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Category Archives: Transportation

Back in the Air Again

By | | Housekeeping, Regional planning, Transportation
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The Antiplanner is flying to Salt Lake City today to speak at a legislative forum tomorrow sponsored by the Sutherland Institute. The topic will be Utah’s 30-year transportation plan. Since the Antiplanner is skeptical about our ability to know things even five years in advance, you can imagine what I’ll be saying about a 30-year plan.

Thursday, I’ll be in Olympia, Washington to speak at a Senate Governmental Operations Committee work session about growth-management planning. My main message will be that growth-management created many more problems than it solved. Most important, according to Coldwell Banker, the price of a 2,200-square-foot house in Seattle is more than three times the price of a similarly sized house in Houston.

However, despite me being very imaginative in coming up with reasons for not studying the subject, I could never tadalafil india cialis come close to Calvin’s reason of not doing his Math homework. Pineal Gland – Located at the center of the brain, it was investigated on whether the intake of it. brand cialis canada pfizer viagra mastercard devensec.com The drug is safe for consumption for most people. If you are suffering from porn-induced erectile dysfunction, it is advised to take up some simple exercises like jogging, walking, swimming viagra uk sales and stretching. Friday I’ll be in Lake Oswego, Oregon, talking about a proposed “high-capacity transit” line to Tigard, Oregon. The term high-capacity transit is a joke, as Portland’s light-rail system can’t run more than two cars in a train (due to the city’s short blocks) and no more than 20 trains an hour. At 150 people per car, that’s 6,000 people per hour. A good busway could move nearly ten times that many people.

In any case, if I get a chance, I’ll try to post some updates over the next few days.

Pre-emptive Cancellation

By | | Transportation
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The polar vortex that supposedly was caused by global warming should have been a great opportunity for Amtrak to prove the worth of intercity trains, which advocates often claim are “all-weather transportation.” Instead, Amtrak preemptively cancelled trains in both the Midwest and Northeast Corridor.

Trains between Chicago and the Twin Cities and between Chicago and St. Louis were all cancelled. The Empire Builder between the Twin Cities and Spokane was also cancelled. Then it cancelled Chicago-Detroit trains. Finally, it reduced service in the Northeast Corridor.
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Admittedly, three trains were stuck in the snow in Illinois in the middle of the night. Fortunately, Amtrak was able to rescue the passengers–with buses.

High-Speed Rail: Wrong for Europe?

By | | Transportation
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Sustainability advocate Kris De Decker argues that “high-speed trains are killing the European railway network.” A native of the Netherlands who currently lives in Spain, De Decker is irked that the replacement of conventional trains with high-speed trains has greatly increased the costs of rail travel, thus encouraging people to drive or fly.

De Decker offers numerous examples of routes where conventional trains were replaced by high-speed trains whose fares are much higher. In some cases, the high-speed trains really aren’t significantly faster than the conventional trains, yet typical fares might be three times as high. In other cases, daylight high-speed trains have replaced overnight trains that were slower but didn’t require any business time and cost less than the high-speed trains even with sleeping accommodations.

He also notes that low-cost air service is often far less expensive than the high-speed trains. “You can fly back and forth between Barcelona and Amsterdam with a low-cost airline for €100 if you book one to two weeks in advance, and for about €200 if you buy the ticket on the day of departure,” he says. “That’s compared to €580 for what the journey would cost you if you would take the high speed train.” He adds that, “Flying has become so cheap in Europe that it’s now cheaper to live in Barcelona and commute by plane each day, than to live and work in London.”

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Horse Pucky

By | | City planning, Transportation
25 Comments

If you thought Mayor Michael Bloomberg was bad, with his proposed ban on large sodas and other attempts at social engineering, just wait for some of Mayor de Blasio‘s ideas to become law. De Blasio has gained attention for wanting to ban horse-drawn carriages in Central Park because they are “cruel” to the horses. It’s apparently much less cruel to simply send the horses to glue factories, but that’s a leftist for you: it is more important to put people (and creatures) out of work because you don’t think their jobs are dignified than it is to let them work for themselves.

De Blasio says he wants to replace the horses with electric cars. That’s so environmentally thoughtful of him, especially since half of New York’s electricity comes from burning fossil fuels. It might promote global warming, but at least it’s not cruel to horses. Whatever you think of the treatment of horses who live in roomy barns, get a minimum of five weeks of vacation per year, and see their doctors far more frequently than most humans, the point is that de Blasio is going to try to micromanage everything.
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Case in point: de Blasio has appointed Polly Trottenberg as his new transportation commissioner. As undersecretary of transportation for policy, Trottenberg is probably the source of most of Ray LaHood’s crazy ideas about streetcars, livability (=living without cars), high-speed rail, and other transportation issues. New York’s loss is America’s gain.

California Thinks Your Time Is Worthless

By | | Regional planning, Transportation
40 Comments

California’s S.B. 375 mandates that cities increase the population densities of targeted neighborhoods because everyone knows that people drive less and higher densities and transit-oriented developments relieve congestion. One problem, however, is that transportation models reveal that increased densities actually increase congestion, as measured by “level of service,” which measures traffic as a percent of a roadway’s capacity and which in turn can be used to estimate the hours of delay people suffer.

