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Category Archives: Transportation

Subsidies Here, Subsidies There, Subsidies Everywhere

By | | News commentary, Transportation
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The Port of Portland plans to spend up to $4 million giving shipping companies incentives to send containers through Portland, rather than another West Coast port. The subsidies would pay shippers $20 per container that is shipped through Portland.

This is a classic zero-sum game: If Portland attracts any containers that would otherwise have gone to Seattle, Vancouver, or some other West Coast port, the other ports will merely match Portland’s subsidies to get the business back. The shipping companies earn a little extra profit, taxpayers lose,and consumers probably won’t save enough to measurably increase purchases of imported goods.

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Light Rail & Low-Income Transit Riders

By | | Transportation, Urban areas
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When Denver’s Regional Transit District (RTD) opened its West light-rail line last April, it naturally cancelled parallel bus service. But, for many people, riding the light rail cost a lot more than the bus. This effectively made transit unaffordable for some low-income workers, who now drive to work.


Click image to download a 2.6-MB PDF of this report.

A group called 9to5, which represents working women, formally surveyed more than 500 people who live near the West light-rail line, and informally interviewed hundreds more. It found that the light rail had put a significant additional burden on low-income families. In one case, someone who was commuting to work by bus for $2.25 per trip now has to pay $4.00 per trip to take the light rail, a 78 percent increase in cost. 9to5 points out that the cost of gasoline to drive the same distance would be about $1.25.

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Overcounting Transit Riders

By | | Transportation
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The Antiplanner has argued that Congress should abolish New Starts and other mass transit grant making programs and distribute the money through formulas instead–preferably formulas that reward transit agencies for increasing ridership. However, I warned, the formulas probably should be based on fares rather than ridership counts as the latter are far easier to fake.

Case in point: Knoxville Area Transit (KAT) has its bus drivers count every boarding rider, and it was foolish enough to have the driver ring a bell for each count. A television news team decided to ride some KAT buses to see if the bells correlated with actual passengers.

On one trip, for example, the reporter heard “the driver hit the bell almost 30 times – when only seven riders had boarded. A short time later, two passengers were counted as 10.”

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Vehicle-to-Vehicle Communications

By | | News commentary, Transportation
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The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) says it wants to require auto makers to build vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communications systems into new cars. Calling V2V “the next generation of auto safety improvements,” the agency says such devices would “improve safety by allowing vehicles to “talk” to each other and ultimately avoid many crashes altogether by exchanging basic safety data, such as speed and position, ten times per second.”


The government wants every vehicle on the road to transmit its location to every other nearby vehicle–as well as any other receivers that happen to be in range.

Supposedly, “the system as contemplated contains several layers of security and privacy protection.” However, privacy advocates should be far more suspicious of V2V than of electronic vehicle-mile fee systems. The big difference between them is that V2V systems by definition incorporate both a receiver and a transmitter, while it is possible to design vehicle-mile fee systems that do not include a wireless transmitter. No transmitter means no invasion of privacy is possible; on the other hand, despite whatever privacy protection is included in V2V, a transmitter necessarily allows someone to receive the signal.

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Rolling Over the Competition

By | | Transportation
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The big news yesterday was that one side completely dominated the other. The Antiplanner doesn’t mean Seattle vs. Denver, but buses vs. trains.

This was supposed to be the mass transit Superbowl. Some dimwit dedicated more than half of the stadium’s parking lot to security and television equipment. The stadium–the largest in the NFL–normally hosts 80,000 people several times a year. But for the Superbowl, most ticket holders were supposed to go the big game by transit.

Eager to cash in on people willing to spend thousands of dollars for a seat at the game, New Jersey Transit generously offered gridiron fans rides on its trains for a mere $50. The NFL also chartered numerous buses to the stadium.

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Time Running Out for TriMet

By | | Transportation, Urban areas
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Portland’s transit agency, TriMet, is building one of the most expensive light-rail lines ever and is planning several more. Yet the agency is running out of money. The cost of maintaining rail lines grows rapidly as they approach 30 years of age, and TriMet’s oldest line was opened for business 28 years ago.


Click image to download the Secretary of State’s audit of TriMet (5.6-MB pdf).

