By Frank on April 30, 2009
I may have mentioned this before, but Phillip Longman’s Washington Monthly article on freight rail infrastructure is fantastic. It includes this quote:
Another notorious set of choke points is in Chicago, Americas rail capital, which is visited by some 1,200 trains a day. Built in the nineteenth century by noncooperating private companies, lines coming from the East still have no or insufficient connections with those coming from the West. Consequently, thousands of containers on their way elsewhere must be unloaded each day, “rubber-wheeled” across the citys crowded streets by truck, and reloaded onto other trains. It takes forty-eight hours for a container to travel five miles across Chicago, longer than it does to get there from New York. This entire problem could be fixed for just $1.5 billion, with benefits including not just faster shipping times and attendant economic development, but drastically reduced road traffic, energy use, and pollution.
PBS’s News Hour had a short piece last week on the Chicago bottleneck that’s worth checking out:
PBS puts the costs at $2.5B, but either way, it’s a steal to fix such an obvious bottleneck in the country’s freight infrastructure
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By serial catowner on April 30, 2009
Public projects are plagued by cost overruns- we all know that.
But what is a cost overrun? Say you go to town to buy a bag of candy, and it turns out the candy is now much more expensive. If you had budgeted for the cost of the candy and now purchased at the much higher price, that presumably would be a cost overrun. If you had ‘planned’ to pay whatever price was asked, would that be a cost overrun? If you turned around and went home without buying anything, would that be a cost overrun?
Public projects are done when nobody else will assume the expense, or when experience has shown that the public interest is only served if the project is public in nature. We have learned from experience that these projects are very likely to cost more and deliver less than expected if we don’t break the project into pieces that can offered for multiple bids and analyzed by independent auditors.
Even so, the Port of Seattle, for example, was able to sneak millions of dollars of illegal payments through their system by lying and hiding these payments. They characterized this as ‘overrun’ but a court might just as easily call it fraud.
In fact, it appears that almost the only time the term ‘cost overrun’ is used is when a public agency admits something cost more than predicted. When the Boeing Airplane company announced last year that Dreamliner costs had soared, we politely and dutifully ‘moved on’. Boeing would, we assumed, make up the shortfall in revenues from lost sales by flying political prisoners around the world, or bribing foreign governments to buy AWACS, or selling tankers to the military. The military doesn’t have cost overruns- they have cost-plus contracts.
Hey, wait a minute- why can’t we have ‘cost-plus’ contracts? Well, mainly because we would then have grotesquely huge cost overruns with our projects, just like the military.
At the bottom line, a ‘cost overrun’ is generally spending the speaker disagrees with by a public agency. Private companies have them occasionally, usually when the term is preferable to ‘fraud’ or ‘managerial malfeasance’. And that guy who took twice as long and cost twice as much to do your kitchen? Well, good luck with that one. If you paid him to get the job done, he’s not the guy stuck with the ‘overrun’.
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By serial catowner on April 27, 2009
Kevin Desmond, KC Metro’s general manager, is interviewed in MassTransit Magazine.
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By Frank on April 23, 2009
The Overhead Wire points to a Charlotte blog that shows that Charlotte’s light rail University extension will cost more than planned:
The Lynx extension will be much more complicated to build than the original light-rail line, which opened in 2007. That line cost $48 million per mile. The extension could cost more than $100 million per mile.
TOW wonders, “Why must they cost so much!!!??!!!” In a separate article, The Infrastructurist proclaims that “Building A Subway Is 96 Percent Cheaper In China”, a figure they arrive at by comparing the cost of building a subway in China as”$100 million per mile versus $2.4 billion per mile in the Big Apple.”
Okay, $2.4B is on the high end because… well, it’s New York. But $100M per mile for China — considering that there’s NO environmental review and abysmal labor conditions — actually sounds like it’s in the ballpark of most US systems, no? Sound Transit’s Link will be in the neighborhood of $150M – $200M per mile (guessing here), and that’s got a substantial subway component.
Obviously there are lots of differences between China, Charlotte, Seattle, and New York, in terms of rail technologies, costs of construction, labor, etc., etc. Still — $100M per mile doesn’t seem all that expensive to me, in Charlotte OR China, especially when you compare it to the costs of building a new highway that would carry that many people.
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By serial catowner on April 22, 2009
Say, how many canaries have to die in this place to get a little service? Since they closed down the Waterfront Trolley, the Aquarium has gone broke, the Smith Tower has 13 vacant floors (including all the streetfront retail) and Danny Westneat was able to count 21 vacant storefronts in a stroll around Pioneer Square recently. Surely this is a neighborhood that could use a little TOD.
And it’s not like you have to build the trolley- it’s already there! At this point you might be thinking “We already have a trolley line that would probably cost $100 million to build and it’s just sitting there? What goes on here?”
It’s partly changing times and smart-ass “solutions”. The City could have renovated the public restroom that already exists in Pioneer Square and staffed it with restroom attendants, but chose to buy automated attendant-free restrooms. Problem not solved. Since the closing of several thousand rooms in flophouses and hotels that lined First Avenue and surrounded Pioneer Square, more people have been living on the street. Problem not solved.
