Light Rail - cautionary tales

I'd reckoned that if Christchurch City Council spent $400 million on a light rail line connecting campus to downtown, they'd need 10,000 people riding that line every day at $10 per person to cover just the capital costs if we use Treasury's recommended 8% discount rate on infrastructure expenditures; if Council's able to fund it somehow at 4%, you need 7,000 daily riders at $10 each to cover the infrastructure cost. The RedBus network carries 5.8 million passengers per year, or 16,000 per day. The draft plan suggested this route as the starting point for a larger rail system.

The December update to Council's planning documents says they'll be examining the feasibility of the  larger network. See page 110 here.

At a broadly estimated system construction and rolling stock purchase cost of around $1.5 to $1.8 billion at today’s prices (excluding ongoing operating and maintenance costs) for a staged, comprehensive city-wide network of five key routes linked to and through the Central City, a decision to initiate this project will be fundamental for the Council and equally importantly for Greater Christchurch.

Today's cautionary tale comes from Norfolk, Virginia.  They've a population of just under 250,000 for the city proper, but a total metro population of 1.6 million if we count the greater Hampton Roads area.

They put in a 7.4 mile starter light rail line for $320 million, or about NZ$400m - roughly comparable to what Council here wanted to spend on a slightly shorter line between downtown and the University. Norfolk's line, The Tide, has now been running for 6 months. They're getting an average of 4,642 riders on weekdays; they're forecasting it'll hit 7,200 daily riders within three years. They're claiming success against expectations of 2900 daily riders, but AntiPlanner puts paid to those claims; the initial projections said they'd get 10,400 riders on weekdays. And they're only charging $1.50 per adult trip. [HT: 36chambers]

Norfolk's Tide system connects a big medical centre complex, an art museum, the entertainment and commercial district, the courts, baseball stadium, Norfolk State University, and a couple of stations with park and ride facilities for mixed commuters in a metro region of 1.6 million people. It's a line roughly comparable to the Downtown to University line Council initially proposed as the start of a light rail network for Christchurch, but in a metro region that's more than four times bigger than Christchurch. And it's only forecast in three years' time to start getting the kinds of daily ridership numbers that might have a Christchurch line covering its capital costs (ignoring operating and maintenance costs).

Here's AntiPlanner on Norfolk:

Needless to say, the Norfolk line also suffered a huge cost overrun, costing about $320 million instead of the $198 million that had been predicted in 2003. It was supposed to open in 2008; instead, it opened in 2011. These problems cost the transit agency head, Norfolk city manager, and several other officials their jobs.

So it is no surprise that the current transit agency head wants people to think the light-rail line is a success. Thanks to credulous reporters whose idea of investigative journalism is to reprint transit agency press releases, many members of the public will soon forget about these cost overruns and ridership shortfalls. But it is interesting to compare the Norfolk numbers with Houston, which also has a 7.4-mile light-rail line. Only Houston’s carried more than 35,000 riders a weekday in 2010, or more than seven times the ridership of the Norfolk line. In its first year of operation, Houston’s carried more than 34,000 riders per weekday.

Or compare Norfolk with the Buffalo light rail, which is almost synonymous with “failure” partly because Buffalo’s total transit ridership–bus and light-rail together–declined from 36 million trips per year just before the light rail opened to 26 million trips per year by 2001, and ridership has hovered around that number ever since. Although it is only 6.2-miles long, the Buffalo line carried 21,500 riders per weekday in 2010, well over four times as many as Norfolk’s.

The real question is: if Hampton Roads Transit ever really thought that its light-rail line would only carry 2,900 riders per weekday in its opening year, why did they build it? 

And recall that where Norfolk's in a metro area of 1.6 million, Houston is 2.1 million for the city proper and a metro region of close to 6 million. Buffalo's greater metro population is also over a million.

I'd be putting money on a Christchurch light rail system being a worse debacle than the Dunedin stadium, but I hope I'm wrong.

Light-rail disease

Christchurch isn't the only victim...

Forget AIDS or SARS, there’s a new billion-dollar contagion popping up across the country. Symptoms include visions of grandeur, severe loss of reality and a propensity to enact massive tax hikes. It’s called LRTS: Light-rail transit syndrome.

And while the surest cure for this new ailment is a large application of public input and a quick dose of common sense, the antidote appears in extreme short supply.

Patient zero in the current Canadian outbreak of LRTS is southwestern Ontario’s Region of Waterloo, a high-tech hub as home to BlackBerry-maker Research In Motion and the University of Waterloo. The diagnosis was confirmed this June when the region, population 500,000, approved an $818-million light rail transit project.

Light rail transit is beloved by bureaucrats and planners for its sleek and modern look that provides the aura of a big-city amenity. Those susceptible to LRTS claim it can transform modest cities into booming metropolises by instantly boosting transit usage, curbing congestion, spurring rapid downtown development and attracting young mobile workers of the Richard Florida ilk.

But like any fixed-track mass-transit system, light rail is best suited to moving high volumes of commuters to and from dense downtown employment cores, as is the case in Calgary. It requires specific densities and geographies to work effectively and even large cities such as Baltimore and Buffalo have struggled with light rail. And it’s expensive.

...

For anyone wondering about palliative care for terminal cases of LRTS, consider an earlier outbreak on the other side of the Atlantic:

Edinburgh, Scotland, population 490,000 was infected by LRTS a few years before Waterloo Region. Its $870-million light-rail transit project was also presented to local taxpayers as the means by which their city would boldly march into the future. And it would be free — paid for by higher levels of government.

Today three-quarters of the budget has been spent but less than a third of the infrastructure is in place. With cost overruns entirely the responsibility of local taxpayers, this summer Edinburgh city council (after rejecting calls for a referendum) debated tearing up the whole thing and forgetting it ever happened. In the end they decided to shorten the route substantially. And they still need to come up with $438 million.

Don’t let Light Rail Transit Syndrome happen to you.

Christchurch light rail fans may wish to read the whole thing.....

The same disclaimer applies to this post as applied to my prior post on light rail.