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Transportation Notes from All Over

By | | News commentary, Transportation
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The city of Detroit decided not to build a light-rail line down Woodward Avenue, so some private foundations are trying to raise the $137 million to build it instead. Are they nuts? Do they really think this is the best use of their money?

In 1996, the Los Angeles Bus Riders Union forced the county transit agency to restore bus service that had been cut in order to pay for rail service. The Bus Riders Union strongly believes that buses work better than train, but the injunction expired a few years ago and the agency has cut service again. However, the FTA has ordered the transit agency to restore the service.

Tampa voters rejected a light-rail ballot measure in 2010, but the rail nuts think it was only because voters were “confused” about the proposal. One thing that’s clear: the main reason many Tampa officials want rail is they hope it will bring billions of federal dollars pouring into their city.

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The Highway Trust Fund Is Doomed

By | | Transportation
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Congress is wrangling over how to spend federal gas taxes, with the Senate wanting to spend about $15 billion per year more than revenues while the House modestly wants to spend only about $10 billion per year more than revenues. But according to the Congressional Budget Office, the money they have to argue about will soon dramatically decline.

Obama’s fuel economy rules, the CBO says, will reduce per-mile fuel consumption faster than the increase in driving. As a result, by 2040 total gas tax revenues will decline by more than 20 percent. That means less money for highways, transit, bike paths, and whatever else Congress wants to spend the so-called Highway Trust Fund on.

The House and Senate conference committee will begin meeting on May 8 to iron out the differences between the bill that passed the Senate and the one that passed the House Transportation Committee but not the full House. Republican members on the House side include Mica (FL), Duncan (TN), Young (AK), Hanna (NY), Shuster (PA), Capito (WV), Crawford (AR), Beutler (WA), Cravaack (MN), Ribble (WI), Buschon (IN), Southerland (FL), Lankford (OK), Camp (MI), Tiberi (OH), Hastings (WA), Bishop (UT), Upton (MI), Whitfield (KY), and Hall (TX). Several of them, including Mica, Shuster, and Young, are known to be fond of pork barrel.

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Transit Score Not Believable

By | | Transportation
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The Oregonian brags that Portland is “the 10th best city” for transit in the United States. But a close look at the web site doing the ranking reveals this may not be true.

First, they only counted the nation’s 25 largest cities for which they had data. This means cities such as Honolulu and Oakland, both of which are much more transit-friendly than Portland, didn’t even get considered. In addition, “second cities” in urban areas, such as Arlington VA and Long Beach CA didn’t get considered even though they had the data and the cities are among the 25 largest in the United States.

Second, the transit score methodology is based solely on proximity to and frequency of transit routes. Whether those transit routes are actually useful is another story; some may be too slow or not reach many jobs in an urban area.

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You Lose Some, You Lose Some

By | | Transportation
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In February, Amtrak proudly opened what it claimed was the first high-speed rail line outside of the Northeast Corridor. An investment of $32 million in train control and signaling systems now allow it to run trains the 80 miles between Kalamazoo, Michigan and Porter, Indiana, at 110 mph. Since trains were previously operating at 95 mph, this improvement saves travelers 7 minutes.

Barely a month later, Norfolk Southern, which owns the tracks east of Kalamazoo, issued orders slowing Amtrak trains from 79 to 25-30 mph. This will add 45 to 90 minutes to the trip time between Chicago and Detroit.

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Sounds like a lose-lose situation to me. Taxpayers lose a lot of money making trivial improvements to a transportation system that hardly anyone uses. The few people who use it are subjected to delays and lengthy trip times in spite of the spending.

The Hidden Cost of Congestion

By | | Transportation
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Nine months ago, Los Angeles had to close a major freeway for maintenance for a few days, which some people predicted would lead to such terrible traffic jams that they called it carmageddon. In fact, levitra soft tabs So to get past this, spammers just began using real email addresses as their stated return address. This is because they are always busy and purchase generic cialis need to beat a deadline. It allows users to and the experts to communicate directly and the find the solution of the issue cialis tadalafil 20mg encountered. 2. A Simple mobile phone will carry the information best online viagra of all loyalty cards. a lot of people stayed home and the predicted jams didn’t materialize.

