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Stressful and Unpredictable

By | | News commentary, Transportation, Urban areas
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Portland traffic is “stressful and unpredictable,” according to one of the co-authors of the Texas Transportation Institute’s urban mobility report. In fact, by some measures, Portland has the sixth-most-congested freeways in the nation, after DC, New York, Los Angeles, Bridgeport, and (strangely) Provo-Orem.

There are other measures by which Portland isn’t quite so bad, though overall Portland ranks 17th even though it is the 23rd largest urban area. The significance of the freeway number is that it is based on actual measurements of traffic by Inrix, while most of the other measures are calculated based on estimates of miles of driving and lane miles of roads. The Antiplanner has never trusted these calculations because a lane mile of highway built in 2000 has a far greater capacity to move traffic than one built in 1950. Thus, the measure that ranks Portland sixth-worst is probably one of the most reliable in the report.
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Portlandia supporters, of course, attempt to double-talk their way out of this. The mobility report, says one, “ignores differences in trip distances among metro areas and how trip distances have changed over time.” The Texas people disagree, saying they do take distances into account. Moreover, a look at census data reveal that the average Portland commuter takes 24.2 minutes to get to work, which about the same as in other urban areas of similar size (Minneapolis is 23.4 minutes; Denver is 25.7; St. Louis is 23.6; Cincinnati is 22.8; San Antonio 23.8). Since census data also show that 85 percent of Portland-area commuters still take autos to work, Portland’s investments in transit and bike paths have, at best, merely nibbled at the edges of the problem.

Congestion King

By | | News commentary, Transportation
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The Texas Transportation Institute has released its annual urban mobility report, and Washington, DC once again takes the crown of wasting the most time and fuel per commuter. Though the urban mobility report makes some questionable claims about the congestion relief provided by urban transit, not even DC’s expensive Metro rail system has kept traffic from costing the average auto commuter $1,400 a year in wasted time and fuel.

Of course, one reason DC is number one in congestion is that, with the growth of government during the recent recession, it has enjoyed far more job growth than most other major urban areas. Yet, if rail transit really were such a good way to relieve congestion, it should have been able to absorb that growth.

Instead, the rail system operated by the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority (WMATA) is actually losing capacity as maintenance shortfalls force the agency to run smaller trains and those trains become less reliable. Last summer, when passengers on the Green line were stranded and had to walk along the rail line in the summer heat, WMATA promised that the agency would improve its safety procedures and keep people better informed.

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Rearranging the Park Benches

By | | City planning, News commentary
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Our cities are in trouble. Most have huge unfunded pension and health-care obligations. Their infrastructure is old and so poorly maintained that it can’t power a football stadium for the full length of a game. Their schools have significantly lower high-school graduation rates than the suburbs, even after accounting for differences in incomes. Housing in many cities is unaffordable, roads are congested, and jobs are fleeing, even in supposedly urban industries such as high tech and finance.

Urban planner Richard Florida has a solution: President Obama should create a new federal Department of Cities. That’s right up there with rearranging the benches at Battery Park before Superstorm Sandy hits.

Like many planners, Florida believes problems can be solved from the top down. He is famous for urging cities to adopt policies that make housing unaffordable, forcing poor and moderate-income people out, thus increasing average incomes and making it look like the cities have attracted high-income “creative” people.

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LaHood’s Legacy

By | | News commentary, Transportation
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As the Antiplanner noted yesterday, Ray LaHood’s lasting legacy as Secretary of Immobility is the loosening of requirements for major transit capital grants in new rules issued a few weeks ago. This is most important for streetcar fans, since the Bush-era rules pretty much predetermined that streetcars were not a cost-effective use of federal transportation dollars. As a result, most of the streetcar projects that LaHood was able to fund came out of stimulus funds, not transportation funds.

With the floodgates opened, expect to see a rash of streetcar applications. Reconnecting America, a pro-transit group, has cataloged more than 600 transit plans under way in more than 100 metro areas. These include 125 streetcar projects in at least 50 cities which may now be eligible for funding now that LaHood has eliminated the Bush cost-effectiveness criteria.

ProjectsCost/Mile (Millions)Daily PM/Million $ Cost
Rapid Bus215309
Commuter rail11617269
Bus rapid transit13516177
Light rail11882121
Heavy rail3448071
Streetcar1254158
Interstate Highways1108,000

This table shows the estimated capital cost per mile of various types of transit projects identified by Reconnecting America. “Rapid bus” is Reconnecting America’s term for fast, frequent bus service with limited stops on existing roads; “bus-rapid transit” is Reconnecting America’s term for similar bus service on dedicated roads. The daily passenger miles per million dollars of capital cost is a crude measure of cost-effectiveness calculated by multiplying projected daily trips for each mode times the average length of trips by that mode (1.75 miles for streetcars; 4 miles for bus; 5 for light and heavy rail; and 20 miles for commuter rail) and dividing by the capital cost. The last row, representing the Interstate Highway System, is offered for the sake of comparison.

