What will the Christchurch Mayor and CEO learn about light rail in the US?

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1 CRMS Special Digest. What will the Christchurch Mayor and CEO learn about light rail in the US? The Costs of Fruitless Tours. The public and media commentators are currently somewhat excited about the travel costs incurred by our Government Ministers and MPs. While we are at it we should probably be asking similar questions about the travel costs of our local government politicians and officials and more particularly about the costs incurred compared to the benefits received. The National Business Review's "Private Bin" advises in its last issue that Christchurch City Mayor Bob Parker, his CEO Tony Marryat, and an urban planner, are planning a trip to the US to investigate the performance of light rail in Los Angeles, San Francisco Bay Area, Seattle and Vancouver. These cities seem unlikely to provide any relevant information, if only because their populations are: Los Angeles 13.8 million San Francisco/San Jose 5.3 million Seattle 3.3 million Vancouver 2.1 million While one can haggle over the extent of metropolitan areas, and populations served by their existing or planned rail systems, these quibbles appear inconsequential given that the population of Greater Christchurch is only 335,000. I suppose the Christchurch team cannot investigate a rail system in the US serving a city of only some 300,000 people, because even America's Smart Growth planners are not that silly. Randal O'Toole who has made many studies of urban rail systems points out (in "Unlivable Strategies" see full reference below) that spending money on expensive forms of rail transit is fundamentally inefficient because other transportation systems cost far less to 1

2 build. He explains that light rail has become popular in the United States precisely because it is expensive. Congress gives transit grants to cities on a first-come, first-served basis. So the cities that build the most expensive transit systems get the largest share of federal transit funding. Naturally, dozens of cities are in line to get their share of the pork. But that does not prove that light rail is worthwhile. Too many cities have built expensive rail lines and then found that, due to overruns, high operations and maintenance costs, or heavy mortgages, they have to cut back bus service. The result is that rail construction has actually led to reduced transit ridership in many, if not most, cases. For an informative and entertaining profile of Randal O'Toole (and his dog Chip) go to: The Grand Tour Los Angeles and San Francisco Bay. Here is what the Mayor and his CEO should learn from their visits to the Los Angeles and San Francisco Bay. Los Angeles reinforces the Portland experience (a much smaller city) where cost overruns forced Portland to raise bus fares and cut bus service during construction of its first light-rail line in the 1980s. As a result, a smaller proportion of Portlanders ride transit to work and other places today than did so in A similar situation in Los Angeles led to a 17 percent decline in transit ridership between 1985 and The NAACP sued the transit agency for cutting bus service in low-income neighbourhoods while building rail to middleclass neighbourhoods. The suit forced the agency to scale back its rail plans and restore bus service, which led to a recovery of ridership. In the San Francisco Bay Area, due to heavy rail debt, San Jose was forced to drastically cut bus and rail service in 2001 and lost 35 percent of its riders. The transit system had 2

3 to make further cuts in Furthermore, despite (or because of) several extensions of the BART line, transit ridership in the San Francisco Bay Area has fallen by more than 10 percent since Several transit advocacy groups, including the Sierra Club (Piper, 2004), the Bay Area Transportation and Land Use Coalition (BATLUC, 2003), and the Bay Rail Alliance (Carpenter, 2007), actively oppose a proposed extension of BART to San Jose because they know investments in other forms of transit are much more cost effective. Overall, US urban areas with rail transit have not fared as well as areas with bus transit. Between 1990 and 2000, the number of people in regions with rail transit who commute to work by transit actually declined, while the number in regions with bus-only transit systems increased. The saddest part of these stories is that the people who lose tend to be those who most depend on transit due to low incomes or an inability to drive, while the people who end up riding rail lines tend to have higher incomes and plenty of automobility (Winston and Shirley, 1998, p. 9). This means that rail transit can be highly inequitable. Seattle and Vancouver. Here is what the Mayor and his team should learn from their visits to Seattle and Vancouver. Seattle. Description: After getting voter approval for rail transit in 1996, Sound Transit began operating 31 miles of commuter rail service between Tacoma and Seattle in It also built a 1.6-mile streetcar line in downtown Tacoma at a cost of $50 million a mile, a third more than planned. As of December, 2003, it also operates a 35-mile commuter rail line from Everett to Seattle. Why it is a disaster: Sound Transit s Seattle-Tacoma commuterrail line is one of the least productive in the nation, carrying less than one seventh as many passenger miles per route mile as the average commuter-rail line. As a result it has one of the highest operating costs per trip or per passenger mile of any commuter rail 3