An audit of TriMet by Oregon’s Secretary of State finds that the agency is already falling behind its maintenance needs. A decade ago, it was completing 92 percent of track maintenance and 100 percent of signal maintenance on time. Today those numbers have fallen to 53 percent for track and 72 percent for signals.

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Porker of the Month?

By | | News commentary, Transportation
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A group called Citizens Against Government Waste gave Oregon Representative Earl Blumenauer the “Porker of the Month award” for wanting to raise gas taxes in order to fund bike paths. Bike paths? They’re complaining about bike paths?

The group points out that taxpayers (they don’t say if this means all taxpayers or just federal taxpayers) have spent $9.5 billion on bicycle and pedestrian facilities over the last 22 years. It neglects to mention that this is only about 1 percent of federal highway spending and about a quarter of a percent of all highway spending. Maybe I’m biased, as (like Blumenauer) I’m an active cyclist, but I find it hard to complain about this.

MIT Press recently published Fighting Traffic, by University of Virginia researcher Peter Norton, who argues that streets used to be for pedestrians, but some vast conspiracy akin to the Great Streetcar Conspiracy stole the streets and gave them to automobiles. I don’t buy Norton’s extreme view, but I do see the need to provide safe facilities for all forms of transport. If roadways were once safe for cyclists and pedestrians but now are not because they are dedicated to cars and trucks, I don’t have serious problems with spending a tiny percentage of highway user fees on safe bicycle and pedestrian ways.

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Electric Cars Not So Green

By | | Transportation
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A new study published in Environmental Science and Technology argues that increased numbers of electric vehicles over the next four decades will not result in a “clear and consistent trend toward lower system-wide emissions.” The reason, of course, is that it takes energy to produce electricity, and much of that energy comes from burning fossil fuels.


Maybe not green enough to be worth the wait.

Of course, we can increase the production of “renewable” electricity. But if we increase the demand for that electricity by driving electric cars, then we’ll still have to burn fossil fuels to supply electricity for other purposes such as light and heat. It might make more sense to use renewable electricity to replace fossil fuels in electrical generation while working to make fossil-fuel-powered cars more energy efficient.

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Still No Infrastructure Crisis

By | | Transportation
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Another year, another spate of stories about how America’s infrastructure is crumbling and how we need to raise taxes to repair it. Here’s the reality: Infrastructure that is funded out of user fees is in good shape; infrastructure that is funded out of taxes is not. Those who benefit from tax-supported infrastructure want the people who use user-fee supported infrastructure to pay more taxes so the former can continue to enjoy their obsolete systems at little cost to themselves.

Oregon Representative Earl Blumenauer wants to increase gas taxes by 15 cents a gallon–nearly double what they are now–to fund transportation infrastructure. But America’s highways, which support the users who pay those gas taxes, are in good shape. The number of structurally deficient bridges is rapidly declining and the average smoothness of pavement is improving.

It’s not hard to see that doubling gas taxes also doubles the money going into rail transit and other slush funds. The Federal Transit Administration said in 2010 that transit agencies suffer from a $78 billion maintenance backlog, and the total has likely increased since then since the agencies were spending less than necessary to keep systems in their current state of poor repair.

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Utah’s Greatest Transportation Need

By | | Mission, Regional planning, Transportation
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The Antiplanner has been asked to talk about “Utah’s Unified Transportation Plan: 2011-2040,” prepared by the Utah Department of Transportation, Utah Transit Authority, and metropolitan planning organizations for Logan, Orem, Salt Lake-Ogden, and St. George. While that’s an impressive title and seemingly an impressive line-up of planning organizations, this is not a plan at all. Instead, it is just a wish-list of projects that the agencies would like taxpayers to fund.

Rational planners are supposed to set goals, identify a broad range of alternative ways of meeting those goals, estimate the benefits and costs of each alternative, use that information to develop an alternative that provides the most cost-effective approach, and then monitor to make sure the plan is really working as expected. This so-called unified plan, however, has no alternatives, no estimates of benefits, no cost-effectiveness analysis, no monitoring of past plans, and no evidence that any of this sort of information was used in coming up with the list of projects that dominates the document.

On top of that, trying to write a unified plan for all state transportation facilities, regional transit systems, and metropolitan areas makes the task all the more difficult. Of course, each agency that contributed to this unified plan has written its own plan and this wish-list is merely a summation of those plans. But I strongly suspect the plans written by the agencies are just as bad.

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