Coyote Blog

Yesterday I posted on a new bus system Phoenix is implementing but that appears to cost 30x less than the light rail system we just built.  I wrote Randal O’Toole of Cato, also known as “the AntiPlanner,” to see what he knew about this system.  Here is what he was wrote back”

Yes, I’ve written about it a lot. The best system is in Kansas City, where they didn’t feel they had to spend $750,000 to make a $300,000 bus look futuristic.

Take a look at my blog, http://ti.org/antiplanner and search for “bus rapid transit” to see some articles on better bus service. Here is the article about Kansas City BRT: http://ti.org/antiplanner/?p=102

Here is an article about Eugene’s bus-rapid transit, which was a stupid waste of money: http://ti.org/antiplanner/?p=21

The only thing good about it is that it didn’t waste as much money as light rail. But that’s like saying you’d rather be stabbed in the heart with a three-inch knife than a six-inch one.

The Eugene mess he refers to has the city building a dedicated bus lane, something Phoenix fortunately is not considering, opting for a traffic light transponder approach rather than dedicated lanes to try to hold schedules.  Here is a snippet of what he wrote about Kansas City:

In 2005, Kansas City did a wonderful thing: It started a bus-rapid transit system the way bus-rapid transit ought to be done. The transit agency didn’t spend hundreds of millions of dollars building exclusive bus lanes. It didn’t buy million-dollar buses just to have a semi-futuristic look.

Instead, it simply began running buses on existing streets on rail schedules. That is, the buses stop only once per mile and the operate three to four times every hour from 4:20 am to 11:20 pm. The greater frequencies and faster buses increased ridership by 25 to 30 percent (see page 11), and most of these new riders were new to transit.

The city built inexpensive but easily identifiable transit stops for the route. The buses were regular buses but were “branded,” that is, painted in an easily recognizable style. In short, Kansas City achieved the kind of ridership increases that light rail would achieve for a tiny fraction of the cost.

In other words, the basic idea makes great sense, but spending a million bucks a bus (as Phoenix plans) just to make the bus look like a train is crazy.

All true, but I might be willing to give in on the more expensive busses if thats what it takes to kill this crazy infatuation with steel rails.   In the Phoenix Mesa Link example, they are probably spending $4.5 million too much for the train-like busses, but if that gives public officials the ability to walk past the light rail buffet and save the $800 million extra rail would have cost, I might consider that a good investment.

Apparently, Phoenix is experimenting with a new style of bus transport that looks and operates like a train:

The Mesa Link debuted the same week as light rail. For now, Link involves a fleet of 10 buses. Each $756,000 vehicle carries a transponder to coordinate traffic lights and keep the bus on schedule for a 12-mile run in 45 minutes.

It’s the start of a much more ambitious program.

Over the next few months, the Regional Public Transportation Authority, which coordinates Valley Metro bus service, will build stations and add technology to the Mesa line to give it more of the pace and feel of a train.

Basically, they are building the thing to look and operate like a light rail train, only running on tires on the existing road.    The travel time may seem slow, but it is nearly identical to the average speed of our light rail line (20 miles in a claimed 70 minutes, though a number of riders say its slower).  And the capacity is nearly identical.

So with the same speed and the same capacity and similar scheduled service with similar style stations, here is the real appeal:

In 2010, a second line will be created to run 12 miles along Arizona Avenue in Mesa and Chandler. It will feature 10 stations and cost $28 million for construction and the purchase of nine buses. Future lines are planned for Scottsdale Road, Baseline Road and Chandler Boulevard.

The 20-mile light-rail line cost $1.4 billion to build.

Holy cr*p.  $70 million a mile for light rail vs. $2.3 million a mile for this system.   That is 30x cheaper.  The only discernible difference is one runs on steel rails and the other on tires.  Oh, and the rail line, in most places it was built, completely removed up to two lanes of existing roadway capacity, while the bus-type system leaves the roadway intact and just uses a fraction of one lane’s capacity.

Now, I would have to sit down and look at the numbers and the service profile to decide if this new bus system made sense financially vs. the old bus system, but why are we even considering extending light rail?  And why oh why did we build this white elephant in the first place.

Share a ride with a prisoner:

Maricopa County sheriff’s deputies may soon begin taking some inmates to Fourth Avenue Jail on Metro light rail in a bid to cut costs.

The Sheriff’s Office announced its intent to transport inmates using the light rail from 44th and Washington streets to the Fourth Avenue Jail in order to eliminate parking fees. MCSO estimates that the new system can save about $72,000 in transport fees.

Seems to be some funny economics at work if the city charges the Sheriff more money for parking a car at the jail than it does for at least 3 people to ride the metro.

Anyway, count on Sheriff Joe to ease any tension you might have with this share-a-ride program:

“There is nothing to be concerned or worried about as my deputies will be armed,” Sheriff Joe Arpaio said in a press release.

Great, but who is going to protect me from the sheriff?  And why does this statement remind me of the famous Al Haig “Don’t Worry, I’m in charge” press conference?

Politics is full of premises that people take on faith without actually testing against facts.  One such premise is that light rail investments reduce energy use and CO2 output.  But data from the USDOT, as I posted before, shows that light rail at average occupancy and autos at average occupancy are in an energy dead heat.   Driving a hybrid or even high fuel efficiency conventional automobile, even solo with no passengers, uses less energy and produces less CO2 per passenger-mile than light rail.

