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The $10 Billion Battle

By | | News commentary, Transportation
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Senate Democrats propose to spend $54 billion next year on transportation and housing. House Republicans want to spend just $44 billion, but President Obama has threatened to veto such a paltry bill.

Obama and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid claim the House bill poses a threat to the nation’s infrastructure, with many citing the collapse of the Skagit River Bridge as an example. But that bridge fell down because it was struck by an oversized truck, not because of any infrastructure shortfall. Besides, the Senate bill only includes $500 million for bridge replacements.

Where will the other $9.5 billion go? Things like Amtrak (half a billion), TIGER grants for such “critical infrastructure” as new streetcars ($1 billion); and $123 million more for New Starts than the House bill. On the housing side, the Senate bill would spend $1.6 billion more than the House on Community Development Block Grants and $75 more than House on “livability” (on which the House proposed to spend zero).

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Unfeasibility Study

By | | Transportation
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As Detroit enters bankruptcy, an Indiana rail passenger group frets that its state hasn’t wasted enough money on pipe dreams. So it is publicizing a so-called feasibility study for a high-speed rail line from Columbus to Chicago. The study proposes to spend $1.3 billion improving CSX tracks to run trains at 110 to 130 mph, resulting in a Chicago-Columbus trip as short as 3-3/4 hours, or an average speed of about 80 mph.

I say “so-called” feasibility study because it seems like a real feasibility study would take the trouble of asking if it were feasible to operate passenger trains at 110 mph on the same tracks as freight trains when CSX, which owns the track, says 90 mph is the fastest it will allow passenger trains on its tracks “unless freight and passenger traffic were separated.” The study calls for running 24 trains a day (12 each way), which is probably more than CSX wants even at 90 mph.

The feasibility study ignores these limits and simply assumes 130 mph is possible. Everything that follows is just as speculative and unrealistic.

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High Housing Costs Not Offset by Low Transport Costs

By | | Housing, Regional planning, Transportation
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Growth-management planners who have made housing unaffordable in California, Oregon, and other states respond that this high cost is offset by lower transportation costs in their cities. They call it the H+T Affordability Index, and the supposed reduced cost of transportation excuses all of the housing affordability problems their plans create.

In fact, most of their cost numbers are hypothetical, and their estimates seem likely manipulated to achieve the result they wanted. Fortunately, we now have a relatively independent source of information that directly contradicts the H+T claim.

The Economic Policy Institute (EPI) is a left-wing organization that seems to believe in income redistribution. However, it has no axe to grind about urban sprawl, so when it calculates the cost of living in various cities, it has no incentive to skew the data in favor of heavily planned regions.

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French Train Crash Caused by Human Error

By | | News commentary, Transportation
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French rail officials say that “human error has already been ruled out” as a cause of the train crash that killed six people last week. But it was a human error, or at least a political error: the error was for the government to put most available resources into building new high-speed rail lines while it let existing lines deteriorate.

Officially, the cause of the crash was a piece of a switch that apparently broke while the train was going through the switch. But that probably happened because the piece that broke was old and worn out.

While the French Transport Minister claimed that “there was no indication that a lack of investment in maintaining the system’s infrastructure was at fault” for this particular crash, he admitted that most of the conventional rail infrastructure is more than 30 years old, meaning it needs to be replaced. “The situation is severe,” the minister added, “with the degradation in recent years of traditional train lines, due to a lack of resources.”

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Repeat After Me: Cost-Effectiveness

By | | Regional planning, Transportation
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Someone named Willis Eschenbach has a blog post arguing that a carbon tax is “crazy” because it will have a negligible effect on how much Americans drive. He observes that the carbon taxes he’s “seen discussed are on the order of $20-$30 per ton” of CO2, and calculates that a tax of $28 per ton equals about 25 cents per gallon of gasoline.

He further calculates that increasing the cost of gasoline by 25 cents reduces per capita driving by about 100 miles per year. Since Americans drive an average of about 10,000 miles per year, this is only 1 percent. “They want to impoverish the poor for that?” he asks.

There are several errors in his analysis, but when I tried to point them out in comments I got lost in an effort to enter a valid on-line name and password. So I’ll just discuss them here. First, let me say that I’m not convinced that anthropogenic climate change is serious enough to warrant huge changes in our society. But if I were, a revenue-neutral carbon tax would be the most sensible change.

