UT’s ‘The Daily Texan’: Standing Alone; Tall, Proud and Strong.
COST Commentary: Thank you to ‘The Daily Texan.’ These article are examples of the wisdom of youth. They display some of the great, Texas common sense which is missing in so much of Austin’s rail rhetoric over the past 30 years. There are numerous “common sense” considerations which too many people have ignored in the emotionally charged campaign surrounding Austin’s bond proposition for the proposed light rail.
‘The Daily Texan’ is the only local newspaper to date to oppose Austin’s light rail as described in the article below. ‘The Daily Texan’ was also the only local newspaper to oppose Cap Metro’s proposed light rail which was defeated in 2000. Time has proven ‘The Daily Texan’ to be correct. Every time a light rail route has been proposed over the past 25 years, it has a different route. Hugely expensive, fixed rail transit for a rapidly growing area, with lower density, is not a responsible choice for flexible, cost effective transit to meet growing, changing needs. Rail has not lived-up to its promises in any city like Austin. In addition, rapidly advancing technology will further make outdated trains a totally irresponsible transit choice for cities like Austin today or 100 years from today.
There are two editorials from ‘The Daily Texan’ following this ‘COST Commentary.’
1. The truth is: Austin’s Light Rail proposition will increase congestion throughout the city; the reverse of the City’s sales pitch and “vision” of lower congestion. Austin’s plan of higher population density and constrained, congestion laden streets will hamper mobility and quality-of-life for all. None of the major Texas cities or other similar cities have reduced congestion with rail transit. Rail is the most expensive, with the highest tax subsidies, of any normal transit option. This results in degrading overall transit because communities cannot afford to build build enough fixed rail to reach large numbers of those needing daily transit to wide-ranging destinations.
2. The City states “We have to start somewhere” and this initial rail line is just the beginning of a network of rail. This initial and increasing tax “bite” is totally unaffordable and will accelerate the continuing departure of low and medium income citizens, resulting in substantial declines in public school enrollment and the closing of dozens of schools. Austin already has the fastest growing “cost-of-living” growth and the most “overpriced housing” of all the nation’s large cities. The rail strains affordability and does nothing for congestion.
3. The City states the light rail will remove 10,000 cars (this is really car trips) daily from the roads. (A two-way work commuter is 2 car trips). While this is a dubious claim, as shown by solid analysis, lets use it. The City also states there are 110 people and 70 cars per day moving to the Austin area. Each car has an average of 3 trips per day or about 200 total new trips arriving each day. Therefore, if the rail takes 10,000 car trips off the road, they will be replaced by new arriving car trips in 50 days and we are back where we started with traffic. This means $1.4 billion is proposed to be spent to delay traffic build-up by 50 days at a cost of $28 million per day. This is clearly not cost effective: We could pay 50 people to stay home or pay companies to allow 50 car drivers to work at home for 50 days. This would cost a lot less. But, it will be even less than 50 days of very small value because there will be more than 100 new cars arriving each day in 2030 when the train is “removing 10,000 cars per day”. Therefore, there will only be 33 days of traffic build-up delay at $42.4 million per day.
4. This rail bond and its interest will use up almost all bonding capacity for some time, and, taxes keep rising if the city continues to add rail lines as planned. Austin already has more than $8 billion in bond debt payback. This rail bond will completely ‘tie the hands’ of the new 10-1 council and prevent them from issuing needed bonds, for other city needs, during their entire term.
5. This proposition is not authorizing the $400 million for “roads.” The City plan is to authorize the roads without citizen’s voting. These road commitments are actually transfers of funds to TxDoT, which performs the work, and could be done anytime, with or without, this rail proposition. But, this would not create the illusion (some call it manipulation or blackmail) that the roads are tied to the voters’ rail authorization.
6. The true cost of the rail will very likely be more than $2 billon when the related costs are considered: Bond Interest of at least $200 million; about one-half of the $400 million road package is to support the light rail; and, overruns which must be paid by taxpayers. Average overruns for such projects are about 40% and are not covered by federal funds if Austin receives any at all.
7. This bond creates the biggest taxpayer gamble in Austin’s history. The federal government has a long line of other funding requests which are ahead of Austin and federal funding availability is very questionable. The City of Austin has no limitation on how much it can spend for planning, engineering, design, environmental, etc. prior to the receiving approval for matching federal funds several years in the future. If federal funds are denied, all Austin tax money spent to this date and as much as $70 million of the bond money spent during these several years will be wasted.
8. The exact cost of the trains annual operations are not known at this point. They have been roughly estimated, by the City, as $22 million. If their costs are as poorly estimated as the current train’s costs, this burden will put Capital Metro in a deep financial hole, resulting in cut-backs in bus service and higher fares; both of which primarily burden those who need daily transit and have no alternative.