A group critical of the Denver light rail system brings us another data point.  In their report (pdf), compiled from the official figures of the Denver transit authority, they claim:  (via the Anti-Planner)

Denver’s light-rail trains use 4,400 British thermal units (BTUs) and produce 0.78 pounds of CO2 per passenger mile. By comparison, the average SUV uses about 4,400 British thermal units (BTUs) and produces 0.69 pounds of CO2 per passenger mile.47 In other words, people who ride Denver’s light rail when gasoline prices rise are not saving energy: they are merely imposing their energy costs on other taxpayers. If oil prices rise again, people can save more energy by buying more fuel-efficient cars than by riding energy intensive rail transit lines

Quite a while back, I made a light rail bet.  I said that for the capital cost of constructing these systems, I could purchase every regular rider a Prius, and with the annual operating deficit each year could purchase gas for all these Prius’s for a full year.  This bet has not yet proved wrong (LA example), even for heavy rail (Albuquerque example).  Now,though, in addition to being more cost effective, the hybrid is also more energy efficient.

Postscript: I am sometimes criticized for not including the highway construction cost in my Prius bet.   First, a new highway lane has far more capacity than most light rail lines, and is far cheaper to build.  I don’t think anyone, even light rail supporters, dispute this.  Light rail is generally supported over highways for what I would call aesthetic reasons — light rail just strikes some people as more elegant a transportation solution.  All the traffic carried by most light rail lines is generally a small fraction of a single highway lane.  The congestion argument is a chimera, and is never supported, even in the fine print of transit authority statistics.  From Denver’s internal projections:

Now, RTD says the line will cost more than $600 million, which is a lot for a mere 11 route miles. Moreover, RTD has changed the proposed technology to something it calls “electric multiple-unit commuter rail,” which sounds something like the Chicago Electroliners or some of the Philadelphia commuter trains.

For this high price, the DEIS reports incredibly trivial benefits. The proposed rail line is projected to take 0.0085 percent of cars off the road. Of course, that’s for the region as a whole, but in the corridor it will take a whopping 0.227 percent of cars off the road. A handful of buses could do as well.

Sent to me by a reader, picture from this article.

Fortunately, there seem to be plenty of empty seats for him ;=)

A reader sent me this, and I found it pretty funny:

Minnesota Public Radio and two neighboring churches in downtown St. Paul are escalating their opposition to the proposed line.

MPR said noise and vibrations from the train, connecting Minneapolis and St. Paul, could harm their ability to record and broadcast. The churches say those very same effects could rattle their aging buildings and disrupt their worship services.

In the latest salvo, MPR has asked the project planners to study alternative routes through downtown St. Paul.

MPR and the churches say they support light-rail, but not the proposed route along Cedar Street. The tracks would be laid about 14 feet from the front door of the broadcast center.

“As far as we know, this is the closest a light-rail line will run to federally designated noise- and vibration-sensitive facilities anywhere in the country,” said Jeff Nelson, public-affairs director for MPR.

I am not sure a comment is even necessary.   MPR has published any number of light rail stories about budget and approval battles that were thinly disguised cheerleading for light rail.  Take this article for example, which discusses how light rail might be saved from trouble, but because it only quotes light rail supporters, a reader can’t even figure out why the trouble exists.

Basically, MPR is saying “please put the rail line, which we support, near someone else who may hate it being nearby as much as we but don’t have the access to the media and the political process to make a big stink about it.”   Already, the line has apparently made an expensive accommodation for just one organization — the University of Minnesota, a state agency.  The arrogance of this is staggering.  It reminds me of the NY Times and Columbia University, both of whom claim to be advocates for the underdog, except when the underdog gets in the way of their real estate deal and eminent domain grab.

By the way, am I the only one who has never heard of a federal designation for “noise- and vibration-sensitive facilities?”  If such a designation really exists (and I sure can’t find it with any similar search terms on Google), what percentage of the list would you guess is politically connected organizations using the designation to get privileged treatment vs. those without power?

Update: The “federally designated” thing is a bit of an exaggeration.  The PR department of MPR was kind enough to send me a link.  They are referring to the category 1 designation in this report, which merely says that amphitheaters and recording studios should be in the quietest category when assessing impacts of transit nearby (neither MPR or any other facility is mentioned by name).  This same report essentially comes to the conclusion that it is perfectly possible for light rail to be near to recording studios and amphitheaters, just that some care needs to be taken in design.

By the way, the “As far as we know, this is the closes a light-rail line will run to” such a facility is just nuts.  I guess the “as far as we know” covers them from outright fraud, but I have to look no further than my own town of Phoenix to find light rail in proximity to such venues.   I know of a few radio stations and TV stations right on the rail line, but a quick Google maps search found at least 9 radio stations and TV stations and recording studios right on just the Central Avenue portion of the route.  In addition, I know of at least 5 ampitheaters on the route, not to mention our main public library.  (In fact, the library is right near the intersection of the rail line and Interstate-10, and I find it perfectly quiet there).  In fact, I would challenge MPR to identify one urban passenger rail line where there is NOT a radio station, TV station, recording studio, or ampitheater in close proximity.

Via a reader, comes this update on the link from Phoenix’s new light rail line to the airport:

Down the line, Sky Harbor plans to phase out shuttles.

