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Monthly Archives: June 2010

More High-Speed Spending

By | | News commentary, Transportation
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Here’s a brilliant idea from a disappointing governator who ran as a fiscal conservative but then helped his state run up tens of billions of dollars of deficits: build a “demonstration” high-speed rail project from Los Angeles to San Diego. The trains would use existing tracks and so would be moderate-speed rail, not true high-speed rail. Schwarzenegger hopes to see it completed before he leaves office so that people can see the benefits of California’s true high-speed rail project that won’t be completed before 2020.

The top speed of Amtrak’s Pacific Surfliner from L.A. to San Diego is 90 mph. Schwarzenegger could spend a billion dollars on this route, but BNSF would still restrict the top speed to 90 mph.
Flickr photo by Snap Man.

Other than the fact that nobody has any money to do what Schwarzenegger proposes to do, one major problem is that the BNSF Railway, whose tracks the trains would use, has a policy that passenger trains may not go more than 90 mph on its tracks. CSX has a similar policy; Norfolk Southern’s limit is 79 mph. Of the nation’s four largest railroads, only the Union Pacific has agreed to allow trains as fast as 110 mph on its tracks, and then only if the government spends billions adding new tracks for both passenger and freight trains to run on.

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Transit Agencies vs. Transit Unions

By | | News commentary, Transportation
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A recent article in the Washington Post highlights new tensions within the transit industry. Most federal transit grants are legally dedicated to capital improvements, but the recession has left most transit agencies short of operating funds, so they have been lobbying Congress to allow them to use more federal funds for operating subsidies.

The main opposition to such legislation, it turns out, comes from what the Post describes as “the biggest transit agencies, such as New York’s MTA and Washington’s Metro.” The Post explains that “The big transit systems argue that letting them use federal funds for their basic operations would reduce their leverage — unions would invoke the funds to seek bigger raises, transit advocates would argue against service cuts, and local and state lawmakers might limit their share of transit funding.”

In reality, this isn’t a tension between big and small agencies; it is a tension between agencies with older rail systems — meaning Boston, Chicago, New York, Philadelphia, San Francisco, and Washington — and agencies with newer or no rail systems. The agencies with older rail systems desperately need money to bring their systems up to a state of good repair. Since such maintenance is included in the FTA’s definition of capital improvements, they are happy to have federal monies dedicated to capital.

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Slow Down; You’re Moving Too Fast

By | | Transportation
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According to the 2006 Canadian census, 25.1 percent of workers in Vancouver and 16.5 percent of Vancouver-area workers take transit to work. This puts Vancouver transit in a league with San Francisco and Washington DC, and ahead of every other U.S. urban area other than New York. By comparison, according to the 2006 American Community Survey, only 12.6 percent of workers in Portland and 7.6 percent of Portland-area workers take transit to work.

So naturally, Vancouver planners want to make Vancouver more like Portland. Specifically, University of British Columbia planning professor Patrick Condon proposes that, instead of building a relatively fast subway line, Vancouver should spend billions of dollars replacing moderately fast, flexible buses with slow, inflexible streetcars. The big advantage of slower transit, says Condon, is that it would “support a long term objective to create more complete communities.” In other words, if people can’t get anywhere very fast, they will be more likely to shop within walking- or tram-distance of their homes, and so retailers and other service providers will be more likely to locate in neighborhoods throughout the city.

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The Broken Ladder

By | | News commentary, Regional planning
17 Comments

Southern California writer Joel Kotkin has a new report about urban growth that in many ways is a sequel to his previous report on Opportunity Urbanism. While Opportunity Urbanism focused on Houston, The Broken Ladder look at London, Mexico City, and Mumbai. The common theme is that density is no longer vital to wealth creation, and land-use regulation aimed at achieving such density
has become an obstacle to the upward mobility of low- and middle-income people.

Kotkin also has a great web site, NewGeography, which has numerous contributors and in many ways is an antidote to the anti-suburbs, anti-auto sites that have proliferated across the web. For example, two writers from the center-left New Democrat Network have an article pointing out that a majority of blacks, Latinos, and other minorities all now live in the suburbs, so the old arguments that suburbs were the result of “white flight” is no longer valid.
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Throwing Good Money After Bad

By | | City planning, News commentary, Planning Disasters, Transportation
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TriMet, Portland’s transit agency, is planning to spend $7 million upgrading the 24-year-old Rockwood station in the city of Gresham, Portland’s largest suburb. TriMet officials hope the improvements will “leverage investment in transit into nearby development opportunities” in that neighborhood. Fat chance, especially since it was the light rail that killed the neighborhood in the first place.

The Rockwood Fred Meyer in 2000. Note the light-rail train in the background.

For 45 years, the center of the Rockwood neighborhood was a Fred Meyer store, a “supercenter” selling groceries, clothing, variety, and hardware. Fred Meyer also leased storefronts to other businesses such as coffee shops and locksmiths. When Fred Meyer spent $400,000 remodeling the store after TriMet opened the light-rail line in 1986, TriMet triumphantly counted it as an investment inspired by the light rail. Never mind the fact that Fred Meyer bragged on its web site that it had remodeled all of its 130 stores at about the same time.

The truth was, things were not going well at the Rockwood store. In January 2003, Fred Meyer shocked the neighborhood by closing it even though it was obligated to pay a lease on the site for another 10 years. The store “was in decline for a number of years,” a Fred Meyer official told the Oregonian (article available to those with access to Infoweb). “It was in a decline before the last remodel.” This was the only time in the chain’s history that it closed a store without immediately reopening a replacement nearby.

