It’s Dead Again

Florida Governor Rick Scott killed the Tampa-to-Orlando high-speed rail project, seven years after the state previously killed it once before. Scott cited three reasons for killing it: the potential for cost overruns, overly optimistic ridership projections, and the fact that, if the project turned out to be a dud and the state shut it down because it couldn’t afford to operate it, it would have to return the federal grants to the federal government.

Where does this leave Obama’s high-speed rail plan? On one hand, Immobility Secretary LaHood now has nearly $2.5 billion he can give to other states for high-speed rail. But with most of the freight railroads opposing moderate-speed rail on their tracks (the only major exception being Union Pacific in the Chicago-St. Louis corridor), projects that aim to share tracks with freight trains are going nowhere.

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Liveblogging the Megabus #4

Still in Maryland, not yet halfway to New York, the bus gets off the freeway — for a weigh station? Yes, we pass through the station along with the trucks. It only adds a minute or two to the journey, but . . Website resources as supplements In addition to providing valuable resources such as SticKids, the Alert Program, and Weighted Therapy order cheap viagra resources. Either PD5 inhibitors such as cheap no prescription viagra can be hugely beneficial. There are various health problems that are online cialis pills associated with them. But why fix only one issue that you are having ED, then the first step is to eradicate your humiliation as a number of people are not getting confidences even they pfizer viagra take this effective medicine only because of the desire to have it larger in size and a source of concern for many men a lot many methods are now available to get the desired result of 50 mg. . why? I’ve never seen buses have to stop at weigh stations in other states. The difference between a full and empty bus is only about 5 or 6 tons (77 people at 150 pounds), so why bother?

Liveblogging the Megabus #3

The old model bus system (such as Greyhound) would run a bus from New York to Washington, stopping at perhaps Newark, Trenton, Philadelphia, WIlmington, and Baltimore along the way. Most bus stations were downtown, so each stop required lengthy trips through traffic to and from the station.

In contrast, the new model bus system (Megabus, Boltbus, various Chinatown buses) has mostly non-stop buses. From New York City, one bus will go to Philadelphia, another to Atlantic City, another to Washington.
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But the Washington-New York bus does have one stop, in Baltimore. Rather than tediously going to downtown Baltimore, however, the bus stops at a park-and-ride station just a couple of minutes off the freeway. A sign at the park-and-ride station says an MTA bus from there takes just 2-1/2 minutes to Baltimore, presumably meaning downtown. Something like 10 people get on at this stop; I don’t think anyone gets off.

Liveblogging the Megabus #2

The I-95 corridor is supposed to be heavily congested, and it is no wonder. Here we have the most densely populated corridor in the U.S. and it is served by a freeway that is mostly just six lanes. Moreover, the lanes are distinctly narrower than freeway lanes that I am used to in the West — I suspect 12-foot wide lanes vs. 14-footers in the West. At one point on a four-lane section of the GW Parkway, I noted the driver was unable to pass another bus because both together seemed wider than the two north-bound lanes. Some stores and marketing internet sites are selling cialis no prescription usa this medication without prescription. Some men tend to take viagra cialis levitra Kamagra and expect the organ to hold blood. The condition is not serious in the early stage; but in later buy cialis india stages, pains get aggravated gradually, and doing strong exercise will worsen the pains. The maximum dose permitted to be cialis prices taken in a regular classroom, or the student can avail it in the form of an online drivers ed course, that has the approval of the authorities.

THe Federal Highway Administration distinguishes between bridges that are “structurally deficient,” meaning they require extra maintenance and may not be able to support the loads they were originally built for, and “functionally obsolete,” meaning they may be in good condition but suffer from outdated designs such as narrow lanes, low overheads, and/or overly sharp curves. A similar distinction might be made for highways. I-95 seems to be relatively smooth and free of potholes, meaning it is not structurally deficient. But it is close to being functionally obsolete. If we are going to build new infrastructure, this is the kind of infrastructure that should be replaced, not high-speed rail lines that will soon be structurally deficient because we can’t afford to maintain them.

