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Monthly Archives: December 2007

Did Urban Planners Cause the Next Recession?

By | | News commentary
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The New York Times asks six economists, “Are we in a recession?” Of course, they don’t agree: one says, “the American economy is slipping into its second post-bubble recession in seven years.” Another says, “as to the factual question of whether we are in a recession given the data in hand, the unambiguous answer is no.” A third says, “Nobody knows.”

If we are entering a recession, most agree that the housing crisis is the cause. And the evidence is overwhelming that the housing crisis was caused by urban planning.

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Light Rail Follies #5: An Objective Panel

By | | Transportation
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The Honolulu city council wants to build a rail line. Yet many people in Honolulu think this would be a waste of money, and they are pushing for high-occupancy toll lanes, that can be used by autos and bus-rapid transit, instead. So, to cover its you-know-what, the city council plans to create an “objective panel” of five advisers who will review the alternatives and select the final plan.

Who will be on the panel? A list of people being considered includes a vice president of Bechtel, a former vice president of Siemens, a former Parsons Brinckerhoff planner, and numerous employees or former employees of various transit agencies, nearly all of which run some form of rail transit.

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Light Rail Follies #4: Dallas Builds On Time, Under Budget

By | | Transportation
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Dallas Area Rapid Transit (DART) says that a light-rail line that was supposed to cost $988 million will actually cost $1.88 billion. The first phase of the “orange” line to Irving, Texas, was supposed to be completed in 2011, but due to “unforeseen” increases in costs, DART will delay that by at least a year. Eventually, the line is supposed to reach DFW Airport, but that depends on whether DART can scrape up enough money to pay for it.

Click on map to view or download a larger version PDF (308KB).

DART blames those evil Indians and Chinese, who are not only taking our jobs and decorating our children’s toys with lead paint, they are consuming the steel and concrete we need by building highways. Don’t they know the age of the automobile is over and they should be building light rail instead? In any case, DART claims its experts could not have predicted this and so shouldn’t be blamed. Of course, that is exactly why transit agencies shouldn’t plan rail construction projects — they can’t predict the real costs and so almost always end up over budget.

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Light Rail Follies #3: Seattle Jumps on the Streetcar Bandwagon

By | | News commentary, Transportation
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Not content with building the most expensive light-rail line in the world, Seattle has to keep up with its Northwest neighbor, Portland, by opening a streetcar line — the unfortunately named South Lake Union Trolley (SLUT). Although this line is only opening today, they are already talking about building more.

Testing the SLUT.Flickr photo by Choconancy.

Streetcars are so insipid that their advocates barely even claim that they have anything to do with transportation. Instead, they are supposed to stimulate economic development — though the only evidence of that is from Portland, which just happened to offer hundreds of millions of dollars of subsidies to developers along its streetcar line. Especially when you consider that many of those subsidies went to the construction of parking garages, can anyone really think that the streetcar had anything to do with the developments?

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Denver Light Rail Service Interrupted by Coal Train

By | | News commentary
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A Union Pacific coal train derailed in the path of adjacent light-rail tracks and a Denver light-rail train ran into one of the derailed cars. No one was injured, but the Union Pacific says it may be 36 hours before the line is cleared. In the meantime, rail riders will be bused around the accident.

A slide show shows the wintry conditions in which the accident took place. The light-rail cars are shown only in the second half of the show.
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Of course, buses don’t have this problem. If a bus is involved in an accident, other buses can go around. Rail lines don’t have such easy options, which is one more reason to rely on low-cost buses instead of high-cost rails.

Light Rail Follies #2: 20th Anniversary

By | | Transportation
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The nation’s worst-performing light-rail system celebrated its 20th anniversary a few days ago, and in honor of the occasion the San Jose Mercury News published a review that tries, but fails, to be positive.

Thanks to the high cost of light rail and the foolish decisions of the Valley Transportation Authority’s, the article notes, VTA is forced to cut bus service again this January. VTA is actually considering spending $334 million extending one of its lines in a project that is projected to attract less than 2,200 riders a day.

The average U.S. light-rail car carries 26 people, but the average San Jose light-rail car carries less than 15 people.
Flickr photo by skew-t.

Today’s situation “is a long way from transit heaven,” the article admits, pointing out that — thanks to previous service cuts — bus ridership dropped by more than a third in the early 2000s and hasn’t come close to recovering since.

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The Big O Covers the Antiplanner

By | | Housekeeping
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Light Rail Follies #1: State Troopers Ride Max

By | | Transportation
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We have a spate of light-rail follies this week. First up: Crime on Portland’s “MAX” light rail has gotten so bad that, in November, Oregon’s governor directed state police to ride the rails regularly to protect passengers from assaults. “I am absolutely adamant that its citizens feel safe at all times in using a fine mass transit system,” said the governor.

Grateful representatives of TriMet, Portland’s transit agency, expressed confidence that the troopers would be able to solve the gang-related crime problems that have plagued the light-rail system. The troopers “will allow us to better work out a long-term solution with local law enforcement people,” said TriMet’s public services director.

While potential passengers might look upon this action with relief, the only problem is that it happened in November, 1988. When TriMet opened the light-rail line in 1986, it eliminated its transit police because it did not have enough money to both operate light rail and offer passenger security. The light rail gave drug dealers and other inner-city criminals easy access to the suburbs, and soon they were intimidating and assaulting riders.

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Transit Agency Head Feels Sorry for Taxpayers

By | | Transportation
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The head of St. Louis Metro, Larry Salci (previously) says he feels “disappointment for the taxpayers” because he lost a multi-million-dollar lawsuit over cost overruns against the company that built his latest light-rail line. I’ll bet he does.

If he cares so much about taxpayers, why is he asking them to pay an additional half-cent sales tax so that he can build more light-rail lines (which will no doubt have their own cost overruns)? It is not as if the recent line is all that successful. As the chart below shows, the opening of the line in 2001 was followed by a decline in bus ridership but virtually no increase in rail ridership.

Click for a larger view. The thin red line represents route miles of light rail. The black line is miles of driving.

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Anti-Sprawl Planners Caused the Housing Bubble

By | | Regional planning
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Easy credit fed the flame of the recent housing bubble. But, as a paper published today by the Cato Institute shows, the flame that inflated the bubble was first ignited by anti-sprawl plans that created artificial housing shortages in many American cities and states. If planning had not boosted median housing prices to several times median family incomes, few homebuyers would have had to resort to sub-prime mortgages.

Click to download the report.

The Cato paper shows that a housing bubble really only took place in a dozen or so states. In the remaining states, increases in housing prices were relatively modest. For example, from 2000 to 2006 prices in California and Florida grew by more than 130 percent, while prices in Texas grew by only 30 percent.

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