The Antiplanner

The Obama administration is threatening to take back the $3.3 billion high-speed rail grant to California if the state legislature fails to approve the state’s high-speed rail plan by the end of June. Legislators had planned to hold some hearings this summer so they could base their decisions on actual facts rather than politics. Ironically, when California Republicans in Congress proposed to rescind the money, they were told there was no legal way to do it.

The High-Speed Rail Authority’s latest plan cuts Anaheim and Orange County out of the picture, alienating another group of voters and officials. Despite these cuts, the agency still expects to spend $68 billion building from San Francisco to Los Angeles. This is far more than it told voters it would cost when it asked them to approve the plan in 2008, and even if the legislature allows the authority to sell bonds to match the federal grant, the agency has less than 10 percent in hand.

A reporter at the Los Angeles Times did a little arithmetic and calculated that, to complete the first 130-mile segment in the Central Valley by 2017 as planned, the authority will have to spend $3.5 million per day. With the possible exception of war time, this is probably more than any one entity has ever spent on one project before. The implication is that the authority, which hasn’t been able to adequately manage anything yet, doesn’t have the capability of effectively spending that much money.

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One recently revealed aspect of the European debt crisis is the role European passenger trains played in running up national debts. The Greek rail system, for example, has debts of $13 billion, or about 5 percent of Greece’s gross national product. Rail workers get paid so well that it would be cheaper to hire taxis to move passengers, at least if the taxis carried two or more passengers at a time.

Greece spends $1.20 per passenger mile on passenger trains. That’s twice what the U.K. spends, but even the U.K. trains are hardly a model of efficiency considering that driving in the U.S. costs only about 35 cents a vehicle mile, including subsidies to highway. Divide that by however many passengers you think are in the cars to get an average cost per passenger mile.

Spain, meanwhile, went so far overboard in building high-speed rail lines that it recently shut one down because it was attracting only nine passengers a day. That’s what happens when you let politicians decide where the trains should go.

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The Antiplanner will be in Washington, DC this week to release American Nightmare and a new paper on transportation finance. On Tuesday noon, May 14, the Antiplanner will be one of three speakers at a hill briefing sponsored by the Competitive Enterprise Institute on transportation.

At the briefing, the Antiplanner will present a new paper on highway finance arguing that the states should move rapidly to replace gas taxes with vehicle-mile fees. Not only are vehicle-mile fees a more equitable way of paying for roads, they will also do far more than any other policy, including HOT lanes, to relieve traffic congestion.

The paper points out the little-understood fact that congestion has two causes: first when traffic flows exceed maximum roadway capacities and second when those capacities are reduced to well below their maximum levels. As a result, congestion can continue for hours after the moment–which may only be for a few minutes a day–when flows exceed maximum capacities.

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When a president takes a stand on a highly controversial issue like gay marriage in an election year, you know he is doing it solely to motivate his base. How so? The job of the president has nothing to do with who can and cannot get married, so in announcing that he supports gay marriage, President Obama is not announcing that he will or can actually do anything about it.

The Antiplanner thinks of gay marriage as one of three litmus sets for whether someone is a libertarian. Are you fiscally conservative but you support gay marriage and drug decriminalization? Then you are libertarian. Some libertarians disagree with one another on other issues such as abortion, immigration, and the war on terror. But I don’t think anyone would call themselves libertarians if they opposed gay marriage or drug decriminalization.

Drug decriminalization–especially for minor drugs like marijuana–is also supported by most of those on the left. Here is an issue the president can actually do something about, as he commands numerous agencies–the FBI, BATF, DEA, etc.–that enforce federal drug laws. At the very least, he can order those agencies to respect state laws in states that have legalized medical marijuana.

Yet Obama has “massively escalated the federal government’s attacks on medical marijuana businesses,” says the director of the Marijuana Policy Project in the Washington Post. His administration has ramped up the war on pot in Colorado despite the fact that even most Republicans in Colorado support medical marijuana.

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A little-known agency in the Department of Agriculture is an out-of-control destroyer of wildlife, reports investigative journalist Tom Knudson in a lengthy series of articles in the Sacramento Bee. The agency, which calls itself the Wildlife Service, kills hundreds of thousands of animals each year. Thousands of non-target animals, ranging from endangered species to people’s pets, are killed by mistake, and in at least some cases the agency’s response is to shoot, shovel, and shut up.

The sad fact is that this has been going on for many years. Back in 1995, the Antiplanner wrote an in-depth audit of this agency, which was then known as “Animal Damage Control.” Prior to about 1985, this program was part of the Fish & Wildlife Service, but Congress moved it to Agriculture under the not-entirely wrong notion that FWS didn’t really have its heart in indiscriminately killing wildlife.

