Thursday, December 09, 2010

A comparable rail project to consider

There is currently a project underway in Honolulu to build a 32 km rail transit line.

Honolulu County covers the whole of island of Oahu and has a population of 876,000.   This compares closely to Vancouver Island's 750,000 people.   The area of Oahu is roughly the same area of the primary populated areas of Vancouver Island.  I raise these to give you some idea that the two locations are roughly the same.   Admittedly Honolulu has a much higher number of tourists.

Here in the CRD and the east coast of the island people are looking at two rail based transit options.   The first being the E&N line and the second being some form of rapid transit from downtown to the Westshore.   We may not be looking at a 32km elevated line like in Honolulu, but we are considering two significant projects that will have many more kilometers of track than anything on O'ahu.  In the order of magnitude, our two projects compare to the one project in Hawai'i.

Honolulu and Victoria have one more thing in common, both cities are avid bus riders.

The reason I raise Honolulu is that their project was slated to cost about $5.5 billion but is now going to be at least $7.2 billion.  This includes the construction costs and subsidies needed to operate the line.

Other than the classic rising costs during the capital stage of the project, there is a major concern that ridership will not be achieved.   The line is being built in the hopes of getting people to leave their cars behind and take transit and has some very optimistic assumptions.  If the numbers are not achieved, the system will have to have large per rider subsidies.

One of the few cities in North America that has approached rapid transit in a reasonable way is Metro Vancouver.   The Canada Line was built along a route that had enough existing bus riders to warrant a rail based transit solution.   There was no attempt to socially engineer the city with the Canada line, it was built to match where the demand was at the moment.

The demand in our region is from downtown to UVic.   There are not that many people on the Westshore taking transit.  Once they take transit is when rapid transit should be considered.   Till then any rapid transit should be focused on access to UVic.

Metro Vancouver also managed to dodge the capital cost problem by using a P3.   The price for the Canada line may have looked expensive at the time at about $80,000,000 per kilometer, but when comparing it to other projects in North America lately, the price is looking more and more like a good deal.

More and more rail based projects in the US are coming in at costs over $100,000,000 per kilometer.  Honolulu is only one example of the costliness of rail based transit and it is not the most extreme.   There are projects that come in on time and on budget but they are the exception and not the rule.   Rail based transit projects have been more of a gamble on a hope for the future than a reflection of reality.

A Canadian comparable project is the Region of Waterloo rapid transit project, currently estimated at a cost of $925,000,000 for about 20 kilometers or about $26,000,000 per kilometer.  I expect that number to rise once the project is underway.   The estimate has a range of +50% to -25% placing the cost range from $20,000,000 to $39,000,000 per kilometer.  This project does not follow existing transit traffic, does not have a good business case and assumes significant transit ridership growth due to the line.

Any rail based transit needs a very detailed and realistically costed business plan.   There have to be mechanisms in place to ensure there is no danger of cost overruns in the projects.   And finally, rail based transit has to follow the people and not try to be an expensive social engineering tool.

5 comments:

Corey Burger said...

More interesting for the Honolulu project is the similar geography: both cities with two major lobes with the new suburbs in the west, past a Naval harbour. What is very different is the number of people. Honolulu is easily twice the size of Greater Victoria and is a major city, not a regional centre like Victoria.

Corey Burger said...

Hmm, further comment regarding "social engineering". What do you think all those road subsidies have been? What about the fact that it is easier to get a mortage for a single-family dwelling than a multi-family one? Sorry, TOD is no more social engineering than existing (50+ year old) zoning is.

Bernard said...

Roads and highways have not been social engineering and neither was the old Victoria streetcar system.

A rail transit system that is built to meet the demand that exists is not social engineering. If it is built to change the habits of people. If we are building a rail line to try and stop people driving, that is what I call social engineering and that is in my mind a very bad reason to build a rail line.

As to the size of the cities, Honolulu is not really much bigger than Victoria, the core of the city seems to be under 500,000

Anonymous said...

I'm not terribly familiar with Victoria, but I am from Waterloo Region and take issue with your characterization of the light rail project here. I'll just make a few points:

The estimates are $790 million in capital costs for opening day, part of which is for the half of the line which will be BRT-lite.

The line follows closely the route of the iXpress, an express bus route which was introduced five years ago and has grown to a ridership of over 10,000 a day. Together with the local bus on that corridor, portions of the LRT route see a bus every five minutes all day long; I believe they carry more than half of all transit ridership in the region.

The projections do not assume growth strictly due to the line, but rather mostly the planning policies which are directing growth to designated urban cores and station areas. The Region is mandated by Ontario to accommodate 200,000 more people within twenty years, and 40% of that growth has to be in the existing city cores. That proportion is already being reached by current development trends here. It is not feasible to deal with a substantially larger population along Waterloo Region's main corridor through roads, and so a transit line that is capable of accommodating that travel demand is an important part of planning for the long term.

-Michael D

Corey Burger said...

The old streetcar system not social engineering? You know why they call them "streetcar suburbs"? Because they were built by developers in advance of the people moving there. Exactly the same thing happened about 50 years later with the new highways.