Between roads and light rail, which option would you suppose is the most cost effective for moving people into and through the downtown area of a major American city?

Now, let's add some more details. Let's say that major American city is Seattle, Washington where a major roadway, the seismically-challenged Alaskan Way Viaduct is reaching the end of its useful life.

To replace the existing elevated double-deck roadway, the Washington state government authorized a deep-bore underground tunnel project, which is set to begin construction this year. Seattle's mayor, Mike McGinn, is opposed to the project because of its high costs. So much so that he commissioned a chart comparing the cost of the project to the cost of existing throughways in Seattle, which is described by The Stranger's Eli Sanders:

The red [sic - it's really orange!] line that shows the cost of the tunnel runs almost off the chart, but the black line showing its predicted usage sat well under the present usage for the little old Ballard Bridge, and just above the predicted usage for the fixed-up South Park bridge. Said McGinn, pointing to his chart:

What their own preliminary [tunnel] studies show is that when you do [the planned tolling], you have 41,000 cars a day using the tunnel. I just want to put that in perspective, and I brought a little graph here... So the deep bore tunnel, it'll move a few more cars than the South Park Bridge, and a lot less than the Ballard Bridge, and cost... a couple billion.

Sounds outrageous, right? Now, what if we compare the cost of the proposed deep bore underground tunnel project to the cost of building a light rail system to operate over much of the same area? Specifically, the area Sound Transit's Central Link, which is similar in scale and scope to the proposed deep-bore tunnel and which Seattle has already built!

Something which the Washington Policy Center's Michael Ennis has already done, going to the trouble of modifying Mayor McGinn's chart to include it (HT: Sound Politics):

Seattle Mayor Mike McGinn loves to use this chart to show the apparent inefficiency of the Viaduct tunnel. If you follow transportation policy or the Viaduct issue, you have seen it many times. It compares cost to how many cars would use it with two other road projects in Seattle.

He then argues we should not replace the Viaduct with a tunnel because it costs too much and provides too little benefit.

McGinn's efficiency argument against the tunnel is hypocritical when the mayor also supports light rail, which is even more expensive and carries fewer people.

Washington Policy Center took McGinn's chart and added some context by including a comparison to Central Link light rail costs and ridership, which McGinn supports.

Sound Transit's Central Link light rail line cost $2.6 billion to build and, assuming that the 3,195,908 people who boarded the line during the first six months of 2010 are any indication, averages an equivalent 23,000 round trip commuters per day.

Meanwhile, Mayor McGinn's idea of a "wasteful" project, representing what perhaps is the most expensive way to build a road, would cost roughly 23% less (assuming it costs a full $2 billion) and would be capable of moving double the number of people that light rail currently does both into and through downtown Seattle.

We'll close with the Washington state's drive-through video simulation of the proposed tunnel:

Is it us or is that the nicest weather for a drive that Seattle's ever seen?

Labels: public transportation

- posted by Ironman at 6:46 AM | Permalink | Home |

Amtrak, the heavily-subsidized, government-owned passenger rail monopoly in the United States, is trying to go green by switching one of its lines, the Heartland Flyer, to run on a special biodiesel blend that includes beef byproducts.

Really. We're not making this up! Miranda Marquit reports:

In an effort to create a greener train, Amtrak has unveiled the Heartland Flyer, which is designed to run on a special biodiesel blend that includes beef byproducts. The idea is to reduce hydrocarbon and carbon monoxide emissions by 10% each and reduce sulfates by 20%. Amtrak also claims that particulates will be reduced by 15% with the help of this new fuel mix.

However, the train won't be running solely on cow power. Discover reports on how Amtrak will use the fuel:

The Heartland Flyer uses about 100,000 gallons of diesel fuel each year to move 84,000 people. For this one-year test run, Amtrak will replace 20 percent of that fuel with biodiesel, produced from tallow from Texas cows. The fat from the cattle, which is normally used to make animal feed and soap, will now instead help power a train.

