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Category Archives: Transportation

Forest Planning & Transit Planning

By | | Public lands, Transportation
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In 1985, the Hoosier Environmental Council hired the Antiplanner to review the Hoosier National Forest plan, which called for clearcutting most of the southern Indiana federal forest. My review uncovered a document admitting that planners had fabricated data to justify money-losing timber sales. Looking at the plan that was then in effect, I discovered that the forest had attempted to meet legal requirements for public involvement by having the forest’s own soils scientist and biologist review the plan.

Wildflowers in the Hoosier National Forest. Forest Service photo.

Since this proved that the existing plan was illegal, and the proposed new plan was not credible, the Forest Service responded to my visit by shutting down the Hoosier Forest’s timber program for more than a decade. Even after that time, it cut very little timber compared to what it had been cutting before 1985.

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Creative But Not Productive

By | | Transportation
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One of the claims made by Indianapolis transit advocates was that improved transit would help the region “compete for jobs and talent.” They cited a study by a group called CEOs for Cities that found that “Young adults with a four-year degree are 94% more likely to live in close-in urban neighborhoods than their counterparts with less education.”

This is the old Richard Florida idea that cities should strive to attract the “creative class” of well-educated people that want to live in lively cities with walkable, transit-intensive neighborhoods. Ninety-four percent sounds like a big number, but let’s put this into context.

The CEOs for Cities study defined “close in” as neighborhoods near downtowns housing an average of less than 5 percent of urban area populations. “Young adults” includes people in the 25- to 34-year-old age class. The 2010 Census found that about 31.5 percent of this age class has a four-year degree or better. If this group is 94 percent more likely to live close in than their cohorts without a four-year degree, then less than 7.5 percent of young, well-educated adults live “close in.” This is less than 2.5 percent more than might be expected if the population was evenly distributed by education class.

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Indianapolis Presentation

By | | Regional planning, Transportation
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Indygo, Indianapolis’ transit agency, offers one of the lowest levels of transit service of any urban area of its size in the Midwest–only Omaha’s is lower. The proposed Indy Connect plan calls for changing this by making a $1.3 billion capital investment and more than tripling Indygo’s operating from about $50 million to $175 million a year. A key feature of the plan is to have communities outside of Marion County–which is the current limit of Indygo’s services–join in a regional transit district.

Proponents say the plan will make Indianapolis more competitive, relieve congestion, and reduce air pollution. Yesterday, I gave a presentation arguing that the plan wouldn’t accomplish any of those goals. Instead, I urged the region and state to save money by contracting out existing transit services; legalizing private transit operations; and encouraging cities outside Marion County to start their own cross-county transit service, which would probably offer better service at a lower cost than a regional transit district could provide.
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My presentation can be downloaded as a 16-MB PDF. Feel free to use this shows or any of the shows downloadable by clicking on the new “presentations” link above.

Living a Fantasy Means Not Counting Costs

By | | Transportation
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Slate writer Jeremy Stahl wants everyone to know that he has a fantasy of riding high-speed trains that pay for themselves (at least their operating costs) and cut greenhouse gas emissions, and he doesn’t understand why other people don’t support that fantasy. He specifically mentions the Antiplanner, who he dismisses for being “conservative.”

Slate lists Stahl as its “social media editor,” and he probably does a great job at that. But he apparently isn’t a numbers guy. You don’t have to be “conservative” or totally innumerate to know that the real world, and not the fantasy he wants to live in, has a limited amount of money and resources. Making decisions about how to effectively spend those resources requires more than just fantasizing how you would like things to be.

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Back in the Air Again: Indianapolis

By | | Housekeeping, Transportation
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The Antiplanner is going to Indianapolis this week to talk to people about a proposed transit plan. The plan, which was written by the Chamber of Commerce rather than Indy’s transit agency, calls for creating a regional transit district (IndyGo, the city’s transit agency, only covers one county) and running several “rapid transit” lines that are billed mainly as bus-rapid transit but that might use light rail on one route where a rail right-of-way is owned by local governments.

The plan is expected to require more than $1.3 billion in capital investments, and the transit system will then require more than triple the operating subsidies–from $43 million in 2011 to $140 million when the plan is fully implemented. Of course, if they actually build a light-rail line, the total costs are likely to go much higher.

In reading through a PDF version of the plan, I was struck by a one-sentence summary of the basic justification for the plan: “A robust regional transit system is necessary to spur our region’s continued economic growth, to preserve our ability to compete for jobs and talent, and to address growing challenges with congestion and air quality compliance” (page 5).

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Can’t Afford to Pay Bus Drivers, But . . .

