Another High-Cost, Low-Capacity Transit Line

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Panama City is opening a new rail transit line this month, but the Antiplanner’s review of the project found a significant flaw: though it cost as much to build as a heavy-rail line, it’s capacity to carry people is less than a light-rail line. The city says it can move about 15,000 people an hour, which is not very many considering that the city estimates nearly 100,000 people enter the city during a one-hour period on weekday mornings. But the 15,000 is at crush capacity, and I estimate a more realistic number is about half that.

As with the Mumbai monorail, I have to ask: if you are going to the expense of building a heavy-rail line, why are you providing the capacity of a light-rail line or less? One answer is the city expects the low-capacity trains to be full, thus giving the impression that the project is a great success.

I’ve never been to Panama City, and early responses to my review suggest that the bus-rapid transit alternative I propose wouldn’t work on Panama City streets. But I suspect it would cost a lot less to modify a few of the streets to allow more buses that could move a lot more people than the rail line will be able to handle.

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Prospects for Mileage-Based User Fees

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“We focus on mileage-based user fees as if they are an end, but they are really just a vehicle to an end,” Jack Basso, chair of the Mileage -Based User Fee Alliance, told the audience at what the group hopes will the first of an annual series of conferences. While everyone in the audience could agree with that statement, there was a sharp division over what should be the real purpose of such fees.

For Robert Atkinson, who recently chaired the National Transportation Infrastructure Financing Commission, the purpose of such fees is to give transportation users incentives to use the transportation system efficiently and transportation providers incentives to manage it efficiently. Such fees, he pointed out, would make it easy to use congestion pricing to relieve or eliminate the waste of traffic jams. Moreover, creating a “platform” for such fees would allow a variety of new groups to manage roads. Private parties could build and toll roads in congested areas. Neighborhood associations could take over street maintenance.

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Back in the Air Again

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The Antiplanner is in Washington, DC, today attending a conference on mileage-based user fees. When my plane landed in DC at 3:50 pm, I turned my cell phone on and got a voice mail that Lars Larson wanted to interview me on his radio show about yesterday’s transit numbers. We arranged to have the interview begin at 4:20.

That put me in a dilemma. I had a meeting in the city at 5:30 and wanted to drop my luggage off at my hotel in Roslyn. If I waited to the the radio show before leaving the airport, I’d be late for my meeting. So I hustled to take the subway to Arlington and hoped I’d arrive before 4:20, as cell service doesn’t extend underground.

Roslyn is five station stops from National Airport. As I’m thinking about the irony that I’m depending on public transit to get to an interview where I expect to be critical of public transit, our train pulls into the third stop, which is the Pentagon. People stand up to get off the train, but the doors don’t open. The crowd of people outside the train who want to get on grows, but the doors don’t open. I’m afraid I’m going to miss my interview, and the doors won’t open. Finally, the driver makes an incomprehensible announcement and the train leaves–and the doors never opened. I no longer felt that riding transit to criticize transit was so ironic.

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Interpreting the Data

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At nearly 10.7 billion trips, transit ridership in 2013 reached its highest level in 57 years, says the American Public Transportation Association. This increase shows that people are “saying we want these (transit) investments made,” APTA’s president, Michael Melaniphy, told USA Today. Needless to say, by “investments” he means building new rail transit lines.

Any century now, transit is bound to overtake driving. Source: Transit data from APTA, urban driving from the Federal Highway Administration, and urban population from the Census Bureau. Click image for a larger view.

However, a close look at the data shows something entirely different. It turns out that New York City subways alone were responsible for more than 92 percent of the increase in transit ridership. Nationally, ridership grew by 115 million trips; New York City subway ridership grew by 106 million trips. According to the New York Times, the growth in subway ridership resulted from “falling unemployment.”

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Dead Again–This Time For Certain?

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The Columbia River Crossing, which was dead, then was alive, now is once more dead. This $3 billion to $4 billion project was going to replace the Interstate 5 bridge across the Columbia between Oregon and Washington, extend light rail into Vancouver, Washington, and rebuild several of the freeway interchanges north and south of the river.

Bridge supporters said it would relieve congestion, but it wasn’t clear how replacing a six-lane bridge with a twelve-lane bridge would relieve congestion when there were only six lanes approaching the bridge from the north and south. Instead, the real goal was to create lots of contracts for bridge builders, rail builders, highway contractors, and various other engineering and construction firms.

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Taxing Commuters Living Abroad

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Governing magazine has a great idea for cities that are hard up for cash: tax suburban commuters. After all, those leeches live outside the city but depend on the city to provide them with jobs. Thus, they should pay a tax for a privilege of working in the city.

Just to make sure they get people coming and going, cities like Detroit also want to tax reverse commuters. That is, they want suburban employers to deduct taxes from the pay of their employees who happen to live in Detroit.

These are both great ideas if the goal is to hasten the fiscal demise of the cities. After all, think how well the cities would be doing if all the employers in the cities moved to the suburbs. The cities wouldn’t have to pay to provide urban services to those employers, but they also wouldn’t collect any property or other taxes from the businesses. Would they be better or worse off? If you think they would be worse off losing those jobs, then a commuter tax is redundant since the city is better off having the jobs without the commuter tax. (The same rationale applies to a reverse commuter tax on city residents who work in the suburbs.)

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New-Car Fuel Economy Up 30% in 7 Years

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The University of Michigan Transportation Research Institute has kept track of the EPA mileage ratings of all new cars and light trucks (pick ups, SUVs, full-sized vans) sold in the United States since October, 2007. Between that month and February, 2014, the average fuel economy of autos sold grew from 20.1 mpg to 25.2 mpg. While your mileage may vary, this is an incredible record of improvement in fuel economy.

