Rail Transit’s Hidden Secret

COST Commentary: Rail Transit has a major “secret” which is rarely highlighted and almost never discussed in the environment of considering an urban rail transit system for a city or region. This secret is well revealed in the article below (with follow-on comments by the author). It is that few understand or consider the long term implications of the fact that rail systems require significant maintenance throughout their life and wear-out in 30-40 years, requiring almost as much investment as the original system. The specific example below in the first article is of the Washington D.C. Metro system, but, it is valid for all such systems; as demonstrated in numerous regions. When this time comes, there is almost always a lack of source for the major funds necessary and total transportation suffers.

The second article is short a follow-up discussion by the author of the first article.

In Austin and other cities, one’s rail considerations should couple this huge replacement cost with the fact that new technology is rapidly approaching which will render a significant rail system as outdated and irrelevant to the area’s transportation needs before the rail system can be implemented. Modern buses may still play a roll in future transit systems but their roll will be quite different than most bus transit systems in operation today.

A paragraph from the third article about the D.C. Metro system put the nation’s rail maintenance and replacement backlog challenges in perspective: “Like other transit systems, Metro suffers from a lack of investment in infrastructure: As Mr. Evans broadcast on Twitter last week, some of the original 1976 trains are still in use. The Federal Transit Administration says one-quarter of the nation’s rail assets are in “marginal or poor condition.” In 2013, it estimated an $86 billion backlog in deferred maintenance nationwide.”

As an example of proposed new rail systems, the fourth article below is about the California High Speed Rail (HSR) being proposed. To start with, California is unable to define where an estimated $43.5 Billion shortfall of an estimated $64 billion (Earlier estimates were more than $90 billion) High Speed Rail system will come from. A high California government official is questioning the advisability of moving forward as he appropriately should. In addition,there has been little or no discussion of the future of replacing such a system and the burden on future generations. This is totally irresponsible. No one believes the train can pay for itself. It will fall heavily on taxpayer shoulders, most of which will never ride the train or benefit from it in any way.
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Why You Should Think Twice Before Building a Rail Transit System
by Aaron M. Renn in newgeography.com, 03/24/2016

The Washington Metro system was shut down completely for a day recently to allow crews to inspect all of the power cables in the system. They found 26 cables and connectors in need of immediate repair.

This is just the latest in a series of safety problems and breakdowns that have plagued the system.

Metro has a large unfunded maintenance liability. This doesn’t surprise us because we expect American transit systems to have a backlog.

The difference is that unlike NYC, Chicago, Boston, etc., which have systems a century old, the Washington Metro system is actually new.

The oldest part of the Metro opened in 1976. That means Metro is 40 years old – max. Much of it is actually newer than that.

Forty years after opening, Metro already faces a maintenance crisis.

This should give other regions pause when it comes to building a rail transit system. My colleague Alex Armlovich points out that NYC has more or less been on a 40 year refresh cycle, with two rounds of major system investment since the subways opened. This doesn’t seem out of line as a capital life heuristic to me.

So cities need to keep in mind that if they build a rail system, they not only have to pay to build it, they pretty much have to pay to rebuild it every 40 years. This is a challenge because as we see it’s easier to muster the will to build something new than to maintain something you already have.

Given the huge permanent capital outlays implied by rail transit, you only want to build it where there’s sufficient value to justify it. Washington unquestionably achieves this. It simply hasn’t been able to capture the value into a maintenance revenue stream, plus Metro (like many systems) has been badly mismanaged.

The problem comes in for cities that aren’t NYC, Chicago, Boston, Philly, DC, and San Francisco. Once you get below that group, the value starts becoming more debatable.

Exhibit A is Los Angeles, which has spent untold billions on a huge rail system as ridership actually declined. LA is continuing to build more and more rail.

But what happens when this system is old?

LA’s Red Line opened in 1993, so is 23 years old. By the time LA finishes its current rail build out, it’s likely that the original parts of the system will be coming into the zone for a major capital refresh.

