Metro is considering the adoption of 28 by 2028 — a plan to complete 28 major transportation construction projects prior to the beginning of the 2028 Los Angeles Summer Olympics. This proposal would accelerate eight projects for completion by 2028 in addition to the 20 specified in Measure M, the 2016 County transportation half-cent sales tax ballot measure.

Metro has a history of over-promising and then failing to deliver on such projects, ultimately making conditions worse for Los Angeles transit users. The 28 by 2028 proposal appears to repeat the pattern.

This is the first brief in a series of summaries that examines Metro’s record, and those of its predecessor organizations, over the past several decades.

This history, additional facts, and economic logic show that 28 by 2028 is unlikely to succeed. Metro’s attempt to accomplish too much too fast has a high likelihood of making transit in Los Angeles County worse for transit riders and other users of the local surface transportation system. The implications are worst for the most vulnerable group: the very large number of low-income and otherwise disadvantaged residents who are strongly dependent on public transit in their daily lives.

Subjects This Series Will Cover

Each of the summaries in this series presents information about one or more of the following:

1. 1. Introduction, Overview, and the Birth of Transit in Los Angeles
   2. The Rise of the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority (Metro)
   3. Metro’s Transit Ridership Is Declining—MTA Ridership is down 21 percent from its 1985 peak and has been declining significantly in recent years.
   4. Metro’s Long Range Plans Overpromise and Underdeliver—Each of Metro’s four half-cent sales taxes approved by the voters has been accompanied by a long-range plan showing the construction of large numbers of new passenger rail lines—most of which get delayed or are never built.
   5. Part A: Improving Bus Service and Reducing Fares Have Greatly Increased Transit Use in Los Angeles Three Times
      Part B: Why Has Metro Been Losing Ridership Since 2007? And What Can It Do to Reverse This Trend?
   6. Labor/Community Strategy Center v. Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority—In the only court decision of its kind, the Special Master ruled that expanding bus service is more effective than expanding rail.
   7. Metro Consistently Significantly Overstates Sales Tax Revenues—Even after optimistic projections of future sales tax revenues have failed to develop, Metro continues to overstate expected revenues. Metro’s most recent projections, for Measure M, are among the most optimistic it has ever produced, and are not credible. This brief has been updated.
   8. Metro Has Frequently Understated Transportation Project Costs—Metro has underestimated the costs of major construction projects and then used accounting and budgeting gimmicks to conceal these overruns.
   9. Metro’s Congestion Pricing Revenue Pricing Estimates Are Not Credible—The agency is advancing congestion pricing as an important potential funding source, which it is, but Metro is projecting huge revenues that are too large to be credible. Implementing congestion pricing will require more time than Metro is projecting, requiring new legislation, and a focused campaign to promote public acceptance.
   10. Metro’s Public-Private Partnership Revenue Estimates Are Not Credible—It is also advancing Public-Private Partnerships (P3) as a tool to reduce costs. P3s improve the quality and reduce the cost of large projects. But Metro is projecting much larger cost savings than possible, and for the projects to be delivered in a shorter time period than is feasible.
   11. Metro Will Not Have the Revenue or the Debt Capacity to Undertake Many of the Proposed 28 Projects—Metro has overstated future sales tax revenues, understated the costs of major transportation capital projects, and relied on long-range plans that would fail to produce the set of major rail transit construction projects they promise.
   12. Metro’s 28 by 2028 Plans and Proposals Are Built on Many Questionable Assumptions and Errors
   13. Metro Has a History of Evading Legal Requirements, Potentially Ignoring the Law
   14. Metro’s Congestion Eradication and Fare-less Transit Proposals Are Unrealistic—The most audacious promises on which Metro bases 28 by 2028—including “eradication of congestion” and fare-less transit—are infeasible and operationally impossible.
   15. Bus Is Very Productive And Cost Effective, Rail Is Not, But Metro Favors Rail Over Bus—Metro has a very highly utilized and well-performing bus system, while its light and heavy rail systems are far less cost-effective.

The first piece of this series was posted on March 1, 2019. The final brief, number 15, was posted on May 28, 2019. 

The post A Critical Review of Los Angeles Metro’s 28 by 2028 Plan appeared first on Reason Foundation.

For several decades, the prospect of an urban rail system has been held up to the electorate as the key to mobility and clean air, but even cursory examination of system performance reveals that it is neither. The Los Angeles rail plan is essentially a failed experiment in transit provision, and all refinements and extensions predicated on expanding the rail system will only increase the cost of the failure. And the plan is not merely wasteful, but is harmful to existing transit options. The Los Angeles rail system is steadily destroying public transportation services in a city that should be much more respectful of the gap between the transit-optional haves and the transit-dependent have nots.

The Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s (LACMTA) commitment to the region’s rail plan has placed it in a political conundrum. The MTA knows the system is a failure and that further investment in rail is harmful, yet the rail plan has been such a high profile project for so long that the prospect of abandoning the project is a source of political terror.

