It is an article of faith among urban & transportation planners that auto travel is very expensive and heavily subsidized to boot. They use this claim over and over to justify increased subsidies to transit.
Fortunately, we have very good information on the actual cost of driving, the actual costs of transit, and the actual subsidies to both. We also have reasonable information about the social costs of driving and can speculate a bit about the social costs of transit.
Many libertarians argue that state governments do a better job than the federal government, and local governments are the best of all. Anyone who has dealt with a city council or planning commission, however, soon realizes that cities can be as inefficient and undemocratic as the feds.
Advocates of small government argue that government would work better if only it weren’t so large. Yet students of nineteenth century American history know that the federal government, though tiny then compared with today, was subject to proportionately as much pork barrel and waste as it is today.
After more than three decades looking at government and government planning, I’ve come to realize the flaw in these arguments. And so I’ve formulated the Antiplanner’s Law of Good Government.
Congratulations to the American transit industry for managing to carry more than 10 billion transit trips in 2006, the first year it has done so since 1957.* Naturally, the American Public Transportation Association (APTA) considers this to be proof that we need to funnel even more subsidies into transit.
“This significant ridership milestone is part of a multi-year trend as more and more Americans ride public transit,” says APTA’s president. “This milestone represents 10 billion reasons to increase local and federal investment in public transportation.”
Rapid growth? Click the chart to download a spreadsheet with the actual numbers, which are from APTA Transit Factbooks.
The momentum is growing for using tollroads, particularly with tolls that vary according to the amount of traffic (congestion pricing), to solve urban congestion problems. New congestion-priced toll roads in Minneapolis and Denver have joined such roads in California, and plans are underway to open more in many other cities and states.
In most cases, the revenue from the tolls goes to pay for the roads. In some cases, a regional tollroads authority collects the tolls and uses them to construct new roads and maintain the existing ones.
Electronic toll gate in Singapore, which pioneered congestion pricing.
The Oregonian celebrates the conversion of a dumpy 1950s ranch home into a beautiful craftsman-style home. To the owners, the home’s big advantage was that it was on a half-acre lot.
Making this out of that. Photo from the Oregonian.
The reconstructed home has twice the floor space, a river-rock fireplace, and an island kitchen with a gas stove surrounded by tile and marble. (Go to the article to see more photos.)
Soon after (and possibly even before) Columbus sailed to the New World, Portuguese and Basque fishing boats were catching cod in the Grand Banks, the shallow seas around Newfoundland. By the 1960s, fishers were removing as many as 800,000 tons of cod from the Grand Banks each year. But in 1992, this seemingly inexhaustable fishery collapsed, forcing Canada to declare a moratorium to allow the fish to recover. No such recovery has taken place, and cod remain nearly non-existent in the area.
Part of the problem was that the Canadian government allowed the use of bottom trawlers that scraped the sea floor and destroyed the habitat vital for young cod. But a new book, Useless Arithmetic: Why Environmental Scientists Can’t Predict the Future, places even more of the blame on the goverment planners in the Canadian Department of Fisheries and Oceans.
The Atlantic Dawn, the world’s largest fishing trawler, can catch enough fish on one voyage to produce 18 million meals.
Andrés Duany — who is a native of Cuba — observes that New Orleans should not be considered the most corrupt city in America, but the least corrupt city in the Caribbean. But, he warns, the city is in danger of losing its Caribbean soul since many of the people who are key to that soul are not moving back.
Many of New Orleans’ low-income neighborhoods were built decades ago, when building codes were not as strict as they are today. Rebuilding them to meet modern codes will cost far more than their former occupants can afford.
Many New Orleans neighborhoods remain unoccupied because their former residents cannot afford to rebuild to modern zoning codes. Flickr photo by lambchops.
When former Portland police chief Tom Potter became the city’s mayor in 2005, he immediately announced “VisionPDX,” an effort to “create a vision for Portland for the next 20 years.” Since the previous mayor, who grew up in Brooklyn NY, seemed determined to impose her Brooklynesque vision on Portland with or without their consent, many Portlanders jumped at the opportunity to submit comments to Potter’s visioning program.
In all, the city received 13,000 responses to its questionaires about a vision for Portland, and they don’t offer much comfort to those who praise Portland’s goal of becoming a compact city. Unfortunately, VisionPDX hasn’t yet posted either the answers to the questionaires or its analysis of them on its web page.
But news reports indicate that the analysis finds that “many Portlanders are deeply worried the city is moving backward” and in particular that it “is becoming unaffordable.”
Today’s Washington Post has a story that Oregon is “rethinking” ballot measure 37, the property-rights measure that voters approved by a 61-to-39 margin in 2004. But all the article really points to is the gripes of a few planning advocates.
The article points out that claims under measure 37 (which allows landowners to ask for compensation or waiver if land-use rules reduce the value of their property) cover less than 1 percent of the land in the state. Yet some blogger interprets this as “For Sale: Oregon, Most of It.” I don’t know where that blogger learned arithmetic, but when I went to school, “less than 1 percent” is not “most of it.”
FasTracks, the $4.7 billion project that aimed to build six new rail transit lines in the Denver metropolitan area, now looks like it will be a $6.5 billion project at least. Transit agency documents obtained by the Denver Post reveal that the latest cost estimates for every single rail line are an average of 64-percent greater than when voters approved the project in 2004.
A light-rail train slowly makes its way through downtown Denver.
According to the Post, the overruns “include almost $1 billion in design and engineering, $345 million in construction materials, $56 million in the price of rail cars and nearly $600 million in unexplained “contingency” costs, among other elements.” RTD, the transit agency, says it thinks this is high, but agrees that the cost will definitely be higher than the 2004 estimates. (The numbers in the Denver Post story are in 2006 dollars, while the $4.7 billion total is in “year of expenditure” dollars.)
