Boondoggles or Successes: Rail Transit a Hot Topic

Since San Francisco’s BART system opened 16 years ago, more than 60 new rail transit lines have been built or planned throughout the country, suggesting that any question about the value of these systems has been resolved.

But, in fact, nationwide debate continues to rage over this new generation of rail lines. And the rail project proposed for the San Fernando Valley is headed into the same tempest that surrounds new systems in Miami, Sacramento, San Diego and elsewhere.

A handful of critics, some with notable academic credentials, have repeatedly attacked these new subway and light-rail lines, many of which are in the nation’s newer cities, where the population is usually not as concentrated as in older Eastern and Midwestern urban areas.

Critics say superimposing costly new rail lines on those low-density cities may satisfy a yearning for civic pride and community identity, but the result may be a series of billion-dollar boondoggles that do little to improve mobility.

‘No Success’

“There isn’t one success story, and yet these outrageously expensive systems are being built everywhere you look,” said Peter Gordon, an urban planning professor at USC who has emerged as a leading national critic of rail projects.

Gordon sees nothing but woe for Los Angeles and other cities that heed the siren song of rail.

Instead of building rail lines, those cities should improve and expand bus service, including by constructing bus-only lanes, and charge motorists for freeway use, particularly during peak commuting hours, Gordon said.

As long as Gordon and other critics have been attacking rail projects--usually in newspaper and magazine stories, occasionally in academic journals--Vukan R. Vuchic, professor of transportation engineering at the University of Pennsylvania, has been rebutting them.

“Gordon and company have been making these irresponsible statements for years,” Vuchic said in a telephone interview.

“Yet they have not one good figure they can cite. If these projects are so terrible, then why do cities keep expanding their rail lines? Don’t the users know best?”

Gordon’s answer is that big construction projects such as rail lines “appeal to politicians because they can point to them as personal achievements and to bureaucrats because they create good-paying jobs.”

Most transportation planners agree that new subway systems in Washington, Atlanta and Baltimore have succeeded in drawing riders.

“Washington and Atlanta are ahead of their ridership projections,” said Richard Stanger, program development director for the Los Angeles County Transportation Commission. “And Baltimore, which is a fairly new system, is already doing well. These systems are all successes.”

The new Miami subway system, opened in 1984, is another matter.

Major Losses

Projected to carry 200,000 riders a day, the 21-mile system has thus far drawn only 40,000, a shortfall that has triggered huge operating deficits and provided effective ammunition to rail opponents.

Nelson Alba, spokesman for the Metro-Dade Transit System, acknowledged that rail critics have “given us quite a beating over ridership.”

But Alba said that the projection of 200,000 riders was based on a 51-mile system, and that the city of Miami Beach cut the heart out of the planned system when it unexpectedly refused to allow the subway within its borders.

The projections also presumed that gasoline prices and parking fees would continue rising in the 1980s, he said, and that there would be 1,000 buses feeding riders into the subway, whereas only 400 are actually in operation.

Gordon dismisses such excuses, saying the system was sold to Miami voters on the basis of “cooked or contrived numbers.”

And he predicts that Los Angeles’ downtown-to-North Hollywood Metro Rail subway, now under construction, will never come close to meeting its projected 300,000 daily riders.

As a result, the subsidies required to keep the subway operating will “bleed the bus system dry” at the expense of the Southern California Rapid Transit District’s 1.4 million daily passengers, he said.

“Higher bus fares will be needed, and the end result will be that you will kick more riders off the buses in Los Angeles than will ever ride the subway or light rail.”

Stanger said Miami’s failure to attract sufficient riders “is not to say that a well-designed, well-executed system, such as those in Washington, Atlanta and BART, shouldn’t be expected to draw heavily.”

“I can’t see any reason Metro Rail shouldn’t be one of the successes,” he said.

Vuchic makes no effort to defend the Miami system, which he said was “overdesigned. It probably should have been light rail.”

In fact, most of the lines under construction in the United States are light rail, which are cheaper but also have a lower carrying capacity than heavy-rail subways.

Heavy-rail systems, whether subway or elevated, get their power from an electrified third rail and are totally separated from pedestrians and road traffic.

Systems’ Differences

On the other hand, most light-rail systems are trolleys, obtaining power from an overhead electric line. The Century Freeway light-rail line, now under construction, is a notable exception because it will have a third rail.

The cost differences between light and heavy rail can be staggering.

Los Angeles’ Metro Rail is costing $200 million per mile, while the Long Beach-Los Angeles light-rail line is being built for $34 million a mile.

For the Valley, the projected cost gap is not as great, but is still formidable.

The county Transportation Commission is studying two possible routes, both of which would connect Warner Center with Metro Rail, and also whether the proposed line should be a subway or elevated extension of Metro Rail, or a ground-level light-rail line instead.

Preliminary cost estimates are $1.3 billion for all-subway and $750 million for light rail.

4 Options

A $2.1-million study scheduled for completion in October will focus on four cross-Valley route options.

Three would use the Southern Pacific railroad right of way that parallels Chandler and Victory boulevards from North Hollywood to Warner Center.

They are an all-subway Metro Rail extension, a Metro Rail extension that is subway in residential areas and is placed in a deep trench or elevated in other areas, and a light-rail line placed in a shallow trench flanked by earthen berms.

The fourth option is an elevated Metro Rail extension along the Ventura Freeway shoulder from Universal City to Warner Center.

Gordon said he has not followed the study of Valley rail options, but predicted that the Long Beach line, due to open in 1990, will draw only about 3,000 riders daily--not the 54,000 that county transit planners project.

The county Transportation Commission’s Stanger cautioned that it could take up to a decade to reach the projected ridership, but he noted that about 35,000 riders a day board buses on routes parallel to the light-rail line.