While the new biofuel can be used on standard train engines, the Heartland Flyer has been given new parts so that it is possible to determine how much damage the biofuel is inflicting on the train over the course of a year. The Flyer is only expected to run for a year, between Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, and Forth Worth, Texas, and then the engine and the train's performance will be evaluated.

So, let's start racking up the cost to the taxpayer here for this grand plan for the future of rail travel in the U.S. USA Today reports that as of 2008, the average Amtrak passenger already benefits from a government subsidy of $32 per passenger, which makes it possible for the U.S. only national passenger rail service to operate despite continual, chronic losses.

A good portion of that taxpayer subsidized cost of operations goes toward buying fuel. Here, since the Heartland Flyer will be operated using a blend of regular diesel fuel and biodiesel, we'll run our numbers based upon what the Energy Information Agency indicates were the national prices of each in January 2010, which will give us a good idea of what such a scheme might cost if implemented nationwide.

Here, we find the average price of diesel per gallon in January 2010 was $2.87. Meanwhile, the price per gallon of 100% biodiesel fuel was $3.59 per gallon. A blend of 80% diesel and 20% biodiesel, similar to what's being proposed for the Heartland Flyer, cost $2.96 per gallon. The table below presents what we find to be the annual cost to each of Amtrak's 84,000 passengers for the 100,000 gallons of fuel consumed on the trains 206 mile, one-way route:

At just 11 cents per passenger then, it doesn't seem like a bad idea. But wait - isn't biodiesel subsidized too? Why, yes, it is, or rather, it was, and it very likely will be again, if the current U.S. Congress has its way! To the tune of $1.00 per gallon.

That may not seem like much, but let's re-run our numbers from the previous table to account for the effects of that subsidy:

We find that switching to the B20 biodiesel blend will increase the per-passenger subsidy that taxpayers provide for each Amtrak passenger on the 206 mile one-way Heartland Express route to $32.27, just shy of a 1% increase.

But that doesn't include the costs of the modifications it will take to make the train run on this special biodiesel blend or any of the expected higher maintenance costs resulting from damage caused by using the biodiesel fuel blend. Nor does it take into account the higher costs for products like soap and animal feed that consumers will see since the cow by-products that might otherwise be used for these products will instead be diverted into biodiesel production.

And since many of the cows that will be producing the by-products are fed with taxpayer subsidized crops, like corn, it doesn't include those costs as well and apparently doesn't provide much benefit for the environment either, the purported reason for the project. We probably shouldn't mention corn prices are themselves higher than they would be otherwise because of government mandates for ethanol production. Also apparently for the purpose of the perceived "benefits" of going green.

If you add it all up, the taxpayer-provided subsidy per Amtrak passenger from implementing this "improvement" is truly, quite generous.

And right now, all for the exclusive benefit of biodiesel producers, a select few cattlemen and optimistically (assuming no repeat passengers) some 84,000 people who don't have to pay as much out of pocket to travel the 206 miles between Oklahoma City and Fort Worth or back again as they might have had to otherwise.

Labels: public transportation

- posted by Ironman at 12:09 PM | Permalink | Home |

Once upon a time, we said:

Economically speaking, of all the ways to transport people between cities, rail is perhaps the stupidest. Nowhere else do we see the confluence of extraordinarily high infrastructure costs (land, construction, equipment, facilities, etc.) and extraordinarily high operating costs (labor, maintenance, fuel, utilities, overhead, etc.) combine with extraordinarily low demand by commuters to produce such little tangible benefit.

And that was just for moving people between cities. When it comes to moving people within cities, as light rail is intended to do, it becomes perhaps even more stupid. The only way to make it work, in fact, is to redesign cities themselves, which costs magnitudes of money even more than what putting a light rail system in place costs.

Speaking of the costs of putting a light rail system in place, we're reminded of a bet proposed by the Coyote Blog's Warren Meyer:

The system [in Phoenix, Arizona] 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.