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Florida vs. Klein

By | | News commentary, Planning Disasters
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Is it ironic, or just self-serving, that Richard Florida, the man who urged cities to attract the so-called creative class with policies that made housing unaffordable, now writes a Wall Street Journal article (link to full article for non-subscribers) arguing that “homeownership is overrated”? Pay no attention to the facts behind the curtain, which are that growth-management policies encouraged by Florida’s ideas created an affordability crisis, which led policymakers in Washington to pressure lenders to loosen mortgage criteria so people could buy overpriced homes, and that growth-management also made prices more volatile so that eventually a large share of American homeowners would be underwater.

Florida can get away with his brazen approach because most of his followers don’t understand economics well enough to follow the above train of logic. As George Mason University economist Dan Klein points out in the very next day’s WSJ, when asked if “restrictions on housing development make housing less affordable,” 60 to 70 percent of liberals and progressives incorrectly answer “no.” By comparison, only 16 percent of libertarians and less than 23 percent of conservatives said “no.”
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This raises some interesting questions. Does economic ignorance lead people to lean left? Or do progressives cultivate economic ignorance? Klein doesn’t speculate about the answer. However, I suspect that some people find economics to be more intuitive than others, and those who don’t easily understand it are more likely to be attracted by flim-flam artists such as Richard Florida.

Wasting Your Time

By | | Transportation
16 Comments

The Texas Transportation Institute’s 2009 congestion report estimated that motorists wasted more than 4 billion hours in traffic in 2007, or about 36 hours per commuter. One way that is often proposed to reduced this waste is getting people to ride transit.

But the cure may be worse than the disease, suggests Steven Polzin of the Center for Urban Transportation Research at the University of South Florida. Polzin points out that the 2009 National Household Transportation Survey found that the average speed of commuters who take cars is 33 mph, while the average speed of commuters who ride transit is only 12 mph.

Rapid transit? Not hardly. Most light-rail lines average 20 mph, and this Hudson-Bergen train is even slower than that.
Flickr photo by WallyG.

Polzin estimates this represents 3 billion hours of wasted time. Although that’s less than three-quarters of the amount of time wasted by congestion, far fewer people commute by transit than by car — 7 million vs. 124 million in 2008. So 3 billion hours is well over 400 hours per transit commuter.

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FTA Wants Your Comments

By | | Follow up, News commentary, Transportation
2 Comments

Last January, Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood announced that he was replacing rules that required that federal transit grants had to be “cost effective” with rules promoting “livability.” Yesterday, the Federal Transit Administration asked for your comments on this proposal.

The FTA doesn’t have new rules yet; it just wants to know what you think of the idea. Considering that the head of the FTA has revealed that he is skeptical of expensive rail projects, especially when cities can’t afford to maintain and operate the systems they have, they might genuinely be interested in some new ideas. After all, how livable can a city be where lots of people have given up their cars for transit only to find that the transit agency has stopped running for lack of funds?

Speaking of costly transit, the Tennessee Center for Policy Research has just published a new paper on the cost of transit in that state. The paper also shows how Tennessee transit systems use more energy and emit more greenhouse gases, per passenger mile, than cars or even SUVs. The only really efficient transit system, the paper shows, is vanpooling, which is the closest thing most transit agencies have to actual automobiles.

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Oil Spill Revisited

By | | News commentary
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The Antiplanner’s previous post about the Gulf oil spill featured a streaming video showing the underwater plume of oil. When I checked it after the post went live, the video showed no oil, so I suggested they had stopped the leak. But that turned out to be optimistic; now the video stream just shows a test screen. (BP has other live feeds if you want to look at one.)

In the meantime, we’ve been treated to hysteria about the spill from all sides. Curiously, most media reports measure the amount of oil released in gallons, when it is conventional to use larger units, such as tons (which are a little over 300 gallons), when describing large amounts. In terms of tons, the spill is in the tens of thousands; in terms of gallons, it is in the millions. Millions sounds bigger, so that is what sensationalists would use. (I suppose they could use ounces.)

The last major spill in the Gulf required 10 months of effort to plug. That was in 1978. I suspect that the current spill attracts more attention because we have better video, and television news today is defined by what they can put on video.

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What a Surprise, Amtrak Lies

By | | News commentary, Transportation
11 Comments

The Washington Times has uncovered a nearly decade-old accounting scandal in which Amtrak employees deliberately falsified financial statements to make it appear that the government-owned company was more financially solvent than it really was. The employees were eventually terminated, but not until they had spent $150,000 of taxpayers’ money defending themselves from charges of fraud and misrepresentation.

Amtrak needs work.
Flickr photo by JFeister.

But Amtrak deceptions go back much further than just to 2001, the year in which the fraud was supposed to have taken place. In the 1980s, Graham Claytor — who many rail fans still regard as the best president Amtrak ever had, largely because Claytor had supported passenger trains and steam locomotives when he was president of the Southern Railway in the 1970s — responded to the Reagan White House by repeatedly promising that Amtrak would be able to cover all of its operating expense out of passenger fares.

Almost as soon as Claytor retired, his replacement, Thomas Downs, repudiated those claims and said that Claytor had been misleading people and deferring maintenance to make trains appear more cost effective. Of course, Downs took office when Clinton was president and he probably thought he could get a windfall from a Democratic White House and Congress. By 1995, when Republicans had swept Congress, Downs too began claiming that Amtrak could run without operating subsidies by 2002.
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