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Moving in for the Kill–or to Be Fleeced?

By | | News commentary, Transportation
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The Voice of Orange County reports that opponents of California’s high-speed rail boondoggle are “moving in for the kill.” But the article presents no clear path for killing the train to nowhere. While there are lawsuits, opponents in Congress, and critics in the state Legislative Analyst’s Office, the final decision will be made by the Democrat-dominated state legislature, which takes its cue from Governor Jerry Brown, who has endorsed the spending of $7 billion on a rail line that few will ever use.

The latest objective poll shows that 37 percent of the people who voted for high-speed rail in 2008 have changed their minds and would vote against it today now that the cost has doubled and the admitted benefits declined. (Only 3 percent of people who voted no say they would vote yes today.)

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Driverless Cars Take Off

By | | News commentary, Transportation
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Self-driving cars will transform mobility, says Sebastian Thrun, the engineer who led the development of the Volkswagen and Google self-driving cars. The fact that Thrun’s article is featured in the New York Times constitutes a major endorsement from America’s “newspaper of record.”

This is the only major endorsement for driverless cars as represented by Thrun. The Huffington Post counts them as one of “18 great ideas of 2011.” Fast Company magazine declared Thrun number 5 on its list of the 100 most creative people in business in 2011 (and Thrun isn’t even a businessman).
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Maybe now we’ll be able to talk about real mobility instead of the artificial mobility provided by such obsolete technologies as streetcars and high-speed rail. “I envision a future in which our technology is available to everyone, in every car,” says Thrun. “I envision a future without traffic accidents or congestion. A future where everyone can use a car.” Sounds great to the Antiplanner.

Remember When Transit Used to Be Efficient?

By | | News commentary, Transportation
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Arlington County, Virginia wants to spend $261 million building a streetcar line that, just four years ago, was expected to cost $100 million less. The streetcar’s costs are now expected to average $50 million a mile.

That’s quite literally insane. When San Diego built the first modern light-rail line, which opened in 1981, it cost about $15 million a mile in today’s dollars. But as more cities built light rail, costs soon rose to $50 million a mile on the average, with some coming in at more than $200 a mile.

Then, in 1999, Portland decided to built a streetcar line, which was billed as a “low-cost alternative” to light rail. Yet Portland’s original line cost $20 million a mile, more than San Diego’s original light-rail line. Now $50 million a mile is considered “comparable to similar projects across the nation.”

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If You Don’t Like the Data, Attack the Messenger

By | | News commentary, Transportation
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California’s Legislative Analyst’s Office announced this week that the state is about to waste $6 billion or more starting construction on a high-speed rail line that will never be completed. “The availability of funding to complete a usable segment is highly uncertain,” said the report, to which the Antiplanner responds, “Duh!”

Yet some people aren’t ready to hear the truth. Assemblyperson Cathleen Galgiani, who claims to have authored the law that is now expected to cost taxpayers more than $100 billion, “decries” the new report as “misleading and biased.” Her complaint seems to be that there must be some sinister conspiracy against high-speed rail, but the Legislative Analyst’s Office won’t tell her who is behind this conspiracy.

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Remember When “Transit” Meant “Transportation”?

By | | News commentary, Transportation
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Portland’s TriMet transit agency is spending more than $370,000 to install solar panels on a downtown building. This will initially save the agency less than $3,700 a year, and even if the savings increase over time, when interest is counted there will be something close to a 100-year payback period.

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TriMet is doing this because it had the money left over after building a light-rail line to Clackamas, Oregon. It’s not like it could have returned the money to the taxpayers, or at least spent it on improved bus service or something that has an actual transportation benefit. In Portland, image is far more important than reality.

Detroit Light Rail

By | | Transportation
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Detroit’s plan to spend $550 million building a nine-mile light-rail line on Woodward Avenue would be laughable if it weren’t wasting so much money that could actually do something useful if spent on something else. Detroit leaders have convinced themselves that light rail is world-class transportation, that it will be the lynchpin of Detroit’s recovery, and that it will keep young people in the city.