Well, let's find out! Fortunately, the St. Louis Federal Reserve's Molly D. Castelazo and Thomas A. Garrett considered this question, specifically looking at St. Louis' MetroLink light rail service, and worked out the basic math for us! We took that math, enhanced it a bit, and built the tool below so you can run numbers for whatever light rail system you might want to consider:

Having run the default numbers, some of which were provided by Castelazo and Garrett, we confirmed that instead of pouring money into low return light rail, the government could simply purchase cars for the light rail riders without them and still have enough money left over to provide all the other riders with substantial credits to use for bus service or other subsidized mass transportation options.

The Coyote Blog's Warren Meyer did follow up his original post with some figures from Los Angeles. And before we leave off, let's also remember that the costs of putting in a light rail system and the subsidies to operate them are not one-time only events.

Light rail. The gift to politicians and the local developers who support them that taxpayers keep giving, and giving, and giving....

Where to Get Numbers

How much a local light rail system is receiving from the government is best found in the appropriate transit authority's annual financial statements of their operating costs (or as is often the case, their annual operating losses.) These agencies should also be able to provide daily average ridership data. The percentage of light rail riders who do not own cars is difficult to estimate, but will most likely range between 10 and 20 percent. To divide the entire annual government subsidy for light rail equally among all individual riders, set this percentage to 0.

The best resource we found for finding the purchase price and annual operating expenses for a car is the Auto Channel's New Car Buying Guide's Total Operating Costs database. The default numbers we entered are those for a base model 2007 Toyota Prius 4-door hatchback for five years, which matches the term of the car loan. The tool assumes this is the term for which the car will be owned and operated.

The tool also assumes that loan payments are made monthly (12 per year.) Current car loan interest rates may be found through Bankrate.com.

Previously on Political Calculations

• A Grand Plan for Rail in the West
  
• Trouble on the Tracks
  
• Linear Cities
  
• Telephones, Steam Engines and Zeer Pots

Labels: public transportation, tool

- posted by Ironman at 1:52 AM | Permalink | Home |

In recent years, states where citizens have the right to bring initiatives to the voting ballot have had this right abused by politicians and the special interest groups that support them.

Perhaps the most powerful of these politician-interest group alliances is represented by the public transportation lobby. This alliance of big project developers and state and local government public transportation agencies perpetually promise the following benefits to the voting public in return for votes (and tax money) supporting their dream of universal public transportation:

1. Better service.
2. Cleaner air.
3. Energy conservation.
4. Greater safety.
5. Less traffic congestion.

Yet somehow, despite all the investment made by taxpayers over the years in supporting public transporation initiatives, the providers of public transportation continue to keep going back to the polls promising the same things, over and over again. How come they're not doing a better job at providing these things after all these years?

The answer is simple. Public transportation is something that the public wants, but only for other members of the public, not themselves. They want the benefits, the cleaner air, the less congested roads, etc. but they don't want to inconvenience themselves into a system that, no matter how grandly planned, cannot serve every need of every individual.

Instead, one suspects that the only reason the public transportation lobby continues to put initiatives on the ballot is to keep an ever-increasing flow of tax money going to the big public transportation project developers and the bureaucrats of the government agencies that run them. This would explain why the problems "solved" by public transportation never really are solved.

So, we here at Political Calculations had an interesting thought. We couldn't help but notice recently that there sure is a lot less traffic on government holidays when government employees don't work. We also notice that government employees often are among the largest employers in every region of the U.S. We also can't help notice that reduced traffic congestion is one of the stated benefits of public transportation.

Obviously, commuting government employees are a clear contributor to traffic congestion. So, why not have a ballot initiative that combines problem and solution together? Let's get government employees out of their cars and onto public transportation!

How can this be done? We suggest that this goal may be achieved by eliminating the biggest subsidy that government agencies provide their employees for their private transportation: the parking place.

