The Antiplanner

Normally, the Antiplanner doesn’t have time for on-line games. But here is a great on-line game illustrating the insanity of housing in Vancouver, BC, which Wendell Cox says is the least-affordable housing market in the English-speaking world. Of course, the reason it is unaffordable is that Vancouver adopted a growth-management plan in the 1970s that put 70 percent of the land in the region off limits to development.

It appears the Antiplanner is not the only cyclist who is skeptical of Portland.

In a trip sponsored by the Kansas Chapter of Americans for Prosperity, the Antiplanner is speaking tonight at the Bank of America Center in Wichita, a city that is just discovering the wonders and costs of modern urban planning. I’ll be speaking to some groups there Friday as well.

Flickr photo by Brent Danley.

If you are in the area, you can find more information here. I look forward to seeing you there.

Most DC visitors and residents consider the Washington Metrorail system to be a great success. Among them is Zachary Schrag, author of The Great Society Subway: A History of the Washington Metro. But, as Schrag clearly documents, by the standards of Metrorail’s original planners, it is a dismal failure.

Back in 1962, planners projected that a 103-mile rail system would cost less than $800 million — or about $4.6 billion in 2009 dollars. Moreover, they expected that fares would cover all of the operating costs and nearly 80 percent of the capital costs (pp. 53-54).

As it turned out, the actual 103-mile system that was completed in 2001 covers all of the basic routes of that original plan, yet cost $17.6 billion in 2009 dollars, close to four times the initial projection. Fares cover only about 60 percent of operating costs and, of course, none of the capital costs.

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TriMet’s $166 million “Westside Express Service” (WES) commuter rail is a miserable failure. After going 60 percent over budget, it is carrying only about 600 round trips per day. The amortized value of the capital cost alone is enough to buy every one of those commuters a brand-new Toyota Prius every year for the next 30 years. Those Priuses would be cleaner than the WES too.

Click for a larger view. Thanks to Steve Schopp for the photo.

So naturally TriMet wants to “celebrate WES” so much that it is advertising this great project on the back of its buses. Note that it isn’t asking people to actually ride the train, because that would never happen — no offense to Wilsonville, Tualatin, or Tigard, but from a transportation view the train goes from nowhere to nowhere, which kind of explains why hardly anyone rides it.

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Jim DeLong, the former aviation director at Denver International Airport, has a sensible suggestion for RTD: Don’t build a rail transit line to the airport. The airport line, which was originally supposed to cost about $316 million, is now expected to cost $1.2 billion. DeLong says that would be a waste.

Before working in Denver, DeLong directed aviation at the Philadelphia airport, which is connected to downtown and other parts of Phillie by frequent rapid train service. More than 30 million passengers a year use the airport, yet only about 2 million train trips arrive or depart from the airport station, and most of them are airport employees.

DeLong relates that he persuaded SEPTA, the transit agency, and the airport to spend $750,000 promoting the train, but had very little impact on ridership. He concludes that “Men and women who have spent a day or more traveling do not want to wait for a train, even for a short time,” especially when carrying baggage. So he proposes that RTD terminate the East line at Aurora, Denver’s eastern suburb.

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At one of the Antiplanner’s presentations in Houston, a member of the audience representing the Citizens’ Transportation Coalition propsed that Houston’s light rail was a success. I asked how he defined “success,” and his answer seemed to indicate that the fact that it carried lots of riders made it a success.

Wikipedia says Houston’s light rail carries the second-most passengers per route mile of any light-rail line in the country. But many of these trips are short — the average trip is 2.4 miles compared with a national light-rail average of 4.6. Also, Houston’s light-rail line is in the inner city and does not yet reach suburbs where ridership will be light. When measured on a passenger-miles per route mile basis, Houston’s is eighth highest, with Los Angeles’ light rail carrying more than 50 percent more passenger miles per mile.

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Chuck Plunkett, a member of the Denver Post‘s editorial board, has a few choice words to say about light rail. Words like “obsolete” and “a transportation option that our environment can no longer afford.”

The Post must have joined the Antiplanner in the pockets of big oil. As recently as a year ago, Denver’s largest paper was an enthusiastic supporter of rail transit. Plunkett himself says he has “long been a fan of rail.” But after reading the Antiplanner’s analysis of light rail and greenhouse gases, and replicating that analysis using the latest available data, Plunket concludes that “further expanding rail in metro Denver would be an outrage.”

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The first question that should be asked about any public policy is, “Who benefits and who pays?” This can be relevant to tollroads, one of the few ideas that is supported by both smart-growth advocates and mobility supporters.

The difference is that mobility supporters believe in tolls as a way for users to pay for the facilities they use — and, not so incidentally, to give signals to those users about when and where it is particularly expensive to travel — while smart-growth advocates believe in tolls as a way of punishing those who drive and taking their money to spend on transit.

The center lanes are the Dulles Access Road; they are free but go only to the Dulles Airport. The other lanes are the Dulles Tollroad and are heavily used by commuters.

Case in point: Virginia’s Dulles Toll Road, which was once owned by the state of Virginia but lately has been taken over by the Metropolitan Washington Airport Authority. The latter organization is nearly doubling tolls on the highway in order to raise money for a boondoggle of an extension of Metrorail to Dulles Airport.

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Twenty-two subway lines enter downtown (south of 60th street) Manhattan. According to the Metropolitan Transportation Council (New York’s MPO), these subway lines carried some 400,000 people into downtown between 8 and 9 am on a typical day in 2007 (open the “rec sec” sheet of the Subway data sheet).

A blogger asks, “what would it take in terms of auto facilities to replace the morning rush hour carrying capacity of the NYC subway?” He concludes it would take a minimum of 167 new lanes of bridges, tunnels, or other highways into downtown Manhattan. But there are several alternative views of his calculations.

He assumes that the only alternative to subways is autos. But what about buses? Many 40-foot buses can carry 64 passengers (42 sitting, 22 standing, which means a higher proportion sitting than on a subway). Spaced five bus lengths apart, 11 buses per minute can cruise down a highway lane carrying more than 42,000 people per hour. That means fewer than 10 new lanes would be needed to carry the people now taking subways — and those 10 lanes would take up a lot less space than the 22 subway lines.

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