No Light Rail in Vancouver!

New Starts Still Suffer Overruns, Ridership Shortfalls

Oct 9

2007

How close to rail transit projects come to meeting their promises of being completed on budget and attracting the projected number of passengers? If you listen to transit agencies, almost every project is completed on time and beats its ridership goals. But those numbers aren’t very reliable as the transit agencies base their claims on projections made shortly before the projects were completed, not when the decision was made to build them.

In the early years of the Bush administration, the Federal Transit Administration commissioned a study to find out how well they were doing. The study was completed in 2003 — and the FTA then sat on it for four years. Now, they have finally released it, and you can download it here (4.4 MB Word file).

Is this light-rail project really necessary?

Flickr photo by brewbooks.

The report was “primarily authored” by Frank Spielberg of SG Associates and Steven Lewis-Workman of the FTA. Based on a review of more than 20 different projects, the report finds that things have improved since US DOT research Don Pickrell released his 1989 report showing that most rail projects went way over budget. But there are still significant problems.

Projects that began in the 1980s, the report estimates, went an average of 40 percent or more over budget. By the 1990s, this was down to around 20 percent. However, this should not be much cause for cheer among rail proponents. For one thing (as documented here), some newer projects that were not evaluated in the Spielberg report have gone far more than 20 percent over budget. The Hudson-Bergen light rail, whose planning began in 1993, went 78 percent over budget, while the San Juan Tren Urbano, whose planning began in 1995, went 113 percent over budget. Seattle’s light-rail project, now under construction, is breaking records for light-rail cost overruns.

Spielberg and Lewis-Workman find that, on average, projections of operating costs were on target. But this average betrays a wide spread. The cost of operating two projects — the Jacksonville Skyway and the San Jose Guadalupe light rail — were more than 70 percent more than projected, and a San Francisco BART extension cost nearly 40 percent more than projected.

Several others cost 40 percent or more less than projected. However, some of the numbers sound suspicious: can Baltimore really run a light-rail line for less than 2 percent of the projected cost? According to the report, Baltimore planned to run the line every five minutes but is only running it every eight minutes, but that hardly seems enough to reduce operating costs by 98 percent.

If projections of operating costs turned out to be okay on average, projections of ridership were drastically overestimated. On average, actual ridership is falling short of projections by 35 percent. To be fair, most of the projections were for 2005 while the actual numbers were for 2002. But most transit agencies did not experience a huge increase in riders between 2002 and 2005, so updating to 2005 numbers would not significantly improve the results.

The report does not compare projections of new riders with actual new riders, giving the excuse that new riders are difficult to calculate based on published numbers. But we know that the Dallas light-rail line that opened in 1996 seemed to generate some new riders, while the line Dallas opened in 2001 did not: they lost as many bus riders as they gained rail riders.

The St. Louis light-rail extension that opened in 2001 did even worse. While the Spielberg report indicates that it carries an average of 16,000 passengers a day, the sad truth is that total light-rail ridership hardly changed after the line opened while bus ridership fell by more than 15 percent. (See the Dallas and St. Louis pages of this worksheet for actual numbers.)

On top of the cost overruns and ridership shortfalls, the report notes that the average transit project took eight years to complete — that is, eight years after publication of the environmental impact statement. The median was six years. That’s a long time to wait for supposedly improved transportation.

The Spielberg report is nearly 200 pages long, most of it devoted to an in-depth evaluation of each of the 21 projects it examines. This should prove a valuable source of information when looking at new rail transit proposals.

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Reprinted from The Antiplanner