4 line. Despite starting out with free service, the Everett line has been running more than 70 percent empty. Nearly 99 percent of the increase in transit commuting during the 1990s is bus transit. Seattle Transit System Data Trips (millions) Share of of Travel % % Transit s growth in travel and market share is almost entirely due to bus transit, not rail transit. But the growth in the region s congestion is due to decisions made early in the decade to concentrate on rail transit rather than highway construction. Those decisions have harmed Seattle area residents in many ways represented by the rail livability index, including the cost overruns, congestion, transit s cost ineffectiveness, and housing prices. Future plans: Sound Transit wants to spend at least $3.6 billion on a light-rail line in Seattle. The agency originally projected that the cost of building a 24-mile light-rail line from the Seattle-Tacoma airport to the University of Washington and Northgate would be $2.4 billion. Shortly after receiving voter approval, the agency increased this estimate to $3.6 billion and the cost may actually reach much more than that. Sound Transit wants to use the funds that voters approved for the planned 24-mile line to build a scaledback 14-mile segment. In 2002, voters also approved a 14-mile, $1.75 billion extension to the 1962 monorail line, which is scheduled for completion in Vancouver. Specific data about Vancouver's rail network are difficult to come by, other than that Wikipedia tells us that the system had debt problems in The debt servicing of SkyTrain was three and a half times the actual operating budget whereas the debt servicing of buses was only one-seventh the operating budget.[70] During the construction of the Surrey extension, the Vancouver Regional Transit Commission, a division of BC Transit, was $30 million in 4

5 debt. The provincial government agreed to cover the debt in 1991 for three years. But the Christchurch Mayor and his team are presumably looking at these rail systems as a means of supporting their Smart Growth plans for the Greater Christchurch area. Randal O Toole s report Unlivable Strategies: The Greater Vancouver Regional District and the Livable Region Strategic Plan reports on how light rail failed to contribute to their objectives. Go to estrategiesgvrd.pdf This wide-ranging report on Vancouver makes the following recommendations on p36: One of the arguments for compact development, for example, is that low-density development supposedly imposes higher urban service costs on the cities or districts providing those services. Instead of discouraging low-density development, the solutionis simply to make certain that the people using those services pay the costs for them. Technical solutions include: constructing new roadways that are managed using electronic tolling; improving arterial traffic flows by installing the latest traffic signal coordinating systems; continually improving air pollution control systems; eventually replacing internal combustion engines with nonpolluting power sources such as electric batteries or fuel cells. Preparing and installing the infrastructure needed to support intelligent driver free vehicles for both public and private vehicles. Economic solutions include: implementing variable-priced tolling to insure that new highways and eventually new lanes parallel to all major existing highways are never congested; developing local improvement districts that allow homeowners in new subdivisions to pay the costs of supporting infrastructure over a multi-year period; 5

6 redesigning and decentralizing transit services so they are primarily responsive to users, and not simply seeking large appropriations for expensive projects. One way of doing this would be to encourage the formation of private transit services, while subsidizing low-income transit riders and other transit-dependent people with transit vouchers that could be applied to any public transport system or operator. To best identify and implement these technical and economic solutions, Christchurch City and Environment Canterbury should develop institutions that have narrow missions and the incentives to efficiently carry out those missions. Sources. Most of this information on specific cities has been extracted from Randal O'Toole's "Great Rail Disasters", first published in 2004 and updated in For the full document go to: For more recent data go to the following for source statistics: The latest data on all U.S. transit systems in Time-series data on rail systems in Conclusion The Christchurch City Council can save the money. If the Mayor and his team ask the right questions, and collect the right data, it will be evident to Blind Freddy's dog that if these boondoggle systems have failed in these major cities, with their major concentrations of employment, then there is no way, short of one of the Wizard's magic spells, that light rail can provide a cost effective and efficient service to Christchurch and its environs. Sorry about that. Owen McShane 1104 Oneriri Rd, R.D. 2 Kaiwaka, Northland, New Zealand Director, Centre for Resource Management Studies