Eventually, an automated train will take passengers around the airport. The project will cover 4.8 miles and will cost $1.1 billion.

Construction on the project began this year, and the first phase is scheduled to open in 2013.

The entire system will be up by 2020, Sky Harbor officials say.

I beg your pardon?  $1.1 Billion.  With a B?  For 4.8 miles?  That is, as the title implies, $3,617 per inch.   It is probably so expensive because they will be working at the blistering pace of 1/3 mile per year, or about 5 feet per day.

Some Valley residents have questioned the reason Phoenix and transit officials didn’t build one train system – light rail – with several stations at Sky Harbor.

Transit leaders considered that, but they decided against it, light-rail officials have said.

Running the line through Sky Harbor would have made light rail even more expensive.

Because, you know, if the Sky Harbor extension is an entirely different project that has to be funded later to make up an obvious service gap that everyone and his dog can immediately spot in the system, then the cost doesn’t count?

Apparently, even before the first train starts carrying passengers (sometime in December), Phoenix’s new light rail system is already forcing bus fares up.  (via a reader)

Before the Valley’s light-rail service ever begins, the cost to ride the train and city buses may be headed up.

The issue of raising the Valley’s regional fare policy has been brewing for several months as transit officials have struggled to cover
rising gas prices and other increased operation costs, said Greg Jordan, Tempe’s transit administrator. Transit and light-rail costs are covered by a half-cent sales tax, which has fallen over the past year.

The real issue is that transit agencies are generally given a fixed pot of money for operating subsidies (in this case the proceeds of a half-cent sales tax) and rail tends to take a hugely disproportionate share of that money, starving out less sexy but more practical and cost-effective bus systems.  Even in the that wet dream of rail planners, Portland:

In fact, 9.8 percent of Portland-area commuters took transit to work before the region build light rail. Today it is just 7.6 percent. In a story repeated in numerous cities that have built rail lines, rail cost overruns forced the city to raise bus fares and reduce bus service. That’s a success?

This is even more likely in Phoenix, where buses make far more financial sense than rail, given our very low densities, lack of a real downtown area, and numerous commuting routes.  In fact, not only is it predictable, but I predicted it:

Rail makes zero sense in a city like Phoenix.  All this will do is create a financial black hole into which we shift all of our bus money, so the city will inevitably end up with a worse transportation system, not a better one.  Cities that build light rail almost always experience a reduction in total transit use (even the great God of planners Portland) for just this reason – budgets are limited, so since rail costs so much more per passenger, other transit is cut back.   But the pictures of the train will look pretty in the visitor’s guide.

The Arizona Republic had another of its cheerleading articles on light rail this morning.  In it was a chart that, contrary to the intent of the article, summarized exactly why Phoenix light rail is doomed.  Below is a chart of the employment density (top chart) and population density (bottom chart) at each stop along the first rail route.  Note that this line goes through what passes for the central business district of Phoenix and the oldest parts of town, so it was chosen to run through the highest density areas – all future extensions will likely have lower numbers.  Unfortunately, they do not reproduce this chart online so here is a scan:

Take the population density chart.  As a benchmark, lets take Boston.  The average density for all of the city of Boston is 12,199 people per square mile.  Phoenix’s light rail line cut through the highest density areas of town has only one stop where density reaches this level, and most stops are less than half this density.  And this is against Boston’s average, not against the density along its rail routes which are likely much higher than the average.

Rail makes zero sense in a city like Phoenix.  All this will do is create a financial black hole into which we shift all of our bus money, so the city will inevitably end up with a worse transportation system, not a better one.  Cities that build light rail almost always experience a reduction in total transit use (even the great God of planners Portland) for just this reason – budgets are limited, so since rail costs so much more per passenger, other transit is cut back.   But the pictures of the train will look pretty in the visitor’s guide.

Postscript: Phoenix’s overall average density is around 2,500 per square mile.  Assuming that the 12,000 in the chart above is one of the densest areas of Phoenix, this gives a ratio of about 5:1 between peak and average density.  This same ratio in Boston would imply peak density areas of 60,000 per square mile.  This may be high, but indicates how much higher route densities on Boston rail should be.  Oh, and by the way, Boston rail is losing a ton of money.

Other city densities here from 1990.  People think of LA as spread out, but LA has a density over three times higher than Phoenix!

Our light rail cheerleader in chief, the Arizona Republic, laments that if Proposition 203 does not make it to the ballot this November, "light rail [in Phoenix & Maricopa County] will lose a chance to win hundreds of millions of dollars for the system’s expansion".

Well, let’s think about that.  The proposition would raise $42.6 billion statewide through a 1% point increase in the state sales tax rate.  But here’s the rub:  Phoenix and Maricopa County constitute a huge part of the state’s population, and presumably, retail spending.  In fact, checking the most recent Arizona state tax facts (for May, 2008), we find that Maricopa County pays about 64% of the state sales tax.  That means that approximately $27.3 Billion of that $42.6 billion in new taxes will be paid right here in the Phoenix metropolitan area. 

Good grief.  So, with a tax increase of $27.3 billion in Phoenix, we can get $0.6 billion back from the state for our light rail boondoggle.  Gee, thanks.  That hardly sounds like my definition of "winning" money.

By the way, this was hilarious:

Ziemba believes that Proposition 203 would have an "extremely significant" impact on light rail expansion if it becomes law.

