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French Train Crash Caused by Human Error

By | | News commentary, Transportation
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French rail officials say that “human error has already been ruled out” as a cause of the train crash that killed six people last week. But it was a human error, or at least a political error: the error was for the government to put most available resources into building new high-speed rail lines while it let existing lines deteriorate.

Officially, the cause of the crash was a piece of a switch that apparently broke while the train was going through the switch. But that probably happened because the piece that broke was old and worn out.

While the French Transport Minister claimed that “there was no indication that a lack of investment in maintaining the system’s infrastructure was at fault” for this particular crash, he admitted that most of the conventional rail infrastructure is more than 30 years old, meaning it needs to be replaced. “The situation is severe,” the minister added, “with the degradation in recent years of traditional train lines, due to a lack of resources.”

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Carmaggedon? Not!

By | | News commentary, Transportation
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Many including CNN predicted that the BART strike would “paralyze San Francisco.” “Public transit in San Francisco came to a screeching halt Monday morning as Bay Area Rapid Transit unions went on strike,” says CNN.

Not exactly. First, BART accounts for less than a third of the region’s transit commuters. Buses account for more than half, and the buses didn’t go on strike.

Second, BART just doesn’t carry enough people to lead to paralysis even if all of them drove instead (and in fact many rode buses). As a state highway patrol officer noted, “If I didn’t know there was a BART strike, I wouldn’t have thought anything was different after looking at the traffic.”

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Is the Columbia River Crossing Finally Dead?

By | | News commentary, Transportation, Urban areas
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The Washington legislature refused to fund the state’s share of a proposed bridge across the Columbia River, proving that at least a few Pacific Northwest politicians still have an ounce of common sense. That doesn’t include the Oregon legislature, which had agreed to put up more than $400 million for the project.

As a result of the Washington legislature’s decision, the Columbia River Crossing office is closing its doors after having spent something like $200 million on a stupid plan for a new bridge that wasn’t going to be tall enough for existing river traffic and whose main goal was to send a low-capacity rail transit line from Portland to Vancouver, Washington.

The two bridges that the new bridge was supposed to replace don’t really need replacement. While one was built in 1913 (and the other in 1958). the older of the two could probably have been replaced for about half a billion dollars if it were really necessary. But the proposed new bridge and associated projects were projected to cost $3.4 billion.

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Is Branson Stealing from U.K. Taxpayers?

By | | News commentary, Transportation
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In recent weeks, readers of The Guardian who weren’t distracted by the Snowden story have been entertained by a debate between lefty economist Aditya Chakrabortty and entrepreneur Richard Branson, the CEO of Virgin Airlines, Virgin Rail, and various other companies. The debate actually started a couple of years ago, when Chakrabortty called Branson a “carpetbagger” because, among other things, he bought a failed bank from the British government for less than the government had spent rescuing the bank.

Virgin Pendolino tilting train in London. Wikipedia commons photo by Andrew Butcher.

Branson replied a few days later saying that “99% of our businesses have nothing to do with government at all and have been built in the face of ferocious competition.” Where his companies do work with the government, he added, their goal–as in the case of the bank–has been to turn loss-making enterprises into profitable ones.

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Rewards for Gardening in Public Spaces

By | | News commentary, Transportation
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In a public relations coup, the Washington Metropolitan Area Transportation Authority (Metro) gave a certificate of appreciation to a man who voluntarily planted flowers in flower boxes that the agency had been neglecting for years at the Dupont Circle MetroRail station. I’m sorry, did I say “certificate of appreciation”? I meant a letter threatening him with “arrest, fines and imprisonment” if he planted any more flowers or tended any of the more than 1,000 flowers he has already planted.

Henry Docter, who styles himself the “Phantom Planter,” says he has planted flowers in public spaces on four continents. Usually, he tries to remain anonymous, but in this case he feared Metro would mistake his flowers for weeds and poison them. So he wrote a letter telling Metro about the flowers and offered to weed, water, and tend them.

Metro says it is merely worried about liability, but Docter says he is willing to sign a waiver. Embarrassed officials say they probably should have left “the word ‘imprisonment'” out of their letter, but that still leaves “arrest and fines.”

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They’ll Do It Every Time

By | | City planning, News commentary
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A middle-class urban planner sees a working-class neighborhood and says, “I wouldn’t want to live there. That neighborhood must be blighted.” So the planner convinces the city to spend hundreds of millions of dollars revitalizing the neighborhood: clearing older buildings and replacing them with new high-density, mixed-use developments that the middle-class urban planner wouldn’t want to live in but thinks others should enjoy, often tying such neighborhoods together with a billion-dollar rail line.

