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Category Archives: Transportation

The New Transportation Intelligence Test

By | | News commentary, Transportation
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The Antiplanner has called streetcars an intelligence test: anyone who thinks they are a good idea is not smart enough to make decisions about urban transportation. Now Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has revealed a new intelligence test, this one dealing with high-speed rail.

Obama’s high-speed rail plan might have replaces 5 percent of American air travel and was projected to cost at least half a trillion dollars. Replacing all air travel would cost much more.

In a description of her Green New Deal released yesterday, Ocasio-Cortez advocates that we “build out high-speed rail at a scale where air travel stops becoming necessary.” This is far more ambitious than Obama’s high-speed rail plan, which was only about 12,000 route miles in five separate, disconnected systems. Continue reading →

“Fundamental Human Right” or Desperate Attempt to Justify More Subsidies?

By | | Transportation
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“We don’t pay for elevators, do we? And rightly so. The very idea is preposterous. Yet the public transit system plays the same role in the city, only sideways,” says James Prince, co-editor of Free Public Transit. Urban transit, Prince argues, is a “fundamental human right and public good.”

No, actually, it isn’t either a human right or a public good. A public good is something from whose benefits no one can be excluded. National defense is the classic example; arguably, storm sewers are a public good as well. But it is easy to exclude people from transit. Continue reading →

BRT Doesn’t Stimulate Economic Development

By | | Transportation
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Five years after spending $35 million on a bus-rapid transit line that opened in 2014, Grand Rapids is upset that the line hasn’t generated the economic development that was promised. In a classic case of throwing good money after bad, it is now spending nearly $1 million to prepare a plan that it hopes will remedy this failure.

The notion that bus-rapid transit would generate economic development was promoted by the Cleveland Regional Transit Authority, which claims that its HealthLine has stimulated billions in new development since it opened in 2008. Transit officials never mention that much of that development has been heavily subsidized.

The bus route traverses what the city calls the Health-Tech Corridor, which in addition to tax-increment financing offers tax abatements, low-interest loans, various job-creation incentives, and a variety of other subsidies. In all the city has spent at least $100 million in the corridor on top of the bus-rapid transit line. If asked, I imagine the transit agency would say it is only a coincidence that the bus route goes through this corridor. Continue reading →

The Money Pit

By | | Transportation
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Last month, the Department of Transportation announced 2018 “BUILD” grants totaling $1.5 billion. BUILD, which stands for Better Utilizing Investment to Leverage Development, is the successor to TIGER, which stood for Transportation Investments Generating Economic Recovery. TIGER was a part of the 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act and should have ended after the economy had recovered. But Congress had so much fun spending other people’s money that it simply renamed the program and kept it going.

The 2018 BUILD grants include 91 projects in 49 states — only Hawaii got left out — including such things as highway expansions, bus-rapid transit, port facilities, and autonomous vehicle services. Regardless of what they are, virtually all of the projects are local and should have been funded locally and not out of federal deficit spending.

One project the Antiplanner is familiar with is the Coos Bay rail line, which goes west from Eugene, Oregon to Florence, and then south along the Oregon Coast to Coos Bay, then east to Coquille and (at one time) Myrtle Point and Powers. The Myrtle Point/Powers rails have been torn out but the rest of it remains. Continue reading →

Amtrak Cancels Chicago

By | | Transportation
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Amtrak, which often claims to offer all-weather transportation, preemptively cancelled all trains to and from Chicago yesterday due to cold temperatures and, as one news report says, “an abundance of caution.” Before Amtrak, private passenger trains would sometimes get stuck in deep snow or be rerouted due to floods.

However, I don’t recall hearing about the railroads cancelling passenger trains on account of cold weather. I myself once took a winter train from Winnipeg to Churchill, Manitoba. The mercury read minus 20 when we left Winnipeg and it was colder than that in Churchill. In fact, I doubt the temperatures ever got above minus 15 during the entire round trip. I regretted taking the trip as it was hard to see much of Churchill when risking frostbite just by going outside — I recall spending most of my time in a library. But the trains were on time despite the cold weather.

There is nothing to feel shy about going generic cialis from canada to get you tested. Sometimes we see that we take enough pharma-bi.com online viagra store food according to our need it is turned into the glucose by your liver and muscles. pharma-bi.com discount viagra Men’s cleaning tips – just like women, men too requiresvarious types of techniques to clean their face and body. Pooping while sitting is not the natural act and prescription de levitra we are not designed to do so. Perhaps Amtrak knows that its aging equipment is so poorly maintained that it can’t handle cold temperatures. Perhaps Amtrak thinks no one is going to try to ride trains in this weather anyway. Or perhaps Amtrak just doesn’t care about its passengers and is using this as a good excuse to save a few bucks. In any case, cold weather isn’t a satisfactory reason to cancel nearly all its trains in the Midwest. Continue reading →

Hear That Lonesome Whistle

By | | Mission, Transportation
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The Antiplanner was pleased to note that the Wall Street Journal reviewed Romance of the Rails last week. Not surprisingly, the comments on this review were much friendlier to the book than the comments on the Trains magazine interview.