Thus shortly LA will find itself in a perpetual capital catchup cycle starting in only a couple decades. This possibly may not happen, but it has happened everywhere else, so why should LA be different?

Given the ridership levels we’ve seen so far, will the value added from rail vs. the old bus approach be there? It’s not looking good. And if the case in LA is looking weak, certainly smaller and less dense places are even more speculative.

All these smaller cities investing billions into rail had better hope their projections of massive benefits come true, because all too soon the rebuild bill will start coming due.

If you don’t believe me, just ask Washington.

Aaron M. Renn is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a contributing editor of City Journal, and an economic development columnist for Governing magazine. He focuses on ways to help America’s cities thrive in an ever more complex, competitive, globalized, and diverse twenty-first century. During Renn’s 15-year career in management and technology consulting, he was a partner at Accenture and held several technology strategy roles and directed multimillion-dollar global technology implementations. He has contributed to The Guardian, Forbes.com, and numerous other publications. Renn holds a B.S. from Indiana University, where he coauthored an early social-networking platform in 1991.

Below is a follow-on note by the author, Aaron Renn
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In Praise of Plain Old Bus Service

Posted: 31 Mar 2016 10:38 PM PDT in new geography.com

My recent post on counting the long term costs of building rail transit got a lot of hits – and as expected a lot of pushback.

There are a lot of people out there that are simply committed to the idea of rail transit, no matter how unwarranted a particular line or system might be.

I find it interesting that the place with the most people applying serious skepticism to transit projects seems to be New York – the place with the biggest slam dunk of a case for it of any city.

Lots of people, for example, have critiqued the proposed Brooklyn-Queens light rail line. In a city where there’s a desperate need for more transit, advocates are very focused on making sure the limited capital we have gets spent on useful projects. Not everyone agrees with each other, but there’s a robust debate, focused on the actual merits.

In cities without much experience of transit, there appears to be a huge bias in favor of very expensive rail projects regardless of their merits.

Some have asked me whether I support Bus Rapid Transit. I can, in some circumstances. Though Alon Levy has convinced me that the economics of South American style BRT don’t necessarily transfer to high income countries.

What I do very much support is significantly improved Plain Old Bus Service (POBS).

Most cities in America have pretty awful bus service, with meandering, radial routes that run infrequently and are basically deployed as a social service.

Contrast that with Chicago or LA (or even New York, despite its subway dominance), where we see bus grid networks that run with reasonable frequency.

I define “reasonable frequency” as meaning I can show up at the stop without consulting a schedule or tracker app, confident that my max burn on wait time is at least semi-humane. Ten minute or less headways would be best, but I can live with 15.

Jarrett Walker has highlighted the role of Portland’s high frequency bus grid, launched in 1982, as changing the game there and making the city’s subsequent light rail system actually functional.

Thirty years ago next week, on Labor Day Weekend 1982, the role of public transit in Portland was utterly transformed in ways that everyone today takes for granted. It was an epic struggle, one worth remembering and honoring.

I’m not talking about the MAX light rail (LRT) system, whose first line opened in 1986. I’m talking about the grid of frequent bus lines, without which MAX would have been inaccessible, and without which you would still be going into downtown Portland to travel between two points on the eastside.

Pretty much any city could benefit from a better POBS network and higher frequencies. This is where there is vast opportunity to invest in American transit without breaking the bank.

Yes, buses cost money. I’m not saying its free. This is where I say we should spend more. A solid POBS system is just the basics to be in the game for any city looking to retrofit transit culture.

Even Portland, the city held up as the exemplar for light rail investment, started by getting its bus system right.
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Washington Metro, 40 and Creaking, Stares at a Midlife Crisis
By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG and NICHOLAS FANDOS, APRIL 3, 2016

WASHINGTON — Jack Evans was a summer intern here in 1976, the year Metro, the capital region’s subway system, opened to rave reviews. It was an architectural triumph, with escalators that plunged into clean, well-lit stations — a mass transit marvel “like ‘The Jetsons,’ ” he says — a far cry from the graffiti-scarred, decrepit system of that era in New York.