The so-called Wildlife Service provides an excellent example of why the left should re-examine its notion that “government is good.” This program was created a century ago, yet there was little reason then and less now for the federal government to be involved in wildlife control. At least a few species have come close to extinction thanks to this program, and it should be shut down immediately. Congratulations to Knudson and the Bee for publishing these articles.

Some smart-growth advocates argue that, even though housing costs more in cities than in suburbs, transportation costs in cities are so much lower that the total cost of housing plus transportation is lower. The problem with these claims is that they are based on average transportation costs.

As Steve Polzin, a transportation researcher from the University of South Florida, points out, low-income people spend a lot less on transportation than high-income people. He estimates the people in the top 20 percent spend five or six times as much on driving as people in the bottom 20 percent.

While wealthier people do drive more than low-income people, they don’t drive five or six times as much. Instead, much of the difference in expenditures “lies in the very meaningful differences between new car ownership and the reality that much of America isn’t driving new cars with high depreciation levels.” In other words, only a few people actually buy cars new and then replace them as soon as they’ve paid them off (which is the assumption that AAA makes in its annual cost-of-driving survey).

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The city of Detroit decided not to build a light-rail line down Woodward Avenue, so some private foundations are trying to raise the $137 million to build it instead. Are they nuts? Do they really think this is the best use of their money?

In 1996, the Los Angeles Bus Riders Union forced the county transit agency to restore bus service that had been cut in order to pay for rail service. The Bus Riders Union strongly believes that buses work better than train, but the injunction expired a few years ago and the agency has cut service again. However, the FTA has ordered the transit agency to restore the service.

Tampa voters rejected a light-rail ballot measure in 2010, but the rail nuts think it was only because voters were “confused” about the proposal. One thing that’s clear: the main reason many Tampa officials want rail is they hope it will bring billions of federal dollars pouring into their city.

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Kansas City sold $295 million worth of TIF bonds to revitalize a part of the city known as the Power & Light District. The developer who benefitted from this money says “the development was successful as part of a broader effort to re-energize the city’s downtown.” Unfortunately, tax revenues are less than a third of what was projected, with the result that city taxpayers are having to make up the difference (as if city taxpayers wouldn’t be paying for it anyway).

The city naturally blames the problems on the recession. But recessions happen. Here’s the difference between private developments and government-subsidized developments: If the private developer guesses wrong, only the investors lose. If the government planners guess wrong, every taxpayer in the city or region loses.

The Wall Street Journal article about this boondoggle doesn’t mention it, but Kansas City wants to spend another $100 million on a two-mile-long streetcar line connecting Power & Light with other parts of downtown Kansas City. No doubt that will fix the problem. While they are at it, how about an aerial tramway, maybe a new sports stadium or two? Just what the city taxpayers need: more places to sink their money.

Congress is wrangling over how to spend federal gas taxes, with the Senate wanting to spend about $15 billion per year more than revenues while the House modestly wants to spend only about $10 billion per year more than revenues. But according to the Congressional Budget Office, the money they have to argue about will soon dramatically decline.

Obama’s fuel economy rules, the CBO says, will reduce per-mile fuel consumption faster than the increase in driving. As a result, by 2040 total gas tax revenues will decline by more than 20 percent. That means less money for highways, transit, bike paths, and whatever else Congress wants to spend the so-called Highway Trust Fund on.

The House and Senate conference committee will begin meeting on May 8 to iron out the differences between the bill that passed the Senate and the one that passed the House Transportation Committee but not the full House. Republican members on the House side include Mica (FL), Duncan (TN), Young (AK), Hanna (NY), Shuster (PA), Capito (WV), Crawford (AR), Beutler (WA), Cravaack (MN), Ribble (WI), Buschon (IN), Southerland (FL), Lankford (OK), Camp (MI), Tiberi (OH), Hastings (WA), Bishop (UT), Upton (MI), Whitfield (KY), and Hall (TX). Several of them, including Mica, Shuster, and Young, are known to be fond of pork barrel.

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The Oregonian brags that Portland is “the 10th best city” for transit in the United States. But a close look at the web site doing the ranking reveals this may not be true.

First, they only counted the nation’s 25 largest cities for which they had data. This means cities such as Honolulu and Oakland, both of which are much more transit-friendly than Portland, didn’t even get considered. In addition, “second cities” in urban areas, such as Arlington VA and Long Beach CA didn’t get considered even though they had the data and the cities are among the 25 largest in the United States.

Second, the transit score methodology is based solely on proximity to and frequency of transit routes. Whether those transit routes are actually useful is another story; some may be too slow or not reach many jobs in an urban area.

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