But alternatives are available, and MTA has the legal grounds to pursue them. The transportation advantages provided by exclusive rights of way are squandered if use of these guideways is restricted to rail cars. The MTA can build busways instead, facilities with greater flexibility, lower costs, and higher capacities than rail lines. If the agency stops rail construction, it can afford to place more buses in service on the elevated Harbor transitway. Existing rail rights of way, including tunnels, can be retrofitted for use as exclusive busways. Seattle is providing excellent service in its downtown bus tunnel. Los Angeles can do as well, even better. Buses can be granted priority access to city streets along the Blue Line right of way and elsewhere.

Southern California is fast becoming a leader in the construction, franchising, and operation of toll roads. Tolls can be used to pay for new facilities, but the real payoff is the opportunity they provide for controlling congestion by requiring drivers to pay the cost of the delay they impose on others. An electronically collected toll turns price into a lever for managing level of service.

Electronic toll collection is not the only technological fix available. Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) focus on expanding the capacity available from the existing transportation network. ITS includes many speculative elements, but also accounts for a number of nuts and bolts measures that focus on realistic system management options. The innovations provided by ITS are difficult to deploy, but may be simplest for public transit systems. The subsidies used to prop up public transit could just as easily be used to underwrite deployment of new technologies for transit.

Better yet, entrepreneurs should be allowed to enter the transit market and compete with the MTA, allowing the Authority to remain a public entity, but forcing it to accept the discipline imposed by market decisions. Many MTA services could be privatized to reduce cost and improve service. If the fare box is the only source of revenue available, then configuring service to capture fares becomes the order of the day.

At the very least, the MTA should proceed aggressively to meet its consent decree obligations to the Bus Riders Union and expand bus service. It should stop manipulating the definitions of funding categories to facilitate more rail expenditures, and it should vigorously fund construction of more High Occupancy Vehicle (HOV) and High Occupancy Toll (HOT) lanes.

The post Better Transportation Alternatives for Los Angeles appeared first on Reason Foundation.

Rubber Tire Guideways are, to a significant extent, “the road not taken” for guideway transportation improvements in Los Angeles and throughout the United States.

Busways, high occupancy vehicle (HOV) lanes, high occupancy toll (HOT) lanes, bus malls, and other rubber tire guideway modes have shown that they can often provide greater transportation capacity improvement, usable by more people, at lower cost than comparable rail modes in many transportation corridors. In many cases, however, such non-rail guideways have not been fairly considered as alternatives to rail lines-if they have been considered at all.

Rubber Tire Guideways are certainly not the right solution for every transportation situation and there are many cases where rail transit is an appropriate and productive component of an overall urban transportation network. However, in cases where decisions are being made for new transportation improvements that may include guideway solutions, Rubber Tire Guideways have proven productivity and cost-effectiveness characteristics that should lead to their serious consideration as traditional/nontraditional transit alternatives.

Selection of transit system components should be conducted in a fair and competent manner, with the technology choice decision not being made until after the study is performed. In Los Angeles, the authors conclude:

• HOV lanes should be given a much higher priority for construction and implementation than rail guideways. Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) projections give HOV lanes far higher transportation productivity and cost-effectiveness;
• Wherever possible and where excess capacity exists, HOT lanes should be implemented on new HOV lanes, and considered as retrofit options for existing HOV lanes;
• Where justified, MTA should provide a high priority to expanding bus and alternative transit service on HOV lanes in its planning and financial budgeting; and
• MTA should consider more Rubber Tire Guideway projects, particularly projects serving the central business district.

The post Rubber Tire Transit appeared first on Reason Foundation.

For more than a decade, the proponents of rail transit in Los Angeles and elsewhere have widely promulgated a set of stock arguments in favor of construction of rail transit. Although rail transit can provide advantages in some circumstances, the proponents of rail often mislead decision makers and the public by claiming nonexistent advantages for rail investments. This campaign has helped convince officials and the electorate that rail transit is a necessary component of a contemporary urban transportation system.

Left unchallenged, these arguments have gradually bored their way into conventional wisdom. However, a close examination reveals that the rhetoric of rail tends to involve sweeping assertions, uneconomic thinking, and assumptions that range from difficult to impossible to verify. We have come to think of this collection of arguments as a mythology. This paper addresses these ten myths, as follows:

Myth #1: Adding Rail is Cost-Effective
Fact: Rail is economically inferior to conventional bus service. The high cost of rail bleeds existing bus systems.

Myth #2: Rail is the People’s Choice
Fact: Voters have been swayed by what amounts to disinformation.

Myth #3: Rail is Fast Transit
Fact: Once out-of-vehicle, station access and transfer delay time is accounted for, rail travel times tend to be longer than the time required to complete the same trip by bus.

Myth #4: Rail Is High-Capacity Transit
Fact: Bus corridors consist of parallel bus lines collectively providing higher capacity than rail lines. Light rail lines cannot deliver more than a small fraction of the carrying capacity provided by dedicated bus rights-of-way. Only the most heavily utilized heavy rail trunks are competitive with busways, and then only at significantly higher costs.

Myth #5: Rail Construction Provides Jobs
Fact: Bus systems provide far more employment per public dollar expended than do rail systems and much more local employment.

Myth #6: Rail Promotes Superior Urban Form
Fact: Rail investments cannot defeat the location incentives provided by the market for urban land.

