No Light Rail in Vancouver!

A Commuter Train for Milwaukee?

Feb 5

2008

Normally, the Antiplanner does not like to use names like “liars” and “cheaters,” preferring to let the facts speak for themselves. But, time and again, these words turn out to perfectly apply to the people who put together rail transit projects.

Take, for example, the Southeastern Wisconsin Regional Transit Authority, or RTA for short, which covers Kenosha, Racine, and Milwaukee counties. Created in 2005, RTA wants to run a commuter-rail line it calls the KRM, from Kenosha through Racine to Milwaukee. The line would meet an existing commuter-rail line that goes from Kenosha to Chicago, and at least one train a day would run through to and from Chicago to Milwaukee.

According to RTA’s latest newsletter, the KRM would cost about $200 million to start up and would require a $6.3 million annual operating subsidy. For that it would carry about 1.7 million trips per year, which translates to 6,700 per weekday.

In other words, RTA wants to spend $200 million to take 3,350 people to and from work each day. The Milwaukee-Racine-Kenosha urbanized areas have about 750,000 commuters, so RTA’s proposal would take less than half a percent of them to work. But they would all have to pay for it in the form of some local taxes plus a diversion of a share of federal and state gasoline taxes to fund the rail line.

The planned commuter line would run 14 round trips per day, which means each train would have about 240 people on board. That’s about five bus loads. So why not just buy five buses for each planned trainset and move people by bus instead?

The newsletter explains that RTA considered a bus alternative, but it would attract only a third as many people as the rail line. It would also cost only an eighth as much to start up, so I always wonder why don’t they just invest three-eighths as much in buses and carry as many people as the rail line.

But then I noticed that the rail line was projected to have seven stops between Milwaukee and Kenosha, while the bus line would stop 27 times. As a result, the bus would take almost twice as long as the train. No wonder it attracted so few people!

The train would average just 38 miles per hour and RTA admits that it would not go significantly faster than motor vehicles, so there is no reason why buses could not be run on schedules similar to the train. So why didn’t they consider an alternative in which buses stopped only seven times?

It turns out they did. The report from the consultant hired by RTA included a bus-rapid transit alternative that stopped fewer times than the regular bus alternative. It included some exclusive busways, so it cost a lot more than the regular bus alternative, but it would cost only half as much as the train. Moreover, it was projected to carry as many riders as the train.

Naturally, RTA told the consultant to drop this alternative from further consideration. It seems they did a focus group and people liked trains better than buses (as long as someone else paid for them, of course). But RTA continued to “consider” the other bus alternative (called “TSM” for transportation system management), no doubt because the FTA requires them to have such an alternative to be considered for federal funding.

The consultant had also estimated that the bus-rapid transit alternative would disrupt traffic more than the trains. But if the busways (which would move no more than about 5 buses per hour) were opened to low-occupancy vehicles that pay a toll, they would actually relieve congestion. Plus, the tolls would pay for most if not all of the new lanes, and by varying the toll, the lanes would never get congested so the buses could meet their schedules. This would result in transportation improvements for both auto drivers and transit riders, and at a very low cost to taxpayers.

Instead, RTA is foisting the rail alternative on an unsuspecting public. Who would ever think that loyal public servants from a public agency would cover up the fact that buses can do as good a job as trains for a lot less money? Only those who know that most rail boosters are liars and cheaters.

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Reprinted from The Antiplanner