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High-Speed Rail Is Still Dead (and Let’s Keep It That Way)

By | | News commentary, Transportation
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The Senate Appropriations Committee voted to spend a token $100 million on high-speed rail after its own transportation subcommittee had zeroed out funding for the program. The purpose, said a rail advocate with US PIRG, is “to keep things on life support until Congress comes to its senses.”

The only way Congress will “come to its senses” and support high-speed rail is if the Democrats take control of both the House and Senate. Does anything think that is going to happen soon? It doesn’t seem so inside the beltway, but to the Antiplanner, $100 million is a lot of money. To just casually throw that around to keep a rightfully defunct program on life support is ridiculous.
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Interesting that US PIRG gets described as a “consumer advocacy group.” The PIRGs were consumer advocates when they were challenging bait-and-switch marketing or promoting auto safety. But promoting a huge construction program whose product few consumers were use is not consumer advocacy; it is corporate advocacy. the Antiplanner wonders how long it will take before progressives come to their senses and figure that out.

Another LRT Exceeds Minimalist Expectations

By | | News commentary, Transportation
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Norfolk Virginia finally opened its light-rail line, and ridership “exceeds expectations” at 5,600 riders a day. Considering they run 212 trains a weekday, that’s just over 26 passengers per train. How many 40-passenger buses would have been needed to handle all that traffic?

Of course, the rail line exceeded expectations in many other ways as well. The 7.4-mile line was originally expected to cost less than $200 million. The final cost was at least $120 million over that. It was also supposed to be open for business in 2008. They exceeded that expectation as well. The original projection was for 10,500 weekday riders by 2021. They’ll have to double ridership to meet that. A lot of city and transit officials also expected the rail line would be a feather in their caps. Instead, they were lucky not to be tarred and feathered when they were run out of town over cost overruns.
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Despite the underestimated costs and inflated ridership numbers, the Federal Transit Administration gave Norfolk light rail a “not recommended” rating in 2004. Too bad the agency changed its mind (or had its mind changed for it by Virginia’s congressional delegation). They could have saved taxpayers a lot of money on a truly wasteful project. But that’s the story of all light rail in a nutshell.

Can Buses Compete with Planes?

By | | News commentary, Transportation
28 Comments

The House of Representatives agreed to extend reauthorization for the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) for four months and for surface transportation for six months. That’s not as long as the two years the Senate wanted for surface transportation, but apparently House Republicans weren’t ready to give up the gas tax (which would otherwise have expired at the end of this month) as a bargaining chip for a more sensible reauthorization bill.

Reauthorization of the FAA has foundered on the essential air service program which subsidizes commercial airline service to about 100 rural communities in the lower 48 states and another 45 communities in Alaska. This subsidy cost about $170 million in 2010, some $12 million of which went to the Alaska airports.

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Louisville Bridge Is Falling Down?

By | | News commentary, Transportation
11 Comments

The Interstate 65 bridge across the Ohio River was closed after inspectors found “two cracks in a load-bearing structure of the bridge.” Naturally, this has generated huge traffic jams, as many people in southern Indiana use the bridge to commute to Louisville and the six-lane bridge carries 60,000 to 90,000 vehicles a day.

Flickr photo by Cindy47452.

No doubt this is going to lead to all sorts of shrill demands that Congress hastily pass a transportation bill so that plenty of federal money will flow to fix and replace structures like this. And maybe some of this will be justified; after all, the bridge, and a lot of the rest of the Interstate Highway System, is almost 50 years old.
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Flickr photo by wblo.

Still, there are many bridges that are a lot older than 50 years. Is the problem with this bridge due to poor design? Flawed construction? Inadequate maintenance? Answers to questions like these will help people decide what actions are appropriate. The Antiplanner’s position remains the same: If we really need it, we can pay for it through user fees, not taxes. For highways, that means, whenever possible, tolls, and this bridge provides an excellent opportunity for tolling. The only problem is that the wheels of government probably can’t move fast enough to implement tolling to pay for any costly repairs.

What’s the Opposite of a “Clean Extension”?

By | | News commentary, Transportation
28 Comments

While the Antiplanner was in Montana, President Obama asked Congress to pass a “clean extension” of the surface transportation laws. By this, he meant that Congress should continue spending money like a drunken sailor the way it has been spending it for the past several years (more specifically, spending it faster than it has been coming in).

But what he meant is not what he said. Instead–apparently aiming at the actual reauthorization–he argued that, “We need to stop funding projects based on whose districts they’re in and start funding them based on how much good they’re going to be doing for the American people.” There are a couple of problems with this. First, it wouldn’t happen with a “clean extension” of the transportation bill, which doesn’t do this.

