Tomorrow the Antiplanner will review more 2017 census data, but today I’ll briefly comment on a few events that took place while I was reviewing census data last week. First, the New York Metropolitan Transportation Authority is blaming subway delays on the passengers, claiming that late-arriving riders sticking their feet in the doors as they are closing are responsible for slow trains. Because no one ever did that before this year!
Speaking of the MTA, a member of MTA’s board is suing Mayor de Blasio and New York policy commissioner James O’Neill for their failure to release data on subway fare evaders. Because it is easier to blame financial problems on someone else than it is to actually do your job of overseeing the agency’s finances.
Speaking of fare evaders, San Francisco’s Muni is upset to discover that one out of four transit riders on the city’s famous cable cars aren’t asked if they have paid their fares. Since most riders pay before they board, this doesn’t mean that one in four haven’t paid, only that they haven’t had their tickets checked by the conductor.
The 2016 National Transit Database indicated that Muni collects $6 in fares for every vehicle-revenue mile of bus operations; less than $8 for light rail; slightly more than $8 for trolley buses; and $11 for streetcars. But it collects $112 per vehicle-revenue mile that cable cars operate. The Antiplanner suggests that Muni has fare evaders on the cable cars are a much lower priority than boosting ridership on its other modes of transit.
Speaking of lawsuits, which I did a couple of paragraphs ago, the private partner in Denver’s commuter rail line is suing Denver’s Regional Transit District for forcing the private partner to pay for human crossing guards on the rail line. Denver Transit Partners claims that RTD and the Federal Transit Administration changed the specifications for the line and that it shouldn’t be required to pay millions of dollars a year to protect people at rail crossings.
Denver Transit Partners received a contract from RTD to build and operate the commuter trains. Congress requires that the trains use positive train control, but Denver Transit claims that the positive train control interferes with the automatic crossing gates, which is why it has had to post human crossing guards.
Denver Transit would like you to believe that positive train control is some new technology, but actually it was invented a hundred years ago, about two decades before automatic crossing gates. By the time railroads began installing automatic crossing gates in the 1930s, they already had positive train control on thousands of miles of rail lines. Somehow they managed to make the two work together. I’m not taking a position on the lawsuit, but this is just one more example of why rail transit is a stupid idea.
Speaking of positive train control, the Regional Transportation Authority that runs Nashville’s Music City Star says that it has to end its Friday evening service because of rules that commuter-rail agencies install positive train control if they run more than 12 trains a day. Installing positive train control would cost almost as much as it cost to start the train service in the first place, and since the transit authority doesn’t have that money, it is easier to cut the number of trains. Of course, if it ran buses, it would save money and not have to worry about positive bus control.
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I’m willing to give Brightline’s Orlando rail plan the benefit of the doubt, as there really is a market of cruise ship passengers between Miami and Orlando. But the XpressWest project proposes to connect Vegas with the San Bernardino County town of Victorville, which is a good two-hour drive away from the Los Angeles cruise terminal. A 2012 Reason Foundation study concluded that the line has no chance of success as airline alternatives are both faster and less expensive. Brightline’s financial analyses must be clouded by an ideological bias towards passenger rail.
Speaking of alternatives to rail, Portland’s TriMet has announced that it plans to replace all of its Diesel buses with electric and natural gas buses. Of course, that’s easy to do as the federal government pays 90 percent of the cost of electric and natural gas buses but only 80 percent for Diesel buses, so for the transit agency alternative-fueled buses cost less provided the total price of the buses is no more than twice Diesel buses. Whether it will make any difference to greenhouse gas emissions is another question entirely.
Meanwhile, various cities are testing self-driving buses. While that’s fine, no one should think that eliminating the driver will save much money because most of the cost of bus operations is elsewhere. In 2016, transit agencies spent $42 billion operating buses, less than $9 billion of which was the drivers.
Of course, bus drivers don’t plan to go quietly. Ohio transit drivers are threatening to strike if transit agencies even think about self-driving buses. Hey, haven’t they heard that automation means more jobs, not less?
Speaking of union workers, the GAO has issued a report warning that Washington Metro (WMATA) pension costs are rapidly rising and “pose significant risk to WMATA’s financial operations.” As the Antiplanner has noted before, unfunded pension and health care obligations threaten to derail many transit agencies in the near future.
Speaking of the GAO, that agency has also issued a report revealing that so-called affordable housing can cost as much as $750,000 a unit in California. The report notes that government-subsidized housing, like all housing, is more affordable in Texas due to less land-use regulation.
In the next couple of days, the Antiplanner will look at the what the 2017 American Community Survey says about the effects of housing affordability problems on blacks and other minorities. That is all.
Why would anyone take a train from LA to Vegas when Flix has bus routes for just $2.99, four times a day.
While maglev’s are perceived as too expensive, like most solid state technologies they get cheaper over time. A better strategy here would be to find ways to make maglev technology cheaper. Although there’s no combating Maglev’s enormous energy requirements; consuming as much as 4-5 times as much as the all electric shinkansen in Japan.
While the cost of running a maglev over long distances remains prohibitive, opportunities for intra-city urban transportation remain. Maglevs replacing urban metro systems as subways and lightrail run at lower speeds (50-70 mph) greatly reduces energy consumption.
HOw is the Brightline that couldn’t raise the billions it needs ot link to Orlando going to come up with another $5 or $10 bilion to link Las Vegas with the Inland Empire?
In the Miami area, I’ve noticed a few newly built “affordable housing” buildings, normally placed in lousy areas of the city. A typical one costs about $30 million for 100 units, or $300,000 per unit.
It’s interesting to note that, according to Zillow, houses in the surrounding areas only cost about $230,000 and would be much more pleasant places to live in.
Can’t say that seems like a good value …