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Category Archives: Transportation

The Future of New Starts

By | | Transportation
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Should federal transportation funds be distributed to states and cities based on fixed criteria, such as population and land area, or should they be handed out based on the political whims of whoever is in power at the moment? While Republicans in Congress are moving in the former direction, the Obama administration is moving towards the latter approach.

Last week, the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee passed a surface transportation reauthorization bill that would use formulas to distributed almost all federal gas taxes. Among other things, this would eliminate the New Starts transit fund, a multi-billion-dollar annual fund that gives cities incentives to plan high-cost rail transit projects, so they can get “their share” of federal dollars, when low-cost buses would work just as well.

Meanwhile, the Obama administration has published draft rules revising the New Starts planning process by making the criteria for transit funding more vague (and therefore more political) than ever before. Where House Republicans would take the politics out of transit funding by turning transit grants into formula funds, the administration’s new rules make transit funding more political than ever by creating vague new criteria that cities can use to justify rail transit projects.

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The Seductive Appeal of Value-Capture Finance

By | | Regional planning, Transportation, Urban areas
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Today, the Antiplanner is in North Carolina, where transit agencies seem to be competing to plan the wackiest, most-expensive rail transit lines that few people will ever use. Right now, the leading contender must be Raleigh, which (according to a paper by UNC-Charlotte transport professor David Hartgen and transit accountant Tom Rubin) is planning a light-rail line that will cost $33 per trip and a commuter-rail line that will cost $92 per trip.

The Antiplanner, however, is in Charlotte looking at a proposed commuter-rail line that is expected to cost more than $450 million to start up and is projected to carry only about 5,600 trips (meaning 2,800 round trips) a day in 2025. The Antiplanner calculates that, for about the same price as the rail line, taxpayers could give every one of the 2,800 riders a brand-new Toyota Prius every other year for the life of the rail project.

This rail line is such a dog that not even the Federal Transit Administration will help pay for it. So the Charlotte Area Transit System (CATS) is proposing that local cities and counties cover half the costs, while the other half would be shared by CATS and the state of North Carolina. Under a proposed financial plan, five cities and two counties are to use “value capture” to raise their half of the money.

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Mica Introduces Surface Transportation Bill

By | | News commentary, Transportation
33 Comments

House Transportation & Infrastructure Committee Chair John Mica introduced a proposed surface transportation bill yesterday. Titled the American Energy & Infrastructure Jobs Act, the bill contains something to make everyone happy as well as things to make everyone unhappy.

To please Senate Democrats, who want to keep spending more than the government is collecting in gasoline and other transportation taxes, the bill proposes to spend $260 billion over five years. That’s at least $10 billion a year more than revenues.

To please Tea Party Republicans, who want to reduce pork barrel spending, the bill contains no earmarks, consolidates or eliminates 70 different programs, and eliminate mandates that states spend highway money on bike paths and other non-highway programs. To please rail nuts, the bill streamlines the rail planning and approval process. To please the energy industry, the bill mandates approval for the Keystone pipeline.

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Breaking Down the Barriers

By | | News commentary, Transportation
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Leave it to the New York Times to put the most negative spin on a conference about driverless cars. “Collision in the Making Between Self-Driving Cars and How the World Works,” reads the headline.

As the Antiplanner wrote three years ago, the main barriers to driverless cars are institutional and bureaucratic, not technological. So it isn’t really news when the Times reports that “an array of speakers suggested that questions of legal liability, privacy and insurance regulation might pose far more problems than the technological ones.”

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Building Eyesores Creates Jobs, Especially When You Tear Them Down

By | | Transportation, Urban areas
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Honolulu has the best bus system in America, taking a higher percentage of commuters to work and carrying more daily riders per capita than any other bus system. But just having the best bus system isn’t good enough for some people, who just have to have a rail line to have “real transit.” So the city is about to break ground on a 20-mile-long elevated rail line that is expected to cost $5.27 billion ($260 million per mile), and will probably end up costing more. The city has already spent $350 million just planning the rail line–enough to operate its bus system for nearly two years–without laying a single inch of track.

The project even has Bette Midler upset. She grew up in Honolulu but now lives in New York which, she notes, went to a great deal of trouble to remove many of its ugly elevated rail lines. “That this project is going to be so small, cost so much, and have such a terrible impact on the environment is dreadful,” she says. “The very idea that the state would sacrifice the most important amenity it has to offer the world, the beauty of its environment, is beyond belief.” Not beyond belief: some people want rail transit no matter what the cost.