At the same time, the proliferation of pricey art galleries was, in retrospect, overdone. There’s just a limit to how many $3000 pieces of art, or even $500 pieces of art, you can sell. Problem not solved.
But the trolley is a solution, not another problem. Extend it 10 blocks east and you’re in the heart of the International District with grocery stores and restaurants. Extend it two miles north and you’re picking up the passengers from the cruise ships and the workers at Interbay (another area the City is, amazingly enough, trying to keep pregnant, barefoot, and poor). It’s only a block from existing trolley track to King Street Station.
If the current leadership, and that means the Mayor, the Port Commissioners, and the King County Executive, can’t bring the trolley back we should put them in storage too. Seattle’s DOT worked up five potential new trolley lines fast enough- now put them to work making the trolley we already have run again.
Make some noise, people, make some noise.
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By Frank on April 20, 2009
Martin references Josh Feit’s post on using the state gas tax to fund transit. Here’s Feit:
The current working transportation budget for 2009-11 puts only 4.4 percent of the $5.9 billion total into transit. And even if legislators were more-transit friendly, the rules governing transportation fundingConstitutionally, the gas tax cannot be used on transitwould have only permitted them to put about 7.3 percent of the money into transit.
I’m not a legal scholar, but David Goldstein spoke with one a couple years back and concluded that we can in fact tax gasoline to fund transit, without resorting to a constitutional amendment. The key is that it has to be a sales tax, not an excise tax:
Article II, Section 40 specifically refers to excise taxes. Theres nothing in the Constitution that says we cant also levy a sales tax on motor vehicle fuel, and theres nothing to mandate how such revenues might be spent. Thus all the hooey weve been fed about how we cant spend gas tax dollars on anything but roads and ferries is exactly that
a bunch of hooey. A simple majority in both houses, and the stroke of the governors pen is all we need to create a dedicated fund for building mass transit. And of course, the people are free to vote yea or nay via referendum or initiative.
This isnt just amateur legal analysis on my part. I checked with a constitutional scholar who assured me that my reading was correct, and that similar proposals have indeed been debated from time to time. And its not such an original or off the wall idea; nine other states already levy both sales and excise taxes on gasoline.
To my knowledge, Goldy hasn’t revisited the issue, so I have no idea if any new information has come to light regarding it. Still, I thought it worth sharing.
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By Frank on April 18, 2009
The CD News has a post up about an effort to move the central/First Hill streetcar over to 12th Avenue (south of Pine) instead of Broadway.
This makes a ton of sense to me. 12th Avenue down around Seattle U is catching fire, and there’s plenty of pedestrian-friendly retail opportunity all the way south to Jackson. Broadway south of Pine, on the other hand, is mostly parking garages and hospital entrances.
Of course, those hospital entrances are exactly the problem. The whole point of the First Hill streetcar was to serve First Hill, which is being bypassed by Light Rail (in what will likely be looked upon decades-hence as a decision as misguided as having the DC Metro bypass Georgetown).
Still, it’s worth exploring. I bet the ridership numbers are greater than they would be for the Broadway alignment, which is estimated at about 3,000 riders per day (PDF). One alternative would be to proceed with the Madison St. bus corridor improvements that were studied by Sound Transit(PDF) during the FH streetcar design process. Or, better, yet, just build a Madison streetcar line all the way out to Madison Park.
You can read more about the 12th Avenue alignment in this PDF. And all of these options are interesting to think about in light of the planned Yesler Terrace redevelopment.
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By serial catowner on April 16, 2009
Do you ‘collect’ rides on transit? Well, here’s one that probably won’t be repeated in your lifetime- the free passenger ferry that will cross Hood Canal for six weeks starting on the first of May.
Connecting buses in Clallam County are shown here and the state web page for the ‘water shuttle’ is here. At the state website you can find links to Kitsap Transit, which can get you from Bainbridge, Kingston, or Bremerton to the water shuttle, and Jefferson County Transit, which can get you to Port Townsend.
Or, you could go to Port Angeles and take a ferry to Victoria…
Just don’t delay- the window of opportunity closes in the middle of June, probably forever.
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By Frank on April 14, 2009
In most normal, semi-sane democracies, politicians see something popular and trip over themselves to get behind it. “There go my people, I must find out where they are going so I can lead them,” goes the old saying.
Indeed, as one examines recent light rail successes in the American West (Phoenix, Salt Lake City, Denver), a pattern emerges: the state governments in all these cities saw their role as a willing partner to the urban transit agency. They chose to help it, to foster it, not to thwart it at every possible turn.
But as Andrew documents in great detail, this is simply not the case when it comes to our state representatives and Sound Transit. You’d think they would have got the message by now that their constituents love Sound Transit (“North Korea-style margins” is one of the funniest phrases I’ve read in a while) and want more of it. Bizarrely, this has not been the case.
When East Link is finally built out, and the ST2 map is complete, the resulting constellation of connected stations will resemble nothing so much as an extended middle finger, pointed South toward the capitol building that tried endlessly — and failed — to strangle it in the crib.
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By Frank on April 14, 2009
In my many years as a New York resident, I knew all about “gypsy” cabs, but I’d never heard of dollar vans until today. Fascinating.
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