuter train that is projected to attract 2,100 to 3,400 daily riders?

To officials in the cities of Boulder and Longmont, this is a no-brainer. Every other major city in the Denver urban area is getting a train, so therefore they need a train too, no matter what the cost and how few the riders. RTD’s general manager piously says, “we want to reach a consensus with the stakeholders,” referring to the fact that Boulder, Longmont, and other city officials only agreed to RTD’s multi-billion-dollar “SlowTracks” rail scheme in the first place on the condition that every major city would get a rail line.

While it seems absurd to spend twice as much money on a technology that will attract barely a tenth as many riders, the truth is that bus-rapid transit would perform better than trains in all of the region’s major corridors. RTD simply ignored that option in those other corridors, even when its own analysis showed that buses were better than trains (which it did every time RTD did a complete alternatives analysis).

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The Failure of Inclusionary Zoning

By | | Housing
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Denver’s urban-growth boundary has made housing expensive. More than a decade ago, the city blamed “failure by the private market to produce enough affordable housing” (see p. 5). To fix this “failure,” the city required developers to build “affordable housing.” Now, the city admits that this ordinance is a failure.

Data from the 2011 American Community Survey indicates that the median value of owner-occupied homes in Denver is nearly four times median family incomes. It should be just two times, which is typical for cities that don’t have urban-growth boundaries or other restrictive land-use laws. So housing prices are nearly twice as high as they ought to be.

As this city document explains, Denver’s “inclusionary zoning” ordinance requires developers who build 30 or more homes or condos at one time to sell at least 10 percent of those homes at “affordable” prices. Typically, this means an average of about $40,000 less than market prices, which is likely below the actual cost of constructing the homes. To make up for the losses, developers have to sell the remaining 90 percent for more than they would otherwise.

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New Low-Capacity Boondoggle Opens

By | | Transportation, Urban areas
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Last Friday, Denver’s Regional Transit District (RTD) opened the West line, its latest low-capacity rail (formerly known as light-rail) line. Officials gave opening speeches claiming that they built the West line “within the adopted budget” and, at the end of the day, sent a memo to RTD’s board bragging that the new line carried 35,000 passengers on the opening day, well above the projected 20,000 per weekday.

Of course, the reason they carried so many people is that the line was free on the first two days. But RTD officials can hardly open their mouths without some lie coming out.

Start with the claim that they built it under budget. As the Antiplanner pointed out in an op ed in yesterday’s Denver Post, when RTD decided to build the rail line in 1997, it projected a cost of $250 million ($350 million in today’s money). As of 2009, the “adopted budget” was for $710 million, more than twice projected. The actual cost ended up being $707 million, allowing RTD to say it was under the budgeted $710 million but still more than twice the projected cost.

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Not Build It?

By | | Transportation
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The cost of one of Denver’s FasTracks lines has gotten so high that RTD, the transit agency, is actually considering not building it. The press kindly reports the cost of the Longmont-to-Denver “Northwest” commuter-rail line as rising from $895 million to more than $1.7 billion, but that ignores the actual initial cost projections.

As the Antiplanner has previously noted, the original cost was projected to be just $211 million. As of last month, that had increased to $1.4 billion. Now it’s above $1.7 billion.
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Rather than not build it, RTD would like to ask voters to increase the sales tax to fund this and the other lines that it had previously promised would be built without cost overruns. But it realizes that voters are not likely to support such a measure. So it is now considering throwing some new highways into the pot, hoping voters will support that. It might be surprised to find that at least some voters oppose subsidies to highways as much as they oppose subsidies to rail transit.

Fast Spending on FasTracks

By | | News commentary, Transportation
15 Comments

The projected cost of the Denver-to-Longmont, or Northwest, rail line–one of six approved by Denver-area voters in 2004–has risen from the 2004 estimate of $462 million to $1.4 billion. For all that money, RTD won’t even get to own the rail line, but will merely rent it from BNSF. Moveover, most of the route from Denver to Boulder and Longmont will parallel a much-less-expensive bus-rapid transit route from Denver to Boulder.

The original cost projection for this corridor, made back in 2001, was just $211 million, an estimate published in a document called the Major Investment Study. This is the only study that seriously looked at alternatives other than rail transit (though it didn’t look at many alternatives), and a cost of $211 million may have seemed reasonable compared to, say, building new highway lanes.

According to this document, by 2004 the estimate had risen to $565 million (in 2002 dollars). (My copy of RTD’s 2004 financial plan says $594 million.) By 2007 the cost had risen once again by $120 million, and by 2008 it had reached $707 million.

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A Question for John Hickenlooper

By | | News commentary, Transportation
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A governor is the taxpayers’ last line of defense against money-hungry bureaucrats who incessantly seek their “fair share” of worker incomes in the form of higher taxes for all sorts of boondoggles. Governors can limit the amount of money that agencies request, they can veto excessive spending bills, and they can make sure bureaucracies don’t waste money that legislatures have appropriated.

To successfully defend taxpayers, governors must be skeptical of claims made by bureaucrats and the special interest groups that benefit from excessive spending, and they must be open to listen to citizen views of proposed spending programs. Denver Mayor John Hickenlooper, who is now running for governor of Colorado, has failed to meet these tests.

In September, 2004, during the campaign to spend billions of dollars on Denver-area rail transit, Hickenlooper endorsed the new tax for more trains, saying that Fastracks would “take at least 250,000 cars off the road — thereby relieving congestion.” This was a complete fabrication.

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Airport Executive: Don’t Build Rail to Airport

By | | Transportation, Urban areas
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Jim DeLong, the former aviation director at Denver International Airport, has a sensible suggestion for RTD: Don’t build a rail transit line to the airport. The airport line, which was originally supposed to cost about $316 million, is now expected to cost $1.2 billion. DeLong says that would be a waste.

Before working in Denver, DeLong directed aviation at the Philadelphia airport, which is connected to downtown and other parts of Phillie by frequent rapid train service. More than 30 million passengers a year use the airport, yet only about 2 million train trips arrive or depart from the airport station, and most of them are airport employees.

DeLong relates that he persuaded SEPTA, the transit agency, and the airport to spend $750,000 promoting the train, but had very little impact on ridership. He concludes that “Men and women who have spent a day or more traveling do not want to wait for a train, even for a short time,” especially when carrying baggage. So he proposes that RTD terminate the East line at Aurora, Denver’s eastern suburb.
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FasTracks Update: Costs Down, Still Can’t Afford It

By | | News commentary, Transportation
17 Comments

If there is one thing Denver’s Regional Transit District (RTD) has become famous for, it is making economic forecasts that are proven wrong a year later. Back in 2004, it projected that it could build 119 miles of rail lines for $4.7 billion. By 2007, the cost was up to $6.2 billion, then $7.9 billion. In 2008, it had declined to $7.0 billion (which everyone but the Antiplanner published as $6.9 billion — but it was really $6.952, which rounds up to $7.0).

The latest projection estimates that, thanks to the recession, the cost will be only $6.5 billion (details here). But the other side of the projection — revenues to pay for it — are even more dismal, with revenues now projected to be $2.5 billion less than originally expected.

In fact, the latest projections indicate that, even if RTD manages to build all of the new rail lines, it won’t have enough money to run them. Of course, RTD and the rail nuts who support it just see this as all the more reason why Denver-area voters should agree to another tax increase. Let’s hope they wise up this time.

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