A shadowy group of so-called private investors known as the M-1 Rail group have actually agreed to put up $100 million of the cost of the project. They aren’t expecting any financial return on this money; more than a third of this amount is coming from the S. H. Kresge Foundation and is being donated as an act of charity. Strangely, the arrangement almost foundered on the seemingly trivial question of whether the tracks should go down the middle of Woodward Avenue (as local residents preferred) or be in the curbside lane (as the M1 group preferred). One pundit went so far as to call this the “Lincoln-Douglas debate of our time.” So serious is this debate that one more transit agency leader has lost his job over rail transit.
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Somebody in Detroit should ask some more serious questions about light rail. If light rail can help urban revival, why did Portland need to spend hundreds of millions of dollars subsidizing development along its light-rail lines? If light rail keeps young people in the city, why does Portland need an urban-growth boundary to do the same? Except for the claim that light rail is far more expensive than buses, about all the other claims for light rail are a bunch of lies aimed at draining the taxpayers (and, in Detroit’s case, some gullible foundation directors) of their money.

Creative Financing Bites Muni

By | | Transportation
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San Francisco Muni may have to pay $68 million to banks and insurers as a result of some “creative financing” done 8 and 9 years ago. As previously described in the Antiplanner, in the early 2000s the Federal Transit Administration encouraged transit agencies to sell their equipment to banks and then lease it back. The banks would get the tax advantages of depreciating the equipment (which, as government agencies, the transit agencies wouldn’t get), and the banks and agencies would split that advantage.

As the Antiplanner noted before, this meant that, for each $100 million worth of capital purchases, transit agencies would get about $3 million more, but the cost to taxpayers would be about $6 million (because the banks would get the other $3 million). The problem today is that the transit agencies also insured the lease payments and the funds were tied to the insurer’s credit ratings. IF and when those ratings fall, the transit agencies are on the hook to repay the entire amount to the banks.
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The good news is that the IRS ruled such tax shelters illegal in 2004. The bad news is at least 30 transit agencies are in the same boat as Muni and may be scrambling for funds to cover their bets. This so-called creative financing was nothing but a dirty little scam that the FTA and local transit agencies played on unwilling taxpayers–just one more reason to privatize transit.

Reviving California High-Speed Rail

By | | News commentary, Transportation
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The California High Speed Rail Authority has reason to be thankful this week as the U.S. Department of Transportation gave it another $900 million, keeping hopes alive for the state’s rail program. That means the feds have given the state a total of about $4.5 billion which, when matched with state bonds (which can only be sold when matched by other money) brings the authority’s total funds to $9 billion.

That’s less than 10 percent of what it will cost to build the San Francisco-to-Anaheim line. The authority plans to start building in the Fresno area next year; if it fails to start by September 30, it loses the federal dollars.

Some members of Congress from California want to take back the rail grants. But it is more likely that the only way to stop the authority from spending billions building a train to nowhere is for the legislature to deny its approval of bond sales.

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New Concept: Compare Benefits with Costs

By | | Regional planning, Transportation
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The San Francisco Bay Area Metropolitan Transportation Commission (MTC) is considering the possibility of using benefit-cost analyses to decide how to spend federal and state taxpayer dollars. This “new” technology dates back to 1848, so you can see why regional planners might be just discovering it now.

As presented in the San Jose Mercury-News, benefit-cost analysis sounds very objective and scientific. The problem, however, is that most of the “benefits” in the analysis, including such things as “Road fatalities and injuries, emissions reductions, the cost of owning and operating a car and even the health effects of physical inactivity,” are almost completely speculative. How do you put a price on those things? How do you measure the effect of building a BART line vs. building a HOT lane on physical inactivity? The answers to these questions will be as political as any other decision, meaning the benefit-cost analysis will be just as politicized as whatever previously passed for analysis at the MTC.

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Reauthorization or Gridlock in 2012?

By | | News commentary, Transportation
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Speaker of the House John Boehner announced last week that House Republicans will soon introduce a surface transportation reauthorization bill called the American Energy and Infrastructure Jobs Act. The good news is that the plan (now available only in outline form) would eliminate New Starts and other slush funds that encourage cities to waste money. The bad news is that the plan would create a new slush fund that will encourage states to waste money on highways and bridges.

As Antiplanner readers know, Congress was scheduled to reauthorize surface transportation–meaning spending of gas taxes and other federal highway user fees–in 2009. But recently Congress has been gridlocked between Tea Party Republicans, who oppose new taxes and wasteful spending, and Senate Democrats, who want to increase spending to “create jobs” but don’t know where the money would come from.

Boehner proposes to resolve this by increasing production of oil & gas on federal lands, including Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, and dedicating the revenues from such production to highways and bridges. Boehner’s plan continues to include no more earmarks; ending or consolidating nearly 70 transportation funds such as New Starts; removing requirements that gas taxes be spent on non-highway projects; and streamlining transportation planning.

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