"This would be the funding to really take our light rail system to
the next level, to expand it to more roots, to connect it to more of
the county," he said. "It will provide the resources to connect the
light rail system in a meaningful way throughout Maricopa County."

Why is that so funny?  Well, because the next $306 million in light rail spending is expected to get us 3.2 whole miles of track.  So at this rate, this $27.3 billion tax increase would net us $600 million which would, before inevitable cost overruns, get us at most 6.5 miles of track.  Wow, that sure sounds meaninful to me.

The other day, I posted an update to my light rail bet saying that not only was light rail incredibly expensive for the amount of transportation it provides, it is not even clear that it provides any "green" benefits  (with "green" today meaning only the potential to reduce CO2, since the global warming hysteria has sucked all of the oxygen out of other environmental goals).

The Antiplanner has more information, this time from the transportation planners in Denver.  Normally, transportation planners grossly exaggerate the benefits of their proposed systems, so it is interesting that even they so no net CO2 savings from their proposed rail lines:

The Antiplanner’s review
of rail transit and greenhouse gases found that Denver’s light-rail
lines produce more greenhouse gases per passenger mile than a typical
SUV. The Gold Line DEIS agrees, admitting that the rail alternative
will result in a regional CO2 increase of 0.034% (see page 3.7-10).

By the way, the Denver system does not do so great on the financial part either:

Now, RTD says the line will cost more than $600 million, which is a
lot for a mere 11 route miles. Moreover, RTD has changed the proposed
technology to something it calls “electric multiple-unit commuter
rail,” which sounds something like the Chicago Electroliners or some of
the Philadelphia commuter trains.

For this high price, the DEIS reports incredibly trivial benefits.
The proposed rail line is projected to take 0.0085 percent of cars off
the road. Of course, that’s for the region as a whole, but in the
corridor it will take a whopping 0.227 percent of cars off the road. A
handful of buses could do as well.

While that might seem terrible, it actually outdistances our guys here in Phoenix, who are projecting that the next 3.2 mile line here will cost $306 million.  While the Denver line is projected to cost $10,300 per foot, the Phoenix line will cost at least $18,000 per foot.

I don’t really understand the various issues in this article on the next phase of Phoenix light rail expansion, but this certainly caught my eye:

It will add another $9 million to the $297 million project. But by
acting quickly to make these changes, there aren’t expected to be
delays in rail construction. Work is scheduled to start in early 2009
and be completed by 2012.

Opposition to the rail plan arose last fall in the last half mile of
the 3.2-mile light rail line that extends from just south of Bethany
Home Road to Dunlap Ave.

Let’s see — $306 million divided by 3.2 miles is very close to $100 million a mile, and that is even before the inevitable cost overruns cut in (as a rule of thumb, I tend to double estimates of light rail construction costs to estimate the actual final total, and even then I am often low).   It also does not include inevitable operating losses.

Nearly a third of a billion dollars to run a rail line a distance most people could walk in 45 minutes.  For three freaking miles.  As a comparison, three buses could provide service on this same route running at 5 minute intervals for perhaps 1% of this capital cost and a substantially lower operating cost.  And better service, since the frequency would be 3 times higher.  Absolutely absurd. 

More on Phoenix light rail here, and more on light rail in general here.

Postscript: Some of you may be familiar with my light rail bet.  I often bet that a light rail line will cost more to build than it would have cost to buy every  regular daily rider a Prius, and more to operate in a year than it would require to gas up all of these Prius’s for a year.  For reference, with a $22,500 cost for a Prius and $306 million (and counting) capital cost, that is enough to buy 13,600 Prius’s.  Anyone want to bet that the number of incremental users attracted to the line by this 3 mile extension don’t exceed 13,600?

Update:  TJIC does the math — $1500 per inch!  Fixed link, thanks to commenters.

The Anti-planner observes:

Over the past 25 years, the population of the Pittsburgh urban area
has remained fixed at about 1.8 million people. Driving, however, has
increased by almost 50 percent.

During this period, Pittsburgh has spent hundreds of millions of
dollars upgrading light-rail lines, building exclusive busways, and —
in the latest project — building a $435 million transit tunnel under the Allegheny River. Despite (or because of) this investment, transit ridership has dropped by more than 25 percent.

Although the numbers vary slightly from place to place, Pittsburgh’s
story is pretty typical of transit everywhere. Sure, some cities have
seen ridership gains, but subsidies to transit are huge and transit
does not make a notable (meaning 5 percent or more) contribution to
personal mobility in any urban area except New York (where it is 10
percent).

He has a good summary of what’s wrong and what might work instead.  I appreciated this observation in particular:

Why do we put up with this? The answer, of course, is that transit is
pork. “For most transit agencies in the United States, if they were to
write a mission statement that is reflective of what they do, they
would indicate that they exist for the purpose of serving their
employees and vendors,” not transit riders, notes Cox.

I have chastised our city on many occasions (more here) for spending enormous amounts of money on a new light rail / streetcar system for Phoenix.  These light rail systems can be twenty or more times as expensive, per mile or passenger carried, than a similar bus system.  But what really, really makes light rail nuts for Phoenix is the lack of flexibility.   Our hugely expensive new light rail system serves just one corridor, in a city that really does not even have a downtown.  Phoenix is characterized by a nearly infinite number of commuting routes that don’t overlay nicely on a suburbs to city-center pattern as they might in, say, Chicago.  Further, the current route arguably follows the least congested route of any in the city!