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Goodbye Ray LaHood

By | | News commentary, Transportation
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Secretary of Immobility Ray LaHood has announced his intention to leave office as soon as a replacement can be found. Aside from an admirable emphasis on safety, LaHood’s main legacy will be a weakening of the cost-effectiveness requirements for transit grants so that, now, the most ridiculously expensive transit projects can get federal funding.

As a result, more than 100 metropolitan areas are lining up with proposals for insanely expensive rail projects. While this is good news to snobs who think that the only real transit is on rails, it is bad news for taxpayers as every rail project funded means money is being wasted that could otherwise have been put to good use.
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Naturally, there is plenty of speculation about who Obama might select to replace LaHood. Some of the names include Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa; Oregon Representative Earl Blumenauer; and former Minnesota Representative James Oberstar, all of whom support the administration’s pro-transit, anti-auto agenda. The Antiplanner is hoping for Blumenauer, the current godfather of Portland’s light-rail mafia, as his move into another job would shake up Oregon’s power structure in ways that might prove positive in the end.

Blumenauer Endorses Vehicle-Mile Fees

By | | News commentary, Transportation
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Representative Earl Blumenauer (D-OR) has introduced a bill directing the Department of Transportation to start vehicle-mile fee pilot programs in every state and authorizing $150 million to fund the program. Since privacy is a major concern for many people, Blumenauer’s bill wisely makes protection of personal privacy a top priority of the program.

Oregon’s bicycle-riding, bow-tie-wearing member of Congress.

Blumenauer’s support for vehicle-mile fees is refreshing considering that, during the last Congress, the House passed a bill forbidding the Department of Transportation from even studying the possibility of such fees. (Fortunately, the otherwise-conservative member of Congress who introduced that bill ended up being a one-term congressman.) But Blumenauer’s stance also has some questioning his motives as he is a major advocate of smart growth and rail transit.

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Kansas City Spared Light-Rail Vote

By | | News commentary, Transportation
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Kansas City voters won’t get a chance to vote on light rail despite the fact that proponents gathered enough signatures to put it on the ballot. The court that rejected the measure said that the plan was unworkable because it didn’t provide enough money to build the mandated rail lines.

A light-rail fanatic named Clay Chastain had petitioned for light rail in Kansas City six times and lost. Then, in 2006, he put a crazy proposal on the ballot to built both light rail and an aerial tramway–this was right after Portland opened its aerial tramway–and managed to win, mainly because the people who normally opposed him figured the measure would lose and so they didn’t bother to campaign against it.

The 2006 measure didn’t include enough funding for the project because Chastain figured the federal government would pay for half. But the Federal Transit Administration looked at the numbers and realized that Kansas City would be forced to drastically cut its bus service if it built light rail, so it rejected the plan. Kansas City leaders put another measure on the ballot that voters mercifully rejected.

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Neglecting the Basics

By | | City planning, News commentary
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Portland is proud of being a livable city. Sure, its streets are crumbling, city buildings are neglected, and its schools are crappy. But don’t worry; it’s a livable city.

The Portland Building in August 1982. Photo by Steve Morgan.

A building so ugly that Willamette Week newspaper uses the “ugly” tag for any article that refers to it.

The Antiplanner noted last February that the city’s transportation bureau elected to give up on street paving and repair so that it could fund streetcars. The latest news is that the city isn’t even property maintaining its buildings, including the internationally famous (for being ugly) Portland building. The city has just over half the money it needs to keep this and other city buildings maintained.

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The Transit Overtime Scandal

By | | News commentary, Transportation
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The Oregonian reports that drivers for TriMet, Portland’s transit agency, are taking so much overtime that many get little sleep. Paying for overtime costs taxpayers a lot of money and the lack of sleep creates hazardous situations.

This TriMet light-rail train crashed into the bumpers at the end of the line because, investigators found, the driver fell asleep at the controls. The TriMet employee who released this video to the public was suspended for doing so.

Thanks to overtime, four TriMet drivers earned more than $100,000 last year, but TriMet says that “only” four of them have been involved in accidents. How about that? Just 50 percent. This naturally raises the question of what share of drivers who don’t take so much overtime have been involved in accidents.

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End Gas Tax? Yes! Pay for Roads with Sales Tax? No!

By | | News commentary, Transportation
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Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell wants his state to be the first to end the gas tax. The Antiplanner supports that idea because gas taxes are an imperfect user fee.

However, McDonnell proposes to replace the gas tax with a 0.8-cent sales tax that he says will generate more revenue than the gas tax. If your only goal is to make government bigger, then generating revenue is a good idea. However, if your goal is to have better roads, then even a gas tax makes more sense than a sales tax.

The key to the success of the free market is feedback. As imperfect as the gas tax is, it generates feedback to highway agencies: if they build roads no one uses, they get no gas taxes.

Sales taxes generate no feedback at all; the agencies get money whether anyone uses the roads or not. We know from the transit industry what happens when transportation agencies are funded out of general taxes. First, they build expensive monuments aimed at pleasing politicians rather than solving transportation problems. Second, they fail to maintain those monuments. That’s hardly a sound prescription for our highway system.

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