Americans want high-speed rail, as long as someone else pays for it. States are chuffed upset, for example, because the federal government now says it wants the states to put up 20 percent of the capital cost. The original Federal Railroad Administration grant guidelines issued back in 2008 suggested that the feds might pay all of the costs. Though they added that states that provided matching funds might be more likely to get federal grants, no doubt some states feel betrayed by this change of policy.
Someone is going to say, “but the federal government paid 90 percent of the cost of interstate freeways, so why will it only pay 80 percent of the cost of rail?” The crucial difference is that both the federal and the state shares of the interstates were paid out of gas taxes, in other words, user fees. (Though called a “tax,” the gas tax was a user fee because it was imposed only on purchasers of gasoline–98 percent of which was used for driving–and because state gas taxes from the start, and federal gas taxes after 1956, were dedicated to highways.)
The interstates were also built on a pay-as-you-go basis: no borrowing in anticipation of future federal gas tax revenues. This introduced feedback into the system: if people didn’t drive, there was no money to build roads. That’s why it took longer than expected to complete the systems: not because people didn’t drive on the interstates–they drove on them like crazy–but because neither Congress nor the states indexed gas taxes to inflation.
The New York Times loves to tell stories of people who got off the “work-spend treadmill” by selling off all but about 100 personal items and moving into a 400-square-foot studio apartment in Portland. Even the Wall Street Journal has jumped on board by telling the heartwarming story of someone who bought and remodeled a small bungalow in Portland.
Actually, they didn’t exactly remodel it. Instead, they tore it down and built this 7,600-square-foot house complete with a wine cellar, sauna, and lap pool. But the good news is that the owners feel the home is too ostentatious, so they are selling it and plan to buy a smaller house in Portland. And a house in Hawaii. They are also keeping their condo in San Francisco.
Everyone agrees that, by lowering credit requirements, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac played an important role in the recent financial crisis. Now the Obama administration has promised to reform those “government-sponsored enterprises” (GSEs).
However, as faithful Antiplanner ally Ron Utt warns, Obama’s idea of reform is more focused on changing American lifestyles than on preventing more financial debacles. Administration officials speak darkly of the “underside to homeownership” and hint that there are some people who should rent, not own. According to Utt, the hidden agenda is to promote more compact cities.
The Antiplanner has never considered parking “subsidies” to be the serious problem that Donald Shoup thinks they are. At the same time, there is nothing wrong with cities pricing curbside parking at market rates. Toward that end, San Francisco’s plan to install parking meters whose rates vary depending on demand sounds just fine.
Unfortunately, the initial program is rather anemic, with rates varying no more than once a month. Instead, the city should allow rates to vary by the hour so that prices are always high enough to allow people to find a few vacant parking spaces when they need them (and are willing to pay for them). Would this lead hordes of people to switch to mass transit? Probably not. But it would help relieve traffic congestion in San Francisco and other crowded cities.
Tualatin, a distant suburb of Portland, is the proud owner of three large and expensive bells that may never toll (there were supposed to be four, but one was stolen). The bells were purchased with TIF (tax-increment finance) money as a part of a $12 million subsidy to Tualatin Commons, a New Urbanist development. But the city ran out of subsidy before it could build a tower for the bells.
A proposal to extend the urban-renewal district for another 25 years, which would have provided the millions needed for a bell tower and other inane projects, was killed when the local fire district objected to the loss of its tax revenues and other taxpayers agreed that the project was frivolous. But the city had already bought the bells for $150,000 (which includes architectural drawings for the bell tower), so now it is stuck with four brass elephants.
Instead of giving up our cars, says the August issue of National Geographic, we can simply scrub the skies of CO2. The article describes a process of removing carbon from the atmosphere that is technologically feasible. Though it is hard to guess how expensive it will be, the article suggests it will be a lot cheaper than dramatically altering the way we live.
“Jet travel would become guilt free again,” reports the magazine. “We could keep our cars and gas stations–no need for a whole new hydrogen- or electric-powered infrastructure. Subversive thought: We could keep our lifestyles.” Interesting that they think the status quo is subversive.