Now Mr. Evans, 62, is the chairman of the transit agency that oversees Metro — perhaps the city’s least enviable job. Last week, at a conference examining Metro on its 40th birthday, he said out loud what Washingtonians had known for years: The capital’s once-glorious subway system, the nation’s second busiest, is short on cash and a terrible mess.

“It’s a system that’s maybe safe, somewhat unreliable, and that is being complained about by everybody,” declared Mr. Evans, who estimates that Metro could face a $100 million budget shortfall next fiscal year.

Then he dropped a bombshell. He warned that whole lines may have to be closed for months for repairs, adding, “If we do nothing, 10 years from now the system won’t be running.”

At a time of deepening concern over aging infrastructure and rail safety around the nation — on Sunday, an Amtrak train struck a backhoe on the tracks outside Philadelphia, killing two people and injuring dozens more — Metro is hardly the only transit agency with problems. But years of well-documented safety lapses, including a crash in 2009 that left nine people dead, as well as petty annoyances like broken escalators and train delays, reveal how a grand vision of American liberalism has collided with reality now that Metro has hit middle age.

The Federal Transit Administration has issued a blistering indictment of the system, warning in a June report of “serious safety lapses.” That month, the National Transportation Safety Board convened hearings revealing that employees of the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority — which runs Metro, as well as a regional bus service — often felt afraid to report safety concerns.

Commuters are frustrated and are abandoning the subway. Weekday ridership declined 6.1 percent in the last half of 2015, Metro officials say, compared with the same period the previous year. Metro’s new general manager, Paul J. Wiedefeld, who shut down service last month for a daylong emergency inspection after a tunnel fire similar to one that killed a passenger in January 2015, concedes that the public is losing faith.

“Clearly in the public mind we have lost credibility in both delivery of the service and some of the safety issues,” Mr. Wiedefeld, 60, said Friday in a surprisingly blunt interview. He said he saw Metro’s safety and reliability problems as rooted in “a very large disconnect between front-line employees and management,” and in a culture in need of an overhaul.

“An organization that had such a proud history has lost it internally, to a degree,” Mr. Wiedefeld said. “That is something we have to rekindle.”

As Mr. Wiedefeld works on a plan to address safety and repairs — he spent part of last week interviewing candidates for a new chief safety officer — he says monthslong shutdowns are “highly unlikely.” Mr. Evans, in a separate interview, stuck by his original statement, and local officials warned that such a move would cripple the city.

Riders are a little disgusted, and a bit ashamed.

“It had been this bright and shining way to get to work, and now it’s become kind of a ‘Chitty Chitty Bang Bang’ operation,” said Bob Deans, 61, who rides Metro each day from his home in Bethesda, Md., to his job at the Natural Resources Defense Council here. He sees tourists on the train, he says, and wants to “apologize and say, ‘No, we’re really better than this.’ ”

The story of Metro’s transformation from a point of pride to the subject of eye rolling among commuters (as well as a Twitter feed, UnsuckDCMetro, with more than 49,000 followers) is, experts say, traceable to a lack of basic maintenance, a history of inept management and an unwieldy governance structure in which three jurisdictions — Maryland, Virginia and the District of Columbia — share responsibility for the system.

The United States was at the height of its car craze when the idea for a subway system in Washington began percolating in the late 1950s and early ’60s. Many cities were carving themselves up with freeways, often destroying poor African-American neighborhoods, said Zachary M. Schrag, a George Mason University professor and the author of “The Great Society Subway,” a 2006 history of Metro.

Metro, he said, offered an alternative, a way to connect the capital to its Maryland and Virginia suburbs in a “structured set of corridors where people would live and work,” with development clustered around train stations — a vision that, in many respects, has come to pass.

The system was to be a visual statement about the power and prestige of the American government, and was conceived, Mr. Schrag said, “very much in opposition to New York,” whose aging system was in the thick of a midlife crisis. In 1966, after President Lyndon B. Johnson signed legislation authorizing Metro’s construction, he directed planners to scour the globe for design concepts so the new subway system could “take its place among the most attractive in the world.”

