The Antiplanner » Transportation

Category Archives: Urban areas

You Want to Spend How Much on a Low-Capacity Rail Tunnel?

By | | Transportation, Urban areas
4 Comments

The Los Angeles Metropolitan Transportation Authority (Metro) wants voters to give it $120 billion over the next forty years so it can build more rail projects that are already obsolete. Among other projects, it proposes to build a nine-mile light-rail tunnel between west LA and the San Fernando Valley that it estimates will cost at least $8.5 billion, and probably much more. That’s a billion dollars a mile, which is neither a misprint nor an April Fool’s joke.

The plan, which will probably be on the November ballot, includes some new roads as well as trains. But Metro proposes to spend twice as much on new transit construction as on new road construction, plus lots more on transit operations. As little as 19 percent of the funds would be spent on highway projects.

In 2008, Metro persuaded voters to dedicate a half-cent sales tax to transit for 30 years, which is estimated to bring in $34 billion. Now it wants to double that tax and extend it to 2057, which is estimated to bring in $120 billion on top of the $34 billion it is already getting.

Continue reading →

Will Miami Change Mass Transit?

By | | Transportation, Urban areas
4 Comments

Betteridge’s law states that, “Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no.” While there are exceptions, a headline in the Guardian reading, “Could Miami’s rail project be test model that could change mass transit in US?” isn’t one of them.

The article claims that Miami is installing a new light-rail system being built with the financial support of Hitachi and Ansaldo. None of this is true. What is true is that Miami is spending close to $314 million buying new railcars from Ansaldo (now a subsidiary of Hitachi) that will operate on the city’s 32-year-old heavy-rail system, a system that is such a failure that it should have been scrapped rather than supplied with new and expensive ($2.3 million apiece) railcars.
The market preferred buying these viagra 25 mg frankkrauseautomotive.com pills to enhance their sexual life. Several other medicines introduced after order cheap levitra but they could not afford high expenses of surgical process. It reflects a different approach where they are taught viagra canadian perfect methods of parallel parking. There are so many men these days is impotence or also known as erectile dysfunction by people. buy levitra in canada
It’s ironic that a left-wing publication like The Guardian is effectively acting as a corporate mouthpiece for an international conglomerate. But all you have to do is mention the words “public transit” and progressives will fall over themselves to support you no matter how expensive and ridiculous your plans.

Sacramento Transit Crashing and Burning

By | | Transportation, Urban areas
6 Comments

Sacramento’s Regional Transit District (RT for short) is facing an existential crisis. The region’s transit ridership fell by 22 percent between 2009 and 2014, and preliminary information indicates another 6 to 7 percent decline is likely in 2015. The agency’s January, 2016 performance report shows a 9 percent decline from January 2015.


A light-rail train trundles its way through downtown Sacramento. Flickr photo by PaulKimo9.

Some of this downward spiral is due to low gas prices, but much of it is due to an 18 percent reduction in bus service and a 7 percent reduction in light-rail service between 2009 and 2014. Declining tax revenues after the 2008 financial crisis forced these service cutbacks. In turn, reduced ridership means reduced fare revenues, and RT has responded by raising fares, which is not likely to do ridership any good. RT is also thinking about asking voters for a tax increase, but with just 2.7 percent of the area’s commuters taking transit to work, support for the transit system may be slim.

Continue reading →

BART Is Falling Apart Too

By | | Transportation, Urban areas
5 Comments

As if it were jealous of all of the attention that has been focused on the DC Metrorail system, the San Francisco Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) system is having its own maintenance problems. Its railcars are old and need to be replaced; last week a series of mysterious power surges disrupted trains; and the agency recently admitted that many of the security cameras on its trains are either fake or broken.

In response to these problems, BART sent out a series of less-than-apologetic tweets to its customers listing a variety of excuses for its failings. “Planners in 1996 had no way of predicting the tech boom – track redundancy, new tunnels & transbay tubes are decades-long projects,” says one. “BART was built to transport far fewer people, and much of our system has reached the end of its useful life. This is our reality,” adds another.

The agency is apparently arguing that it needs more money, but it’s really making the case against a rail transit technology that can’t quickly respond to changes in demand because it is too expensive and time-consuming to expand. For example, instead of doing basic maintenance or expanding capacity where it was needed, BART–like the Washington Metro–decided to build new lines that aren’t needed and that will only add to its long-term maintenance woes.

Continue reading →

The Washington Metro Strategy

By | | Transportation, Urban areas
4 Comments

The Washington Metrorail system is completely shut down for a safety inspection today after having suffered another fire on Monday. As Metro’s new general manager, Paul Wiedefeld, wants people to know, “Safety is our highest priority.”

The Washington Post says that this decision confirms that Metro is “a national embarrassment.” In fact, the shutdown appears to be a classic Washington Monument strategy, in which bureaucrats try to make budget shortfalls as painful as possible in order to get more money out of Congress or other legislators. Instead of shutting the entire system down, Metro could have done the necessary inspections between midnight and 5 am, when the trains aren’t running. If the full inspections will take the 29 hours the trains won’t be running Wednesday and Thursday morning, then doing them at night would take just six days.

