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HOT Lanes for Less

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Some people have argued that a defect of high-occupancy/toll lanes is that they are expensive to install as they require their own on- and off-ramps in order to keep them separate from the general lanes. But–as the Antiplanner observed on a recent trip from Oregon to Texas–the Utah Department of Transportation has nearly 150 miles of HOT lanes that cost little more than ordinary freeway lanes.

Utah’s express lanes run along Interstate 15 from Spanish Forks (south of Provo) to South Ogden, about 72 miles in each direction. They are separated from the general lanes only by a double stripe. The “on- and off-ramps” consist of periodic replacement of the double stripes with dashed lines. Vehicles are free to enter and exit the express lanes where the lines are dashed, while they aren’t supposed to cross where there are two solid lines.

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What I Learned in Texas

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Oregon is the slowest state in the West. No other western state has such slow speed limits. Nationally, only Hawai’i is slower.

Texas, meanwhile, is the fastest state in the country. On a two-lane rural road, for example, Oregon allows speeds no higher than 55 mph; Texas may allow 75 mph. On a four-lane freeway, Oregon may allow 65 mph; Texas freeways are often 80 mph.

When a state highway enters a city with stop lights, Oregon speed limits slow to no more than 45 mph; Texas may keep speeds as high as 75 mph. That’s right; you can be legally driving at 75 mph and suddenly have to stop at a red light.

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Ryan Rolls Over Fiscal Conservatives

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After years of indecision and short-term extensions, the House of Representatives passed a six-year transportation bill yesterday. Since the bill is not much different from a bill passed by the Senate a few months ago, it seems likely that the two will agree on a final bill later this month.

One of the main obstacles to the bill has been fiscal conservatives (and some liberals) who objected to $80 billion of deficit spending over the next six years. Many of the conservatives wanted to cut spending to be no more than gas tax and other highway revenues; the liberals wanted to raise gas taxes to cover the deficits and provide revenues for even more spending on roads and transit. Instead, the House stayed the course of spending more than is available, using various accounting tricks to cover the deficits.

What really happened is that newly minted House Speaker Paul Ryan wanted to prove his worth, so he twisted enough arms to get the bill passed. The bill even includes reauthorization of the Export-Import Bank, which many conservatives hated. Apparently, the long-term opponents of this bank and transportation deficits just gave Ryan his honeymoon and allowed the bill to pass without a big fight: only 64 members of the House voted against the final bill.
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The Pickrell Effect

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Peter Callaghan, a reporter for the Minneapolis Post, has figured out that rail transit planners routinely overestimate transit ridership. He calls this the Pickrell Effect, after US DOT researcher Don Pickrell, whose 1990 report found that most rail projects underestimated costs and overestimated ridership.

(Callaghan doesn’t mention the other Pickrell Effect, which is that government employees who report such shenanigans are likely to be sent to the local equivalent of Siberia. For his effort, Pickrell was told by a Deputy Secretary of Transportation that he would never be allowed to work on a transit study again.)

Callaghan does say that Pickrell’s study led to “more scrutiny” by the Federal Transit Administration, resulting in “a measurable improvement in forecasts, with mixed results.” Which is it: an improvement or mixed results? Callaghan says that a 2003 FTA study found that, of 19 projects since the Pickrell report, “only” eleven greatly overestimated ridership while eight came within 20 percent of ridership estimates.

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Innovation Does Not Mean Expensive

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“Innovation” means introducing new things. But to be successful, innovators don’t just introduce new things, they introduce things that are cheaper and better than what preceded them. Steam trains were a successful innovation because they were faster and less expensive than horses and wagons. Automobiles were successful because they were faster and less expensive than trains. But if automobiles had come first, no one would have successfully introduced the “innovation” of steam trains.

A New York transit advocacy group called the Transit Center has a very different view of innovation. As expressed in the above graphic from its recent report, A People’s History of Urban Transit Innovation, innovation doesn’t mean finding new things or finding ways of doing things better for less money. Instead, it means selling the public on old things that are more expensive and less effective than what we already have.

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Three Months of Work for a Three-Week Bill

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After three months of debate, Congress has agreed to extend federal highway and transit spending for three weeks. Authority to spend federal dollars (mostly from gas taxes) on highways and transit was set to expire tomorrow. The three-week extension means that authority will expire on November 20.

Many members in Congress hope that the three-week delay will allow them to reconcile the House and Senate versions of a six-year bill. Among other things, the Senate version spends about $16.5 billion more than the House bill, $12.0 billion on highways and $4.5 billion on transit. The two bills also use different sources of revenue to cover the difference between gas tax revenues and the amounts many members of Congress want to spend.