Lo and behold, the plan “works” in the sense that housing in the area is now more expensive and suddenly the working-class families are priced out of the market. So the middle-class planner says, “What a terrible shame. We need to spend more money subsidizing affordable housing.” This makes the planner feel less guilty even though someone else’s money is used to subsidize the housing and the people getting the subsidized housing are most likely friends of the developer who just graduated from college and are therefore “low income” at the moment even though they can expect to be high income soon.
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Then comes along a middle-class journalist who doesn’t understand the problem. The problem is not, as this article suggests, that rail transit has boosted property values (which it hasn’t, really–see this post to understand what is going on). The problem is that government should have kept out of the development business in the first place.

The Great Society Subway Slowly Grinds to a Halt

By | | News commentary, Transportation
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Some called it the Great Society Subway, and like a metaphor for the failure of Lyndon Johnson’s grandiose plans, the Washington Metro Rail system is slowly breaking down. No less than the Washington Post calls it “a slow-rolling embarrassment whose creeping obsolescence is so pervasive, and so corrosive, that Washingtonians are increasingly abandoning it.” System ridership is down by 5 percent from a year ago even though other transit agencies in the region have seen growth.

“Last Monday morning, all five Metrorail lines were beset by mishaps, the second such one-day calamity in three weeks,” the Post editorial continued. “The comatose escalators; the crumbling ceiling at Farragut North, year after year after year; the funereal lighting; the frequent signal problems; the routine single-tracking that makes weekend Metro use torturous–all of this takes a toll on riders that Metro officials too blithely dismiss.”

Metro’s general manager gets paid $350,000 a year to watch the trains and rails rust away, and as if that isn’t enough next year Metro’s board is giving him a raise to $366,000. One excuse for such high pay for what amounts to a failure is that it wasn’t all his fault; but really, why should managers of rail transit agencies get paid so much more than managers of agencies that only run buses?

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Killing Our Economy

By | | News commentary
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Those who believe in human-caused climate change often point out that skeptics are most likely to be economic conservatives who don’t like the idea of problems that can’t be solved by the free market. But the accusation goes the other way as well: believers are most likely to be self-described progressives who love big government and are thrilled by the idea of a problem that can only be solved by making government bigger.

This was recently pointed out by Michael Shellenberger & Ted Nordhaus of the Breakthrough Institute (and co-authors of “The Death of Environmentalism“). One of their main exhibits is a 2011 article from The Nation by Naomi Klein.

“Climate change is a collective problem, and it demands collective action,” says Klein. “Climate change supercharges the pre-existing case for virtually every progressive demand on the books, binding them into a coherent agenda based on a clear scientific imperative.” Those “progressive demands” include “publicly funded elections and stripping corporations of their status as ‘people’ under the law”; “ending the cult of shopping” along with all economic growth except “for parts of the world still pulling themselves out of poverty”; and of course “subways, streetcars and light-rail systems that are not only everywhere but affordable to everyone [and] energy-efficient affordable housing along those transit lines.”

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Will the Feds Sideline Driverless Cars?

By | | News commentary, Transportation
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“Feds ask states to sideline driverless cars,” warns Forbes magazine. That’s actually a bit of a stretch. What the 14-page report from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) “recommends” is that states authorize self-driving cars for testing only, and that states that want to permit “non-testing operation of self-driving vehicles” should at least require that a licensed driver be in the driver’s seat ready to take over if the car reaches a situation it can’t handle. That’s pretty much what is happening anyway.

As Wired magazine notes, “the feds have no clue how to legislate autonomous cars,” mainly because they are “far behind the times . . . with regard to emerging technology.” The feds “want rules, but don’t want to inhibit innovation; they don’t want to pass laws at the federal level (just yet), but don’t want individual states going it alone.”

The federal government once funded research into driverless cars, but ignominiously cancelled the program in 1998 for specious reasons. The administration in 1998, as today, had an anti-auto agenda, so the Antiplanner wouldn’t trust the feds to oversee driverless car programs. They would probably insist on more central control and then do what they could to sabotage the program.

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Smugness Alert

By | | News commentary
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Young people have been told so often that they are especially virtuous for living in inner cities and riding transit instead of driving that they have developed a serious epidemic of smugness. For example, one writes that “my generation is car-sharing, using transit, walking, biking and generally using any number of forms of transportation that are far more energy-efficient and less carbon-dependent. We support high-speed rail, view climate change as a real threat and are eschewing suburban sprawl that has consumed precious land and energy.”

There are lots of things wrong with these claims, but the biggest is the idea that young people today are somehow different. In reality, every demographic group is growing faster in the suburbs than the cities. Reports of rapid inner city growth are often based on very tiny numbers: a couple of decades ago, hardly anyone lived in downtown, thanks mainly to urban planners who used federal urban renewal money to clear minorities, single men, and others out of downtown areas. When you start at near zero, any growth at all will be a large percentage, but it doesn’t indicate a major trend.

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