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The subject is transit oriented development (TOD) based on light rail. For a definition, see the previous post, in which I also explained the Yang, or positive, side of light rail for a small- to medium-sized city or Smid-cit. For this week, I’d like to explain the negative side.
To start with, if you are going to lay light rail down a city street right of way, you had better have a great design. Not a good design, but a great one. Particularly if you plan on letting automobile traffic continue to use what’s left of the street. In the olden days of my childhood, electric streetcars usually occupied the middle lanes of the street, or a median, and car and (always small) delivery truck traffic was minimal. When there were only two traffic lanes, the streetcars shared them with auto traffic. Cut to today, and TOD doesn’t work unless you have something called walkability. That means wide and safe sidewalks. Let’s say you started with a street that has businesses, sidewalks, a lane of parking and two lanes of traffic on each side with a narrow (say 12 foot) median. First, you’re going to need all of that median and more for passenger platforms near intersections or stops. Then you’re taking away a lane of traffic unless you prohibit parking, and may have to take up some sidewalk. If you took away parking, pedestrians may not want to be exposed to a lane of moving automobiles right next to them.
Then you need a way to get pedestrians to the middle for boarding trains. Do you make walkovers or walkunders, or do you just create more of a traffic mess by using pedestrian only walk signals?
Then there’s cost, both for infrastructure and for equipment and maintenance. Light rail infrastructure costs from $20 to $30 million per mile of street, depending on whether you’re using diesel or electric railcars, and depending on your electric distribution system. If you need power substations, you are talking lots more. With maintenance and recurring costs, probably a $35 million figure should be used for any Smid-cit project. Will the increase in sales, rents, and new development pay off the bonds for this kind of investment? (Answers below.)
No matter how energy efficient is moving people with light rail, saving the world one kilowatt at a time costs a lot of money. Light rail systems almost never take the desired number of cars off the street right away. A few, like Seattle’s system, have been popular from the get go, but the averages say that drivers who regularly use your street to get to work or shop will just choose another street rather than ride your trains, especially if the trains do not take them right to the door of their destination. (Drivers will get used to this during your construction phases.) If your city is really, really good at sales and marketing, they just may convince your employer to move to a spot on the new line; but the odds are they won’t. In fact, if the employer has a lot of employees and finds out it is taking many of them longer to get to work to go around the congestion created by the light rail, the employer just might move to a suburb, or to where grain waves amber.
Last week, I pointed out that a developer likes to see light rail because he/she doesn’t want to be perceived as one who contributes to auto pollution. The Yin side is that developers also won’t be interested if the ridership base for your light rail project isn’t big enough. So don’t build light rail where at least some commercial and residential development doesn’t already exist. It’s the old Catch 22.
Fares? A $5 to $10 fare (per ride) will faze some but not all. Above $10 and you will be running empty trains. Ideally, your Smid-cit would be better off under $5. The less money comes from the farebox, the more comes from the taxpayers. Stop and do the math, play with some ridership numbers, and see how many decades it will take to pay off your bond issue. Another catch: As fares go up, ridership goes down.
Finally, remember this. Light rail doesn’t pay for itself. It may never have. Granted there are some heavy passenger rail startups that today think they can make money, but these may be pipe dreams. Plough through the massive walls of creative accounting practices all the way back to the 1880s, and I would wager that electric street railways never showed a profit. Ever. My point is that your Smid-cit will be saddling its population with a subsidy for transit forever, unto Eternity. That’s with a capital E. In some cases, this may be perfectly okay. In others not okay.
Bus Rapid Transit? Some European cities have a combination of both, on the same right of way. But this article is not about BRT. Most of the same arguments, other than a reduced construction cost (perhaps $10 to $15 million per mile) apply. Fuel and maintenance still apply.
I’d still like to see a street railway in my town. But I don’t know if I can afford it.
© 2016 – C. A. Turek – mistertrains@gmail.com
(Charles A. Turek is a writer and novelist based in Albuquerque, NM. After four decades working in areas of the insurance industry related to transportation, he now writes on all aspects of American railroading.)
