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California Rail Follies

By | | Transportation
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The California legislature based its approval of the sale of billions of dollars of bonds to start construction of high-speed rail partly on claims that the rail line would help revitalize California’s economy. But now a study from UCLA finds that Japan’s high-speed rail line, one of the most popular in the world, failed to boost that nation’s economy.

“Rather, the evidence suggests high-speed rail simply moves jobs around the geography without creating significant new employ- ment or economic activity” says the study. “As an engine of economic growth in and of itself, CHSR will have only a marginal impact at best.”

The California High-Speed Rail Authority responded to the study by trotting out an architect who claimed all sorts of benefits for the train. Asking an architect to respond to an economic analysis is like asking a plumber for a second opinion on your cancer diagnosis. The plumber might give you the answer you want, but probably not the right answer.

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Metro Says Heat Wave Not “Extreme”

By | | News commentary, Transportation
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A Washington, DC, Metro train broke down for unknown reasons and another one jumped the tracks in another routine day for DC rail transit. The derailment was caused by a “heat kink” in the tracks, and Metro says it normally slows down trains during “extreme heat,” but hadn’t decided to do so in this heat wave.

Metal expands when it gets warm, and railroads used to leave gaps between the rails every 35 feet or so to allow for such expansion. But modern railroads weld the rails together to form a continuous ribbon that is prone to kinking at high temperatures. To deal with this, they use special allows that, they hope, won’t buckle in hot weather. The alloys used on Metro rails are good to temperatures up to 95 degrees, which DC exceeded for 11 days straight. Apparently, no one at Metro remembered to issue the slow orders.

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Environmentalists Destroy Boston Transit

By | | News commentary, Transportation, Urban areas
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The Metropolitan Boston Transportation Authority (MBTA, or “T” for short) is in deep financial trouble, with nearly $9 billion of debt and a $3 billion maintenance backlog that is growing more every year. According to a Boston Herald op ed by Harvard researcher Charles Chieppo, the blame for this can be placed on the Dukakis administration and the Conservation Law Foundation (CLF).

When Massachusetts was planning the Big Dig, CLF sued demanding investments in transit to mitigate the air pollution generated by new auto traffic resulting from the Big Dig’s minor expansions in highway capacity. Dukakis settled by agreeing to build 14 new transit projects.

In fact, those transit investments did little or nothing to clean the air. For one thing, relieving congestion actually reduces air pollution. For another, cars today are so clean that persuading people to ride transit instead does little for air quality.

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California Itching to Lose a Decade

By | | News commentary, Transportation
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Last week, the California legislature voted to destroy the state’s economy for another decade. The 21 senators who voted for the measure told the public they were approving a high-speed train from Los Angeles to San Francisco, but everyone knows they barely have enough money to build from Fresno to Bakersfield.

In voting to borrow $4.5 billion as a down payment on a rail line that is certain to cost at least $68 billion, and more likely over $100 billion, the legislature is risking the state’s entire economic future. The state already has a $16 billion deficit in its budget (which it closed only with one-time tricks and the promise of increased taxes), and the rail line will immediately increase that by more than a quarter of a billion per year, and in the long run (if it continues building) by much more.

This is not about jobs. More jobs are going to be killed by running up tax rates (or further cutting services) to pay for the deficits. This is not about transportation. Though advocates promise fast downtown-to-downtown travel times, only 2.5 percent of Los Angeles-area jobs are located in downtown LA, so few residents will ever have reason to ride the train. This is nothing more than pork barrel.

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Does Transit Promote Urban Development?

By | | Regional planning, Transportation
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Back in 1995, the FTA asked transit advocates Robert Cervero (of the UC Berkeley planning school) and Samuel Seskins (of Parsons Brinckerhoff) whether transit let to changes in urban form. After reviewing the literature, they concluded that “Urban rail transit investments rarely “create” new growth, but more typically redistribute growth that would have taken place without the investment” (page 3). They added that this “redistribution” mainly favored central city downtowns at the expense of the suburbs.