To cover this difference, the Senate bill, known as the “Developing a Reliable and Innovative Vision for the Economy Act” or DRIVE Act, provides three years of funding by supplementing gas taxes with new customs, air travel, and mortgage-backed securities guarantee fees. The House bill, called the Surface Transportation Reauthorization and Reform Act, doesn’t offer any source of funds; instead, House Transportation & Infrastructure Committee Chair Bill Shuster merely expressed hope that the House Ways & Means Committee would find a source of funds.

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California High-Speed Rail Will Be Late,
Over Budget, and Obsolete

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The Los Angeles Times has a special report finding that the California high-speed rail project will cost far more and take far longer than the rail authority is promising. The official cost estimate remains $68 billion for an abbreviated system despite the fact that a 2013 Parsons Brinckerhoff report to the authority said there was no way the project could be done for that price.

P-B’s report was “never made public” and the rail authority refused to release it under the state public records act. However, “an engineer close to the project” slipped a copy of the report to the Times.

The rail authority has established a record for ignoring such reports. In 2012, another consultant told the authority that costs should be revised upwards by 15 percent. The authority simply fired the consultant.

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The Clock Is Ticking

By | | News commentary, Transportation
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Because authority to spend federal dollars on highways and transit expires at the end of this month, the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee (or, to be precise, the chair of that committee, Bill Shuster) has proposed a new bill titled the Surface Transportation Reauthorization and Reform Act. Like the Senate bill proposed last July, the House bill authorizes spending for six years but only provides funding for the first three.

Although the bill promises to “streamline environmental review,” it also adds several new–and probably unnecessary–programs to the existing bureaucracy. These include:

  1. A “Nationally Significant Freight and Highway Projects Program.” Since we already have an Interstate Highway System, a U.S. Highway System, and a National Highway System, a National Freight Highway System seems redundant.
  2. A “National Surface Transportation Innovative Finance Bureau.” Unfortunately, all too often, “innovative finance” means finding a creative way to stick it to the taxpayers.
  3. Funding for vehicle-to-infrastructure communications equipment. However, in the opinion of many experts, such equipment will soon be rendered obsolete by self-driving cars.

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Although the House and Senate now each have six-year bills, the two do not agree on many details. Most importantly, the two differ on where they will get the $10 billion to $15 billion a year needed to continue deficit spending. Thus, many observers believe that Congress will do little more than pass another short-term extension at the end of this month. The big question is whether it will be a two-month extension or a six- (or more) month extension. If the latter, little more (other than additional extensions) is likely to happen in 2016 as it is an election year. If they pass a two-month extension, however, it may signal that they are serious about resolving their differences so they can pass a true six-year bill before the end of this year.

Semi-Self-Driving Tesla

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Tesla says that next year its cars will not only steer themselves within a lane, they will change lanes to pass slower vehicles when it is safe to do so. While other high-end cars, such as the Mercedes S-class, can steer themselves (“lane centering”), Tesla is the first to promise automatic lane changing.

San Ramon, California may see the nation’s first self-driving buses next year. The buses will operate in an office park called Bishop’s Ranch. While their range will initially be limited, they will use existing infrastructure, which means all of the people who have been dreaming of pod cars should pack up their bags and go home. Pod cars and similar personal-rapid transit devices would, like Contra Cost County’s self-driving buses, have a limited range, but would require expensive new infrastructure to work at all.

Volvo’s CEO, Håkan Samuelsson, has so much confidence in his company’s progress towards completely automated vehicles that he says the company would accept full liability for any accidents that were the fault of its cars. (Google and Mercedes have made similar promises.) At the same time, Sanuelsson has urged the United States government to impose national guidelines on the states for self-driving cars. The Antiplanner isn’t so sure; I’d rather have 50 different state laws, some good and some bad with the bad ones learning from the good, than one national rule that is almost certain to be bad with little opportunity to learn because there are no other sets of rules in other states.

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Top Down vs. Bottom Up

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The Brookings Institution’s Robert Puentes takes a look at infrastructure procurement and reaches exactly the opposite conclusions as the Antiplanner. Puentes says that successful infrastructure needs 1. visionary leadership; 2. public sector expertise; 3. standardization; and 4. public-private collaborations.

To the Antiplanner, all of these goals and recommendations are exactly wrong. My recommendations would be: 1. get the incentives right; 2. rely on user-fee driven processes; 3. let hundreds of flowers (or at last 50) bloom; and 4. gradually turn infrastructure planning and management to the private sector.

Leaders follow incentives. No matter how visionary the leaders are, bad incentives will lead to bad outcomes. Get the incentives right and the visionary leaders will follow.

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