But, we shouldn't eliminate all parking for government employee. After all, we've already acknowledged that no public transportation system, no matter how well executed, is capable of serving every need of every individual. So, the initiative should direct government agencies to only provide parking for just 20% of its employees. Surely that would be enough to accommodate the unique needs of each government employee. Plus, we can count upon the wisdom of the government agencies in allocating the use of their parking places by their employees. If they can successfully allocate our tax money to achieve optimal results, they can certainly do the same with a mere handful of spaces in their own parking lots!

It's a perfect win-win scenario! The voting public gets what they really want (a large number of other people off the roads) and the public transporation lobby gets what they want (more tax money and increased investment in public transportation resources.) In fact, there should be no greater advocate for this change than the government agencies responsible for public transporation themselves. We look forward to their enthusiastic support for this proposed initiative....

Labels: none really, public transportation

- posted by Ironman at 9:39 AM | Permalink | Home |

Economically speaking, of all the ways to transport people between cities, rail is perhaps the stupidest. Nowhere else do we see the confluence of extraordinarily high infrastructure costs (land, construction, equipment, facilities, etc.) and extraordinarily high operating costs (labor, maintenance, fuel, utilities, overhead, etc.) combine with extraordinarily low demand by commuters to produce such little tangible benefit.

That's why the recent report by the Associated Press' Catherine Tsai of plans by a Denver group seeking to build a high-speed commuter rail line from Wyoming to New Mexico should light up big, bright, neon, flashing "WARNING" signs to responsible public officials who would be asked to contribute tax money to support the boondoggle.

The group, Front Range Commuter Rail, led by former Colorado state representative Bob Briggs is advocating connecting the cities of Cheyenne, Wyoming, Denver, Colorado and Albuquerque, New Mexico with high-speed passenger rail service. Trains would travel over a 602 mile long route at speeds of 110 miles per hour in the group's plan.

The plan is being pushed forward to exploit the perceived good graces of Denver-area voters who voted last November to expand rail service in Denver's metropolitan area. The plan also has the support of Cheyenne LEADS, a private corporation that supports economic development in that city.

Tsai's report notes that the group has gained support from several members of Colorado's delegation to the U.S. Congress (links added):

Briggs said Sen. Ken Salazar and Rep. Mark Udall, both D-Colo., and Rep. Bob Beauprez, R-Colo., all have voiced support for the line.

This political support is necessary for the advancement of the project, since the rail lines that the group would seek to convert from freight to high-speed rail service would need to be designated as a high-speed rail corridor in order to obtain federal funding for the project. Initially, the funding would be used to conduct a study of the feasibility of the project, and later the conversion of the line from freight to high-speed passenger rail service.

The conversion of the existing freight rail lines to high-speed rail lines would be expensive, costing roughly $3 to $4 million dollars per mile. Assuming that all 602 miles of rail line would need to be converted puts the minimum cost of just installing the high-speed rail tracks at $1.8 to $2.4 billion dollars.

Tsai summarizes the group's goals for ridership:

The grand plan is to have a line offering one trip per hour, 18 hours a day, carrying 3.5 million to 4 million people a year, Briggs said.

Using these numbers, assuming 260 working days per year and 18 trips per day, Briggs is counting on moving an average 13,462 and 15,385 people per day, or between 748 to 855 people per trip.

By contrast, Amtrak presently carries roughly 64,000 passengers a day over its entire nationwide system. Chris Suellentrop of Slate provides additional numbers for comparison:

Amtrak carries about 64,000 passengers a day. That compares to 1.8 million passengers daily for domestic airlines and 984,000 passengers daily for intercity buses. That's right, more than 15 times as many Americans use intercity buses than use Amtrak. And those are just the mass-transit options for intercity travel. More people drive between cities than take a plane.