Journal book reviewer Patrick Cooke called the book an “exhaustively researched exploration of America’s passenger-rail story” and correctly noted that, though I love passenger trains, I’m a “reluctant realist” who wrote the book as a “love letter to a dying friend.” However, “‘Dying’ may not be the best way to describe rail,” suggests the first comment on the article. “‘Permanent vegetative state’ might be more accurate.”
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For those who love passenger trains, Cooke optimistically suggests that there may be hope for the future as “The so-called Green New Deal proposal, conjured in a rapture of utopian bliss and soon to be launched by the Democratic House, will cost, by one estimate, $700 billion to $1 trillion annually and includes funding for high-speed, zero-carbon rail” and “$25 billion in mass-transit spending to build, or expand, subway and light-rail transit systems nationwide.” Someone should point out to those Democrats that slide rules and manual typewriters emit far fewer greenhouse gases than electric calculators and microcomputers.

Northwest High-Speed Rail Cluelessness

By | | Transportation
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A couple of days ago, the Antiplanner noted that cities fail to learn from each other’s experience with rail transit disasters. It turns out that states don’t learn either, as the state of Washington is considering creating a high-speed rail authority and giving it millions of dollars to study a high-speed rail line from Eugene to Vancouver, BC.

Of course, such an authority worked so well in California, where costs have more than doubled, the project has been delayed for years verging on decades, and proponents’ claims that fares would cover operating costs are so unlikely as to be laughable. If it doesn’t work in California, which has the densest urban areas in the United States, how can it possibly make sense in the Pacific Northwest, where populations and densities are much lower?

The article is accompanied by a photo of a Siemens prototype high-speed rail car. My 66-year-old eyes can’t read all of the writing on the side, but if Siemens were honest it would read, “Connecting cities at half the speed and ten times the cost of flying.” Continue reading →

Public Transit for Others

By | | Transportation
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More than eighteen years ago, the Onion reported that “98 percent of commuters favor public transit for others” so that everyone else can drive on uncongested roads. That hasn’t changed, as in 2016 Los Angeles overwhelming voted for measure M, which will spend $120 billion on transit improvements, yet ridership there has dropped from 600 million trips in 2016 to 550 million annual trips in 2018.

To find out why this is happening, UCLA researcher Michael Manville, an associate professor of urban planning, did a survey of 1,450 Los Angeles-area voters and found out the Onion was right: very few voters supported the transit tax because they expected to ride transit. Instead, nearly 70 percent of supporters voted for it because they thought it would relieve congestion and reduce air pollution.

“In truth, taming traffic isn’t what transit does best,” observes CityLab in its review of Manville’s study. “Done right, it brings low-cost, efficient mobility to the masses, even when the roads are jammed.” But spending $120 billion on high-cost, low-capacity transit lines is hardly the definition of “done right.” Continue reading →

Honolulu Rail Disaster

By | | Transportation
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Recent audits of Honolulu Authority for Rapid Transit (HART) by the city of Honolulu and state of Hawaii provide a backroom view of how the rail transit-industrial complex is scalping taxpayers. Honolulu’s rail line, which was originally supposed to cost less than $3 billion, is now expected to cost well over $9 billion, thanks to poor planning and HART essentially letting the foxes (in the form of outside contractors) guard the chicken house (the public purse).

The first of four state audits (summarized here) says that the city hastily signed contracts committing itself to the project before all environmental and financial reviews were completed. The audit doesn’t say so, but the city did this to prevent opponents, who were marshaling legal and political forces against the project, from stopping it. Continue reading →

End the Shutdown Now!

By | | Transportation
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The government shutdown has reduced DC Metro ridership by 25 percent and Metro revenues by $400,000 a day. This has led senate Democrats to demand an end to the shutdown in order to save Metro. After all, as everyone knows, the main purpose of the federal government is to provide customers to transit agencies like Metro.

The senators representing Maryland and Virginia — Ben Cardin, and Chris Van Hollen, Mark Warner, and Tim Kaine — have issued a joint statement calling the shutdown “wasteful” and “destructive.” “At a time when Metro already is undertaking substantial, disruptive projects to improve safety and reliability,” they said, “President Trump’s shutdown is jeopardizing the health and stability of the entire Metro system.”
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But what better time to shut down the government than when Metro is doing “disruptive” projects? Should Trump have waited until everything was fixed to shut it down? (As if that’s ever going to happen.) The reality is that Metro itself is wasteful and destructive, and when it has a $25 billion maintenance backlog the addition or subtraction of $400,000 a day isn’t going to make much difference.