The incremental cost of light rail over bus systems has been justified to us by our government overlords by economic development.  The argument goes that light rail creates more business development along their routes than a bus system.  Now, I am skeptical of this, given the region justified building a billion dollar stadium for the hapless Cardinals on the same justification (not to mention numerous subsidies of a couple of college bowl games that add little to an area that is going to get holiday tourists because of its climate whether there is a football game or not.

But what about Portland?  Supposedly Portland light rail is the go-by which all we unplanned cities should emulate.  But the Anti-Planner brings this helpful observation about Portland’s experience with light rail and development:

Streetcar advocates often say that 7-mile-per-hour streetcars aren’t about transportation, they are about economic development.
But they expect the Department of Transportation to pay for them out of
highway user fees. Why didn’t they ask the Department of Housing and
Urban Development for the money?

Of course, the Antiplanner doesn’t believe
that streetcars catalyze economic development. Instead, they merely
catalyze more tax subsidies for economic development. Portland spent
$90 million on a streetcar line and $665 million on subsidies to
development — then credited the development to the streetcar line.
Yeah, right.

The unfortunately named and horrendously ill-conceived and over-priced Seattle trolley takes to the streets today.  The Anti-Planner has an overview in the third in his series on light rail follies.

The Anti-Planner has a series of posts of late on light rail that in total point to a perverse moral hazard in public transportation funding that helps to explain why states and cities are building so many rail projects, when the numbers almost never make any sense (as I blogged for LA, Phoenix, and Albuquerque).  Though the Anti-Planner does not state these rules, from his recent posts I have inferred three rules:

• A city can get capital construction dollars from the feds, but you can almost never get maintenance or operations money (similar story in recreation)
• The feds will fund big, expensive, sexy rail projects.  They will not fund purchases of buses and are unlikely to fund something so prosaic as a bus stop or terminal  (general rule of thumb:  federally funded projects must be large enough to justify being named at some future point after the local Congressman or Senator who earmarked the project.)
• It is very easy to de-fund bus systems — you just don’t replace aging buses and cut routes over time.  It is hard to de-fund, or, god forbid, abandon a rail line, since the thing sits out there so visibly.  Sunk costs can also be a political issue if rail lines were to be closed.

For most public transportation goals, particularly in spread out western and southern cities, buses are a cheaper and higher service solution than rail.  They can carry the same passenger traffic for far less total dollars (capital plus operating costs) and they can cover far more routes.  In fact, one can argue that rail lines are inherently regressive, as they tend to serve commuting corridors of the middle and upper classes rather than the typical routes of the poor, for whom the systems are nominally built.

So what can one expect by the application of these three rules?  Well, we would expect local authorities to favor large, expensive capital rail projects rather than refurbishment or expansion of bus systems.  As operating costs rise for the trains, we would expect bus service to be cut back to pay for the rail operating deficit.

Which is exactly what happens.  In fact, rail tends not to increase total ridership at all, at best shifting ridership from inexpensive buses to expensive trains, and at worst decreasing total ridership as rail lines with just  a few stations and routes replace more extensive webs of bus transport.  And, in twenty years, when these rails systems need extensive capital overhauls, we find cities with huge albatrosses on their hands that they are unable to maintain or update.

Tom Kirkendall observes that this could have been written about Houston light rail.  I would add that it also could have easily been written about Phoenix light rail, which I have criticized here and here and here.  And heavy rail? Don’t get me started.

Beyond these impressions, Tom Rubin observes that VTA has “the worst
operating statistics fo any American transit operator.” The reason for
this, he says, is that San Jose — being built mostly after World War II
— is one of the most spread-out urban areas in the country. Not only
are people spread out, but jobs are spread out, with no job
concentrations anywhere.

This makes large buses particularly unsuitable for transit because
there is no place where large numbers of people want to go. So what was
VTA’s solution when its bus numbers were low relative to other transit
agencies? Build light rail — in other words, use an expensive
technology that requires even more job concentrations.

Now it has one of the, if not the, poorest-patronized light-rail
systems in America. So what is its solution? Build heavy rail, a
technology that requires even more job concentrations.

This is an interesting factoid from another Anti-Planner post:

The amazing thing to the Antiplanner is that anyone would take this
proposal seriously. The average urban freeway lane costs about $10
million per mile. The average light-rail line costs about $50 million
per mile and carries only a fifth as many people. Seattle’s proposed
lines were going to cost $250 million per mile, making then 125 times
more expensive at moving people than a freeway lane.

Portland is the poster child for light rail "success," but this is an interesting definition of success:

“Many (Portlanders) use their public transportation system,” says
Weyrich. In fact, 9.8 percent of Portland-area commuters took transit
to work before the region build light rail. Today it is just 7.6
percent. In a story repeated in numerous cities that have built rail
lines, rail cost overruns forced the city to raise bus fares and reduce
bus service. That’s a success?

A lot more money for fewer total transit riders.  This is absolutely predictable.  Light rail creates huge investment along one single route.  The assets created are totally inflexible — unlike buses, they can only run one single route.  For most western cities with low density and literally hundreds of different commuting routes this way and that, light rail is silly.  Here are a couple of analysis I did for Albuquerque, LA and Phoenix.  Here is more about Portland.