The train’s supporters include the City Council, the Chamber of Commerce and the Real Estate Council of Austin. None of these organizations seeked or allowed alternative views to be presented by knowledgable professionals prior to approving resolutions to support these rail bonds. None of these organizations revealed the planned long term cost and tax implications for Austin citizens.
We have been here before. Let’s not forget what we learned. Many of today’s rail promises are eerily similar to the ones made about the current red line. The Red Line has achieved none of its major promises:
1. Rail ridership remains well below expectations and Cap Metro’s overall transit ridership has been stagnant for 15 years while the population has grown 56%. The Red Line rail did not change this trend as ridership is down this year and projected to be down next again next year. Stagnant transit ridership has existed in the U.S. for more than 50 years. The four major Texas cities are among the fastest growing major U.S. Cities, but, have less total transit ridership today than 15 years ago, before spending billions on rail transit.
2. The Red Line was advertised to reduce congestion but no one has noticed this. Most observe there are more people delayed in vehicles being stopped by the Red Line than there are riders on the train.
3. The Red Line cost twice as much as committed to voters. Cap Metro promised 2004 voters that the Red Line’s operating costs would be $2 million per year when it opened in 2007. It actually opened in 2010 and operating costs are now $14 million. Cap Metro reports this train costs about $20 per average passenger ride which is almost 5 times the cost of a bus passenger ride at about $4. This clearly indicates the system is highly subsidizing train riders who generally own cars and can afford to pay more and placing the financail burden on: 1. lower income citizens through higher bus fares, and, 2. on all taxpayers.
4. The Red Line was described as “environmentally friendly” but it would be less polluting if all the rail riders were in individual cars.
Summary: Let’s not make a huge mistake doing the same thing that a previous, much smaller mistake has taught us. The proposed light rail’s estimated, but dubious, ridership is only 6 times the Red Line commuter ridership. However the proposed light rail’s capital costs will be a minimum of 10 times the red line and, likely, much more with transparency and competent analyses.
We need mobility which cost-effectively serves the 99% of daily trips which are on our roads. The sharing of road infrastructure is the most cost-effective way to efficently serve the daily needs of private, public transit, shared, hired, emergency/public safety, commercial and other government vehicles. Passenger rail is the most expensive form of transit and cannot effectively serve the community’s multiple needs. We clearly cannot afford to provide this rail “alternative,” for so few, at the expense of achieving the needs and aspirations of all citizens for effective mobility. Trains will limit and constrain our mobility while degrading transit for those who need it the most. In human time, greater mobility has provided greater quality of life.
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This November, vote no on Proposition 1 bond package
Published in ‘The Daily Texan’ (University of Texas), October 13, 2014
BY THE DAILY TEXAN EDITORIAL BOARD
Without a doubt, rail is a polarizing issue in Austin politics. On Tuesday, Student Government passed a resolution declaring support for Proposition 1, the Green Line urban rail and bond proposal. In July, given information and perspectives of the moment, this editorial board begrudgingly offered its endorsement for Project Connect’s urban rail plan. After further consideration and deliberation, it is only with sincere disappointment that this board must withhold our endorsement of Proposition 1, to be voted on this November.
While $600 million of the bond will go toward rail, $400 million of the bond is earmarked for road improvements. Perhaps an effort to shove a sub-par rail proposal down the public’s throat by enticing them with bundled road funds, the bundling of these two projects is unfortunate. Roads need improvement to alleviate traffic, and this disapproval of Proposition 1 should not be taken as disapproval of road improvement. Rather, the flaws of the urban rail plan outweigh the benefits of the linked road improvements.
There are two facts about public transportation that must be acknowledged before moving forward. First, the purpose of public mass transit, contrary to many pro-rail advertising campaigns, is not to ease congestion of personal vehicles. Public transportation provides an alternative to congestion, but it will never be the solution. Second, like public schools and municipal parks, public transportation is a necessary public service, not meant to be inherently profitable but sustainable enough to facilitate the everyday travel of a functioning community. With these two considerations, we must avoid auto-centric, capitalistic conversation regarding urban rail.
The route north of the river has caused the most controversy. While Project Connect, the plan’s creator, constantly touts the ‘data-driven’ plan, we question the metrics used in this designation. Project Connect used projected, as opposed to current, density data to drive its route proposal. Areas surrounding the Red Line have not seen this projected density growth that justified its creation, and we fear that, if passed, the Green Line will suffer a similar fate.
