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Kansas City Spared Light-Rail Vote

By | | News commentary, Transportation
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Kansas City voters won’t get a chance to vote on light rail despite the fact that proponents gathered enough signatures to put it on the ballot. The court that rejected the measure said that the plan was unworkable because it didn’t provide enough money to build the mandated rail lines.

A light-rail fanatic named Clay Chastain had petitioned for light rail in Kansas City six times and lost. Then, in 2006, he put a crazy proposal on the ballot to built both light rail and an aerial tramway–this was right after Portland opened its aerial tramway–and managed to win, mainly because the people who normally opposed him figured the measure would lose and so they didn’t bother to campaign against it.

The 2006 measure didn’t include enough funding for the project because Chastain figured the federal government would pay for half. But the Federal Transit Administration looked at the numbers and realized that Kansas City would be forced to drastically cut its bus service if it built light rail, so it rejected the plan. Kansas City leaders put another measure on the ballot that voters mercifully rejected.

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Confusing Inputs with Results

By | | Transportation
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Why do liberals confuse inputs with outputs? Matthew Yglesias raves about how wonderful Los Angeles is for building more rail transit, even though the city’s last burst of rail construction resulted in a 17 percent decline in transit ridership.

A Los Angeles attorney named Robert Garcie provides an antidote to Yglesias’ rantings. He notes that LA’s transit agency “spends almost twice as much on rail to carry about one fourth as many passengers” as buses. LA transit ridership recovered only when a court order directed the city’s transit agency to restore the bus service it had cut to pay for rail. When that order expired, it started new rail projects, cut bus service, and ridership is again decreasing.

Meanwhile, Cleveland reporter Angie Schmitt thrills to the fact that, even though big cities such as Boston, Chicago, and Washington can’t afford to maintain the rail systems they have, smaller cities such as Grand Rapids, Ft. Collins, and Savannah want to build their own rail systems that they won’t be able to afford to maintain. Schmitt writes for DCStreetsBlog, a popular blog known for its support of “livability,” whatever that is.

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The Transit Overtime Scandal

By | | News commentary, Transportation
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The Oregonian reports that drivers for TriMet, Portland’s transit agency, are taking so much overtime that many get little sleep. Paying for overtime costs taxpayers a lot of money and the lack of sleep creates hazardous situations.

This TriMet light-rail train crashed into the bumpers at the end of the line because, investigators found, the driver fell asleep at the controls. The TriMet employee who released this video to the public was suspended for doing so.

Thanks to overtime, four TriMet drivers earned more than $100,000 last year, but TriMet says that “only” four of them have been involved in accidents. How about that? Just 50 percent. This naturally raises the question of what share of drivers who don’t take so much overtime have been involved in accidents.

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End Gas Tax? Yes! Pay for Roads with Sales Tax? No!

By | | News commentary, Transportation
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Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell wants his state to be the first to end the gas tax. The Antiplanner supports that idea because gas taxes are an imperfect user fee.

However, McDonnell proposes to replace the gas tax with a 0.8-cent sales tax that he says will generate more revenue than the gas tax. If your only goal is to make government bigger, then generating revenue is a good idea. However, if your goal is to have better roads, then even a gas tax makes more sense than a sales tax.

The key to the success of the free market is feedback. As imperfect as the gas tax is, it generates feedback to highway agencies: if they build roads no one uses, they get no gas taxes.

Sales taxes generate no feedback at all; the agencies get money whether anyone uses the roads or not. We know from the transit industry what happens when transportation agencies are funded out of general taxes. First, they build expensive monuments aimed at pleasing politicians rather than solving transportation problems. Second, they fail to maintain those monuments. That’s hardly a sound prescription for our highway system.

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More Automakers Move Toward Self-Driving Cars

By | | News commentary, Transportation
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Lexus cautiously presented its work towards a self-driving car at the Las Vegas Consumer Electronics Show yesterday. Audi has taken the bolder step of obtaining a Nevada license for its self-driving car. Tire maker Continental has also entered the field.

Lexus (which of course is owned by Toyota) is advertising its technology as more of a “co-pilot” that will take over driving in case of what it judges to be an emergency. “Our vision isn’t necessarily a car that drives itself,” said executive Mark Templin, “but rather a car equipped with an intelligent, always-attentive co-pilot whose skills contribute to safer driving.” That’s an important intermediate step that will make driving safer, but it won’t have the revolutionary effects that truly autonomous cars will bring.

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So who will dominate the self-driving auto field? Google hopes that automakers will provide the hardware and let it provide the software. But
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Transportation Manifesto 2013

By | | Mission, Transportation
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The New Year seems an appropriate time to state, or restate, the main goals of this blog. Today the Antiplanner will focus on transportation. Future manifestos will focus on land-use regulation and public land management. Any suggestions for improving these principles and corollaries are welcome.

1. The Transportation Agency Principle: The sole goal of government transportation agencies should be to efficiently enhance mobility.