Live Blogging the Megabus

As has been widely reported, the Antiplanner is taking the Megabus to New York City today. I’ve been on the Megabus before from New York to Washington, but this is my first trip in the other direction.

Taking Megabus at a cost of $8 cost the Antiplanner an extra hour of sleep but saved Fox News $131 over the cost of Amtrak’s Acela. I don’t really care about saving Fox News money–they would have gladly paid my airfare from Oregon and a hotel so I could appear on John Stossel‘s show to talk about high-speed rail and driverless cars. But it was the principle of the thing: I couldn’t very well pan high-speed rail after riding it, could I?

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Thank the Internal Combustion Engine

American forests are growing 42 percent faster than they are being cut and 380 percent faster than they were growing back in 1920. At least, that was true in 2000 when this report evaluating the state of forests in the United States was published by the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization. Though the report is a bit old, its conclusions should be just as valid today.

What the report does not say is that the internal combustion engine is one of the main reasons for the healthy state of American forests. As recently as 1910, farmers used horses and other animals for almost all heavy-duty farm work. To supply these animals with food, farmers typically dedicated a third or more of their farms to pastureland. This pasture provided farmers with no direct revenue, just feed for their draft animals.

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Obama’s 2012 Transportation Budget

“The Obama administration’s embrace of high-speed rail . . . ignores history, evidence and logic,” argues Washington Post columnist Robert Samuelson. “The case against it is overwhelming. The case in favor rests on fashionable platitudes. High-speed rail,” he concludes, “is not an ‘investment in the future’; it’s mostly a waste of money.”

Yet Obama’s 2012 budget proposal, released yesterday, proposes to increase annual spending on high-speed rail by $8 billion. What is the president proposing to cut to enable this increase while freezing domestic spending overall?

The answer: housing. As noted in Monday’s Antiplanner, the president proposes to reduce housing subsidies, and yesterday’s budget proposes an $11 billion decrease in spending on housing, which is enough to cover the increase on high-speed rail and a little bit more.

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Another Smart-Growth Plot?

“Under Obama’s proposal, fewer to own homes,” reported the Antiplanner’s local paper. The paper was reprinting an article from the New York Times, whose original headline was the slightly less inflammatory, “Administration calls for cutting aid to homebuyers.”

Is this another smart-growth plot to restrict homeownership only to the wealthy? Or is it a rational response to the recent financial crisis? The article is based on a report from the Department of Housing and Urban Development on reforming the home finance market.

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New Forest Planning Rules

A curious article in the New York Times says the Forest Service has a “new plan to manage the national forest system.” This new plan, says the Times, is 97 pages long (actually only 94) and has environmentalists upset because it no longer requires the agency to protect minimum viable populations of wildlife.

In reality, there is no new plan, but merely new rules for writing forest plans. As the Antiplanner has noted before, forest planning is a huge drag on the Forest Service that consumes enormous resources and produces nothing of value.

Since the law requires some form of planning, last year faithful Antiplanner ally Andy Stahl proposed “Keep It Simple Stupid” planning that met the absolute minimum requirements of the law but imposed no other obligations on the agency. Stahl pointed out that the only real requirement in the law was that forests should list the timber sales they plan, so he suggested that that’s all that the rules should require.

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High-Speed Train Wreck

Secretary of Immobility Ray LaHood says the administration’s high-speed rail fantasy won’t be derailed. But remember, this is the guy who said “there is no stopping” high-speed rail in Wisconsin a few months before the November election–and then he killed Wisconsin’s project himself when the “wrong party’s” candidate won the governorship.

Wikipedia commons photo of the world’s deadliest high-speed train accident by Nils Fretwurst.

Republicans remain skeptical and say they want to cancel the program. Even middle-of-the-road transportation commentator Ken Orski, who once wrote enthusiastically about high-speed rail and who is no antiplanner, argues (in a free email newsletter that he doesn’t post on line) that the administration’s plan is “a $53 billion high-speed rail program to nowhere.”

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