Month: April 2008

The Washington Policy Center, a right-wing think-tank, issued a “study” entitled “The Facts on Light Rail: A Comparative Analysis of Light Rail Systems in Six West Coast Cities”. It’s the standard anti-rail stuff: it’s expensive, no one rides it, and buses would do a better job.

Michael Setty at publictransit.org has written a convincing rebuttal to the methods, arguments and facts of the study. For example, WPC uses San Francisco to talk about how expensive transit is, but fails to mention that one third of all commute trips in the three counties served by BART and Muni are taken on transit. Setty also shows that LRT is cheaper per passenger mile (38¢) than buses (55¢), in direct contrast to WPC’s claim that buses are 12% cheaper to operate.

A particularly money passage in the Setty piece:

WPC also claims that LRT does not reduce congestion or auto usage. However, according to Bailey, Linda, Mokhtarian, Patricia L. PhD, and Little, Andrew. The Broader Connection between Public Transportation, Energy Conservation and Greenhouse Gas Reduction. February 2008. ICF International. http://www.apta.com/research/info/online/land_use.cfm, transit reduces urban travel by 102 billion annual vehicle miles traveled (VMT) in U.S. urban areas, or about 6% of total urban VMT and two VMT for every urban passenger mile traveled on transit. About half of this impact is due to rail, which reduces travel by up to 10.9 daily VMT per household within 0.75 miles of a rail transit stop. This mitigates probably hundreds of billions in new roads otherwise “needed” without transit.

Applying this two for one reduction in VMT compared to daily transit passenger miles, five of the six West Coast LRT systems (excluding San Jose) are suppressing approximately 1.75 billion annual VMT, saving direct expenditures for auto trips of roughly $850 million based on the 2007 IRS Standard Mileage rates for business purposes, e.g., $0.485 per mile driven. This savings offsets net operating subsidies of about $304 million for the five LRT systems, plus an estimated annualized capital expense of $400-$450 million for the roughly $7.5 billion invested in West Coast LRT except for Santa Clara–e.g., assuming current 30-year U.S. Treasuries rates of 4.35%, and an annual set-asides to fund future replacements (actually provided by Federal formula funding).
These estimates do not include any allowance for reducing parking expenditures by the private sector, the increased value of land next to LRT stations, reduced travel times for transit dependents in some cases, and precluded expenditures for additional urban roadway capacity needed. In all corridors served by LRT, roadways already exist, usually freeways.

One of the main criticisms of transit is that it accounts for so few “trips”, as measured in vehicle miles travelled. But transit reduces the overall number of miles travelled, not just by car but by all means. So a simple usage metric is over counting the people who live in Spanaway and commute to Redmond, and dramtically over-counting those who live in Ballard and work in First Hill.

It’s great stuff, and the best smack-down of the standard anti-transit arguments I’ve read in a long time.

Kemper Freeman is fighting light rail in Vancouver. Well, not himself, but by proxy with Michael Ennis at the Washington Policy Center doing the dirty work. Kemper’s a big donnor to WPC (Jon DeVore at HA has some details on where WPC gets its money, and how they spend it). Some in Clark county way to extend Portland’s Max across the Columbia to Vancouver. Mike Ennis’s opinion piece in the Columbian is so full of absurdities as to almost be hilarious.

Light rail does not reduce traffic congestion. In 2005, light-rail systems on the West Coast served only about 2 percent of the work force in their service areas. On average, these systems only remove between 0.39 percent and 1.1 percent of cars from the roadway.

As I’ve said a million times at this blog, the goal is to move people, not cars. I don’t really care whether cars disappear from the road. As people move here (and Portland/Vancouver), there will always be more cars.

Light rail is expensive and it requires significant public assistance. On average, West Coast light-rail systems need taxpayer subsidies to pay for 73 percent of operations and 100 percent of capital improvements every year.

Yeah and roads make tons of money, that’s why we have such an easy time replacing the Viaduct and the 520 bridge. So do buses, those things are cash cows! I wonder what the figure is for the BRT that Ennis loves so much?

Light rail is far less efficient than a bus system. Attracting a new rider to light rail costs 16 to 47 times as much as attracting a new rider to a traditional bus system. And when accounting for passenger demand, West Coast light rail is 12 percent more expensive to operate than bus service.

Sure the capital costs of rail are large compared to buses, so it’s not surprising that rail costs more to “attract a rider”, but that statistic is massively misleading. And the 12% figure is not only wrong, it ignores the fact that advertising revenues are 15~25% of operating costs for rail systems, while just 10% for bus systems.

Just to get an idea of what kind of guy Ennis is, check out this post from the WPC blog:

On this Earth Day, I’m reminded of the push for highly dense, urban centers by incorporating transit oriented development (TODs). The idea is to build residential and commercial development along a railway or transit station. Through public subsidies and tax breaks, TODs typically require government manipulation of the market to attract the new community. Some also result in high vacancy rates and empty businesses because of the unnatural market.

Here is Thailand’s version of a TOD:

I wish I could make this stuff up.