Light Rail Would Cost O.C. Too Much

If you support the Orange County Transportation Authority’s plan to build the Centerline light rail system, then you either plan to use the system yourself or you are expecting that lots of other people will use it and relieve congestion. Neither is likely the case.

If you plan to use the system, then either you actually may use it or, more likely, only think you will. According to OCTA and experience in other cities, riders who actually use these systems are predominantly former bus transit users.

Other riders who think they will use it have good intentions, but likely will not. Surveys have shown that people tend to be overly optimistic on such planned usage. Sixty-five percent of the respondents in an OCTA survey indicated that they would use the system. But even OCTA estimates that the percentage of commuters using light rail will be less than half of 1%. The vast majority of people who say they will use the rail system will either never or rarely do so.

If you are one of those who want the rail system so that others will use it and relieve traffic, you will be surprised at how negligible this effect will be. The Centerline is projected to remove fewer than 43,000 daily auto trips compared with a total of 14 million daily trips in Orange County in 2020. That is less than one-third of 1%. Compared with the projected 40% growth in transportation, one can conclude only that the impact on traffic will be minuscule.

The cost to achieve this negligible improvement is very high, about $2.3 billion in capital costs alone. A good measure of value is the OCTA’s cost-effectiveness. The cost to pull one person trip off the road is estimated at $14.30, and more than 90% of this cost is borne by the auto rider who thinks this expenditure was making a difference on traffic.

Rail proponents suggest one advantage of a rail line would be to absorb traffic to and from sports stadiums along the route. So consider two people who decide to go to the ball game and to take the train instead of drive. They will pay about $4 for fare. The public cost of getting their one car off the road for this one round trip will be $53.20.

The worst of the news is that the Centerline light rail system will require a major portion of Orange County’s transportation investment in the next 20 years. The result is that we will experience significantly more congestion than we should expect if our projected funding was more effectively employed.

What is needed is a better assessment of all the various alternatives and more emphasis on effective use of our tax dollars. When this is done, I am confident that expanded bus operation using advanced technologies, more and improved roadways, and other technologies will prove to be better choices than a rail line in Orange County.