Metro opened on March 27, 1976, with one line, the Red, and five stations. Today the system has six lines (including the new Silver Line, opened in 2014 as part of a plan to eventually connect the city to Dulles International Airport) and 91 stations. Metro riders made roughly 261 million trips last year, according to the American Public Transportation Association.

Like other transit systems, Metro suffers from a lack of investment in infrastructure: As Mr. Evans broadcast on Twitter last week, some of the original 1976 trains are still in use. The Federal Transit Administration says one-quarter of the nation’s rail assets are in “marginal or poor condition.” In 2013, it estimated an $86 billion backlog in deferred maintenance nationwide.

But Robert Puentes, the incoming president of the Eno Center for Transportation, who wrote a 2004 paper on Metro, says the system’s problems also stem from a singular reality written into it from the outset: It is an “institutional orphan” with no single mayor or legislature in charge. Metro, he said, is the only mass transit system of its size without a permanent source of funding, like a tax on businesses near stations. It relies solely on allocations from its three jurisdictions and on its own fares for operations.

Others, like Eleanor Holmes Norton, the district’s nonvoting delegate to the House, complain that the federal government, which depends on Metro to carry thousands of workers to places like the Pentagon, does not contribute to the system’s $1.8 billion annual operating budget. It would take an act of Congress to change that; Ms. Holmes Norton, a Democrat, says that persuading Republicans to sign on would be “like pulling teeth.”

In 2005, Richard A. White, then Metro’s general manager, warned Congress in written testimony that “without adequate, predictable resources, it is not a question of WHETHER Metro’s service will further deteriorate, but WHEN.”

But the city paid scant heed until the deadly 2009 crash, which ushered in an era of greater federal oversight. Eight riders and a train operator were killed and dozens were injured when one train rear-ended another as it idled near an aboveground Red Line station on the city’s outskirts.

The National Transportation Safety Board blamed the widespread failure of Metro’s automatic train-control system for the crash, as well as general negligence about safety. The board also said that old train cars posed an “unacceptable risk” and should be replaced as soon as possible.

By this time, Congress had already passed legislation authorizing $1.5 billion over 10 years for Metro to make capital improvements and repairs, like fixing broken escalators and buying new rail cars. Some improvements have been made, and modern trains have been purchased, but Mr. Wiedefeld said Metro had consistently underspent the money.

Safety problems have persisted. In addition to the tunnel fire that killed a passenger in January 2015, a train derailment in August raised red flags. No one was injured, but the track defect that caused the derailment had been detected a month earlier and ignored, reflecting “a system breakdown that was simply unacceptable,” said Peter Goelz, a transportation consultant who has advised Metro.

Metro spent much of 2015 without a full-time general manager, amid disagreement on its 16-member board over whether to hire a transit expert or a turnaround specialist. Mr. Wiedefeld, who previously ran Baltimore-Washington International Thurgood Marshall Airport, arrived in late November, and has so far been given good reviews.

Now, Mr. Wiedefeld and Mr. Evans appear to be pursuing a two-pronged public relations strategy. While Mr. Wiedefeld tried to tamp down the uproar over potential closures, Mr. Evans made clear in an interview that he was pleased with the reaction, which he hoped would help him “sell the region,” and Congress, on the need for an organizational overhaul and for more money. Metro also has a $2.5 billion unfunded pension liability, Mr. Evans said.

“Unless you are living under a rock,” he said, “everyone now knows that Metro has terrible financial problems.”

Now the question is what it will take to restore the system to its former glory — and whether that can be achieved. Mr. Schrag, the professor and author, remains hopeful. “The New York subway came back, and Metro can come back,” he said. Still, he added: “It’s such a bittersweet moment. This was supposed to be a birthday party.”
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Bullet train: Failure to identify funding for Southern California leg unacceptable, official says
By Ralph Vartabedian, March 26, 2016, 4:56 p.m. in L.A. Times

The California rail authority’s failure to identify a source of funding to connect Los Angeles to the future bullet train system is not acceptable, said Hasan Ikhrata, executive director of the Southern California Assn. of Governments.

