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Maglev: The Next Generation of Boondoggles

By | | News commentary, Transportation
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A group in Maryland is promoting magnetically levitated trains in the New York-Washington corridor. “Superconducting” maglev, says the group, is the “next generation of transportation.”


Superconducting maglev train being tested in Japan. Wikimedia commons photo by Yosemite.

Get real. Japan is proposing to build such a line from Tokyo to Osaka: 320 miles for a mere $112 billion. That’s $350 million per mile, or twice as much as the current estimated cost of California high-speed rail boondoggle (about $100 billion for 440 miles). Except for contractors, nobody is too happy about the cost of that line.

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Conference Wrap-Up

By | | Transportation
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Transportation blogger Jim Bacon attended the American Dream conference and has a few words to say about Dale Moser’s presentation about Megabus. Bacon also comments on the debate that took place Sunday night over the proposition that Congress should abolish New Starts and distribute the same amount of money using a formula based on transit ridership or fares.

This debate was supposed to be about the ethics of Congress giving transit agencies incentives to choose high-cost transit systems when lower-cost systems would work just as well. But it descended into a debate over rail transit. I argued that, with a formula fund, transit agencies would be free to spend their share of the formula on rail transit if they wished, but would not be rewarded for choosing rail over less-expensive buses.

My opponent, Art Guzzetti, of the American Public Transportation Association, argued that capital projects can’t be built with formula funds; they require dedicated funds. I responded that all federal highway funds are formula funds and have been used on such capital projects as the Interstate Highway System. The difference is that the Interstate Highway System was built with user fees in the form of gas taxes, and only built at the pace that gas tax revenues allowed, while transit agencies want to build expensive rail lines regardless of the fact that user fees will not pay for the capital, maintenance, or even much of the operating costs.
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The Megabus Revolution

By | | Transportation
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One of the many excellent speakers at this year’s American Dream conference was Dale Moser, CEO of Coach USA and Megabus. Coach USA is owned by Stagecoach, one of the two large private transit companies that emerged when Britain privatized much of its transit industry. (The other is First Group, which among other things owns Greyhound.)


Just seven years after it began, Megabus covers scores of cities in the East, South, and Midwest as well as several in the California market. Click image for a larger view.

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Yellow Journalism at the L.A. Times

By | | News commentary, Transportation
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Every experiment with vehicle-mile pricing that has ever been done protected driver privacy. In most if not all experiments, devices used to calculate charges did not even keep track of where users were; only what they owed. Legislation introduced in Congress to shift to vehicle-mile pricing set privacy as a top priority. Yet the Los Angeles Times ominously writes about “black boxes” that “possibly” will tell the government where you are driving or have driven.

Given concerns over the NSA and other government agencies that have admitted they are keeping track of our emails and other communications, privacy is a legitimate concern. Yet given the concerted efforts by supporters of vehicle-mile pricing to protect privacy, it is irresponsible of the L.A. Times to make a big deal of this.

The article quoted several people pointing out that gas taxes don’t work anymore, if they ever did, but ended up quoting someone saying Congress should just raise those gas taxes so that drivers won’t have to “be concerned about their privacy.”

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Central Planning for Freight

By | | Transportation
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It’s not enough that urban planners are messing up passenger travel in cities. Now they want to “reduce urban impacts” of freight transport. This report, with its discussion of “modal shifts” and “Freight villages,” reads like someone took a smart-growth plan for rail transit and transit-oriented developments and simply did a bunch of finds-and-replaced.

The report includes numerous comparisons of the costs of truck vs. rail freight. Rail is less expensive than trucks–if you have high volumes moving from point A to point B. But rail simply cannot compete with trucks for low volumes moving from many origins to many destinations. That’s why most rail shipping today is coal, grain, or containers–all things that can go from one of a few origins to one of a few destinations.

The fundamental problem with this report is the same as is found in most anti-auto reports: it treats trucks as the problem rather than treating the impacts of trucks. Are trucks noisy? Yes, but muffling the noise works better than trying to limit truck traffic. Do they pollute? Yes, but we know that pollution can be cleaned up at the exhaust pipe more effectively than by reducing miles of travel. Do trucks add to congestion? Sure, but treating congestion with variable-priced roads, signal coordination, and similar road improvements works better than trying to reduce driving.
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Should Transit Be Regional?

By | | Regional planning, Transportation
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The Indianapolis Chamber of Commerce thinks a regional (as opposed to county) transit agency will help Indianapolis compete with regions such as “Minneapolis and Salt Lake City that offer extensive transit systems.” The Antiplanner disagrees, pointing out that the Indianapolis urban area is already growing twice as fast as Minneapolis or Salt Lake City, and higher taxes aren’t going to help.