The latest news is that former Hawaii Governor Ben Cayetano is running for mayor for the specific purpose of killing the rail line. The Honolulu Star-Advertiser “objectively” reports that, if Cayetano wins, “money and jobs may disappear.” Yes, money will “disappear” back into taxpayers’ pockets, who will foolishly spend that money on things that will create jobs that are a lot more useful than building an elevated rail line that will only have to be torn down in a few years.
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Self-Driving Cars in the Pipeline

By | | Follow up, News commentary, Transportation
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The hit of last week’s Detroit Auto Show was the 2013 Ford Fusion. This was a surprise because the car was merely a stylistic upgrade of an existing model.

The real significance of the Fusion is not the “strong personality” or the fact that Ford will offer both hybrid and plug-in hybrid versions, but that it is the first moderate-priced (under $30,000) car to offer key technologies on the road to driverless cars: adaptive cruise control, lane keeping, self-parking, and collision avoidance. While Ford’s versions of these technologies are weak in that they don’t actually drive the car, when combined with an enhanced GPS navigation system, it is likely that all that will be needed to turn the 2013 Fusion into a totally self-driving car will be a software upgrade.

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When We Don’t Build It, We Won’t Build It Here Instead of There

By | | News commentary, Transportation
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Once the envy of much of the rest of the United States, the California high-speed rail project is increasingly viewed as being run by a bunch of buffoons who can’t see the handwriting on the wall. Actually, a few of them may see it: last week the authority’s executive director and board chair both resigned. The former said he wanted to “spend more time with his family,” code for “I no longer want my name associated with these crackpots.”

The board chair remains on the board, and the board as a whole still can’t read the handwriting. Last week they decided that, when they fail to find the money to build the portion of the line from Bakersfield to Los Angeles, they won’t build it through Lancaster and Palmdale instead of not building it over the Grapevine, which had previously been given serious consideration. To even bother to make the decision shows they haven’t realized the project is hopeless.

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Brouhaha in Grants Pass

By | | News commentary, Transportation
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As if to show that even small cities can waste gobs of money on transit infrastructure, Grants Pass, Oregon (population 35,000) recently debated the wisdom of spending more than $100,000 each for several modest three-seat bus shelters to serve the Josephine County Transit system. As The Oregonian notes, this is roughly the cost of building a modest three-bedroom, two-bath home, not counting the land.

The story began when Grants Pass decided to boost transit ridership by building five bus shelters using federal Congestion Mitigation/Air Quality (CMAQ) funds. Under state and federal rules, the city did not have any engineers who were considered qualified to design such shelters, so the city had to hire an outside consultant. The shelters designed by the consultant were originally expected to cost $76,000 apiece, but due to cost overruns the cost rose to $106,000. By comparison, the nearby city of Roseburg, Oregon (population 21,000) built similar (though perhaps not quite as pretty) shelters for $7,000 to $11,000 each.

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Not Learning from History

By | | News commentary, Transportation
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Last week, the Washington Post commemorated the 30th anniversary of a horrific Air Florida plane crash with an article about how that crash has led to huge improvements in airline safety. In response to that crash, airlines have improved deicing formulas and have strict rules about how quickly aircraft must take off after being deiced, and pilots have improved their responses to slow ascents.

The end of the article briefly mentions that, just a half hour after the plane crash, Washington’s MetroRail suffered its first fatal accident when a train of flimsy railcars “slammed into a concrete pillar near the Smithsonian station.” Unfortunately, neither this crash, nor a similar but nonfatal 2004 crash, nor the fatal 2009 crash, led Washington’s transit agency to reinforce the vehicles that were so easily subject to telescoping and collapsing. At best, the agency learned to require that new rail cars be better built.
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The lesson for commuters is, if you ride the Washington Metro, avoid the cars whose four-digit number starts with a 1. The lesson for policy makers is that a competitive environment is more likely to produce safety improvements than a subsidized monopoly.

Not Build It?

By | | Transportation
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The cost of one of Denver’s FasTracks lines has gotten so high that RTD, the transit agency, is actually considering not building it. The press kindly reports the cost of the Longmont-to-Denver “Northwest” commuter-rail line as rising from $895 million to more than $1.7 billion, but that ignores the actual initial cost projections.

As the Antiplanner has previously noted, the original cost was projected to be just $211 million. As of last month, that had increased to $1.4 billion. Now it’s above $1.7 billion.
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Rather than not build it, RTD would like to ask voters to increase the sales tax to fund this and the other lines that it had previously promised would be built without cost overruns. But it realizes that voters are not likely to support such a measure. So it is now considering throwing some new highways into the pot, hoping voters will support that. It might be surprised to find that at least some voters oppose subsidies to highways as much as they oppose subsidies to rail transit.