Unless the group is prepared to remove Interstate 25 from the western landscape, it's highly unlikely it would ever see anything close to these figures. Anyone with any opportunity to vote against this boondoggle should do so, especially in light of greater, real needs following Hurricane Katrina.

Previous Rail-Related Posts at Political Calculations

• Trouble on the Tracks
• Linear Cities

Labels: economics, public transportation

- posted by Ironman at 8:30 AM | Permalink | Home |

The Heritage Foundation recently ran a series of horror stories detailing the poor performance of the U.S.' highly subsidized passenger rail service Amtrak. While the horror stories provide ample anecdotal evidence of the railroad's monumentally poor service, the question remains - can passenger rail work in the U.S.?

The answer: Not without a massive infusion of new subsidies, in addition to continuing the present level of taxpayer-provided money. At present, nearly 40% of Amtrak's operating expenses are covered by the largess of the U.S. taxpayer. Even with this level of support, Amtrak can expect to lose more than $700 million this year, as none of Amtrak's routes are profitable. (In 2004, the operating losses for all Amtrak routes added up to more than $695 million, with an average loss per passenger of $245.)

New subsidies would be required to address Amtrak's deferred maintenance costs, which presently total more than $10 billion dollars (Reference: Wall Street Journal, subscription required.) Beyond the deferred maintenance expenses however, substantial increases in taxpayer subsidies would be required to address Amtrak's capital infrastructure.

How Else Is Amtrak Not Working?

When you consider the price tag for keeping Amtrak afloat, it's hard to support continuing its government subsidy. It becomes even harder when you realize how few people would actually be affected by discontinuing Amtrak's most unprofitable rail routes and redirecting its resources toward achieving sustainable profitability where it could potentially make money. Chris Suellentrop of Slate provides numbers for comparison:

Amtrak carries about 64,000 passengers a day. That compares to 1.8 million passengers daily for domestic airlines and 984,000 passengers daily for intercity buses. That's right, more than 15 times as many Americans use intercity buses than use Amtrak. And those are just the mass-transit options for intercity travel. More people drive between cities than take a plane.

The subsidy from the federal government has another negative effect upon the passenger rail service. It insulates Amtrak from market-driven realities. For example, Amtrak's management structure is highly bloated. Chris Suellentrop notes that the railroad has 80 vice presidents, although it plans to reduce that number to 25. In addition, Amtrak's labor costs (wages, salaries and benefits) are far in excess of the vast majority of other transportation industry workers receive while facing real world competitive pressures.

Should U.S. Taxpayers Keep Supporting Amtrak?

There comes a time that when a system breaks down, it must be changed or else it will fail entirely. The time for change for Amtrak will come on September 30, when the President's proposed budget for 2006 would discontinue Amtrak's taxpayer subsidy. Far from being a death knell for the railroad, the President's proposed budget marks a wake-up call for Amtrak's management, workers and passengers, who must brace themselves for the changes that will need to be made to make passenger rail service viable in the long term. For the U.S. Congress and the President, no subsidy should be granted to Amtrak without an enforceable guarantee that the railroad will finally undertake the radical restructuring that it has avoided for so long.

Labels: public transportation

- posted by Ironman at 8:30 AM | Permalink | Home |

I recently contributed to some back of the envelope analysis over at Josef's Public Journal regarding the performance of Sound Transit's Sounder commuter rail service following the release of the Seattle based Coalition of Effective Transportion Alternatives' "Sound Transit Report Card". In his followup post, "Sounder Math (01)", Josef noted the exceptionally low ridership for Sounder commuter rail between the downtowns of Seattle and Everett, which averages 150 round-trip passengers each workday. By comparison, in 2004 the route between the downtowns of Tacoma and Seattle averaged just under 1,700 round-trip passengers per day.