Though we are accustomed to measure fuel economy in miles per gallon, a more appropriate way to compare vehicles is the other way around: gallons (or some other unit of energy) per mile. As Green Car Reports observes, when asked, “Which saves more gasoline, going from 10 to 20 mpg, or going from 33 to 50 mpg?” most people answer the latter but in fact the former is true. In any case, when measured in gallons per mile, new-car fuel economy improved by 30 percent between October 2007 and February 2014.

The Department of Energy hasn’t posted data for 2012 or 2013, but its Transportation Energy Data Book, table 2.13, say that over the seven years from 2005 through 2011, the average BTUs per vehicle mile of all autos on the road declined by 7 percent, from 5,600 to 5,200. Since new cars replace the old fleet at the rate of around 6 percent per year, the 30 percent increase in new-car fuel economy is not immediately seen in the entire fleet, but it will be eventually.

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We Have the Technology

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A recent issue of the New York Times Magazine suggests that the technology for recreating species that have gone extinct in the last few thousand years will soon be available if it is not already. Scientists have already attempted to clone an extinct European wild goat known as a bucardo, and while the results were not successful they were clearly moving in the right direction.

Passenger pigeons in their native habitat, an Iowa woodland, from a diorama in the Denver Museum of Science and Nature. The background to this diorama was painted by Charles Waldo Love. The Flickr photo is by Jessica Lamirand; click image for a larger view.

Species that have been extinct for millions of years, such as dinosaurs, are beyond our reach. But the Times argues that recovery of such species as the passenger pigeon, which once numbered in the billions, and the woolly mammoth should both be possible in the very near future.

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Obama’s Transportation Plan

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President Obama’s latest transportation “vision” is as unrealistic as Governor Brown’s plan to pay for high-speed rail with cap-and-trade revenues. Obama proposes that Congress spend $302 billion on surface transportation over the next four years, or $75.5 billion a year. This is nearly $25 billion more per year than Congress is spending today, which is already $10 billion more per year than federal surface transportation revenues.

In the 2012 round of transportation reauthorization, the debate was whether to limit spending to actual revenues of about $40 billion a year or continue spending at historic rates of about $50 billion a year. Senate Democrats prevailed at the $50 billion rate, but only by agreeing to limit the bill to just two years instead of the usual six. That compromise expires this year just before the Highway Trust Fund runs out of money due to overspending.

In 2012, revenues (mainly from fuel taxes but also excise taxes on truck tires, trucks, buses, and trailers) in 2012 were $40.2 billion. By law, $5.0 billion of this was dedicated to transit. Congress actually spent $8.2 billion on transit while $41.1 billion nominally went to highways (but in fact some of this also went for transit and other non-highway programs). Spending increased by more than revenues in 2013 and 2014.

In fact, Congress has been spending more than revenues since at least 2001, draining the Highway Trust Fund’s reserves which were once well over $20 billion. Between 2008 and 2012, Congress supplemented the fund with $41 billion in general funds. In 2013, it added another $12.6 billion, and if spending continues at current rates it will have to add $15 billion more in 2015. Despite claims that these represent subsidies to highways, no supplements would have been necessary had Congress not diverted billions of dollars to transit each year and mandated that spending exceed revenues.

Given the Republican’s animosity to deficit spending combined with both parties’ reluctance to raise taxes, Obama’s plan to increase deficit spending by 250 percent, from $10 billion to $35 billion a year, is no more than a fantasy. His proposal to rescue the Highway Trust Fund with another $63 billion supplement from a “one-time transition revenue” resulting from his proposed Pro-Growth Tax Reform is equally unrealistic, both because Congress is unlikely to pass Obama’s proposal unaltered and because there are better things to do with the money should reforms produce any one-time transition revenues.

What the president really wants is more grant programs like TIGER, which allow the Department of Transportation to both reward the president’s political supporters and support social-engineering projects such as streetcars and transit-oriented development. TIGER and similar grant making programs are not about transportation; they are about political pork barrel.

What fiscal conservatives should want instead is a plan that limits expenditures to be no greater than revenues; ties expenditures to the source of those revenues (i.e., fuel taxes to highways); and eliminates porkish competitive grant programs. Even in the unlikely event that Congress raises gas taxes rather than transitions to vehicle-mile fees, that platform will improve transportation at all levels because it will give transport agencies incentives to respond to users rather than politicians and crony capitalists. The best would be for Congress to not increase taxes, thus forcing state highway agencies and local transit agencies to rely more on user fees than taxes.

Do the Math, Governor

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Jerry Brown proposes to use cap-and-trade revenues to help pay for the state’s high-speed rail boondoggle. It’s questionable whether this is legal, and even more questionable whether high-speed trains will actually reduce greenhouse gas emissions after their entire lifecycle emissions are considered.

What everyone seems to be missing, however, is that the cap-and-trade revenues won’t come close to covering the cost of a high-speed rail line. Brown proposes to dedicate $250 million of annual cap-and-trade revenues to the rail line, but even at an unrealistically low 2 percent rate of interest, that won’t even repay $6 billion worth of bonds, much less the $9 billion in bonds that voters approved in 2008 or the far greater amount it will actually take to complete the line.

The media keeps reporting the cost of the high-speed train as $68 billion, when everyone knows that’s only for a moderate-speed train. The most recent estimate of the true high-speed train envisioned by the 2008 ballot measure is $98 billion to $117 billion–and there’s no reason to think that estimate is any more realistic than the previous estimates which started at less than $10 billion.

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