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Monthly Archives: January 2011

More on China’s High-Speed Rail

By | | Transportation
9 Comments

An American blogger in China makes some interesting points about China’s rail system. The country’s existing rail network is currently being used to capacity by freight (mainly coal) and conventional passenger trains. In fact, the number of passenger trains has pushed a lot of coal traffic onto trucks and highways.

The high-speed rail network was supposed to get passengers off the conventional rails, in turn allowing freight trains to get coal and other freight off the highways. But the high-speed rail fares are so high that ridership is low and the vast majority of rail riders are sticking to the conventional trains. The result is a surplus of passenger capacity without alleviating the shortage of freight capacity.

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Portlandia Is Here

By | | Follow up, Housekeeping
18 Comments

Although it will not premiere on television until January 21, the first episode of Portlandia is on line. Hulu says something about it expiring in three days, but if the video below doesn’t work, you might be able to watch it here or here.

Richard Florida claims that, by attracting the “creative class,” cities like Portland are building wealth and enhancing productivity. On the other hand, the thesis of Portlandia was best summarized by economist Randall Pozdena in 2007: “We are attracting (to Oregon) a lot of young, enthusiastic people who aren’t particularly well trained and who aren’t bringing a lot of human capital to the region.”

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One More Nail

By | | Transportation
75 Comments

The Washington Post editorialized against spending any more tax dollars on California’s high-speed rail project, saying “California should have to fill in its project’s economic and logistical blanks” before more federal or even state dollars are spent. While no one is surprised to see fiscally conservative papers such as the Washington Examiner come out against high-speed rail, the fact that the traditionally liberal Post is against it suggests that the end is near.

Naturally, rail advocates accuse the Post of being “unfair,” but they miss the Post‘s point, which is that the California High-Speed Rail Authority only has a tiny fraction of the money it needs, no private investors have offered to contribute (despite the Authority’s predictions that they would provide at least $6 billion in funding), and the Authority has been accused of mismanagement and optimism bias by, among others, the California State Auditor, a peer committee of transportation engineers, and experts at the University of California at Berkeley.

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Superstreets Relieve Congestion

By | | Transportation
8 Comments

With many transportation planners have given up trying to relieve congestion or, worse, are trying to increase congestion in order to persuade people out of their automobiles. So it is refreshing to see some innovative ideas that will actually relieve congestion on the highways used for around 80 percent of our travel.

One idea is known as superstreets, in which major streets are given priority over cross streets. Vehicles on the cross streets can cross the major streets only by getting on the major street, making a u-turn, and then turning right onto the cross street. As described in this report from North Carolina State University, this greatly reduces both the time required for traffic signals to cycle and the number of conflict points between the two streets.

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Another idea is the diverging diamond interchange, which has its own web site. Under this system, vehicles on the secondary highway actually cross over and run on the left side of the road for the length of the interchange, which again reduces the signal timing (or the need for any signals at all for many drivers) and the number of points of conflict.

These and other ideas have been compiled in compiled in one document by an Idaho planning agency. Their costs are relatively low and would do much to save people time and fuel.

Virginia Light Rail Woes

By | | News commentary, Transportation
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The city manager for Norfolk, Virginia, has been forced to resign due to allegations that she knew about light rail cost overruns but failed to inform the city council. The senior vice president for development of Norfolk’s transit agency, Hampton Roads Transit, has also quit in response to allegations that her mismanagement led to the cost overruns.

When Flickr user DearEdward took this photo in July, 2008, Hampton Roads Transit was promising to start operating Norfolk’s light rail in December, 2009. Now it has postponed the opening to late in 2011.

They follow the transit agency’s previous general manager, who was forced to quit a year ago when the cost overruns first came to light. Meanwhile, Hampton Roads Transit has announced that the light-rail line is not only $106 million over budget, it is at least 16 months behind schedule. The most recent scheduled date for opening the line, May 2011, has been postponed indefinitely because of delays in delivering and installing safety equipment.