Until the high-speed rail authority released a new draft business plan last month, the state had planned to open its first operating segment between Burbank and the Central Valley by 2022. But in a major concession to its limited funding, the plan now calls for a cheaper segment that would run from San Jose to the Central Valley by 2025.

By the time that initial segment is built, all the existing funds would be exhausted, leaving uncertainty about how and when the line would cross the geologically complex mountains of Southern California.

The lack of specificity is stirring some deep concerns among legislative analysts and Southern California’s political leadership, reflected in Ikhrata’s position. Ikhrata is scheduled to testify at an Assembly oversight hearing on Monday and says he will deliver a message that there are still too many unknowns in the plan.

“You can’t say you can do something without saying how you are going to pay for it,” he said in an interview. “This is a must. If you don’t have the money in the bank, I understand that. But you can’t assume the money is going to fall from the sky. You have to have a path. You can’t be silent totally.”

The state’s Legislative Analyst’s Office has raised the same concerns, saying in a report that the business plan fails to make a case for how it will pay for a completed system. The bullet train has been funded so far by a $9-billion bond, $3.2 billion in federal grants and about $500 million a year in greenhouse gas fees, all of which leave big shortfalls in the $64-billion megaproject. The shortfall is estimated at $43.5 billion, an amount that would be difficult or impossible to find in the short term.

The Assn. of Governments has played a key role in representing the region at the rail authority, signing a 2013 memorandum of understanding that provided for about $1 billion of investments in Southern California’s transit systems to prepare for the future bullet train. The deal put Southern California on a near equal footing with the Bay Area, which received money to electrify its Caltrain commuter system.

But the larger questions remain about the project’s ability to deliver a system that would connect Los Angeles and San Francisco in two hours and 40 minutes, which is required under the 2008 bond act that voters approved. In the earlier plan, the rationale for starting Southern California was based on the region’s larger population and the gap in passenger rail service that now exists between Bakersfield and Palmdale over the Tehachapi Mountains.

Rail authority chief Dan Richard said in a recent interview that closing the rail gap remains important, but the state simply did not have the estimated $31 billion it would take to build in the south. The northern alternative would cost $21 billion and allow the state to build an operating system, theoretically with the funding it already has.

“We understand that high-speed rail wants to start in the north,” Ikhrata said. “We understand that logic. Having said that, this system will only be valuable if this connects San Francisco to Los Angeles.”

The statement reflects a continued belief that starting the system in the south remains the most logical approach and some nervousness that the region could be left behind, despite Richard’s often-repeated assurances that “nobody will be left behind.”

“The most important segment is from Bakersfield to Palmdale because there isn’t any rail connection,” Ikhrata said. “That gap must be closed and the business plan must be clear how they are going to close it. If they build a system that fails to connect Los Angeles, this will be the biggest failure of an infrastructure project we have ever had in the state of California. It will be sad for future generations.”

A central political reality of the bullet train project is that its main supporters are from Northern California, led by Gov. Jerry Brown. Ikhrata said the project does not have enough support among the key leaders in the Los Angeles region.

“You don’t find advocates because the story has changed so many times,” he said. “They are getting antsy. They are playing along.”

There also remains critical questions about how the future bullet train system will actually be constructed and how it will operate in Southern California, which Ikhrata believes needs to be addressed sooner rather than later.

“We are still where we started,” he said.

Ikhrata said the business plan now envisions using shared track through much of Southern California, though exactly what that means is unclear. In earlier planning, the state rail authority had planned to share track with Metrolink commuter trains and freight trains between Los Angeles and Anaheim. In the prior plan, the system would have had dedicated exclusive track between Los Angeles’ Union Station and Palmdale.

But Ikhrata said the blended system would now include the section between Union Station and Palmdale.

If so, it could affect the top speeds of the trains. Under past plans, the rail authority said the trains would operate at the full 220 mph between Bakersfield and Los Angeles. But a blended system could result in lower planned speeds, as it has in the Bay Area.

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