Greetings from Asbury Station

Here we go again. I just read about another rail boondoggle in today's Chicago Tribune. This time the idea is to put a new station on the CTA Yellow Line (formerly known as the Skokie Swift.) This particular line only has stations at each end with a third station being built at Oakton now. At a gut level, it seems intuitive that adding more stations might make sense. But now I couldn't disagree more. The Evanston Yellow Line Station Engineering Feasibility Study has recommended building at new station at Asbury Ave. in Evanston.

Alas, let's look at the numbers. Just for simplicity, I'll use the 2010 numbers as they did in the study as presented yesterday -- no inflation and no population growth. The operating and maintenance costs are projected at $913,000 annually, and the capital (building) costs are projected at $23 million ($23,000,000). The forecasted ridership? 263,000 annually. Is that a good deal? Well, that's $3.47 for every rider at the station just on operating costs. The cash fare is $2.25, so that's clearly not going to cover the cost. (Not to mention that the average fare will be something less than $2.25 due to discounted fares.) And those capital costs? Assuming a 30-year life span, which is probably more than generous, let's add on another $2.32. (Again, I'm not accounting for discounting, but this is a back-of-the-envelope thing.) So that brings us to $5.79 for every rider. Oh my. For far less, we can probably hire cabbies to give them a ride directly to the Howard station (at least if we can get 2 or 3 to share a cab). At least I haven't found that any money has been committed yet -- other than to studies.

Maybe there's some reason why taxpayers should support this kind of mess, but I don't get it. Do you?