The California legislature has come up with a solution: S.B. 743 exempts cities from having to calculate and disclose levels of service in their environmental impact reports for densification projects. Instead, the law requires planners to come up with alternative measures of the impacts of densification.

On Monday, December 30, the Governor’s Office of Planning and Research released a “preliminary evaluation of alternative methods of transportation analysis. The document notes that one problem with trying to measure levels of service is that it is “difficult and expensive to calculate.” Well, boo hoo. Life is complicated, and if you want to centrally plan society, if you don’t deal with difficult and expensive measurement problems, you are going to botch things up even worse than if you do deal with those problems.

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$12.2 Billion Bike Path

By | | Transportation
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Some bicycling nut in London has proposed 135-mile “skycycle,” meaning a three-story tall exclusive bikeway, around the city. The headlines to the story say it will cost £220 million, but that’s just for the first four miles. At that rate, the entire 135-mile system would cost nearly £8 billion, or some $12.2 billion.

Meanwhile, the Washington Post reports that most American states are increasingly controlled either by people who think this would be a good idea or those who think it would be a bad idea. Red states are doing better economically, argues Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal, but Illinois Governor Pat Quinn argues that red states leave too many people behind.

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High-Speed Rail in England

By | | Transportation
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High-speed rail fortunately appears to be dead in the United States, but it is still alive and kicking taxpayers in England. In the last decade, the country spent 11 billion pounds (about $18 billion) building high-speed rail about 67 miles from London to the Channel Tunnel, a project known as High Speed 1. Ridership was disappointing: the private company that operates it expected revenues would cover operating costs, but instead has required government subsidies of more than 100 million pounds per year.


Click image for a larger view.

Despite this, politicians and rail contractors want to spend at least 43 billion pounds (more than $70 billion) on High Speed 2, from London north to Manchester and Leeds. Manchester is about 200 highway miles from London, and the rail line promises to cut a bit more than an hour off of people’s highway journeys. However, the train will take about the same amount of time as flying, and by my count there are currently 13 flights a day between London and Manchester.

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Drive by Wire

By | | News commentary, Transportation
15 Comments

“I found myself driving the Infiniti on surprisingly long highway stretches without touching the accelerator, brake pedal or steering wheel,” writes New York Times auto expert Lawrence Ulrich in his review of the Infiniti Q50. “The Q50 charts a course toward the self-driving cars of tomorrow.”

As shown in the 2010 video above, the technology to allow cars to detect lines on the pavement and steer themselves between those lines–known as lane keeping–has been available for several years. But most auto companies selling in the United States have used a weakened version of the system known as lane keep assist that alerts drivers if they inadvertently cross the stripes, but isn’t designed to do all of the steering independently.

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New Starts Hearing

By | | Transportation
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At the New Starts hearing last week, the Antiplanner testified that the federal government has given transit agencies and local politicians incentives to waste money on expensive transit projects that increase congestion, use more energy than the cars they take off the road, and harm transit riders. Members of the House Highways and Transit Subcommittee then proceeded to prove my point by asking FTA Administrator Peter Rogoff a long series of questions that were all some variation of, “When are you going to send more money to my district?”

Los Angeles-area Representative Grace Napolitano did ask one interesting question: if rail transit does so much to increase property values, why aren’t transit agencies paying for rail lines by imposing some sort of tax, such as tax-increment financing, on those enhanced values? It wasn’t that she disbelieved that rail transit enhanced property values; she just thought that cities could build even more rail lines if they took advantage of this great opportunity.

The Antiplanner didn’t get a chance to respond during the hearing. But in follow-up comments, I pointed out that the enhanced property values are entirely illusory. First, rail transit doesn’t lead to regional economic development; all it might do is shuffle that development to different places around the region. Thus, if property values along the rail line do rise, that means values somewhere else in the city or region are depressed.

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Stalling out? Try Dead

By | | Transportation
25 Comments

Sam Stein at the Huffington Post frets that “Obama’s vision for high-speed rail is in danger of stalling out.” Where has he been the last three years? High-speed rail was in danger of stalling out in 2010, when Florida, Ohio, and Wisconsin elected governors who turned back funds for their states’ programs. Today, Obama’s “vision” is dead, and so is high-speed rail in this country.


Unlike air and highway travel, with Obama’s high-speed rail vision, you won’t be able to get from anywhere in the country to most other places in the country.

Like other rail nuts, Stein tries to make it appear we are in some kind of race for supremacy with Japan and other countries. “With countries like Japan already investing in the newest form of rail technology –- magnetic levitation, which LaHood called “way too expensive” for the U.S. –- the nation is very much set to be left in the proverbial dust.” The problem is that “the newest form of rail technology” is just as obsolete as the previous form. Stein might as well worry that we aren’t keeping up with the Japanese on floppy disk technology.

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