Eschenbach’s most important error is his implicit assumption that the best way to measure the effects of a carbon tax on greenhouse gas emissions is by the number of miles of per capita driving. In fact, I’ve argued for years that reducing per capita driving is not a cost-effective way of reducing greenhouse gas emissions, and Eschenbach’s analysis reinforces that: large reductions in driving would require much higher taxes than most analysts believe are necessary to reduce emissions.

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Operation Flower Destruction

By | | Follow up, Transportation, Urban areas
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Washington Metro trains catch fire. The trains are supposed to be run by computers, but since a June, 2009 crash the Washington Metropolitan Area Transportation Authority (WMATA) hasn’t trusted the computers, so it has human drivers who aren’t any more trustworthy.

With numerous elevators and escalators out of service and frequent train breakdowns, WMATA is subject to increasingly harsh criticism from even its usual friends at the Washington Post. Even WMATA’s high-paid general manager admits the agency is only half done with the repairs it has scheduled (which are probably less than it needs).

So what does the agency have its employees do? How about spend a day ripping out all of the flowers that a self-styled Phantom Planter put in at the Dupont Circle subway station? Because it would be horrible if non-agency approved flowers bloomed in red, white, and blue, as the planter expected would happen next month.

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Carmaggedon? Not!

By | | News commentary, Transportation
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Many including CNN predicted that the BART strike would “paralyze San Francisco.” “Public transit in San Francisco came to a screeching halt Monday morning as Bay Area Rapid Transit unions went on strike,” says CNN.

Not exactly. First, BART accounts for less than a third of the region’s transit commuters. Buses account for more than half, and the buses didn’t go on strike.

Second, BART just doesn’t carry enough people to lead to paralysis even if all of them drove instead (and in fact many rode buses). As a state highway patrol officer noted, “If I didn’t know there was a BART strike, I wouldn’t have thought anything was different after looking at the traffic.”

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Is the Columbia River Crossing Finally Dead?

By | | News commentary, Transportation, Urban areas
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The Washington legislature refused to fund the state’s share of a proposed bridge across the Columbia River, proving that at least a few Pacific Northwest politicians still have an ounce of common sense. That doesn’t include the Oregon legislature, which had agreed to put up more than $400 million for the project.

As a result of the Washington legislature’s decision, the Columbia River Crossing office is closing its doors after having spent something like $200 million on a stupid plan for a new bridge that wasn’t going to be tall enough for existing river traffic and whose main goal was to send a low-capacity rail transit line from Portland to Vancouver, Washington.

The two bridges that the new bridge was supposed to replace don’t really need replacement. While one was built in 1913 (and the other in 1958). the older of the two could probably have been replaced for about half a billion dollars if it were really necessary. But the proposed new bridge and associated projects were projected to cost $3.4 billion.

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Is Branson Stealing from U.K. Taxpayers?

By | | News commentary, Transportation
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In recent weeks, readers of The Guardian who weren’t distracted by the Snowden story have been entertained by a debate between lefty economist Aditya Chakrabortty and entrepreneur Richard Branson, the CEO of Virgin Airlines, Virgin Rail, and various other companies. The debate actually started a couple of years ago, when Chakrabortty called Branson a “carpetbagger” because, among other things, he bought a failed bank from the British government for less than the government had spent rescuing the bank.

Virgin Pendolino tilting train in London. Wikipedia commons photo by Andrew Butcher.

Branson replied a few days later saying that “99% of our businesses have nothing to do with government at all and have been built in the face of ferocious competition.” Where his companies do work with the government, he added, their goal–as in the case of the bank–has been to turn loss-making enterprises into profitable ones.

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Rewards for Gardening in Public Spaces

By | | News commentary, Transportation
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In a public relations coup, the Washington Metropolitan Area Transportation Authority (Metro) gave a certificate of appreciation to a man who voluntarily planted flowers in flower boxes that the agency had been neglecting for years at the Dupont Circle MetroRail station. I’m sorry, did I say “certificate of appreciation”? I meant a letter threatening him with “arrest, fines and imprisonment” if he planted any more flowers or tended any of the more than 1,000 flowers he has already planted.

Henry Docter, who styles himself the “Phantom Planter,” says he has planted flowers in public spaces on four continents. Usually, he tries to remain anonymous, but in this case he feared Metro would mistake his flowers for weeds and poison them. So he wrote a letter telling Metro about the flowers and offered to weed, water, and tend them.

Metro says it is merely worried about liability, but Docter says he is willing to sign a waiver. Embarrassed officials say they probably should have left “the word ‘imprisonment'” out of their letter, but that still leaves “arrest and fines.”

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