Around the Country, Light Rail Is Plagued by High Costs, Low Ridership : Track record: Experts say other systems have failed to deliver on early projections as solutions to urban transportation ills.

Light rail systems, like the Blue Line that will begin to run between Los Angeles and Long Beach this weekend, are attractive and fun to ride, but they tend to be expensive money-losers that do little to solve urban transportation problems.

That is the widely held view of academic experts who have studied the new light rail lines that have been built in various American cities in recent years.

A recent U.S. Department of Transportation study of new light rail projects in Buffalo, N.Y., Pittsburgh, Pa., Portland, Ore., and Sacramento found that ridership projections were greatly overstated and that both construction and operating costs were much higher than expected.

For example, average weekday ridership is 66% below expectations in Pittsburgh, 54% in Buffalo and at least 30% in Sacramento, according to the report.

One line that has exceeded expectations, according to its operators, is Southern California’s only existing light rail system--the San Diego Trolley, which began operation in July, 1981. The 33-mile line provides transportation from the U.S.-Mexico border north to downtown San Diego and east to the city of El Cajon. There are plans to more than triple the track mileage within the next decade.

But if many sleek new transit lines lack for riders, they do not lack for high costs--both to build and to operate.

The federal report found that construction costs were 59% higher than expected in Buffalo, 28% in Portland and 17% in Sacramento. Operating expenses were 45% above expectations in Portland and 12% in Buffalo. Actual operating costs were 10% below anticipated in Sacramento--the only example in the study where performance exceeded the early projections.

“Almost every analyst who looks at these systems realizes they don’t make much sense as a public investment,” said Don H. Pickrell of the Transportation Systems Center in Cambridge, Mass., who wrote the Department of Transportation report.

“The bottom line is that these things don’t perform and aren’t worth the money,” said Peter Gordon, associate dean of the School of Urban and Regional Planning at USC and a longtime critic of rail transit.

Portland’s 15-mile system, which opened in 1986, cost $240 million. Buffalo’s 6.4-mile system, which opened in 1985, cost $536 million. Pittsburgh’s 10-mile system, which opened in 1987, cost $537 million. Sacramento’s first 9-mile leg, which opened in 1987, cost $172 million.

Gordon predicted that the 22-mile Blue Line, which cost an estimated $877 million to build, will attract relatively few riders as it wends its way between Long Beach and downtown Los Angeles, crossing some of the area’s toughest gang turf en route.

“This will cost the public dearly,” he said. “There will be reductions in bus schedules; there will be fare increases; overall transit use will decline. That is the sad scenario I see.”

But Neil Peterson, executive director of the Los Angeles County Transportation Commission, which built the Blue Line, disagrees with Gordon and Pickrell.

“In my opinion, the Pickrell report is distorted,” Peterson said. “He takes his estimates (of costs and ridership) at a certain point in time in the planning process and then compares them with the final numbers. But in any planning process you’re going to find a lot of different numbers at various times.”

Pickrell said that he compared actual ridership and cost figures with the estimates that were made when the projects were approved and that there is no fairer way to do it.

He said ridership estimates are inflated and cost projections are understated because “planners and political promoters seek inflated forecasts so they can sell the public on their projects and get more money from the federal government.”

Peterson acknowledged that the Blue Line once was projected to have as many as 54,000 average daily boardings, but that has since been scaled back to 5,000 to 6,000 in the early weeks of operation, perhaps 12,000 by December.

He said this was because “the assumptions had changed.” The downtown Los Angeles Metro Rail and the Century Freeway light rail line are not yet operating; feeder bus lines have not yet been established, and the price of gasoline and downtown parking have not risen as high as officials expected a few years ago.

Blue Line operating costs are high, Peterson said, because of an “extraordinary investment in security”--about $12 million of the estimated $33-million budget for the first year will be “security-related.”

County sheriff’s deputies, both uniformed and plainclothes, will be guarding the stations, riding the trains and watching the line from the air.

Although the Blue Line is the first modern-day rail system to be built in the Los Angeles area, it is not the first in the state. In addition to Sacramento, there are light rail lines in San Diego and in Santa Clara County.

There is also the San Francisco Muni-Metro, part of the city’s Municipal Railway, which carries an average of 130,000 riders a day on five lines. This is an updated and expanded 80-year-old trolley system that, unlike the Los Angeles “Red Cars,” never was abandoned.

The San Diego Trolley--a $260 million system that started running nine years ago--is probably the most successful of the new light rail lines. Officials report an average daily ridership of 49,000, a figure that has been achieved five years ahead of schedule.

A 10-mile light rail line between downtown San Jose and employment centers in north San Jose and in the city of Santa Clara carries about 9,200 people a day, about half of what was expected at this point, said Bruce Kosanovic, a spokesman for Santa Clara County Transit.

When another 10 miles are added next summer, it is hoped, ridership will jump to 20,000 a day, Kosanovic said.

Construction costs, estimated in 1982 to be $321 million, have climbed to $550 million, he said, partly because the second 10 miles are being built in a freeway median instead of on city streets.

The Sacramento light rail system carries more than 20,000 riders a day, which is far below the 50,000 riders projected for the year 2000.

HOW OTHER CITIES’ LIGHT RAIL LINES COMPARE ANNUAL OPERATING EXPENSE (millions of 1988 dollars):

BUFFALO PITTSBURGH PORTLAND SACRAMENTO Forecast 10.4 n/a 3.8 7.7 Actual 11.6 8.1 5.8 6.9 % Difference 12% n/a 45% -10%

WEEKDAY RAIL PASSENGERS*

(thousands):

BUFFALO PITTSBURGH PORTLAND SACRAMENTO Forecast 92.0 90.5 42.5 50.0 Actual 29.2 30.6 19.7 14.4 % Difference -68% -66% -54% -71%

* Forecast ridership for Pittsburgh applies to “Stage I” light rail line only; actual ridership figure applies to combined total for “Stage I” and “Stage II” lines. Sacramento forecast is for year 2000.

SOURCE: Urban Mass Transit Administration, U.S. Department of Transportation