I’ve been citing that study as definitive for many years, but recently someone asked me if there is anything more recent. As a matter of fact, there is.

In 2010, Brookings published Urban and Regional Policy and Its Effects (volume 3), which included a paper by USC planning professor Genevieve Giuliano and one of her colleagues that addressed the same question. Based on “more than three decades of research,” they “found little evidence that transit investment has had significant impacts on urban structure.”

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More Evidence That Portland Is Nuts

By | | Transportation, Urban areas
20 Comments

TriMet, Portland’s transit agency, has made the largest cuts in its history, including reductions in bus service, fare increases, and elimination of free rail rides in downtown Portland (the free bus rides were eliminated last year). Meanwhile, it is using nearly $10 million of money supposedly dedicated to the Milwaukie light-rail line to remodel its offices.

Portland’s mayor and alleged pedophile Sam Adams considers TriMet’s subsidized passes for “youths” to be one of his “favorite program,” so he has proposed to fund it by charging TriMet $2 million for using city property for its bus shelters and benches. What an innovative financial tool!

Apparently, all that broke government entities need to do is requisition funds from other broke government entities. TriMet can build its next light-rail line by charging the state rent for taking cars off the road. The state can fund its k-12 educational programs by charging the universities for the future college students it is providing. The federal government can eliminate the national debt by charging water districts for the clean water that runs off of federal lands. Pretty soon everyone can own money to everyone else and we can all pretend that they cancel out (ignoring, of course, the original investors who will lose their shirts, but they’re probably part of the 1 percent so they deserve it).

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Clinically Dead

By | | News commentary, Transportation
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California’s high-speed rail project seems to be dead. At least, that’s the conclusion of a Washington DC writer commenting on a report that Governor Brown has given up on the idea of exempting high-speed rail from environmental reviews.

Without that exemption, the writer thinks, the state will never be able to build the line. However, In the spirit of former Egyptian President Mubarak, who was clinically dead though maybe still alive, perhaps California high-speed rail is only clinically dead. The latest word is that Brown is only delaying, not ending, his proposal exempt the project from environmental reviews.

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Antiques or Obsolete?

By | | Transportation
18 Comments

Someone made a little poster designed to convey the value of high-speed rail.

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Selectively Enforcing the Law

By | | News commentary, Transportation
77 Comments

Last week, Andrew asked why the Antiplanner hadn’t commented on the federal shutdown of dozens of “Chinatown bus” companies, and the simple answer is that I hadn’t heard about it until then. Although my friends at the American Bus Association, whose members do not include the Chinatown bus companies, are happy about the shutdown, I am not so certain it is a good thing.

If the same criteria used to shut down the Chinatown buses were applied to the Washington Metrorail, Boston T, or Chicago Transit Authority, these systems would be shut down as well. At the moment, the federal government doesn’t have the authority to shut down urban transit systems for safety reasons, but Congress is considering giving it that authority. Can you see the FTA shutting down a major transit system just because it has deferred maintenance for years and its system is deteriorating faster than it can keep it up? I can’t. Somehow I think pressure from Greyhound, Megabus, and other larger carriers have as much to do with the Chinatown shutdowns than safety issues.

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The Nigerian Streetcar Scam

By | | Transportation
15 Comments

Yesterday, the MacIver Institute published the Antiplanner’s study of a proposed streetcar line in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. In response, I received the following intriguing email.

Dearly Beloved,

I know this letter will come as a surprise to you, but I hope you will read it in detail. My name is Chuck Hails, and I am the executor of the estate of a man who has the same last name as yours. When he passed away recently without any heirs, he left an estate of $2 billion. I am willing to share this estate with you by investing, in your name, in a blighted area of your city.

The late billionaire whose estate I represent was very fond of streetcars, so to make this investment appear legitimate, all you will have to do is buy some streetcars; four or five will do. I happen to know of a factory in the Czech Republic that can sell you these streetcars for less than $2 million each.

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