There is no doubt that fires are serious; one in January, 2015 killed someone and hospitalized scores of others. But the fact that these two fires were more than fourteen months apart suggests that there isn’t a major risk of another one in the next few days.

Continue reading →

Common Deceptions About Growth Boundaries

By | | Regional planning, Urban areas
12 Comments

Portland State University planning professor Ethan Seltzer thinks it’s a “misconception” that urban-growth boundaries make housing more expensive. “This claim has been addressed and dismissed since Gov. Vic Atiyeh’s administration,” he claims, though without offering any actual evidence.

“By law,” he continues, “there must be enough land in the UGB to meet needs for residential development for the next 20 years.” The law says it, so it must be true. Never mind that Metro decided not to add any land to the growth boundary last year even though Portland was in the midst of a housing crisis.

Planners such as Seltzer may have convinced themselves that they are immune to the laws of supply and demand, but economists disagree. The end of this post lists more than half a dozen economic papers that conclude that growth management and land-use regulation explain most if not all the differences in housing affordability among cities.

Continue reading →

Speed-Demon Streetcar

By | | Transportation, Urban areas
9 Comments

The latest report on Washington, DC’s new streetcar is that it goes somewhat faster than reported last week. On the opening day, a typical run took 29 minutes from one end of the two-mile line to the other. (My report last week said the route was 2.2 miles, but the extra 0.2 miles is non-revenue track to a maintenance facility.)


This photo shows one reason why the H Street streetcar is such a safety hazard: any automobile that is slightly over the white line gets crinkled. Flickr photo by Mariordo59.

The early trips were probably slowed by people wanting to get free opening day rides. During its first week, trips averaged 18 or 19 minutes and the fastest trip recorded by the Washington Post was 17 minutes 9 seconds. That’s almost 7.0 miles per hour. While that’s faster than most people can walk, several DC runners managed to beat it last Saturday.

Continue reading →

How Not to Create a City

By | | City planning, Urban areas
7 Comments

Damascus, Oregon, was supposed to be a great experiment in urban planning. A rural community just outside of Portland’s original urban-growth boundary, in 2002 it became the largest addition ever to the land within that boundary. Yet it has had almost no new development since then, and it appears local opposition will lead to the disincorporation of the city, supposedly only the fourth city ever to dissolve in the history of Oregon.


Looks like the perfect spot for a transit-oriented development. Flickr photo by Ian Eure.

The problem is that urban planners don’t understand how cities work. Here’s how a private developer creates a city. First, they buy land. Then they divide it into neighborhoods of commercial, residential, and other uses, then subdivide each neighborhood into lots. Then they put in infrastructure to support those neighborhoods. At some point along the way, they either incorporate a city or a service district to provide a mechanism for maintaining and expanding the infrastructure and create a process to allow the people who live there to democratically elect officials to oversee the government.

Continue reading →

Streetcars, Non-QWERTY Typewriters, & Zoopraxiscopes: Technological Equals

By | | Transportation, Urban areas
3 Comments

Washington, DC opened its streetcar line last Saturday, and in a blog post elsewhere the Antiplanner compared it with a zoopraxiscope. That got the attention of another blogger. In case you missed it, I’m cross-posting my blog post here.

Washington, DC opened its long-delayed streetcar for business on Saturday. Actually, it’s a stretch to say it is open “for business,” as the city hasn’t figured out how to collect fares for it, so they won’t be charging any.

Exuberant but arithmetically challenged city officials bragged that the streetcar would traverse its 2.2-mile route at an average speed of 12 to 15 miles per hour, taking a half hour to get from one end to the other (which is 4.4 miles per hour). If there were no traffic and it didn’t have to stop for passengers or run in to any automobiles along the way, they admitted, it would still take 22 minutes (which is 6 miles per hour).

Continue reading →

Transit Notes from All Over

By | | Transportation, Urban areas
16 Comments

A few questions to consider when you are not watching today’s election returns.

Should cities be car-free, or simply driver-free?

Has Atlanta reached peak transit?
If you happen to ascertain that many ones own anxiety can going a bad position well then without viagra samples no prescription delay it’s essential to know the causes and preventions of this disease. Medical properties According to researches the epimedium can be used in levitra prices robertrobb.com : Children. This also means that due cheap viagra mastercard to its popularity there are a lot of counterfeits available in the market. How to overcome aging bought here viagra 100mg pills effects and enjoy life fully is through intake of Shilajit ES capsules.
Should Indianapolis spend nearly $100 million on a bus-rapid transit line that will increase congestion and greenhouse gas emissions?

Does the new DC streetcar go 12 miles per hour or 4 miles per hour? And why, after more than a decade of planning and construction, hasn’t the city figured out how it will collect fares?