“That’s historically what we’ve done,” says physicist Klaus Lackner. “We’ve run into environmental issues that seemed insurmountable–and we’ve found a solution.” The Antiplanner doesn’t necessarily endorse the scrubbing process described in the article, but does endorse the sentiment that there are less-expensive ways of solving problems than trying to force people to give up their mobility. The most interesting point is that this is coming from a mainstream magazine that has had a strong environmental bent in recent years.
Here’s a heartwarming story: Late last year, Clayton County, Georgia (a suburban Atlanta county) decided to terminate its subsidized bus service to Atlanta, saying it was costing $10 million a year but only bringing in $2.5 million in revenue. Despite protests from bus riders, the service was duly ended on March 31, leaving many riders worried that they would not be able to reach their jobs.
What’s so heartwarming about that? Starting this week, a private party has started a new bus service following some of the same routes as the Clayton County buses. Fares will be $3.50, compared with average fare collections on the County buses of about $1.10 in 2008. The Antiplanner extends best wishes to QuickTransit.
In an article worthy of The Onion, the Washington Post proclaims that “Dupont Circle escalator incident prompts Metro to take action.” The incident in question was the breakdown of the giant, 130-foot escalators at the Dupont Circle Metro station, which forced patrons to walk or, in some cases, crawl over handrails to adjacent escalators. The escalator problems were compounded by inadequacies in Metro’s radio network that prevented employees from communicating with one another about the breakdown.
Video by Twitter user @giveit2lloyd; view the original here.
The Post noted that Metro’s interim general manager, Richard Sarles, admits that “Metro had failed to maintain the conveyances adequately. ‘These escalators are old; they have not been kept in a state of good repair, so we’re behind the curve on that,’” said Sarles. Sarles took over from the previous general manager, John Catoe, who resigned in disgrace on April 1, saying he was “taking the fall” for the deaths of 9 people in a maintenance-related accident last year.
So what great action is Metro taking to deal with the escalators it has failed to keep in a state of good repair? It is providing bullhorns to station employees so they can do better crowd control and communicate with one another the next time the escalators break down. That’s proactive!
Delta and Northwest have merged, and now United and Continental are merging. So naturally someone raises the specter that airfares are going to go up. “Concentration in any industry leads to higher prices,” says someone who claims to have analyzed the airline industry for 40 years.
I don’t know what industry they have been analyzing, but it isn’t the one I’ve observed over the past 40 years. The problem for the airlines is that the cost of starting a new airline is low. Sure, the planes are expensive, but you can lease those. Once you have those, you don’t have to pay for air space, you don’t have to build airports, and you don’t have to build your own air traffic control system. As a result, for every airline that disappears through bankruptcy or merger, another one springs up.
Though not relevant to the rest of this post, this plane is not only painted like a salmon, it is a piece of pork. As a favor to the Alaska fishing industry, Alaska Congressman Don Young wrote a half-million-dollar earmark into the 2005 transportation bill to paint this plane to advertise Alaska salmon. Photo courtesy Alaska Airlines.
A new census of downtown Portland employers reveals that, for the first time since the annual census began in 2001, the number of downtown workers taking transit to work exceeded the number driving in 2009. This isn’t because the number taking transit to work increased — it declined by 6 percent — but because the number biking and walking to work grew by 170 percent.
You can look at all the census data for 2001 through 2006 in the 2006 report. The 2007, 2008, and 2008 reports contain commuting data only for those years. These data were collected by the Portland Business Alliance.
The increase in biking and walking to work accounts for almost 90 percent of the reduction in driving to work, and some might say this is a victory for Portland planners. But a comparison of the downtown census data with U.S. census data for the city of Portland and Portland urban area in 2000 and 2008 reveal some problems. (Note: The U.S. Census did not report commuting data in its 2001 survey, and the 2009 survey data are not out yet, so I am using 2000 and 2008 to compare with the downtown census’ 2001 and 2009 data.)
