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Monthly Archives: January 2010

LaHood Eliminates Cost-Efficiency Rules

By | | News commentary, Transportation
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Last week, Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood announced that federal transit grants would now focus on “livability.” Buried beneath this rhetoric is LaHood’s decision to eliminate the only efforts anyone ever made to make sure transit money isn’t wasted on urban monuments that contribute little to transportation.

Back in 2005, then-Secretary Mary Peters stunned the transit world when she adopted a “cost-effectiveness” rule for federal transit grants to new rail projects. In order to qualify, transit agencies had to receive a “medium” cost-effectiveness rating from the FTA, meaning they had to cost less than about $24 for every hour they would save transportation users (either by providing faster service to transit riders or by reducing congestion to auto drivers). This wasn’t much of a requirement: a true cost-efficiency calculation would rank projects that cost $0.50 per hour much higher than projects that cost $23.50 per hour; under Peters’ rule, they were all ranked the same. But any projects that went over the $24 threshold (which varied with inflation — by 2009 it was up to $24.50) were ruled out.

After throwing various temper tantrums, transit agencies responded in one of four ways. Those close to the $24 threshold went back and cooked their books to either slightly reduce the cost or slightly increase the amount of time the project was supposed to save. Those that were hopelessly far away from the $24 threshold, but had powerful representatives in Congress, obtained exemptions from the rule. These included BART to San Jose, the Dulles rail line, and Portland’s WES commuter train. Those that didn’t have the political clout either shelved their projects or, in a few cases, tried to fund them without federal support.

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Mercury News Gets It Wrong Again

By | | News commentary, Transportation
6 Comments

The San Jose Mercury-News has long been a booster of ridiculously expensive rail transit projects such as Bart to San Jose. This week, it has a five-part series on the woes facing Bay Area transit agencies.

First, it tells us that, thanks to lower gas prices combined with higher transit fares, “commuters are leaving mass transit for their cars.” Maybe that wouldn’t have been a problem if the paper hadn’t encouraged the region to build such a high-cost transit network.

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Surprise: Another Light-Rail Line Is Over Its Budget

By | | News commentary, Transportation
9 Comments

“Norfolk leaders want an audit to figure out why its light rail project has gone $108 million over budget,” reports the Associated Press. The city doesn’t need to spend money on an audit. The reason for the overrun is obvious: It’s a rail-transit construction project.

As if that isn’t enough, the line was planned by Parsons Brinckerhoff (PB), the company that planned most of the rail transit lines that have gone over budget in the past 50 years. PB also planned and helped build the Big Dig, another urban-planning project that went way over budget.

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Driving, Transit, Cycling Down

By | | News commentary, Transportation
9 Comments

Any smart-growther enjoying a moment of schadenfreude over recent reports of a decline in driving have to recognize that transit ridership is also down. Moreover, the city of Portland, which likes to think of itself as the bicycle capital of the United States, reports that cycling is down as well.

The actual numbers are revealing. Portland estimates that cycling in 2009 was 5 percent less than in 2008. The American Public Transportation Association says that transit ridership in the first nine months of 2009 was 3.8 percent less than the same period in 2008. Meanwhile, driving the first nine months of 2009 is actually 0.2 percent greater than the same period in 2008.

If it is greater, then why the reports of a decline in driving? They are based on a rolling twelve-month average, and the twelve months ending in October, 2009 included the months immediately following the panic and crash of 2008. But thanks to lower fuel prices, 2009 beat 2008 in five of the first nine months of each year despite unemployment.

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HSR as Wasteful in U.K. as in U.S.

By | | Transportation
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Rail advocates argue that high-speed rail makes the most sense in 300- to 600-mile corridors, so some think that the United States is too big for it to work. Conversely, English columnist Simon Jenkins argues that Britain is too small for high-speed rail to make sense: what the country needs, he says, is more reliable trains, not faster ones. “In rail terms, England is one huge metropolis in which the chief constraint on time is not technology but the number of stops.”

Jenkins writes with authority (and a bit of sour grapes), as he was on the board of British Rail in the 1980s before it was privatized and also on the board of London Transport. He thinks the “pseudo-privatization” of rail services has made it less reliable and more bureaucratic than ever (against which it has to be pointed out that Britain is the only European country where public transit is gaining market share).