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Save the States by Eliminating Urban Renewal

By | | City planning, News commentary
27 Comments

One of Jerry Brown’s first acts after taking office as California’s new/old governor was to propose to eliminate the state’s 425 urban redevelopment agencies. These agencies spend more than $5 billion a year on urban renewal subsidies that are largely unnecessary, and Brown hopes he can somehow tap into that money to help the state cover its financial deficit, currently estimated to be about $28 billion.

The redevelopment agencies are mostly funded out of tax-increment financing (TIF), which means the money they spend would otherwise go to schools and other services, many of which also receive state funding. Every dollar that schools get that would otherwise go to urban renewal is a dollar that the state doesn’t have to spend to fund the schools.

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Are We at the Bottom Yet?

By | | Meltdown, Useful Data
14 Comments

According to economists at Moody’s, the housing market will bottom out in 2011–which means now may be the time to hunt for cheap homes and be ready to flip them when prices start going up. Unfortunately, the Antiplanner can’t afford the $250 required to listen to Moody’s webconference, so let’s look at some other data to see how likely it is that prices will start to recover.

First, we can go to the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA), which publishes home price indices beginning in 1975 for states, metropolitan areas, and the nation as a whole. Many news reports rely on the Case-Schiller index, but that index only covers a selection of metro areas and misses many states. The FHFA uses the Case-Schiller methodology but has a much larger database.

The Antiplanner has made a user-friendly Excel chart from FHFA’s state data. Simply enter the two-letter acronyms of up to six states in cells BK150 to BP150, and the chart should update with those states. Nationally, housing prices peaked in the first quarter of 2007, declined through the second quarter of 2010, and recovered slightly in the third quarter of 2010. But, as averages of the country as a whole, national data do not provide very useful indicators of what is really happening in housing markets.

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Cox: Make Builders Responsible

By | | Transportation
7 Comments

The builders of any Florida high-speed rail project should be responsible for cost overruns and all operating losses, suggests a new report from the Reason Foundation. Written by the Antiplanner’s faithful ally, Wendell Cox, the report suggests that rail construction is likely to go at least 40 percent over projected costs and that rail fares are not likely to cover operating costs.

The report notes that California has decided to build the first segment of its high-speed rail line in the flat Central Valley, where costs should be not significantly greater than those in Florida. Yet California is projecting costs of $64 million per mile, while Florida’s costs are projected to be only $32 million per mile.

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Passing the Test

By | | Transportation
23 Comments

This week, the new Republican-dominated House passed one of the first tests of its ability to promote fiscal sanity in the face of interest-group lobbying. On Tuesday, the House voted in new rules that govern its own operations, and one of those rules struck at the heart of recent transportation pork barreling.

Even though federal highway funding comes out of gas taxes, Congress must take two steps before the money can be spent. First, a bill must authorize the spending. Then a second bill must actually appropriate the money–and appropriations normally can be, and often are, less than authorized.

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Have We Reached “Peak Travel”?

By | | Transportation
9 Comments

The New Year brings a number of news reports fretting (or hoping) that the amount of travel we do has peaked or plateaued. Given that cars are becoming more fuel-efficient, that means that the total amount of energy we use driving will significantly decline. However, the real implications of the claim are far more dire.

The news reports are actually based on a paper published by researchers at Stanford University more than a year ago. The researchers followed the time-honored technique of looking at past data trends, drawing a dotted line into the future, and claiming it as a prediction. Reality is somewhat more complicated.

A much more interesting report, published more than a decade ago by the Minnesota Department of Transportation, compared population and job densities with travel behavior in 31 cities. “Land use, at least at the aggregate level studied here, is not a major leverage point in the determination of overall population travel choices,” the study found. “On the one hand, certain relationships emerge which correspond to generally held beliefs, for example that high residential concentration increases transit share,” though it did not reduce driving or congestion. “On the other hand, aggregate land use characteristics had little or no discernable impact on other measures of travel behavior.”

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