The AZ Republic, long-time cheerleader for our current light rail project, writes another ode to commuter rail.  Today’s love note is on the Albuquerque commuter rails system.

Sharon Hedrich heads out a little before 7 each morning for the 20-mile
trip to the law office where she works in downtown Albuquerque. She
used to leave home earlier for the dreaded crawl down the city’s
congested freeway.

Driving to work could take 40 minutes or
more, depending on the number of emergencies stalling traffic. Now, she
boards a commuter train, settles into a plush red seat and spends the
half-hour ride reading a novel.

She says the train saves her aggravation – and money.

"I put 7 miles a day on my car instead of 50," Hedrich said recently as
the train zipped toward Albuquerque, New Mexico’s largest city. "It’s
50 bucks a month for me to ride this. I couldn’t even get two tanks of
gas for that."

I am just all aglow for Sharon.  But does the project make sense for the taxpayers of the city and the state (and probably nation) that funded it?  Well, we don’t know.  Because the AZ Republic writes 56 paragraphs lauding the system without once telling us anything about the system performance.  Does it cover its costs?  Are city roads visibly less congested?  Is there a net energy savings?  Is there measurably less pollution?  We don’t know.  All we know is that three people, Geronimo Trujillo, Briana Duran, and Sharon, like it. 

Well, let’s see if we can do the analysis that the Republic couldn’t manage.  We are told it has 3000 presumably round-trip riders a day, and the fare for these riders is $50 per month.  That’s $150,000 of revenue a month or $1.8 million a year.  How much does it take to operate?  Well, we are not told by the Republic and the Albuquerque authority ties itself in pretzels avoiding the question in this FAQ (question 1) comparing apples to oranges and lemons and bananas and any other fruit that might divert our attention.  But I can absolutely guarantee that it costs a hell of a lot more than $1.8 million.  I am not sure that covers the fuel bill, but it certainly does not cover wages, fuel, maintenance and whatever the state is paying the private owner of the rails for trackage rights. 

Let’s see if we can find an analog that does disclose its costs to the public.  The commuter rail system in Northern Virginia called the VRE is about twice as long and carries about twice the passengers as the Albuquerque system.  Its costs are $55.4 million per year, so we can conservatively assume that the Albuquerque system is costing perhaps $20 million a year, a figure that exceeds its revenues by a factor of 11x.  That equates to a taxpayer subsidy of $6,000 per rider per year, which is not atypical for these systems.

And this ignores the capital cost.  Unbelievably, the article does actually mention the capital cost in the 36th paragraph, which is $135 million.  That is $45,000 per rider, or enough to buy two Prius’s for each rider.

So Sharon Hedrich is happy?  Of course she is freaking happy.  The taxpayers paid $45,000 up front costs and $6,000 per year so she can save 43 miles of driving a day.  Assuming she has a 20 mpg car, pays $3 a gallon for gas, and rides the train to work 250 days a year, taxpayers are paying $6,000 a year to save Sharon $1,612.50 a year in gas.  If we want to consider gas plus wear and tear on her car at 45 cents per mile, taxpayers are paying $6,000 a year to save Sharon $4,837.50 per year.   The taxpayers would have been better off — by a LOT — buying her a Prius and paying her expenses to drive than buying and operating a train for her.  This is consistent with my past number crunching on other urban rail systems here and here.

Does the Republic mention these problems?  Sort of:

The system endured the typical raps against a big public-works project:
It fell behind schedule, an anti-tax foundation called it a bad idea
and there were some startup problems.

Dang those tax foundation guys – always getting in the way of progress!  Thank god such a great idea as subsidizing Sharon "endured" these Luddites.

By the way, I am a long-time train watcher and model railroader.  I love trains.  And, all things being equal and if everything was free in the world, I would love to have more commuter rail trains. Unfortunately, all things are not free.  And in most cases, particularly low-density cities outside the northeast, rail tends to be the most expensive possible option.  As a libertarian, I would rather the government just not appropriate this money in the first place.  But given that they are insisting on spending $135 million plus $20 million a year on transportation, nearly any other conceiveable project would have gotten more bang for the buck.

Update:  Below is a picture of Brianna Duran riding in an empty rail car.  It’s good Albuquerque is keeping all those empty seats off the highway.

Update 2: Here is the predictable response to the empty seat snark:  Well, it’s the people’s fault for not choosing such an obviously superior mode of transport.  Wrong.  Its the government’s fault for not taking people’s preferences into account when spending all that taxpayer money.  A government that adjusts itself to the citizens is a Democracy.  A government that demands citizens adjust themselves to the government is fascism.

Update #3:  I am getting email about the government subsidy of highways.  In theory, this is not supposed to be a subsidy.  The large gasoline prices we pay at the pump are supposed to be for highway funds.  This is actually a pretty intelligent way to pay for roads, because it does a decent job at matching use to fees, with a bit of a penalty thrown in for low mpg cars.  To the extent that gas taxes do not match road costs, I am all for eliminating any subsidy and making them match with the right gas tax.  But I know whatever subsidy there is is not as high as for this rail.  Using the numbers for this example, applied to 100 million US commuters, would imply a capital cost of $4.5 trillion and a yearly operating subsidy of $600 billion.  And this would only cover commuting.  Remember, the people in the story can’t give up their cars – rail lines only run a few places.  These costs would be to allow commuters to give up their cars part of the time — about the same number of roads and cars would still be necessary.