But his arguments against high-speed rail are right on: it is a “gargantuan project” that “will cost a lifetime of money” and mainly “serve a few rich travelers.” Nor is it “particularly green.” Instead of investing billions in building brand new tracks, the money should be spent on making the existing tracks work better.

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Gee, Krugman’s Graphs Look Like the Antiplanner’s

By | | News commentary, Planning Disasters
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Comparing housing prices in Los Angeles with those in Atlanta using a graph very similar to those used by the Antiplanner, Paul Krugman remakes the point that the United States did not have one housing bubble: it had many. And, he adds, the bubbles were caused by land-use regulation, while places that did not have government constraints on land did not have bubbles.

The Economist makes the point, previously made by the Antiplanner (on p. 115 of Best-Laid Plans, that volatile housing prices reduces mobility and increases unemployment rates. When home prices drop and homebuyers find themselves “underwater,” some won’t leave even for better jobs elsewhere because they can’t afford to lose the house.
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Unfortunately, most of the people who commented on the Economist article conclude that this means people are better off renting than buying. This may be true if you live in a region infested by smart-growth planners. But in relatively free housing markets, buying remains better for most of those who can afford the down payment — not because of the economic return you get from buying but because homeowners enjoy a higher quality of life.

The News Report from Hell

By | | News commentary
4 Comments

This is not really about antiplanning, but as a rail fan I am offended by this story about Amtrak weather delays. Far be it from the Antiplanner to defend Amtrak, but the NBC News reporter who wrote it just has his facts wrong.

He says the California Zephyr arrived in Chicago “almost 24 hours late” after a journey of “nearly five days” from Sacramento. “Almost 24 hours” turns out to be 19 hours, but the train normally takes less than 50 hours to go from Sacramento to Chicago, so how could the trip have taken five days?

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FasTracks Update: Costs Down, Still Can’t Afford It

By | | News commentary, Transportation
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If there is one thing Denver’s Regional Transit District (RTD) has become famous for, it is making economic forecasts that are proven wrong a year later. Back in 2004, it projected that it could build 119 miles of rail lines for $4.7 billion. By 2007, the cost was up to $6.2 billion, then $7.9 billion. In 2008, it had declined to $7.0 billion (which everyone but the Antiplanner published as $6.9 billion — but it was really $6.952, which rounds up to $7.0).

The latest projection estimates that, thanks to the recession, the cost will be only $6.5 billion (details here). But the other side of the projection — revenues to pay for it — are even more dismal, with revenues now projected to be $2.5 billion less than originally expected.

In fact, the latest projections indicate that, even if RTD manages to build all of the new rail lines, it won’t have enough money to run them. Of course, RTD and the rail nuts who support it just see this as all the more reason why Denver-area voters should agree to another tax increase. Let’s hope they wise up this time.

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Transportation Apartheid or Victim-Industrial Complex?

By | | News commentary, Transportation
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A lawsuit in a federal court charges that Chicago’s Regional Transportation Authority (RTA), which distributes funds to three different transit agencies, has systematically discriminated against minorities when it allowed the Chicago Transit Authority (CTA) buses and trains (which are mostly used by blacks and Latinos) to decline while it kept up on and expanded suburban Metra commuter trains (which are mostly used by whites). This case is similar to a suit in Los Angeles that was settled when the transit agency agreed to restore bus service to minority neighborhoods, and an on-going suit in the San Francisco Bay Area (third item down).

Many Chicago elevated lines are poorly maintained.
Flickr photo by Ateller Teee.

Civil rights attorney Robert Bullard calls transportation policies that favor white suburbanites over inner-city minorities “transportation apartheid.” But a conservative blogger suggests that the Chicago lawsuit may be just “a racist shakedown perpetrated by the Victim Industrial Complex.” Which is correct?

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Airport Insecurity

By | | News commentary, Transportation
27 Comments

Someone walked the wrong way through a gate at Newark Airport and the Transportation Security Administration shut terminal C down for six hours. Someone put honey in their checked luggage at Bakersfield Airport and TSA shut the airport down for several hours. A dog barked when he sniffed an airline-owned suitcase and TSA evacuated the Minneapolis airport. Meanwhile, a kid in St. Louis loses his Christmas present because it looks a little like plastic explosive.

All of these are overreactions to the “Christmas bomber.” As many have pointed out, no one has any idea whether these increased security measures make sense — and many others doubt that they do.

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