Capital Metro often references the “success” of the Red Line to boost confidence in voters that it can handle this new project. Though riders and Francine Pares, communications manager at Capital Metro, testify that at peak hours the Red Line is so full that there is standing room only, this is not a viable metric for measuring the real success of the line. Initial ridership projections of the Red Line estimated 3,000-4,000 riders per day growing to eventually 8,000-10,000 daily. In August, Pares said “more than 60,000 MetroRail trips are taken each month,” but keep in mind that a single person can make multiple trips in a day. This averages to around 2050 trips per day, less than initial estimates and nowhere close to projected growth. The fact that the Red Line has standing room only is a testament to the size of the vehicle rather than true demand. The “success” of the Red Line is dubious at best.
Furthermore, central corridor advocates overemphasized the risk of losing possible Federal Transit Administration funding, necessary for the current rail proposal, if they proposed a Lamar-Guadalupe route. They argue that because the city had just installed Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) using FTA funds on the same route, a request for funding on this route would be rejected. In addition to the explicit grant language containing provisions for future development funding along the BRT route disproving this claim, Scott Morris from Our Rail group provided a memo obtained from Capital Metro where an FTA representative is quoted saying the administration would consider funding for development along the BRT route should the city introduce new priorities.
With this new proposal, many look back nostalgically on the 2000 light rail proposal, thinking, “If only we had known!” This redesigned route of this current proposal is a reaction to the 2000 “rail fail,” attempting to address issues that led a narrow margin of 2,000 more people to vote “no” at the turn of the century. But Austin has changed, and this proposal has not adequately adapted. More people than ever understand the need for comprehensive public transportation improvements. It’s a curious fact, and a daunting omen, that so many rail advocates have come out against this rail plan. Though we support transit initiatives that will make our city livable and affordable, we oppose this proposal.
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COST Commentary: We strongly support Mr. Smalley’s comments below regarding Austin’s current light rail proposition, its negative impact on the community and Cap Metro’s very poor Red Line rail performance, which has a cost per rider of $20 or 5 times a bus rider. However, we temper our views of the Houston light rail performance by noting that Houston’s overall transit ridership today is 20% below its ridership in a ‘bus only’ system before the first Houston light rail was implemented. This is while Houston’s population has grown 35% in the past 15 years. In Austin, Cap Metro’s Red Line rail implementation has been followed with a reduction in total transit ridership, which Cap Metro projects will further decline next year. This is while Austin’s area population has grown 56% in the past 15 years. All four major Texas cities are among the fastest growing in the nation and their total transit ridership has decreased in the past 15 years while spending billions on rail
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Proposition 1 rail is expensive white elephant
BY CLAY SMALLEY In ‘The Daily Texan,’ October 9, 2014 at 10:53 am
In 2000, there was a ballot proposition for a light rail line in Austin. If the measure had passed the vote, Austin would have a robust light rail system running from downtown all the way out to 183 along the Drag and North Lamar Boulevard. It was, and still is, the most heavily traveled bus corridor in Austin, at the time carrying the 1L, 1M, 101 and bits and pieces of other routes that happened to pass by UT and downtown. And with good reason: The corridor has the highest population density and job density of any in the city. If built, the line would carry 40,000 passengers each day and cost $300 million — numbers very similar to the successful Houston MetroRail, which happened to begin construction the following year.
The 2000 vote in Austin, however, failed by a very thin margin — eight tenths of a percent. As a result, Capital Metro substituted the MetroRapid buses for the light rail, and built the completely separate Red Line commuter rail.
Fast forward to now — Project Connect, a partnership between the City of Austin, Cap Metro and other transit agencies, will be putting a questionable light rail plan to the vote in November. Phase One of the construction would consist of light rail starting at the Austin Convention Center downtown, running north along San Jacinto Boulevard and Trinity Street to pass by the east side of UT, then jogging over to Red River to the Hancock Center, crossing the existing Red Line with an expensive bridge or tunnel and following Airport Boulevard to the derelict Highland Mall.
This line would carry half the passengers per day that the 2000 proposal would. At a hefty price tag of $1.4 billion in taxpayer dollars, though, it’s not much more than a shiny, expensive version of the bus route 10, and it’s such an awful plan that even former Cap Metro transit planner Lyndon Henry is against it.
What happened? Why did Project Connect choose this route, instead of retrying the Guadalupe-Lamar route? While the 2000 vote failed, it still passed within the city limits of Austin, whose residents are the only ones voting on the bond initiative this time around. Has anything significantly changed about the city that makes this corridor better?
Smooth Ride, or Bumpy Start?
Let’s look at some real-life examples of light rail systems around the country. The aforementioned Houston MetroRail was planned as an upgrade to the most heavily traveled bus corridor and designed to be a backbone to the transit network of the city. The initial segment followed a near-straight line from downtown Houston to an outlying park-and-ride near the former Astroworld amusement park, tying together popular destinations and job centers such as the Texas Medical Center, the Museum District, Rice University, and the Reliant Stadium complex. This was the north-south axis of job density across the center of Houston. In other words, light rail just made sense there.