Tim Wu believes he has diagnosed the problems of public Wi-fi.  Public wi-ife is a great idea, he says, but the problem is that municipalities have not recognized they need to spend real money on it.

It’s hard to dislike the idea of free municipal wireless Internet
access. Imagine your town as an oversized Internet cafe, with invisible
packets floating everywhere as free as the air we breathe….

Not quite. The basic idea of offering Internet access as a public
service is sound. The problem is that cities haven’t thought of the
Internet as a form of public infrastructure that—like subway lines,
sewers, or roads—must be paid for.

It could be, however, there are a few tiny differences between public wi-fi and public roads:

• Any wi-fi system you install today will be dated in three years and obsolete in five. In fact, given the long delay in public projects between design (and presumably technology selection) and deployment, the system may well be obsolete on the day it gets turned on.  Would we have made the same public highway investment we did if roads went obsolete every five years?
• Roads don’t tend to have private competitors.  And when roads are constructed by private entities, say in a new housing development, you can absolutely bet that the municipality doesn’t feel the need to invest in "public" roads to run beside them.

Wu admits that both cable and DSL have a much lower cost to serve urban customers, which is why private efforts for urban wi-fi tend to fail.  Free municipal wi-fi will therefore be more expensive to build and operate than if you just provided direct public subsidy payments to poorer people to use existing private solutions.  Further, a huge part of the investment will go towards giving away free access to people who already have internet service from a private supplier and are willing and able to pay for it.

Note that Wu never actually names a goal for municipal wi-fi or a
problem it is solving, just this beautiful vision of a city-wide
internet cafe (are we going to provide municipal coffee too?)  This fascination with municipal wi-fi reminds me of nothing so much as a similar fascination with light rail.  You can see it in his opening comment about the "oversized internet cafe."  This is an aesthetic, not an economic, vision.  Our light rail project here in Phoenix is the same way.  It will haul passengers more expensively and at a far higher investment and with less flexibility than our bus and road system.   With the investment we are putting into the system we could have instead bought cars for every rider and had money left over.  It makes zero sense for the density and commuting patterns of this city, but still we are doing it, because there is a subset of people who love light rail as some sort of pleasing aesthetic vision.  Name any goal either one is trying to solve (e.g. access to transportation or internet) with public investments in light rail or municipal wi-fi and those goals could be solved more cheaply some other way. 

Postscript:  A while back, I wrote about another danger of municipal wi-fi:  That bureaucrats in charge of the system will try to protect their jobs by blocking new competitors:

[the municipal wi-fi authority] can use its government authority to block new entrants. …  Take another large government network business: The Post
Office.  The USPS tried like hell to get the government to block Fedex,
and almost succeeded.  The government continues to block competition to
the USPS for first class local mail.  Heck, the USPS has tried at
various times to argue that it should have authority over email and the
Internet.  The government blocks new cigarette manufacturers to protect
the settlement money it gets from the old-line tobacco companies and it
blocks usage of Love Field in Dallas to protect D/FW airport.
Bureaucracies never, ever let themselves die, and there is no way a
municipal broadband business will ever let itself be killed by a
competitor – that competitor will be blocked, even if that likely means
that local broadband consumers have to stick with higher costs and
outdated technologies.

You see something very similar with municipal water systems trying to get the government to limit the growth of bottled water.  It happens all the time.  Already, examples exist of municipalities trying to shut down wi-fi competition from private companies.

Boston’s Logan International Airport is attempting to pull the plug on
Continental Airlines’ free Wi-Fi node, which competes with the airport’s
$7.95-a-day pay service.

In an escalating series of threatening letters sent over the last few weeks,
airport officials have pledged to "take all necessary steps to have the (Wi-Fi)
antenna removed" from Continental’s frequent flyer lounge….

Five years from now, one issue is going to dominate the news on the state and local level.  It’s not going to be civil marriages or abortion of light rail.  It’s going to be unfunded pension liabilities.  Nearly every city, county, and state government body has promised over-generous pensions to millions of their employees, and almost none of them have been putting any money aside to fund these future liabilities (unlike those evil and untrustworthy private companies, who may not always put enough aside but are at least doing something).

Most of us know that the government uses accounting methods and practices that would put private individuals in jail.  For example, Enron managers have gone to jail for accounting practices that allegedly attempted to hide liabilities and keep them off financial statements.  The government does this all the time, and routinely. 

Over the next few years, the GASB will require that governmental bodies reveal the size of these unfunded liabilities.  And you heard it here first, the numbers are going to be MASSIVE.  I am almost sure that the numbers will dwarf the shortfalls in Social Security and maybe Medicare as well.  Anyone want to be that politicians will propose to close these gaps by intelligent spending cuts rather than new taxes?  HAH!

From Cato@Liberty:

A common criticism of Social Security choice
(and defense of the Social Security status quo) is that there
are dishonest actors in private markets who would put people’s private
account assets at risk of (in the words of the AFL-CIO) “corruption, waste and Enron-ization.” These critics argue that society is much better off keeping Social Security in the honest, benevolent hands of Uncle Sam.

What must these critics be thinking about today’s NYT above-the-fold article on teacher pension fund shenanigans in New Jersey? The lede says it all:

In 2005, New Jersey
put either $551 million, $56 million or nothing into its pension fund
for teachers. All three figures appeared in various state documents —
though the state now says that the actual amount was zero.

