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Arlington Votes Against a Streetcar

By | | Transportation, Urban areas
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Streetcar skeptic John Vihstadt won a seat on the Arlington County (Virginia) board this week, the first Republican to do so in 15 years. One of the main issues in his campaign was the board’s plan to spend $250 million on a streetcar in this suburb of Washington, DC.

The election took place less than two weeks after the release of a consultant’s report that concluded a streetcar would dramatically boost economic development in the county (a claim disputed by the Antiplanner. Some people believe the report was timed to influence the election. If so, it didn’t work.

The election also took place after the unveiling of Arlington’s $1 million dollar bus stop that doesn’t even provide decent shelter from the elements. This served to raise voter awareness of the county’s free-spending ways when it comes to transit.
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TriMet Tramples on People’s Credit; Streetcars Still Late

By | | Transportation
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Portland transit follies are increasingly scrutinized by the local media, something that should have happened years ago when there was still a chance of stopping projects such as the $1.5 billion boondoggle low-capacity rail line to Milwaukie. (The video below shows why it is such a boondoggle.)

Joseph Rose, the superreporter who can walk faster than a speeding streetcar, has found that the fare machines for Portland’s low-capacity rail lines are in service a lot less than the agency claims. Some are down more than 35 percent of the time. Since they give out $175 tickets to people who don’t pay their fare, this can be distressing.

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Milwaukee Presentation

By | | Transportation
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Last year, the Milwaukee city council approved a $64 million streetcar plan on a 10-to-5 vote. But there’s a snag in the plan. Building the streetcar will also require $30 to $50 million to move underground utilities. Men are inclined to have sexual issues by the age of 50 and complete ineptitude is seen in every sixth man by the age of 80, nearly 80% of all men suffer from BPH symptoms. uk generic viagra The bridge designing engineer was sildenafil overnight David McDonnold. If you buy 40 pills you will be spending $199.20 US dollars instead of $217.13 and will be saving $21.60 viagra pills in india US dollars. It helps to prevent aging process in men and generic viagra from canada is the lack of person’s psychological sexual capability. The city was hoping to force utility companies to pay the costs, but the state public utilities commission may not agree. This just proves once again how easy it is to spend other people’s money.

The Antiplanner’s presentation about the folly of streetcars is available in either PowerPoint or PDF format. People are free to borrow from it if they find it useful.

Back in the Air Again

By | | Housekeeping, Transportation
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Today the Antiplanner is in Milwaukee to try to help persuade the city not to build a streetcar line. It is notable that many of the places that want streetcars–Cincinnati, Kansas City, Milwaukee, Orange County, to name a few–originally had light-rail plans that never happened. It is almost as if streetcars are seen as a consolation prize for failing to sucker the locals into funding light rail.

Yet cities were right not to build light rail, and streetcars would be an even bigger waste of money. The least-expensive streetcar lines being planned today are more expensive than the first light-rail lines. Both San Diego’s and Portland’s first light-rail lines cost less than $15 million per route mile, and even after adjusting for inflation that’s less than $30 million per mile today. Yet most streetcar lines being planned today are expected to cost $30 million or more per track mile, which is $60 million per route mile.

The problem with light rail is that it is expensive, low-capacity transit that doesn’t go very fast–most light-rail schedules average only about 20 to 22 mph. Streetcars are worse, having much lower capacities and speeds of only about 6 to 10 mph.

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Proposed Anaheim Streetcar

By | | Transportation
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Anaheim is another city planning a streetcar line, in this case from the Amtrak/Metrolink station (and planned high-speed rail station) to Disneyland. Disney is reportedly enthused about the project, since otherwise it might have to provide its own buses. The consultants planning the streetcar have also no doubt convinced Disney that the streetcar is “high-capacity transit,” a term that is naturally used numerous times in the city’s alternatives analysis.

Click to download the table of contents to the alternatives analysis for the Anaheim Slow Connection.

Maybe it is due to my poor Googling skills, but I haven’t actually been able to find a page on the city of Anaheim’s web site linking to the alternatives analysis. However, I have found individual chapters of the analysis, including the executive summary, chapter 3: transportation analysis, and chapter 7: comparison of alternatives. If you want to download any of the other chapters, read the table of contents and then copy and paste http://www.anaheim.net/images/articles/4947/ChapterX.pdf into your browser, substituting the number of the chapter you want for the X.

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The Continuing Saga of the American-Made Streetcar

By | | Planning Disasters, Transportation, Urban areas
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Portland Streetcar, the non-profit organization that operates streetcars in Portland, is demanding that the city cough up $145,000 to fix its brand-new, American-made streetcar. Let’s take a look at the history of this car.

First, the city used its own money to buy streetcars from the Czech Republic for an average of $1.9 million apiece. Each streetcar has just 30 seats, but the cost per vehicle is about six times greater than a 40-seat bus. But that wasn’t expensive enough.

The most recent expansion of Portland’s streetcar system was funded by the federal government, which has a buy-America requirement. So Oregon’s congressional delegation and lobbyists persuaded the Federal Transit Administration to give Oregon Iron Works $4 million to build a prototype streetcar. The company used plans purchased from the Czech manufacturer of Portland’s streetcars to effectively produce a replica of those cars.

