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Why High-Speed Trains Are a Ridiculous Fantasy

By | | News commentary, Transportation
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High-speed rail supporter Alfred Twu has gotten a lot of attention for having boldly drawn a map of where he thinks high-speed trains should go. Never mind that Twu’s map is even more absurd than Obama’s plan. What’s sad is that the romance of trains still manages to hold peoples’ attention long after passenger trains have become technologically and economically obsolete.

Slate calls this the “liberals’ dream [of] what America’s high-speed rail network looks like.”

Anybody can draw a map, and that map is likely to reflect their own particular preferences. The Antiplanner’s ideal high-speed rail line would connect my home in Camp Sherman, Oregon (population 380) with Cato’s offices in Washington, DC. Of course, I tend to move about every eight or nine years, so by the time the rail line was finished the only potential regular customer would be gone. But just think of the jobs that would be created!

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Stressful and Unpredictable

By | | News commentary, Transportation, Urban areas
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Portland traffic is “stressful and unpredictable,” according to one of the co-authors of the Texas Transportation Institute’s urban mobility report. In fact, by some measures, Portland has the sixth-most-congested freeways in the nation, after DC, New York, Los Angeles, Bridgeport, and (strangely) Provo-Orem.

There are other measures by which Portland isn’t quite so bad, though overall Portland ranks 17th even though it is the 23rd largest urban area. The significance of the freeway number is that it is based on actual measurements of traffic by Inrix, while most of the other measures are calculated based on estimates of miles of driving and lane miles of roads. The Antiplanner has never trusted these calculations because a lane mile of highway built in 2000 has a far greater capacity to move traffic than one built in 1950. Thus, the measure that ranks Portland sixth-worst is probably one of the most reliable in the report.
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Portlandia supporters, of course, attempt to double-talk their way out of this. The mobility report, says one, “ignores differences in trip distances among metro areas and how trip distances have changed over time.” The Texas people disagree, saying they do take distances into account. Moreover, a look at census data reveal that the average Portland commuter takes 24.2 minutes to get to work, which about the same as in other urban areas of similar size (Minneapolis is 23.4 minutes; Denver is 25.7; St. Louis is 23.6; Cincinnati is 22.8; San Antonio 23.8). Since census data also show that 85 percent of Portland-area commuters still take autos to work, Portland’s investments in transit and bike paths have, at best, merely nibbled at the edges of the problem.

Congestion King

By | | News commentary, Transportation
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The Texas Transportation Institute has released its annual urban mobility report, and Washington, DC once again takes the crown of wasting the most time and fuel per commuter. Though the urban mobility report makes some questionable claims about the congestion relief provided by urban transit, not even DC’s expensive Metro rail system has kept traffic from costing the average auto commuter $1,400 a year in wasted time and fuel.

Of course, one reason DC is number one in congestion is that, with the growth of government during the recent recession, it has enjoyed far more job growth than most other major urban areas. Yet, if rail transit really were such a good way to relieve congestion, it should have been able to absorb that growth.

Instead, the rail system operated by the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority (WMATA) is actually losing capacity as maintenance shortfalls force the agency to run smaller trains and those trains become less reliable. Last summer, when passengers on the Green line were stranded and had to walk along the rail line in the summer heat, WMATA promised that the agency would improve its safety procedures and keep people better informed.

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Safety vs. Fuel Economy?

By | | Transportation
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Robert Norton is a former attorney with Chrysler, so he must know cars, right? Apparently not, for his recent National Review On-Line article about auto safety misses the mark.

Norton frets that Obama’s fuel economy standards, which require that the average car sold in 2025 gets 52 mpg, will lead to dangerous cars. His evidence is a thought experiment.

“Imagine a head-on collision,” he says, of “a Cadillac Escalade and the other a Chevy Volt. Which would you want to be in?” He thinks it is obvious that anyone would want to be in the Escalade. Yet many small cars are considered safer than many larger vehicles.

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LaHood’s Cost-Effectiveness Rule

By | | Transportation
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It was with some trepidation that the Antiplanner finally took the time to carefully read the Department of Transportation’s final rules for major transit capital grants. Long-time readers may recall that the Antiplanner is concerned about the cost-effectiveness of these grants, and urged the Department to strengthen those requirements–without much hope that the Obama administration would pay any attention.

The law requires the Department to take cost-effectiveness into account when it considers applications for funds for streetcars, light rail, and other “New Starts” transit projects. But the Federal Transit Administration had always given this only token consideration until Bush’s second Secretary of Transportation, Mary Peters, put some strict limits on just how expensive projects could be if they were to get any federal funds.

Secretary LaHood chafed at these limits, particularly because they prevented any funds being given for streetcars. So he announced in 2010 that he was going to get rid of the limits. On behalf of the Cato Institute, the Antiplanner commented on LaHood’s proposal to make the change and then commented on the draft rules.

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LaHood’s Legacy

By | | News commentary, Transportation
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As the Antiplanner noted yesterday, Ray LaHood’s lasting legacy as Secretary of Immobility is the loosening of requirements for major transit capital grants in new rules issued a few weeks ago. This is most important for streetcar fans, since the Bush-era rules pretty much predetermined that streetcars were not a cost-effective use of federal transportation dollars. As a result, most of the streetcar projects that LaHood was able to fund came out of stimulus funds, not transportation funds.