Like many state and local government pension systems,
New Jersey’s is woefully underfunded compared to the benefits it will
have to pay in the future. (This situation will make headlines in the
coming years, as state and local governments begin to disclose their
pension fund and retirement benefit system shortfalls in accordance
with a recent GASB
requirement.) In New Jersey’s case, the shortfall is more than has been
publicly acknowledged, however: “an analysis of its records by The New
York Times shows that in many cases, New Jersey has overstated even
what it has claimed to be contributing, sometimes by hundreds of
millions of dollars.”

Thanks to Tom Kirkendall for the link to my light rail post.  For quite a while, he has been "railing" against Houston’s light rail proposals (where I was born and raised).  By the way, he is right that Phoenix is even less amenable to a rail-based system than Houston.  Houston has low population density and its downtown area is small compared to metro-friendly cities like New York, making rail an iffy proposition.  But Phoenix is even less dense and its downtown is tiny compared even to Houston.

A previous post of Tom’s also gives me data to feel even more confident about my proposed bet, which was this:

If we take the entire cost of the system’s construction, plus its
annual operating losses/subsides, I will bet that we could have bought
every regular rider of the rail system a nice car instead and gas for
life cheaper than the cost of the rail system.

Obviously we don’t have Phoenix numbers yet, but he links an LA Times story with Los Angeles numbers:

Three light-rail lines have been added to L.A. county’s transit system
in the last 20 years. Together, these cost $2.5 billion in capital
costs, they serve about 125,000 passengers per day and account for a
fiscal loss of approximately $252 million per year — if one
acknowledges that capital costs are real, something that transit
operators and boosters often neglect.

Note that LA’s system is actually a more desirable system from a rider standpoint than the one in Phoenix, since in some areas the trains avoid traffic lights, making them closer to heavy rail, and thus have a faster speed.  So lets run my bet against LA’s numbers.  We don’t really know what the core ridership numbers are.  Certainly its less than the 125,000.  And we don’t know if an out in the morning and back at night commute counts in these numbers as one passenger or two (From here, it looks like 125,000 passengers making 2 trips each).

If the core ridership number is 125,000, the highest possible choice, then the total capital cost of the system per rider is $20,000 per rider.  This means I was right, that we could have instead bought ever rider a car for the same money.  Since the real ridership is probably less than that number, this means we could have bought ever rider a car and had money left over.  Concerned about the environment?  Then make every car a Prius, which the money would just about cover even without the volume purchasing discount they would likely get.

But what about gas?  Well, they say they have a $252 million per year operating loss.  This subsidy, which is above and beyond ticket sales, equates to $2,106 (!) per daily rider, even using the higher 125,000 figure.  At $2.50 per gallon, this equates to 15.5 gallons of gas per rider per week. 

So you can see with the LA numbers, even using the largest possible interpretation of their ridership numbers, the money used for the train could have instead bought every passenger a new car and filled the tank up with gas once a week for life.

Yes, I know, the argument is that the train reduces congestion.  Supposedly.  I have two responses:

• Rail has never reduced congestion in any city.  Go see London and Manhattan.  In fact, rail seems to encourage urban density that increases congestion. 
• In Phoenix, where rail will often replace existing lanes of roads, the train will likely carry fewer people than the lanes of traffic used to, so congestion will increase.

Phoenix is in the process of tearing up half the city to put in its first light rail line.  There seems to be a hard core of people out there who get a huge hard-on for light rail, and I just don’t get it.  Some random observations:

• We are building light rail that is essentially a "trolley."  This means it runs at street levels, often down the median strips of roads, and has to stop at stoplights just like cars and buses.  My question is, in this configuration, how is light rail any different than a bus?  Except for the fact, of course, that it is far more expensive and far less operationally flexible. 
• The system is not up and running yet, so I have not seen ridership numbers, but I will make a bet:  If we take the entire cost of the system’s construction, plus its annual operating losses/subsides, I will bet that we could have bought every regular rider of the rail system a nice car instead and gas for life cheaper than the cost of the rail system.
• It looks to me like the rail system will actually increase congestion.  For most of its route, it is removing lanes from busy roads, and by running down the middle it will make left turns more difficult and complex. 
• Supporters of these systems point to NY or London as examples of what we can achieve.  Bullshit.  No city that has embarked on this light rail stuff has had the success or the political will or the money to build out a network with the critical mass that these larger cities have.  Most end up with orphaned routes (see LA, for example) that don’t tie into anything. 
• Phoenix is the last city on the planet that a rail based system should work for.  I don’t have the book in front of me, I will have to get it from home, but I remember a book on urban development that showed Phoenix had the flattest population density distribution of any city studied.  What this means is that we don’t have a city center and suburbs – it means that we are basically all one big suburb.  So there are no single routes (for example in Chicago from the northern suburbs into downtown) that have any critical mass of traffic.  People are driving from everywhere to everywhere.  In fact, my suspicion has been that there are a group of politicians and business people who want to try to create a downtown area, and are using massive public funds in the form of light rail lines converging on the city center to try to jump-start such development.
• The Commons Blog has a link-rich post on the failure of the Portland light rail system, supposedly the model all light-rail promoters point to.

Update:  Jackalope Pursuivant has more on Phoenix light rail