Mobility is so important socially and economically that it deserves the same protection under the Constitution as freedom of speech and freedom of religion. (In fact, freedom of movement is nominally protected under the privileges and immunities clause of the Constitution.) Enhancements in mobility over the past century have been a major factor in increasing wealth, reducing poverty, increasing lifespans, and increasing leisure time. No other goal should be allowed to divert attention from the efficient enhancement of mobility.

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San Jose Transit Is Still Near the Top

By | | Transportation, Urban areas
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That is, near the top of the list of the nation’s worst transit systems, says the San Jose Mercury-New. “The near-empty trolleys that often shuttle by at barely faster than jogging speeds serve as a constant reminder that the car is still king in Silicon Valley,” says the paper, “and that the Valley Transportation Authority’s trains are among the least successful in the nation by any metric.”

Many if not most San Jose light-rail “trains” are just one car long, which means they aren’t really trains at all. Considering an average load of just 18 people, the first third of this articulated railcar would be more than enough to handle the demand most times of the day.
Flickr photo from Albert’s Images.

Five years ago the Antiplanner declared the Santa Clara Valley Transportation Authority (VTA) to be worst-managed transit system. Is it still the worst? It has a lot of competition, including Baltimore, Buffalo, and Pittsburgh, yet VTA manages to remain competitive.

In terms of number of riders per light-rail car, VTA carried an average of just 18.3 in 2011, a number lower than all other light-rail systems except Buffalo (17.0) and Baltimore (18.2). Fares from San Jose’s light-rail riders cover just 15.7 percent of the trains’ operating costs; only Baltimore, at 12.0 percent, is lower. Counting just operating costs, taxpayers pay nearly $5 to subsidize each light-rail trip, an amount exceeded only by Dallas and Pittsburgh light-rail systems. Overall, I’d say Baltimore’s is the worst system, with San Jose’s a close number two.

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Failing the Intelligence Test

By | | Follow up, Transportation
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Garl Boyd Latham, of the Texas Association of Railroad Passengers, predicts that San Antonians will be “pleased by streetcars once they are running.” His response to the Antiplanner’s op ed critiquing the city’s streetcar plan basically amounts to, “don’t confuse me with the facts; I know what I believe.”

To be precise, Latham says, “An astute man can prove anything he wanted with facts and figures,” then argues that the Antiplanner “manufactured an artificial reality through the manipulation of facts.”

One of those supposed manipulations is my claim that streetcars cost more than buses. Latham admits the capital costs are high but claims that, once built, streetcars have “a minimum life expectancy of a half-century or longer,” which will be surprise to the Federal Transit Administration (or just about anyone in the transit industry), which says streetcar vehicles last about 25 years, and other streetcar infrastructure lasts no more than 30 years. Not even counting maintenance, FTA data clearly show that streetcars cost far more to operate–either per vehicle mile or per passenger mile–than buses.

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Defining Success for Amtrak

By | | Transportation
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The Auto Train, which carries passengers and their autos between Virginia and Florida, was a “private failure” but a “public success,” says the January, 2013 issue of Trains magazine. For those who don’t know the story, the Auto-Train began as a private venture when a Department of Transportation employee named Eugene Garfield took a DOT feasibility study and $56,000 of his own money to begin the service from Lorton, Virginia (outside of DC) and Sanford, in central Florida. When it began service a few months after Amtrak took over most of the nation’s passenger trains, the Auto-Train was heralded as a great success, earning a profit as early as its second six-months of operation.

The original Auto-Train.

In 1974, however, Garfield bet the company starting a second route from Louisville to Florida, hoping to capture some of the Chicago market. Even without this failed investment, the profits Auto-Train reported only covered operating costs, not maintenance. As so many railroads have done in the past, it was deferring maintenance hoping for more profits to cover those costs in the future. That deferral contributed to at least two accidents that cost the company millions of dollars. The hoped-for long-term profits didn’t happen–Trains reports that it only netted a profit in 1973, ’74, and ’75–and the company went out of business in 1981.

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The Benefits and Costs of Tolling

By | | News commentary, Transportation
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The costs of collecting electronic tolls are rapidly declining, particularly for roads that only accept electronic tolls. In 2009, when I was writing Gridlock, the best available estimates indicated that 12 to 23 percent of toll revenues went to collection costs, compared with just 3 percent for state gas taxes.

However, a recent paper from the Reason Foundation claims that the costs of collecting electronic tolls has now fallen to be almost as low as the costs of state gas tax collections. Moreover, once the benefits of using tolls to relieve traffic congestion are considered, tolls become a far less costly way to pay for roads.

Those traffic congestion benefits are the reason why the Antiplanner recently proposed that highways be refinanced out of tolls in the form of vehicle-mile fees rather than gas taxes. Congestion imposes a $100 billion-plus annual cost on Americans; we know how to fix it, and the only thing preventing that solution is inertia.

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