Unmentioned is the fact that “regional transit” is generally a euphemism for rail transit, and that the proposal for a regional Indianapolis transit agency includes a plan for a low-capacity rail line. Basically, someone wants to spend a lot of money on obsolete transportation.
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Only about 17,000 Indianapolis-area workers live in households that lack cars. I’m not saying this should be done, but it would cost less, and do more for regional vitality, to give every one of those households a new Toyota Prius than to build a low-capacity rail line. With or without rail, Indianapolis doesn’t need regional transit.

Sacrificing Safety

By | | Transportation
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The Wall Street Journal points out (search for “Bay Area Shutdown” if this link doesn’t work) that the BART employees who are on strike represent an industry that has seen one of the steepest declines in worker productivity in history. By just about any measure–transit trips per worker, revenues per worker-hour, costs per passenger mile–the transit industry has gone backwards more than a century in both labor and capital efficiency.

The really scary thing, at least if you are a transit rider, is that the result of this strike will be that BART, along with other transit agencies, will sacrifice safety in order to politically accommodate its workers. Many public employees have fat pensions and guaranteed health-care for life, but if paying for these things forces your local planning department to not pass a few new rules or your local library to buy a few less books, no one is going to be particularly damaged.

However, transit agencies–and especially rail transit agencies–can and do cut maintenance budgets in order to keep the money flowing to workers with cushy jobs. This is because of the asymmetry in union-employer negotiations when the employer is a public agency that reports to elected officials who depend on union support to get elected. In the case of transit, this asymmetry is both local and national in scope, as federal law requires that transit agencies keep unions happy in order to be eligible for federal grants.

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BART Strike Today?

By | | News commentary, Transportation
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San Francisco BART employees were going to go on strike a couple of months ago, but Governor Brown invoked a “60-day cool-off period.” It seems unlikely that 60 more days of negotiations could resolve the issues–and they didn’t, as workers are expected to on strike today.

BART says that it needs $15 billion to rejuvenate its system over the next few years. To cover this cost, it wants workers to pay more into their pension and health care plans. Despite a proposed 12 percent pay raise over four years, the workers refused. Unions offered to go into binding arbitration, but BART management–probably fearing that arbitrators wouldn’t see BART’s maintenance problem as having anything to do with worker pay–refused.
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Even Bay Area commuters who used to love BART are beginning to understand the problems. First, BART employees, like most transit employees, have a cushy deal to begin with, and arbitrators would be reluctant to cut it back. More important, rail transit is just too damn expensive, and the costs never go away. Outside of places with Tokyo- or Hong Kong-like densities, nobody can really afford to run a passenger rail system, and those who try are going to find themselves in the same bind as BART is in today.

Why Is This Even a Question?

By | | Transportation
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Denver’s Regional Transit District (RTD) has a tough decision to make. Should it spend under $300 million on bus-rapid transit and get an estimated 16,300 to 26,600 daily riders? Or should it spend $600 million to $700 million on a commuter train that is projected to attract 2,100 to 3,400 daily riders?

To officials in the cities of Boulder and Longmont, this is a no-brainer. Every other major city in the Denver urban area is getting a train, so therefore they need a train too, no matter what the cost and how few the riders. RTD’s general manager piously says, “we want to reach a consensus with the stakeholders,” referring to the fact that Boulder, Longmont, and other city officials only agreed to RTD’s multi-billion-dollar “SlowTracks” rail scheme in the first place on the condition that every major city would get a rail line.

While it seems absurd to spend twice as much money on a technology that will attract barely a tenth as many riders, the truth is that bus-rapid transit would perform better than trains in all of the region’s major corridors. RTD simply ignored that option in those other corridors, even when its own analysis showed that buses were better than trains (which it did every time RTD did a complete alternatives analysis).

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A Red-Letter Day in American History

By | | Transportation
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Today is the 100th anniversary of first moving assembly line for making automobiles. This new production process democratized mobility by making cars available to the masses rather than just an elite.


The moving assembly line at Ford’s Highland Park plant. Click image for a larger view.

The Wall Street Journal celebrated this day early with an article in its weekend edition, “Honk If You Love the Mass-Produced Automobile.” The Antiplanner did not write the headline, but it is appropriate. (If the link doesn’t work, try Googling “Honk If You Love the Mass-Produced Automobile.”)

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