Independent Sources arch-enemy Sen. Harry Reid (D-NV) is behind an effort to spend $1.3b on a 300mph magnetic levitation train running from Las Vegas to … Primm, Nevada.

Haven’t heard of Primm? You’re not alone. Take a look here at what the Los Angeles Times called “a three-hotel sideshow on the Nevada-California border. It’s best known for an outlet mall, the giant Desperado roller coaster and a bullet-riddled 1934 Ford that carried the infamous Bonnie and Clyde to their deaths.”

The good news is that if Reid has his way, you’ll be able to get from Vegas to Primm in twelve minutes!

The 40 mile line is envisioned as the first piece of a route eventually extending to Anaheim. California and the U.S. would get to pay for constructing the balance of the route — although neither has expressed any serious interest in doing so.

The LAT reports that “The consortium predicts that 13 million people will ride the Las Vegas-to-Primm line the first year of operation, providing a $50-million annual profit. The complete system is projected to attract 39 million riders in 2015, generating more than $500 million in profit. Proponents hope to tap the enormous popularity of Las Vegas, which now attracts about 38 million visitors a year — 27% of them from Southern California.”

We love cool things, especially cool things that go really fast, as much as anyone. But this is dumb.

Notice any problems with the ridership projections? For instance, that an average of one out of three visitors to Las Vegas would have to ride the train in order for it to make its projections? There is no single attraction anywhere that gets that market share.

Nevadans don’t have to look far to find a train project in trouble. In March the Las Vegas Sun reported “Since its reopening, the (Las Vegas Strip) monorail has run mostly trouble-free but has continually fallen short of initial ridership estimates.” Its February ridership was about 622k; far short of the 1.5m / month initially projected by its supporters.

A 2000 consultants report that anticipated such lower ridership numbers found that the Strip monorail “is unlikely to achieve its ridership projections, revenue projections or financial obligations.” The State of Nevada will ultimately have to pick up the shortfall.

In fact, rail projects NEVER achieve their ridership projections, and vacuum up transit funds better spent on almost anything else. Looking at rail projects in Baltimore, Buffalo, Detroit, Jacksonville, Los Angeles, Miami, Pittsburgh and Washington DC, the same consulting firm said

“The experience …. with high volume ridership projections has been uniformly unsuccessful. … (in Miami) that city’s metro rail system was to have carried 240,000 daily riders. Actual ridership fell 85 percent short, and a decade later carries less than 50,000 daily riders — still approximately 80 percent below projection. … Similar problems have occurred with respect to projects opened in the 1990s. For example, the Los Angeles “Green Line” was projected to carry 65,000 daily passengers in 1994 and 103,000 by 2003. Actual ridership was less than 20,000 in 1997, three years and 70 percent behind projection. Among the high volume projections, the average error has been 72.2 percent, and the smallest projection error was 27.7 percent in Washington, DC”

Similarly, in a heavily footnoted article, Thomas Rubin of the Texas Public Policy Foundation spent 2-1/2 pages tracing the evolution of the Los Angeles Red Line and concluded “we have seen the projected ridership on this line fall from the 376,000, that was used to justify it to the public and funding partners, to 80,000, a falloff of 79%. … There is a long history of such a pattern of ridership projections … The Red Line was built at twice the (initially projected) cost per mile and attracted 21% of the projected ridership; not exactly a record to be proud of.”

Should the line be extended to Anaheim (at a currently projected cost of $12b), the black hole will only get bigger. While such a service could be faster than air travel, when security waiting times are factored in, it’s also projected to cost $120 round trip — $20 more than airfare today, and significantly more than driving. And that’s assuming Southwest and America West don’t start a fare ware to kill the train.

The whole train-to-nowhere (sorry, Primm!) approach is nutty. You could run dozens of free busses a day up I-15 for years and years for the same $1.3 billion. If the case for the train is so obvious, let private investors take it on. Perhaps we could find the same folks who invested in the Chunnel (see: financial disasters of the 1990’s).

[Notorious porker Sen. Don Young (R-Alaska) is Reid’s henchman on this scam.]

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Update: We post about transportation bill pork going to this project here

Technorati Tags: government waste, Southern Californiapork spending, maglev, train

This entry was posted on Monday, May 9th, 2005 at 5:06 pm by A Senior Administration Official and is filed under Brilliant, but uncategorizable, Your Tax Dollars In Action. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.