With the floodgates opened, expect to see a rash of streetcar applications. Reconnecting America, a pro-transit group, has cataloged more than 600 transit plans under way in more than 100 metro areas. These include 125 streetcar projects in at least 50 cities which may now be eligible for funding now that LaHood has eliminated the Bush cost-effectiveness criteria.

ProjectsCost/Mile (Millions)Daily PM/Million $ Cost
Rapid Bus215309
Commuter rail11617269
Bus rapid transit13516177
Light rail11882121
Heavy rail3448071
Streetcar1254158
Interstate Highways1108,000

This table shows the estimated capital cost per mile of various types of transit projects identified by Reconnecting America. “Rapid bus” is Reconnecting America’s term for fast, frequent bus service with limited stops on existing roads; “bus-rapid transit” is Reconnecting America’s term for similar bus service on dedicated roads. The daily passenger miles per million dollars of capital cost is a crude measure of cost-effectiveness calculated by multiplying projected daily trips for each mode times the average length of trips by that mode (1.75 miles for streetcars; 4 miles for bus; 5 for light and heavy rail; and 20 miles for commuter rail) and dividing by the capital cost. The last row, representing the Interstate Highway System, is offered for the sake of comparison.

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Goodbye Ray LaHood

By | | News commentary, Transportation
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Secretary of Immobility Ray LaHood has announced his intention to leave office as soon as a replacement can be found. Aside from an admirable emphasis on safety, LaHood’s main legacy will be a weakening of the cost-effectiveness requirements for transit grants so that, now, the most ridiculously expensive transit projects can get federal funding.

As a result, more than 100 metropolitan areas are lining up with proposals for insanely expensive rail projects. While this is good news to snobs who think that the only real transit is on rails, it is bad news for taxpayers as every rail project funded means money is being wasted that could otherwise have been put to good use.
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Naturally, there is plenty of speculation about who Obama might select to replace LaHood. Some of the names include Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa; Oregon Representative Earl Blumenauer; and former Minnesota Representative James Oberstar, all of whom support the administration’s pro-transit, anti-auto agenda. The Antiplanner is hoping for Blumenauer, the current godfather of Portland’s light-rail mafia, as his move into another job would shake up Oregon’s power structure in ways that might prove positive in the end.

CNN Not Impressed with Vermont’s “High-Speed Rail”

By | | Transportation
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Vermont officials are proud that a federal high-speed rail grant allowed them to take 29 minutes of the Vermonter schedule between New York City and Burlington. This is quite a bit less impressive than it sounds, as the speeded-up train still takes 9.5 hours for an average speed of 38 mph. By comparison, Megabus does the same trip in as little as 6.5 hours. Megabus slao has the advantage of reaching inner Burlington, while Amtrak stops in the suburb of Essex Junction, about 7.5 road miles away.

CNN rode the train and was less than impressed. After all, the top speed of the train in most of Vermont is a mere 59 mph, though there is a short stretch of 79-mph track. CNN’s Drew Griffin wonders why high-speed rail money was used for such a low-speed project. (A scruffy looking Antiplnnner briefly appears in the CNN video.)
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To be fair, the Obama administration always knew that its high-speed rail plans would be incremental in those states that weren’t building brand-new rail lines, which means (since Florida dropped out) any state but California. Still, it is worth questioning wny the government has to subsidize trains when companies such as Megabus and Bolt Bus can provide faster, more frequent service with relatively few subsidies.

Light-Rail Inefficiency Project

By | | Transportation
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Stung by the entirely accurate criticism that it is one of the worst-run transit agencies in America, San Jose’s VTA has come up with a breath-taking plan for improving its efficiency. Naturally enough, the plan is called the light-rail transit efficiency project.

Click image to download an 8-MB presentation describing San Jose’s “light-rail efficiency plan.”

The plan (see summary here) consists of spending up to $25 million building two passing tracks so that express light-rail trains can pass local trains in downtown San Jose. I know what you’re thinking: this has to be a work of genius. I mean, who would ever think of one transit vehicle passing another? Except, of course, buses, which do it all the time and which don’t need millions of dollars of new infrastructure to make it possible.
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The Continuing Saga of the American-Made Streetcar

By | | Planning Disasters, Transportation, Urban areas
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Portland Streetcar, the non-profit organization that operates streetcars in Portland, is demanding that the city cough up $145,000 to fix its brand-new, American-made streetcar. Let’s take a look at the history of this car.

First, the city used its own money to buy streetcars from the Czech Republic for an average of $1.9 million apiece. Each streetcar has just 30 seats, but the cost per vehicle is about six times greater than a 40-seat bus. But that wasn’t expensive enough.

The most recent expansion of Portland’s streetcar system was funded by the federal government, which has a buy-America requirement. So Oregon’s congressional delegation and lobbyists persuaded the Federal Transit Administration to give Oregon Iron Works $4 million to build a prototype streetcar. The company used plans purchased from the Czech manufacturer of Portland’s streetcars to effectively produce a replica of those cars.

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