By | | Follow up, Transportation, Urban areas
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Neil McFarlane, the general manager of Portland’s TriMet transit agency, stunned Portland-area residents recently when he warned that the agency would have to cut service by 70 percent unless unions agreed to reduced benefits in upcoming contract negotiations. When he did so, he piously noted that TriMet’s non-union managers have had a pay freeze for four years.

Turns out that pay freeze was more imaginary than real. In the last year alone, TriMet gave its managers pay increases totaling nearly $1 million. McFarlane alone received a 3 percent raise, which–considering his previous pay was $215,000 a year–means a $6,450 boost to his income.

TriMet’s financial woes are hardly new. Last year, TriMet made the largest service cuts in its history and also decided to start charging fares in what was formerly the downtown Fareless Square. Most of the streetcar line had been in Fareless Square, and as a result actual streetcar fare collections averaged less than 4 cents per reported ride.

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Transit Ridership Falls Since 2008

By | | News commentary, Transportation
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The lies begin right in the headline of the American Public Transportation Association’s annual press release patting the industry on the back for carrying heavily subsidized riders last year. “Record 10.5 Billion Trips Taken On U.S. Public Transportation In 2012,” claims the press release headline.

The text reveals that it wasn’t actually a record at all, but merely the “second-highest ridership since 1957.” When was the first highest? In 2008, meaning the headline would have been more accurate if it had read, “Transit Ridership Falls Since 2008.”

Of course, as a lobby group, APTA is paid to promote the transit industry. Reporters are also paid to see through lobbyists’ lies, but unfortunately most of them simply modestly rewrite the press release while others add their own propaganda.

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Milwaukee Presentation

By | | Transportation
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Last year, the Milwaukee city council approved a $64 million streetcar plan on a 10-to-5 vote. But there’s a snag in the plan. Building the streetcar will also require $30 to $50 million to move underground utilities. Men are inclined to have sexual issues by the age of 50 and complete ineptitude is seen in every sixth man by the age of 80, nearly 80% of all men suffer from BPH symptoms. uk generic viagra The bridge designing engineer was sildenafil overnight David McDonnold. If you buy 40 pills you will be spending $199.20 US dollars instead of $217.13 and will be saving $21.60 viagra pills in india US dollars. It helps to prevent aging process in men and generic viagra from canada is the lack of person’s psychological sexual capability. The city was hoping to force utility companies to pay the costs, but the state public utilities commission may not agree. This just proves once again how easy it is to spend other people’s money.

The Antiplanner’s presentation about the folly of streetcars is available in either PowerPoint or PDF format. People are free to borrow from it if they find it useful.

Back in the Air Again

By | | Housekeeping, Transportation
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Today the Antiplanner is in Milwaukee to try to help persuade the city not to build a streetcar line. It is notable that many of the places that want streetcars–Cincinnati, Kansas City, Milwaukee, Orange County, to name a few–originally had light-rail plans that never happened. It is almost as if streetcars are seen as a consolation prize for failing to sucker the locals into funding light rail.

Yet cities were right not to build light rail, and streetcars would be an even bigger waste of money. The least-expensive streetcar lines being planned today are more expensive than the first light-rail lines. Both San Diego’s and Portland’s first light-rail lines cost less than $15 million per route mile, and even after adjusting for inflation that’s less than $30 million per mile today. Yet most streetcar lines being planned today are expected to cost $30 million or more per track mile, which is $60 million per route mile.

The problem with light rail is that it is expensive, low-capacity transit that doesn’t go very fast–most light-rail schedules average only about 20 to 22 mph. Streetcars are worse, having much lower capacities and speeds of only about 6 to 10 mph.

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Brookings Buys into Amtrak Accounting Tricks

By | | Transportation
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“Combined, Amtrak’s short-distance corridors generated a positive operating balance in 2011,” says the Brookings Institution’s new report on Amtrak. This suggests that the United States should “invest” more in such short-distance routes.

The problem with this is that just one short-distance route, the Boston-to-Washington Northeast Corridor, dominates all the other routes. That one route carries as many passenger miles of travel as all the 27 other short-distance routes put together. Of those 27 routes, only three–the Carolinian and trains from Washington to Lynchburg and Washington to Newport News, Virginia–had a “positive operating balance,” to use Brookings’ term, in 2012. But all of those routes actually start in either New York or Boston, so really they are Northeast Corridor trains too.

In using the term “positive operating balance,” Brookings–with the help of Amtrak’s non-standard accounting methods–is being highly misleading. First, both Brookings and Amtrak count state subsidies as “revenues,” so Brookings doesn’t count a train’s operating loss that is offset by such subsidies against that train’s “operating balance.” Since only short-distance trains receive state subsidies, this leads to a strange recommendation from Brookings that Congress should encourage state subsidies of long-distance trains, as if that would make the subsidies go away. As someone told USA Today, “A subsidy is a subsidy whether it’s coming from federal, state or local taxpayers.”

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