And it saw packed trains from Day One. By the end of 2004, the year the Houston MetroRail opened, it saw 33,000 boardings on a typical day. The line has since been extended on the opposite side of downtown, and two more lines are being built as I write. They plan on expanding the system even further to stitch together all the employment centers of the city as well as beefing up the bus system to serve all the Houstonians farther away from the rail system. For such a car-oriented city, Houston is doing a fantastic job of balancing out its modes of transportation.
But an equally car-oriented city, San Jose, has been struggling to make its light rail system work since its inception. In the late ‘80s, when everyone was scrambling to buy a Macintosh or a PC with Windows 3.0, the local governments of the booming Silicon Valley wanted to complement the growth with a light rail system. With the Santa Clara VTA’s bus network to build off of, they were taking a huge gamble. The plan they came up with was one linking the downtown of San Jose, some neighborhoods of single-family homes, and vast expanses of parking lot with small office buildings peppered throughout. They crossed their fingers, expecting the rail line to induce growth, with tightly-packed office buildings and homes replacing the scarcely populated parking lots, driveways and front yards. This was the only way the light rail system could score enough riders to keep it financially stable.
Today, the Santa Clara VTA Light Rail has failed to live up to its projections, carrying 30 percent fewer passengers at an operating cost 30 percent higher than the average light rail system in the United States. It costs taxpayers in the rest of the region $10 to subsidize every round trip, and less than 1 percent of the county’s residents even ride the trains regularly. It’s important to note: There is such a thing as bad light rail.
How does this compare with the plan here in Austin? If the 2000 Guadalupe-Lamar plan had passed, our city would have a light rail system similar to the one in Houston. It would serve all the existing walking-oriented parts of the city, including Downtown, UT, the Drag and West Campus as well as some other areas that would be more conducive to walking if they were given a little push, like the Triangle and the area around Lamar and Airport Boulevard. Trains would have been packed from the day the line opened.
And all it takes to make a San-Jose-style light rail line is to move a good line a mile east. The Project Connect line still passes through Downtown and UT but eschews state office buildings to instead serve downtown parking garages and follows San Jacinto Boulevard, an incredibly inconvenient route for the cash-cow West Campus riders. North of the University, Red River is full of low-density residential areas, with vociferous neighborhood associations that will fight tooth and nail to prevent the neighborhood from getting denser. The closest this line gets to a dense business district is near the HEB at Hancock Center, which is still an island in the middle of an ocean of parking lots. We shouldn’t put rail where we think density may be at some point in the future — rail should go where density already is.
The Consequences of Building the Wrong Route
“Won’t it take another ten to fifteen years for another light rail proposal to be put to a vote? Austin needs rail now to fix congestion!”
This is an argument I’ve unfortunately heard quite a lot. Despite what any politician says, public transit doesn’t do anything to relieve car congestion — it simply provides an alternative to it. Consider New York City: Driving around Manhattan is hell, and will likely be that way for the foreseeable future. But fortunately, there’s a cheap, quick way of getting around that is immune to car congestion, and that is the New York Subway. You may end up on a crowded train with your face in someone’s armpit for a while, but at least you’ll get to where you’re going on time.
The only way to reduce car congestion is to make it less convenient to drive. But few people want more toll roads or a higher gas taxes — unpopular ideas. So, Austin will see congestion for as long as people drive cars.
As for the lengthy waiting period, it isn’t as lengthy as it seems. It happened to be 14 years between this light rail proposal and the previous, but the average turnaround time is about 3.8 years – and grassroots organizations like AURA are working to make it even shorter. We shouldn’t rush into a bad, expensive plan if it won’t take us that long to wait for a good one.
So what if this rail line isn’t perfect? Why should we let the perfect be the enemy of the good? As it turns out, this rail route can’t even be considered good — it’s worse than building nothing. CapMetro’s Red Line commuter rail is running at full capacity, but still needs a whopping $18 subsidy for every boarding, or in other words, CapMetro loses $18 every time someone rides the Red Line. The commuter buses it replaced only needed a $3 subsidy for every boarding. So what did CapMetro do to compensate for this hefty loss? They diverted money from serving the bus system, resulting in route removals (anyone remember the Cameron Road and Wickersham Lane shuttles?) service cuts and fare hikes (or as Cap Metro calls it, fare restructuring).
This rail is something Austin can’t afford to screw up. No matter what, this proposition will only make transit worse if it passes. The resulting reduction in bus service will only encourage us, and everyone around us, to drive more – the exact opposite effect of what a transit project should do.
If you feel that cutting more bus routes will help Austin grow and develop, go ahead and vote “yes” on Proposition 1.
At least Austin will get a shiny choo-choo.
Smalley is a computer science senior from Katy and a member of Austinites for Urban Rail Action.