Why the major difference in ridership between the two cities? I believe the difference is primarily due to the rail routes between them. The rail corridor between Tacoma and Seattle parallels the Interstate 5 (I-5) corridor for much of its route. Meanwhile, the rail route between Everett and Seattle parallels the coast of the Puget Sound. The difference for commuters? Many more businesses are located along the highway than are located along the Sound. Most businesses near the Everett-Seattle rail line are actually located some distance away off Washington State Highway 99, which would require commuters to take secondary public transportation in order to reach their places of work. In addition to the time required to travel via commuter rail, this imposes a substantial additional burden and hassle in getting to their places of work. For commuters between Everett and Seattle, Sounder rail simply doesn't make much sense - certainly not when they may avoid the hassle and drive instead, or take already established bus service if that puts them nearer their work than Sounder commuter rail service.

The exception of course applies for those commuters who work in downtown Seattle, who work much closer to Sounder's stations and do not have to go out of their way just to complete their commute to work. The bottom line is that when it comes to public transportation, how close a commuter's workplace is to the nearest station trumps nearly all other considerations in determining how successful a route will be.

That got me thinking about what it would take to make public transportation successful in being attractive to enough commuters to make it the most preferred choice. The good news is that architects and public officials have individual pieces of the puzzle that only need to be put together. The bad news is that cities, and our ideas about them, would have to be completely reconsidered (not to mention being monstrously expensive!)

Making Public Transportation Work

First of all, to really make public transportation really work, you need to make everybody live and work within easy access of it. From the public transportation standpoint, where today's cities go astray is in their grid system. Once city streets extend beyond easy walking distance of a main street or transportation corridor, public transportation begins to become more difficult to provide. As the distance grows greater, public transportation service becomes more and more difficult to provide, and as a result, it becomes more costly, less efficient and less effective as a viable means of moving people from place to place.

So, to make public transportation viable as the primary means of transport for an entire city, cities themselves need to be designed to closely follow a single transportation corridor. This is where the concept of Solare: A Lean Linear City comes into play. Born in the mind of Paolo Soleri, the leading architect behind some very ambitious urban reconsiderations, including the Arcosanti project near Cordes Junction in central Arizona, SOLARE has been conceived as a "continuous urban ribbon" especially designed for China. Soleri's linear city concept consists of:

Two main parallel structures of thirty or more stories extending for kilometers to hundreds of kilometers.... Each [urban] module can accommodate a population of about 1500 people and the spaces for productive, commercial, institutional, cultural, recreational, and health activities.

The image below shows a view of the concept from both overhead (the upper portion) and from the side (the lower portion):

If you can, imagine the city illustrated above stretching for hundreds and hundreds of miles.

So, What's The Price Tag?

When I look at a concept like this, the first question that forms in my head is: "How much is *that* going to cost?" Unfortunately, I haven't found any cost estimates to indicate what the price tag for a linear city would be, so I turned to the most talented people in the world at thinking really, really, really big: Texans. Here's a description of the Trans-Texas Corridor, which is simply the biggest road of which I've ever heard:

The Trans-Texas Corridor project, as envisioned by Republican Gov. Rick Perry in 2002, would be a 4,000-mile transportation network costing an awesome $175 billion over 50 years, financed mostly if not entirely with private money. The builders would then charge motorists tolls.

But these would not be mere highways. Proving anew that everything’s big in Texas, they would be megahighways — corridors up to a quarter-mile across, consisting of as many as six lanes for cars and four for trucks, plus railroad tracks, oil and gas pipelines, water and other utility lines, even broadband transmission cables.

Source: "$175 Bil Megahighway Proposal Splits Texas" via Google's cache of the Arizona Republic's January 15, 2005 edition.

Now, just multiply that $175,000,000,000 figure by anywhere from 100 to 1000, and you can see what a city to go alongside of it might conservatively cost. Then again, you could pay for it on the installment plan, and it would have no excuses for not having a viable public transportation system from the get go. It's all just a question of how much it's worth to shut up the advocates of ever increasing public transportation services....

Labels: public transportation, technology

- posted by Ironman at 9:30 AM | Permalink | Home |