No Light Rail in Vancouver!

Light Rail Follies #2: 20th Anniversary

Dec 11

2007

The nation’s worst-performing light-rail system celebrated its 20th anniversary a few days ago, and in honor of the occasion the San Jose Mercury News published a review that tries, but fails, to be positive.

Thanks to the high cost of light rail and the foolish decisions of the Valley Transportation Authority’s, the article notes, VTA is forced to cut bus service again this January. VTA is actually considering spending $334 million extending one of its lines in a project that is projected to attract less than 2,200 riders a day.

The average U.S. light-rail car carries 26 people, but the average San Jose light-rail car carries less than 15 people.

Flickr photo by skew-t.

Today’s situation “is a long way from transit heaven,” the article admits, pointing out that — thanks to previous service cuts — bus ridership dropped by more than a third in the early 2000s and hasn’t come close to recovering since.

Still, VTA has its true believers, including the head of the Silicon Valley Leadership Group, who claims that San Jose light rail carries “more people than ride CalTrain,” the San Jose-to-San Francisco commuter trains. Of course, he is wrong: CalTrain carried more than 9.0 million trips in 2006, while VTA light rail carried less than 8.3 million. Since commuter-rail trips are longer, CalTrain carried five times as many passenger miles, yet its operating losses, net of fares, were $41 million compared with light rail’s $48 million.

CalTrain, on the right, carries more people at a smaller cost to taxpayers than VTA’s light rail. The Altamont Commuter Express, left, doesn’t do as well, but still costs less per passenger mile than light rail.

Flickr photo by Richard Masoner.

The Merc-News points out that Santa Clara County taxpayers pay as much or more for transit, yet their transit system carries fewer riders, than almost any system with light rail in the country. “The heavy tax commitment to transit,” the article notes, “means fewer dollars for road upgrades.” Especially since a half-cent sales tax that voters approved of for roads was hijacked by the transit agency in 2000.

The newspaper faithfully parrots the line that light rail “helped spur development and lure people downtown” — but notes that the hundreds of millions of dollars of redevelopment (TIF) money might have played a role. “No one thinks light rail hasn’t helped,” says the writer, who obviously failed to consult the Antiplanner.

“The light-rail system should be considered a 100-year investment,” says San Jose’s director of transportation planning. That shows how shallow planners are: within another 20 years, that investment will be completely worn out and San Jose will have to decide whether to scrap it or spend another few billion replacing it.

The article quotes the Antiplanner’s friend, Tom Rubin — or misquotes him, anyway, saying that he said the transit agency’s approach has been to offer anyone a ride from any place at the lowest fare possible. Actually, VTA’s general manager was the one who said this.

What Rubin actually said was that Silicon Valley, with its jobs spread out more thinly than almost anywhere else in the country, was unsuited for large-bus transit service. So to go from buses to light rail, which requires even more job concentration to work, was a mistake. Having made that mistake, VTA now wants to build BART, which requires even more job concentration. (You can download Rubin’s 17-megabyte PowerPoint show about VTA from the American Dream Coalition web site, or purchase a DVD of his presentation for $5.)

Light rail was the wrong solution for San Jose in 1987, it is the wrong solution today, and it still will be the wrong solution in 2027. We can only hope that San Jose’s leaders and opinion makers, including the Mercury-News, come to their senses by then and decide to junk the whole thing.

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Reprinted from The Antiplanner