Myth #7: Rail Will Be Paid For With NonLocal Funds That Cannot Be Used For Other Purposes
Fact: Funds requested for rail must often be spent on rail systems, but local authorities may seek funds for a variety of purposes and have considerable discretion in how local transportation funds are spent.

Myth #8: Rail Will Attract New Riders to Transit
Fact: Rail seldom increases and often reduces total transit ridership.

Myth #9: Rail Will Decongest Roads
Fact: Rail is not a decongestant. New facilities cannot decongest existing facilities. The impact of transit on highway level of service is small.

Myth #10 There are No Alternatives to Rail
Fact: Doing nothing is often better than building a rail system, but there are many low-risk alternatives to rail. We have lacked the political will to pursue them.

By their nature, myths are nearly impervious to attack, even by sound theory. Consequently, our strategy is to measure outcomes as frequently as we can, and to examine the position of rail advocates in light of these results.

Our counterarguments are often grounded in the Los Angeles experience. However, these myths tend to be advanced anywhere rail advocates congregate to pursue their special interests. Thus, we also rely on national data and explain our Los Angeles conclusions in as broad a context as possible.

There is an eleventh myth we have not addressed. We cannot. No one can, and this provides the myth with a nearly divine status among rail advocates. The eleventh myth is “Rail will ultimately perform as required, but only if the rail system is constructed in its entirety.” Thus, no matter how dismally existing rail systems might perform, proponents have an argument for building more. We cannot disprove this argument conclusively because it is grounded in blind faith, and we cannot afford to build rail systems large enough to test it. However, we can draw informed conclusions from the best evidence available. Larger urban rail systems are not better rail systems; they are more expensive failures.

The post Ten Transit Myths appeared first on Reason Foundation.

In March 1995, the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority adopted a Long Range 20 Year Plan-“A Plan for Los Angeles County: Transportation for the 21st Century.” Analysis of the $72 billion plan reveals a multitude of flaws and inconsistencies in predictive models, baseline and scenario results, and against existing data.

Population forecasts-a critical component of planning?are internally inconsistent within the plan. The population forecast for the transportation model used a 33.4 percent population growth forecast from 1990 to 2015. This extremely high growth rate assumption resulted in predictions of high growth of travel and forecasts of extremely low freeway and surface street speeds. The financial model, however, utilized a 19 percent population growth rate which produced low tax revenue forecasts limiting funding for transportation improvements. Changing the key variable in this modeling exercise is an unacceptable methodology.

The plan is heavily skewed toward rail, which is made to look more favorable by highly selective accounting. Only local costs-revenues extracted from Los Angeles County-are considered in evaluations of rail cost-effectiveness. The MTA’s year 2015 baseline suggests that about 72 percent of transit passenger miles traveled will be made on bus, and 28 percent on rail. However, close scrutiny of the primary scenario’s speed forecasts implies that this proportion would be reversed, with 29 percent of passenger-miles of transit travel being made on bus and 71 percent on rail. According to MTA’s transportation model, with all rail lines constructed, the five lines with the highest average weekday boardings per station (nationally) would be in Los Angeles.

While the two top light rail performers predicted by the plan do not satisfy its own nebulous criteria for inclusion in the primary scenario, these same rail projects are funded at 130 percent over original cost estimates. And while total Metrolink ridership is less than any one of several MTA bus lines, the long-term plan effectively calls for a $454.3 million reduction in bus funding over the term of the plan. Under even the plan’s most optimistic scenarios, bus revenue service hours would be reduced by over 20 percent relative to 1990. This results in a dramatic funding shift from bus to rail transit in the most crowded urban bus system in the United States. And it’s an expensive shift: precursor documents to the plan report public costs per new transit trip for the 14 rail projects in the plan will range from a low of $16.31 to a high of $98.38.

With regard to air quality, integrally related to transportation planning, the plan ignores data showing that rail projects rate very poorly on air quality improvements compared to almost anything else, and the MTA’s air quality analysis does not consider the possibility that planned reduction of bus service will induce many trips in older, poorly maintained, high-emission automobiles-potentially making air quality worse, not better.

Finally, it does not appear that the plan conforms to even the MTA’s own interpretation of the Federal Transit Authority guidelines, nor are literal models of the FTA’s guidelines used to establish staff recommendations put forth in the plan.

The MTA proposes to spend $417 million over the next twenty years on planning rail projects. It is illustrative to note that at the 1995 proposed operating subsidy of $0.89 per bus passenger, this money could be used to increase bus ridership by 469 million passengers. That is almost as many passengers as the Long-Range Plan indicates would be carried over 20 years if all of the rail lines proposed there were constructed immediately. Of course, given the currently poor quality of bus service in the region, it is doubtful that one could find enough willing riders to provide that many new boardings.

Our analysis concludes that if the MTA’s Long-Term Plan is followed, the MTA will find itself committed to construction of rail lines it cannot afford to build or operate. We recommend the MTA convene a panel of independent external experts to review both the planning process and the plan.

Attachments

• Full Study

The post Why Rail Will Fail appeared first on Reason Foundation.