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Streetcar Woes

By | | News commentary, Transportation, Urban areas
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Portland opened its new east side streetcar line a couple of weeks ago, but the real story is in the Lake Oswego plant that is supposed to be making streetcars to run on the new line. In 2011, the company, United Streetcar, announced that its first streetcars would be several months late and it would only be able to build five streetcars for the price of six–and the company’s president was brazen enough to say, “You’re not getting less. I actually think you’re getting more.”

The company’s streetcars are essentially copies of the first streetcars the city bought from a company in the Czech Republic. The price of the Czech streetcars was $1.9 million apiece (only about six times more than a bus that has more seats). The cost of United Streetcar’s first streetcar? $7 million. If Portland is lucky, it will eventually get five for an average of a little more than $4 million each–but hey, they’re made in the USA (a requirement for federal funding).

Strangely, the city didn’t complain about getting short-changed one streetcar, and it’s response to the delay was to spend more money hiring a company, LTK Engineering Services, to monitor the company making the streetcars, paying it $1.35 million to date. So far, only one of the five streetcars is out on the streets (or, fairly frequently, in the repair shop). To prod United Streetcar into finishing the other four, which are several months behind schedule, the city is about to hand over another $386,000 to LTK.
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How does LTK spend that money? It has eight engineers watching over the shoulders of the workers at United Streetcar, for each of whom it bills the city a mere $162 an hour. Don’t worry, says the city; there are plenty of “contingency funds” in the project’s $148.3 million budget to cover this cost.

Who says streetcars aren’t cost-effective? They are pretty cost-effective for LTK, not to mention United Streetcar.

How Many Lies Are in These Documents?

By | | Transportation, Urban areas
15 Comments

Portland’s Metro has published an environmental impact statement (EIS) for a proposed streetcar line to Lake Oswego, the city’s wealthiest suburb. Why anyone thinks people in Lake Oswego would want to ride a streetcar to Portland is beyond the Antiplanner, but Metro’s goal is to spend money, not to transport people.

The Antiplanner turned almost at random to page 6-10 (physical page 398) and found an interesting table: “Cost-Effectiveness by Alternative.” This EIS actually considers a bus alternative, but the table says it is not cost-effective. The cost of carrying one new rider on the bus is $3.82, says the table, while the cost of carrying a new streetcar rider is only $0.98.

But wait just a moment: the table says these numbers represent the “operating cost per new transit person trip.” The traditional measure of cost per new trip, as defined by the Federal Transit Administration, included capital costs amortized at 7 percent over 30 years. When amortized capital costs are added in, the cost per new trip of the bus is $7.93, while the cost of the streetcar is $19.01.

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Good Luck to Lake Oswego Streetcar Opponents

By | | Transportation, Urban areas
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Residents of Lake Oswego, Portland’s wealthiest large suburb, have hired one of the state’s leading (and most liberal) political consultants to oppose a planned streetcar between downtown Portland and their community. Who has the bucks to hire Bergstein? One of the names mentioned is Elaine Franklin, wife of former U.S. Senator Bob Packwood. As Bojack says, “this might be more fun than we first thought.

Why is this even an issue when TriMet, Portland’s transit agency, is nearly broke? The Federal Transit Administration is giving TriMet “only” half the cost of a ridiculous (and ridiculously expensive) light-rail line to Milwaukie, a suburb whose residents soundly trounced funding for light rail the last few times it was on the ballot. As a light-rail pioneer, TriMet is used to getting the feds to pay for 75 percent or more of its light-rail boondoggles.

To make up some of the difference, TriMet is asking voters for permission to sell $125 million worth of bonds (to be repaid by property taxes) to buy new buses. This is really just a ploy to support light rail, as transit agencies almost never borrow money to buy new buses. But the agency lost the last three times light rail was on the ballot, so it hopes voters might think buses are worth funding instead.

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Planning Student Proves Consultants Are a Waste of Money

By | | News commentary, Transportation
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Spending around $1,000, 20-year-old Daniel Jacobson, a Stanford University undergraduate student, has written a 140-page streetcar feasibility study for Oakland, California. The city of Oakland itself had already spent $300,000 on a streetcar study back in 2005, and planned to spend another $330,000 for further study this year.

Of course, the Jacobson’s study is filled with fabricated data, false assumptions, and phony calculations. But most readers will be too dazzled by the beautiful graphics to notice. Besides, any $300,000 professional feasibility study would contain the same fabricated data and calculations.

The biggest fabrication, of course, is the inevitable claim that building a streetcar will lead to economic redevelopment. There is not a chance in hell that spending $100 million or more on a 2-1/2-mile streetcar line would lead to any economic development, and even if it did, it would only be development that would have taken place somewhere in the Oakland area anyway. But any streetcar study is going to make this claim because that is the only way to justify spending tens of millions of dollars on a nineteenth-century technology that is slower, less flexible, and more dangerous to have on the streets than buses that cost far less.

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