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Monthly Archives: July 2010

The Problem with Transit

By | | Transportation
25 Comments

Table 12 of the historical tables supplementing the 2010 Public Transit Fact Book reveals that, since 1970, the number of workers needed to operate America’s public transit systems has increased by 180 percent. Table 38 reveals that, in the same time period, the cost of operating buses, trolley buses, light rail, and heavy rail (the only modes whose costs are shown in 1970) increased by 195 percent (after adjusting for inflation using the GDP deflator).

Meanwhile, table 1 shows that ridership on buses, trolley buses, light rail, and heavy rail (again, the only modes shown in 1970), grew by a mere 32 percent. That means each transit worker produced 53,115 transit trips in 1970, but only 26,314 trips by all modes in 2008. In other words, by any measure, transit productivity has declined by more than 50 percent.

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Demonizing Mobility

By | | News commentary, Transportation
16 Comments

Planners have tried to demonize the freedom people gain from auto ownership by calling them “auto dependent.” Now they are demonizing air travelers by calling them “binge flyers.”

As energy efficient as trains? So what? We’re still going to demonize it.

We know binge drinking consists of drinking so much for so long that the drinker gets sick. But just who supposedly flies so much that they make themselves sick?

Back in the 1950s and 1960s, people enviously called frequent flyers the Jet Set, referring to people who were so rich that they could fly to Acapulco, Cannes, or Capri on a moment’s notice. Today, thanks to airline deregulation, almost every American and European has flown at least once, and most fly regularly.

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Streetcars for Charlotte, Cincinnati, Ft. Worth, & St. Louis

By | | Transportation
3 Comments

The Department of Transportation has announced $290 million in “livability” grants, including $25 million each for streetcars in Charlotte, Cincinnati, Ft. Worth, and St. Louis plus $5 million to extend a streetcar line in Dallas. “Streetcars are making a comeback because cities across America are recognizing that they can restore economic development downtown,” the DOT press release quotes FTA chief Peter Rogoff as saying, “giving citizens the choice to move between home, shopping and entertainment without ever looking for a parking space.”

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Are the Rich the Biggest Defaulters?

By | | Meltdown, News commentary
18 Comments

Last week, the New York Times published an amazingly shallow article saying the “biggest defaulters on mortgages are the rich.” This contention is supported by a single pair of data: the owners of about 14 percent of homes worth more than $1 million are delinquent on their mortgages, while only “about” 8 to 9 percent of homes worth less than $1 million are behind in their payments.

The problem is, what is the Times‘ definition of “rich”? As one of the paper’s columnists pointed out a few days later, “Just because you have a million-dollar mortgage doesn’t make you a millionaire.” And if you live in a state that has a lot of growth-management planning, such as California or Florida, chances are good that you own a house worth more than $1 million simply because the median price of homes in many cities in these states was close to that much (or, in a few cases, more) at the peak of the bubble.

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Safe Cycling

By | | Transportation
22 Comments

A Florida bicycling group tells its members to ride in the middle of any lane that is less than 14 feet wide. An animation explains why doing so is safer for the cyclist and notes that (in Florida, at least) “a cyclist is entitled to use the full width of a lane that is less than 14 feet wide.”

“We ride with traffic, follow the rules, communicate, and move predictably,” says another Florida cycling group. “We do not ride on the edge of the road.” (The two web sites are so much in lock-step with one another that they were no doubt funded by the same government program.)

I guess this is time for the Antiplanner’s annual bicycle rant. As an active cyclist, I am in sympathy with the notion that cyclists are entitled to use the full lane when necessary. But I would never suggest that anyone do so except in specific circumstances. In particular, I would only regularly use a full lane when traffic is slow enough (perhaps because signals are timed to 15 to 20 mph) that I can keep up without delaying other vehicles.

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California High-Speed Rail in Trouble

By | | Planning Disasters, Transportation
118 Comments

New reports have raised questions about and spurred opposition to California’s grandiose high-speed rail plans. First, last April, the California state auditor reported that the state’s high-speed rail authority suffered from “inadequate planning, weak oversight, and lax contract management,” which is not exactly what you want to hear about an agency that is about to build the most expensive state-sponsored public works project in history.

Second, a new report from the University of California found that the state’s ridership forecasts “are not reliable.” Based on a re-assessment by economist David Brownstone (who is fast becoming one of the Antiplanner’s favorite economists) and two UC engineering profs, the fares needed to cover the trains’ operating costs would have to be more than double the original projections, which is also more than the cost of flying. Since the measure approved by voters in 2008 forbade any state operating subsidies, such high fares would doom the project.

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New York Rediscovers the Bus

By | | Transportation, Urban areas
9 Comments

Tongues are wagging in New York City about a new transportation technology that doesn’t require you to descend into a dank tunnel smelling of urine, sweat, and lysol. The new technology is called a bus, and New York’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority used one to introduce a new bus-rapid transit line two years ago. Not only has it attracted many new riders, it has done so without costing more than $2 billion a mile and more than a decade of planning and construction to start it up.

New York’s Bx12 “Select Bus Service.”
Wikipedia commons photo by Adam E. Moreira.

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Charlotte Light Rail a Big Flop

By | | Transportation, Urban areas
28 Comments

Let’s see: 100 percent cost overrun? Check.

Anemic ridership? Check.

Requires tax breaks, tax-increment financing, and other “public investments” to stimulate transit-oriented development? Check.

Declared a great success by the transit agency desperate for tax increases to fund further rail projects? Check.

Must be light rail.

As Wikipedia points out, when planned in 2000, Charlotte’s light-rail line was supposed to cost $225 million. The final cost turned out to be $467 million. Even after adjusting for inflation, that’s close to a 100 percent cost overrun. (Actually, considering inflation from 2000 to 2007, that’s about a 75 percent cost overrun.)

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TIF & Crony Capitalism

By | | City planning
14 Comments

Speaking of crony capitalism (as the Antiplanner was doing last week), one of the biggest sources of such urban corruption is tax-increment financing (TIF). TIF was invented in the 1950s to help cities revitalize neighborhoods that were supposedly so blighted that no one would gentrify them without government support. Today, such blight (which resulted when people left high-density inner cities for low-density suburbs) is mostly a thing of the past.

Urban planners use TIF to promote their social agendas, most recently favoring high-density, mixed-use developments (which is ironic since TIF was originally used to clear such developments that no one wanted). City managers see TIF as a way of boosting their budgets at the expense of schools and other entities that they see as competitors for the limited amount of tax dollars that property tax payers (and, in some states, sales tax payers) are willing to cough up. Mayors and city councilors see TIF as a way of rewarding developers who contributed to their political campaigns, which is where the crony capitalism comes in.

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Happy 17th Birthday

By | | Housekeeping
15 Comments

Chip the Wonder Dog is 17 years old today, which in dog years makes him approximately as old as Walter Breuning, the former Great Northern Railway employee who is thought to be the oldest man in the world. Like Walter, who was fitted for his first hearing aid at age 111, Chip is showing his age, but remains an important part of the family.

Though grey in the muzzle, Chip remains as handsome as ever as seen in this photo taken on May 28, 2010. Click any photo for a larger view.

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