Long Beach Press-Telegram Editorial on City's Recent $69k Streetcar Study, and some Portland Debunking
Roy Reynolds
A love affair with trolleys
What is it that makes some public officials believe that people would rather ride trolleys than drive their own cars? This would be an idle question, if taxpayers didn't get stuck with the consequences, which is what could happen in Long Beach.
At a cost of "only" $69,000, local officials have a feasibility study that shows they could have a system of trolleys criss-crossing the city for "only" $900 million. Some might say that's a bargain, since most of it would be federal money.
This is an essential point, since Long Beach is broke. But even if the feds footed the entire bill for the trolley system, it wouldn't exactly be a gift.
The trade-off would be no federal money for needed improvements to mass transit, highways and freeways, including a key proposal that would untangle the mess of trucks and cars on the 710 Freeway. Does this make sense?
Even if it did, the basic premise is wrong. And it's not just the clichéd notions about Americans' "love affair with the automobile." People all over the world, as soon as they can afford it, buy a car and if possible a house and they move to the suburbs.
As Wendell Cox of the Reason Foundation has written, metropolitan areas in Europe in the last 40 years gained 24 million in population, but 27 million moved to the suburbs, meaning that central cities, just like many in the United States, have lost population. This was just as true in Paris and London as in Munich or Rome.
Those residents of European suburbs obviously aren't riding trolleys. In the London area, average commuting time is among the highest in Europe: 45 minutes, yet one poll showed that even if commuting time doubled, only 7 percent would switch to buses or trains. Their reasons for driving to work: It's quicker, 56 percent; they need a car at work, 36 percent; public transit is inconvenient, 28 percent; cars are more comfortable, 26 percent; they enjoy driving, 23 percent; and it's convenient or parking is cheap, 21 percent.
Sound familiar? The only problem seems to be getting public officials to listen.
What started the latest round of studies by planners in Long Beach? One councilmember, Suja Lowenthal, visited Portland, Ore., a few months ago and was impressed with that city's trolley system. But what Portland planners tend to de-emphasize is that their system soaked up many millions of dollars of grant money when it was plentiful, then when the trolley lines didn't produce the expected development boom, the city offered many millions of dollars in subsidies to developers, while schools and other needs suffered.
The end result? Since Portland started its costly social experiment in the 1980s, public transit's share of the commuting market has declined from 9.8 percent to 7.6 percent, partly because bus service got cut to help pay for the cost of the trolleys. As for the people who are living with this experiment, Portland's residents voted against raising taxes to build more light rail in 1998, against an increase in neighborhood densities in 2002 and in favor of a property-rights measure in 2004 that flew in the face of planners' density theories. Yet planners continued to want to build more trolleys.
What do the trolleys have going for them? As one skeptical analyst said, they are cute. When Portland planners talk enthusiastically about trolleys with visiting planners, they often have a receptive audience.
We won't attempt to explain why this is so when planners
talk to planners, but one thing is clear. Residents of Long Beach are
much better off without $900 million worth of cute trolleys.
Original HDR study available here.
Benke
tram lines was illustrated. Looked suspiciously similar to the
square grid of PRT lines we usually advocate... Do they have
personalized mini-trams which switch themselves maybe?
Cost was estimated at around $26 million per mile for most lines. This
is a very low figure, about half of what recent experience says that
tram lines cost... This shows the pro-tram bias of the
people who did the study, although not to the extreme extent that our
co-authors for the Uppsala study did. They landed at a fascinatingly
low 60 Mkr/km, which translates to $14 million/mile or so. No tram
line has been built at this level in recent decades, but now they
insist that this is the true cost. Luckily the study's receiver didn't
believe them. A more recent CBA also concluded that even at this
investment level PRT was more beneficial than trams for Uppsala!
Bengt
On Nov 24, 5:04 am, Roy Reynolds <roy.reyno...@prtstrategies.com>
wrote:
> $900 million may seem like a bargain, but it's just the beginning of
> real costs.
> Posted: 11/23/2009 07:38:31 PM PST
>
> What is it that makes some public officials believe that people would
> rather ride trolleys than drive their own cars? This would be an idle
> question, if taxpayers didn't get stuck with the consequences, which is
> what could happen in Long Beach.
>
> At a cost of "only" $69,000, local officials have a feasibility study
> that shows they could have a system of trolleys criss-crossing the city
> for "only" $900 million. Some might say that's a bargain, since most of
> it would be federal money.
>
> This is an essential point, since Long Beach is broke. But even if the
> feds footed the entire bill for the trolley system, it wouldn't exactly
> be a gift.
>
> The trade-off would be no federal money for needed improvements to mass
> transit, highways and freeways, including a key proposal that would
> untangle the mess of trucks and cars on the 710 Freeway. Does this make
> sense?
>
> Even if it did, the basic premise is wrong. And it's not just the
> if possible a house and they move to the suburbs.
>
> As Wendell Cox of the Reason Foundation has written, metropolitan areas
> in Europe in the last 40 years gained 24 million in population, but 27
> million moved to the suburbs, meaning that central cities, just like
> many in the United States, have lost population. This was just as true
> in Paris and London as in Munich or Rome.
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Original HDR study available here
> <http://www.prtstrategies.com/files/COLB_Final.pdf>.
Roy Reynolds
The real opportunity in Long Beach, in the District of the councilwoman who arranged for this $69k study, is to develop a very fast, 24/7 "horizontal elevator" collector/distributor between the Queen Mary (now a hotel and event venue), the city's convention center and the downtown hotel, retail and restaurant area (Pine and Ocean Avenues, still in her District). The HDR study acknowledged that running a heavy streetcar over the bridge which connects the Queen Mary to the downtown was "problematic", and given the snake's nest of bridge approaches with tight radiis, it appears impossible to those I've had look at it. The Queen Mary hasn't really succeeded in LB due to its accessibility by only automobiles and slow, infrequent city shuttle buses. For it to have real value, its 50-acre parking lot needs to be sacrificed for other development (as was previously planned before its last re-developer bagged the project) with guests, event goers and conventioneers then brought in/out to the city's ample nearby parking assets.
The HDR study was much more a sales job than an analysis. You're right that the costs were dramatically understated, by at least half per my data. My friend Tom Rubin also choked on the 15-20 mph average speeds that were quoted for streetcars -- there's data readily available that shows American systems (including Portland's) that show real operational averages in the 7-8 mph range -- so again, HDR was off by at least half. There was also no discussion in the HDR study re. safety and liability -- the Metro Blue line LRT running at-grade, on city streets in Long Beach and then north to Los Angeles,sometimes in dedicated guidway, sometimes not, has been involved in over 90 fatalities and 800 accidents over its 22+ mile alignment since its inception in 1990.
There more on my website's Long Beach page (http://www.prtstrategies.com/longbeach.html). Roy
Benke wrote:
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