Detroit's Expensive M1 Rail To Nowhere Gets A Quixotic New Name

With much fanfare the 3.3 mile, $137-million-dollar-to-build streetcar on Woodward in downtown Detroit has just received a new name.

It's neither a catchy nor inspiring name, but more of a "named after our sponsor" sorta thing, and many aren't particularly thrilled with it, particularly those of the bien-pensant progressive class of Detroit:

The Detroit Free Press: QLINE could have been named with nod toward better transit

Mind you, for truth in advertising, and to fully link it to Detroit, all they had to do was add one letter that would sum up Detroit nicely and just call it the: DQLINE.

M1 Rail To Nowhere Looking For More Of Other People's Money

Light Rail is nirvana for the SWPL folks.

It's apparently such a draw that you can cancel it, but it keeps coming back again.

Even at 3 miles it's supposedly the little engine that could bring economic development to Detroit, just by existing and going up and down the three mile strip.

Even this crazy expensive light rail to nowhere is considered awesome. It's backers were all ready to go until they re crunched the numbers and realized they didn't get all the federal money up front they thought they would receive and were short $12 million out of the $173 million:

The Detroit News: Detroit's M-1 rail project in jeopardy without millions in new fed funding

The $173 million dollar, three mile light rail project on Woodward, down from the originally planned 8 miles of rail at $371 million just realized that they're short about $12 million in initial start costs and need it from the Feds to get the project started.

At $8,000 a foot, 57.6 Million per mile, it's costing about ten million more per mile to build the smaller system than the original 8 mile system. Expect the inevitable cost overruns to jack it up even more.

The Woodward Light rail project is looking like a case of the politician's syllogism:

We must do something mass transity to show what a cool place we are.
The M-1 Rail project is something mass transity (for all of 3 miles and an unknown amount of riders with millions of annual subsidies to be determined).
Therefore We must build it.

Another Detroit project that goes nowhere yet will be subsidized forever.

Detroit's Light Rail Redux - If At First You Don't Suceed, Get Subsidised Again!

The previous plan, now rejected as too expensive was allegedly going to cost around $300 million to build and require subsidies in the amount of $6 million per year if not more.

Now they're planning a shorter stretch of light rail:

Operating the 3.4-mile line would require $4 million to $10 million a year, depending on whose estimates you believe.

So a shorter rail line will cost $125 million to build and more per year to operate. Either that or they're being more honest about the costs now.

This is after Detroit Mayor Bing at the cancellation of the original rail project stated:

No public transit project will be successful if it requires operational subsidies from local or state government.

Well, it looks like Mayor Bing just changed his mind in less than a month, perhaps LaHood made him an offer he couldn't refuse:

"We see light rail as a part of regional transportation, so light rail is not dead," Bing said at a news conference with Snyder and U.S. Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood. "It's back on the table" but as part of a plan for a wider bus rapid transit system.

I believe the definition of insanity was doing something over again and expecting a different result? In this case the insanity is due to the city's and indeed the federal government's obsession with rail-based transit.

Light rail in Detroit is going to be another subsidized, inefficient, and expensive failure, with the added fun of really messing up Woodward Ave to regular car traffic to boot. 3.4 miles of light rail is not enough to be a usable system, and the capital and operating costs are going to require yet another suburban bailout if this goes forward.

Detroit: Since it didn't work last time, lets do it again, but bigger.

The Detroit News: Lessons from the People Mover

he rail system circles downtown Detroit and was built in 1987 on the theory that it would help fill office buildings and draw new restaurants, residents and retail outlets. It was also supposed to connect to hoped-for subway and rail lines.

But like many government projects built without regard for a return on investment, the People Mover never delivered on its promise.

Ridership never reached the 12 million annual passengers predicted before it opened, let alone the 20 million needed to break even. So the city has kicked in huge subsidies to keep if from shutting down and standing as yet another reminder of Detroit's struggles.

Read that last paragraph again.

Detroit knew it would take 20 million riders for the People Mover just to break even and they opened it predicting it would get 12 million and then it didn't even reach that. It was opened with a prediction that it would lose money, but they under-predicted the loss. Currently the city is subsidizing each rider's trip by $2.

This is known as Governmental Math: "We lose money on every rider, but we make it up in volume!"

So they're going to do it again, only bigger, using federal transit dollars as well as some private investors and city money:

Detroit is now moving ahead with plans to build a light rail system up Woodward Avenue from downtown. It's an ambitious project funded with private and federal dollars.

Once again, the promise is that the rail line will hasten downtown's recovery and spark pockets of development around the stations.

It's an enticing project. But we hope the city will be more realistic in its ridership estimates, as well as projections of spin-off economic benefits, before taking on annual operating subsidies that could dwarf what it takes to keep the People Mover-to-nowhere spinning nearly empty cars around downtown.

Any bets on who gets to cough up the annual subsidy when the rail line fails to reach the break-even point?

At a Bargain price of $371 Million, Woodward Ave may get 8 fashionable miles of Light Rail - What could possibly go wrong?

Lyle Lanley: Well, sir, there's nothing on earth
Like a genuine,
Bona fide,
Electrified,
Six-car
Monorail! ...
What'd I say?
Ned Flanders: Monorail!
Lyle Lanley: What's it called?
Patty+Selma: Monorail!
Lyle Lanley: That's right! Monorail!

The Simpsons Marge vs the Monorail

From the Detroit News:

DETROIT -- City leaders have pinned their mass transit hopes on an eight-mile stretch down Woodward Avenue that connects the State Fairgrounds with downtown, calling the $371 million project a "first step" toward the return of light rail to Metro Detroit.

Construction could begin in three years, with an estimated 11,000 riders a day by 2013.

At about $33,727.27 per rider, we may be better off buying each of them a used car...but that $371 Million is just the starting cost.

"It's not an end, it's a start," said Norman White, the chief financial
officer for the city and project manager of the Detroit Transit Options for Growth Study.

We were afraid of that.

But questions remain: How will the area pay for it, and how will it handle a substantial annual subsidy?

White, a former DDOT director, said mass transportation is subsidized in Detroit and elsewhere.

The reward for developing interconnecting transit systems is the development they'll spur. In Dallas, Denver and other cities building or expanding their light rail systems, land around the lines has seen millions of dollars in construction.

"That's the payoff you get," White said. "No system will ever pay for itself."

Draw your own conclusions on that one, a promise of potential development along an 8 mile strip on Woodward - in Detroit, a city quite unlike Denver and Dallas in quite a number of economic ways, in return for an eternal tax subsidy that you know Detroit will mismanage and will be tapping the suburbs to pay for...

Step right up for the monorail folks, step right this way....