Bus Lines to Be Dropped

Since most of the bus lines will be dropped when the 21-mile light-rail line is opened, he said that “35,000 a day seems to be almost a minimum. And with the congestion we have in Los Angeles, the line is sure to draw additional people from their cars.”

Stanger added that he would “not be at all surprised if the line eventually goes substantially over the 54,000,” although he said that would depend on the economy, freeway congestion and population growth.

The opening of three new light-rail systems on the West Coast in the past 2 years has triggered a series of confusing disputes over whether they are living up to their promises.

In Portland, a 15-mile system that opened in 1986 serves 19,000 people a day, above the 15,000 projected at the start of construction in the early 1980s, but far below the 40,000 predicted in 1976.

Karen Casey, spokeswoman for the Tri-County Metropolitan Transportation District of Oregon, said the estimate of 40,000 was “based on an assumption of skyrocketing oil prices. And no one knew then that our local economy would go into a slump.”

Excuses Charged

Gordon retorted that Portland rail officials, “like those elsewhere, always have some reason why they can’t keep the promises they made when the system was sold to the public.”

“I expect that same sort of failure to perform in Sacramento and San Jose.”

In Sacramento, a 1-year-old system is drawing 14,000 riders daily, but Michael R. Wiley, Sacramento Regional Transit executive assistant, confidently predicted that the 18-mile system would reach its projected ridership of 21,000 “in 1 more year or maybe just a little longer.”

Less than half the San Jose system began operating this year, and a spokesman for the Santa Clara County Transportation Agency said it is “still too early to say if we will meet ridership predictions.”

Despite their sharply lower cost, light-rail systems have been as harshly criticized as subways.

San Diego Trolley

In 1985, Jose A. Gomez-Ibanez, an urban planning professor at Harvard, writing in the American Planning Assn. Journal, questioned the value of three light-rail lines.

His targets included the much-praised San Diego Trolley, which proponents cite as an example of the best of its type.

In the oft-quoted article, Gomez-Ibanez argued that San Diego’s downtown-to-the-border trolley had merely diverted bus riders, and that increases that had been claimed after the trolley’s 1981 opening were no greater than those experienced by buses serving the same general area.

He concluded that the slumping Mexican economy, which triggered a mass migration north in the early 1980s, was the more likely cause of the increased ridership.

Nor was Gomez-Ibanez impressed by the trolley’s widely praised ability to recover more than 80% of the rail system’s operating costs from fares. By contrast, the San Diego bus system recovers about 40% of its operating costs from fares, which is about average nationwide. The remainder is made up from federal, state and local subsidies.

Cost Ratios

The trolley’s frequently cited high ratio of fare to operating cost is misleading, Gomez-Ibanez said, because maintenance costs are held down in the years immediately after service begins because most of the equipment is brand-new and much of it is “still under warranty.”

Besides, he said, in San Diego and elsewhere, light-rail lines shouldn’t be compared to bus systems because the rail systems “skimmed the cream off the older bus systems by taking over one or two of the most heavily traveled and profitable trunk bus routes and leaving the buses to operate the less profitable, but necessary feeder services.”

And the cost of building the rail systems was clearly higher than it would have been to provide a comparable bus system, the Harvard professor insisted.

In rebuttal, Alan D. Havens, a transportation analyst for the Southern California Assn. of Governments, said Gomez-Ibanez “used a strategy that such critics often use in basing his conclusions on results in the first years after the trolley opened.”

Noting that ridership on the San Diego line has since climbed to 30,000 a day from the 12,000 a day that Gomez-Ibanez used in his calculations and that the fare box recovery ratio has risen to 89%, Havens said, “the new figures totally invalidate everything he wrote.”

Havens also criticized Gomez- Ibanez for “skipping over, as if it hardly mattered, the fact that the trolley has cut the time it takes to get from downtown to the border from 90 minutes down to 45 minutes.”

He added that “even if it cost more, the trolley represents a vast improvement in the quality of service over the buses it replaced.”

Buses are “jerky and noisy and smelly, and bus stops have few amenities,” Havens said. “There’s no way to compare a bus system with a modern rail system.”

Vuchic similarly contends that bus systems and rail lines shouldn’t be compared because trains are much more inviting. He added: “Why must everything public be the cheapest possible, while it is OK to spend freely on cars and other things that are private?”

‘Civic Monuments’

Rail critics say the tendency of rail proponents to emphasize the higher-quality service offered by trains over buses illustrates one of their points--that the chief lure of these systems is that they are personal monuments to the elected officials and others who bring them into being.

If Los Angeles, Miami and other cities “had money to waste on public transportation,” Gordon said, “then you could justify these high-priced systems as civic monuments.”

But when funds are limited and congestion is bad and getting worse, “it’s not responsible or sensible to spend so much of what you have on a system that serves a handful.”

Said Vuchic: “Gordon and other critics might just as sensibly do a cost-benefit study on San Francisco’s cable cars.

“They would probably conclude the system should be ripped out because it doesn’t pay.”

NEW RAIL SYSTEMS

HEAVY-RAIL SUBWAYS

Starting Daily Date Miles Passengers L.A. Metro Rail 1993-97 18 300,000 Miami 1984 21 40,000 Baltimore 1983-87 14 50,000 Atlanta 1979 32 187,000 Washington, D.C. 1976 70 509,000

LIGHT-RAIL SYSTEMS

Starting Daily Date Miles Passengers San Fernando Valley* 1997-99 15 40-50,000 San Jose 1987-88 9 6,000 Sacramento 1987 18 14,000 Portland, Ore. 1986 15 19,000 San Diego 1981-86 20 30,000

* Might be built as Heavy Rail system for which there are not yet ridership projections.

Source: Los Angeles Times telephone survey