A MagLev for Pittsburgh?

Why is it that certain technologies inspire such religious passion in people? A wacky proposal to spend billions of dollars building a maglev rail line from Pittsburgh Airport through downtown Pittsburgh to one of its suburbs has enough traction that the Pennsylvania House Transportation Committee recently held hearings on it.

Someone might be excused for thinking that maglev would be the solution to traffic problems around the airports in Atlanta, Dallas, or other fast-growing regions. But Pittsburgh? Which, as Wendell Cox notes, is the only major U.S. urban area that is losing population? What is the point? Evidently, the point is to spend lots of money, which seems to be the name of the game for politicians — especially in Pennsylvania.

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Back in the Air Again

Today the Antiplanner is making a quick round trip to Boise to speak at an Idaho Freedom Foundation luncheon about streetcars. The event will take place at the Old Spaghetti Factory at 610 W. Idaho Street.

The location is a bit ironic as Spaghetti Factories all feature a streetcar as one of their built-in antiques, although in Boise’s case it is a replica. It is doubly ironic as the first paid job the Antiplanner ever had was helping to restore the streetcar that would be put in the very first Spaghetti Factory, which opened in Portland in 1969. That job resulted from the fact that I had been volunteering for the Oregon Electric Railway Historical Society, which at that time operated in a little town in the Oregon Coast Range called Glenwood. (It has since moved to Brooks, just off I-5 north of Salem.)
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In any case, if you are in Boise, I hope to see you at the luncheon.

More Transit Data

Recently, the Federal Transit Administration added Historical Data Files to the National Transit Database. These files include operating and capital expenses, trips, passenger miles, and other data for all federally funded transit agencies from 1991 through 2007.

I downloaded the files and put all the ones that were important to me — operating expenses, capital expenses, fare, vehicle revenue miles, vehicle revenue hours, directional route miles, trips, and passenger miles — on separate worksheets of a single spreadsheet (4.4 MB Excel file). All of the years in the columns of all of the worksheets are identical, and the agencies and modes in all of the rows are also identical unless you resort them.

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Boston Transit System Near Collapse

“The Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority [MBTA] is in danger of collapsing under its own operating expenses and debt obligations, to the point that it can’t even pay for repairs that are vital to basic safety,” reports the Boston Globe. That conclusion is based on an official review of the MBTA that Governor Deval Patrick entrusted to former John Hancock CEO David D’Alessandro.

Up through the 1990s, the MBTA was funded by the state, with the agency effectively presenting a bill for its deficits to the legislature each year. Concerned that this failed to give transit officials incentives to control costs, the legislature in 1999 decided to give MBTA a fixed 20 percent share of state sales tax revenues and told it to operate out of those revenues. This was supposed to lead to reduced operating costs and greater investments in the long-term health of the system.

As the D’Alessandro report documents, this isn’t what happened. First, most costs, such as fuel, were outside of MBTA’s control. Even costs that were under MBTA’s control, such as payroll, ended up increasing far faster than planned. Meanwhile, the sales taxes that were supposed to fund MBTA’s deficits fell short of expectations. The result, over an eight-year period, was a $558 million shortfall.

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Smart Growth at the Polls

National news reports of last Tuesday’s election focused on the New Jersey and Virginia governor’s races and the congressional race in upstate New York. But smart growth and rail transit played a role in several local races.

First, Peter Brown, a candidate for mayor in Houston, had made smart growth the centerpiece of his campaign. A member of the city council, Brown put more than $3 million of his spouse’s money into the race and polls favored him to win a plurality of voters, which would have put him into a runoff with the second out of four major candidates if Brown didn’t win an outright majority.

As it turned out, Brown came in third after another city official (who happens to be gay) and a black civil rights activist. Opinions vary on why the results differed from the polls — Brown got only 22% when the polls said at least 24% were for him, while the other candidates all got more than polled — but at least this is not a ringing endorsement for smart growth.

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The Ultimate Transportation Antiplanning Book

This is a bit premature, but booksellers such as Amazon and reviewers such as the Globe and Mail have already let the cat out of the bag. So I might as well announce the forthcoming publication of a new book: Gridlock: Why We’re Stuck in Traffic and What to Do About It. This book is to transportation planning what The Best-Laid Plans is to government planning in general.

Regular readers of the Antiplanner will be familiar with some of the arguments in the book: Mobility is valuable, and the personal mobility provided by the automobile is not only convenient and inexpensive, it is available to nearly every family in developed countries. Mass forms of transportation such as intercity trains and urban transit cannot substitute for the automobile, so efforts to restrict automobility can cause grave harm to society.

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Employment Up, Transit Ridership Down

Transit ridership has fallen in 2009, which the American Public Transportation Association blames mainly on the recession. But in Washington, DC, where the economy is doing well thanks to the growth of big government, ridership has fallen by 3 percent, leading to serious financial problems for Washington Metro.

Yet the financial problems described in the above article barely scratch the surface. As the FTA noted in a report last spring, Washington Metro and rail transit agencies in five other cities — New York, Boston, Chicago, Philadelphia, and San Francisco — collectively have a $50 billion maintenance backlog. TRUTH: There are three different phases of chiropractic care – Saving Money on your Overall Health Care Costs Thirty-one million Americans have lower back pain at any given time. deeprootsmag.org cialis online overnight Testosterone is the male sex hormone that guides the functioning of excessive proteins that is necessary for plenty of cancer on line cialis cells. What a joy when the vision is buy levitra professional corrected, sight clear. Chocolate is a top supplement for aphrodisiac. 3. cialis tablets 100mg At current rates of spending on maintenance, says the report, these rail systems will continue to deteriorate. This explains situations like trains catching on fire.

Great Example of Government Planning

Oregon Governor Kunlongoski wanted to give tax breaks to companies building windmills. The Oregon Department of Energy estimated the tax breaks would cost the state $13 million in foregone revenues over the first two years. The governor said that number was too big, so officials told the legislature they would cost only $1.2 million.

Flickr photo by qousqous.
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The resulting “tax incentives are now among the nation’s richest.” How much did they end up costing? $167 million in the first two years — nearly 13 times the secret projections and 140 times what they told the legislature. In the second two years, they anticipate the cost will be $243 million.

As someone commented on fark.com, this “seems like a win-win.” Liberals should make be happy because we have more windmills and conservatives should be happy because the state has less money. Maybe if Oregon gets enough windmills, the state will wither away.

Stuck in the 1960s

Each year, about one out of 40 households receive a letter from the Census Bureau demanding that they fill out an American Community Survey asking such nosy questions as how much money each person in the household earns each year, how they heat their house, and whether they have a flush toilet. Though some have suggested that people should boycott the decennial census as too “intrusive,” the Antiplanner is a voracious consumer of census data, and so I was proud to receive and fill out the 28-page survey form form this year.

This survey is an annual extension of the Census Bureau’s so-called long form, which has been given to one out of six households each decennial census since at least 1960 (including the Antiplanner’s in 2000). As I filled out the 2009 form, it occurred to me that some of the questions have not been significantly updated since 1960.

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