Instead, Los Angeles is now experiencing a population explosion. Who could have predicted that keeping traffic moving is an important way of preventing overpopulation?

Living in a Fantasy World

By | | Transportation
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Here’s a great idea: when people stop driving their cars, build light-rail down the freeways and turn the rest of the freeway space into buildings and parks. Think about what that means.

Despite claims that rail transit can move as many people as a 10-lane freeway, the reality is that the average two-track light-rail line moves about as many people as one-fourth of a freeway lane. None move more than about half a freeway lane.

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The good news is that, so far, no public money has been spent on this. But it won’t be long before some smart-growth planner proposes such a thing.

Electric Cars Will Save Us — NOT!

By | | Transportation
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Last week, the Union of Concerned Scientists released a report that found–surprise, surprise–electric cars aren’t all that green (at least from a climate view) if the electricity used to recharge the cars comes from burning fossil fuels. Yet, in a Colbert-like manner, a colleague of one of the report’s authors asks in a blog post if electric cars are “a good choice or the best choice for lowering global warming emissions?”

As the New York Times points out in its coverage of the report, driving a Nissan Leaf in Denver produces about the same emissions as driving a 33-mph gasoline-powered car. The report doesn’t look at the life-cycle costs, nor does it look at the marginal cost of new electricity.

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Transportation Bill Going to Conference Committee

By | | Transportation
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The House and Senate plan to hold conference committee negotiations over the transportation reauthorization bill. Early this year, the House Transportation Committee had approved the most fiscally conservative reauthorization bill considered by congress since 1991, if not since 1982. Yet the bill never reached the floor of the House due to opposition from fiscal conservatives who said that the bill wasn’t fiscally conservative enough.

So the negotiations will center around the Senate bill, which is far from fiscally conservative in any sense of the word. It requires far more deficit spending than the House bill. It continues to divert a huge share of federal gas taxes to transit, which the House bill would have ended. And it includes all sorts of provisions that have nothing to do with transportation. In short, it is basically a continuation of the 2005 law with a few minor expansions of government power and spending.
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Naturally, House Democrats are elated. Transportation writer Ken Orski says it is likely that numerous “questionable items . . . have been slipped into this massive 1,600-plus page bill” (which is nearly twice as long as the House bill had been). The real fiscal conservatives in the House better do everything they can to kill the conference bill or the gamble they waged killing the House bill will come back to bite them.

The Non-Story Story

By | | Transportation
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Nearly two years ago, the Federal Transit Administration released a report saying the transit industry has a $77 billion maintenance backlog. So why is the Associated Press making a big deal of this report now?

“Americans are turning to trains and buses to get around in greater numbers than ever before,” says the AP. “The aging trains and buses they’re riding, however, face an $80 billion maintenance backlog that jeopardizes service just when it’s most in demand.”

The article’s writer never critically examines the claim that Americans are riding transit “in greater numbers than ever before,” and it is flat-out wrong. The American Public Transportation Association’s latest ridership report says that Americans took 10.4 million transit trips in 2011.

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Cold Feet on Rail Transit

By | | Transportation
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The Virginia legislature appears to have rejected a plan to spend $300 million in state money on construction of the Dulles rail line. This is only about 10 percent of the money needed to finish the line to Dulles airport, but it will put a crimp in plans to do so.

This is a line that everyone from the Washington Metropolitan Transit Authority (WMATA or Metro) to the Federal Transit Administration to then-Secretary of Transportation Mary Peters agreed should not be built. For Metro, not building the line was practically a matter of survival: it can’t afford to maintain the lines it has now, much less any new ones. On top of that, the Silver line will share tracks with the Orange and Blue lines in downtown Washington, and those tracks are already being used to capacity at rush hour. This means every Silver line train will require one less train on the Orange and Blue lines, increasing crowding and likely turning off riders.

For Peters and the FTA, it was simply a matter of cost-efficiency: studies showed that bus-rapid transit would work nearly as well as rail at a tiny fraction of the cost. But developers at Tysons Corner wanted to increase the density of their development, and Fairfax County planners said the area didn’t have the transportation facilities to support more density. So the developers convinced the Virginia Congressional delegation to persuade then-President Bush to overrule Peters’ decision.

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