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Another Bad Idea

By | | News commentary, Planning Disasters
24 Comments

Someone named Marc Fasteau urges the United States to adopt an industrial policy. Because, after all, it worked so well in Japan (two lost decades of nearly zero economic growth), China (rapid growth but rampant corruption), and Germany (which has fined one of its biggest manufacturers more than $1.5 billion for bribing local officials to sell its products).

Fasteau’s column is accompanied by the above mindbogglingly complex (and almost unreadable) chart showing how five federal departments or agencies would work with banks and corporations to create a US Tech Strategy Board that would engage in a “technology based planning system.” This system would be sure to bring the rapid pace of technological advancement in computing, biotech, and other fields to a near standstill. The board would no doubt endorse high-speed rail, minicomputers, composting toilets, and other “modern” technologies.

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Pipeline Brings Attention to Tar Sands

By | | News commentary
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The New York Times editorialized against a pipeline aimed at bringing petroleum from Alberta into the United States, saying the pipeline “would traverse highly sensitive terrain” and the oil involved would generate too much carbon emissions. As far as “highly sensitive terrain” goes, the federal government’s environmental review found “no significant impact” from the pipeline.

The real issue is the future of our economy. Climate alarmists and peak-oil prophets want to minimize the production and consumption of oil. As the Antiplanner has noted before, When proponents of peak oil make their predictions of the future, they only consider what is known as “conventional oil” and ignore tar sands and oil shales. By opposing this pipeline and taking similar actions against producers of tar sand oil and other unconventional sources, they seek to make their prophecies self fulfilling.
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The Antiplanner remains a climate agnostic with the caveat that it makes more sense to be ready to adapt to climate change, if it happens, than to try to prevent it. The climate models indicate that even if we met the Kyoto protocols the climate would still change. Rather than hobble ourselves by crippling our economy, it makes more sense to be as productive as possible so that, if the climate does change, we can more easily adapt to it. If climate change is really happening, actions needed to truly stop it would do more harm to humanity than the change itself.

Why Conservatives Hate Trains

By | | News commentary, Transportation
37 Comments

Debates over high-speed rail and federal transit funding have inspired a number of writers asking why conservatives hate passenger trains. Most of them get it wrong.

The real answer is: they don’t. They just hate subsidies, at least if they are fiscal conservatives (as opposed to social conservatives like the late Paul Weyrich).

Case in point: San Francisco’s Central Subway, which, as the Wall Street Journal points out, is going to cost at least $1.6 billion for 1.7 miles of rail that (as the Antiplanner’s faithful ally, Tom Rubin, points out) will actually be slower than the buses it replaces (because it will require people to make more transfers). If you don’t have a Wall Street Journal subscription, which I don’t, you can read about it here, here, and here, among other places.

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World Boondoggle Center

By | | News commentary, Planning Disasters, Transportation
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The World Trade Center that was destroyed almost ten years ago was a frequently photographed symbol of New York City, but it was also a huge boondoggle of the New York & New Jersey Port Authority that was heavily subsidized by motorists paying bridge tolls. So of course, it is completely appropriate that the building that will replace it will be an even bigger boondoggle, costing $3.3 billion. As New York Times columnist Joe Nocera says, this is “an example of just about everything wrong with modern government.”

Still under construction.
Flickr photo by Sergey Shpakovsky.

This price tag will make it “by far, the most expensive office building ever constructed in America,” yet it “will add 2.6 million square feet of office space in a city that doesn’t need it.” At the time the original, 13.4 million-square-foot World Trade Center was destroyed on 9/11/01, Manhattan already had more than enough vacant office space to make up for it. At the most recent report I can find, downtown Manhattan alone currently has more than 10 million square feet of vacant space.

The building will be just one part of “a staggering $11 billion worth of government-sponsored construction,” says Nocera, including a subway station that is already $1 billion over budget. How fitting that we celebrate the attack that led to the most expensive war we’ve ever fought with the most expensive war memorial ever built. Of course, somewhere with 72 virgins, Osama Bin Laden is laughing away, because what better way to defeat the Americans than to get them to spend themselves into oblivion.

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One More Reason to Shrink Government

By | | News commentary
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The Antiplanner used to think that a sure sign of a centrally planned economy is when the capital is the wealthiest city in the country. So what does it say about the United States when Washington DC has the highest median income of any metropolitan area in the country?

I learned this little tidbit from a rather disturbing story about Great Falls, Virginia, where owning a “$2.8 million home with its own elevator, wine cellar and Swarovski crystal chandeliers” is a sure sign of being a government contractor. A few other interesting points:

  • More than half the residents of Great Falls earn more than a quarter million dollars a year (what do you suppose they think of Obama’s soak-the-rich tax proposals?).
  • The District of Columbia has the second-highest disparity between the pay of high- and low-wage workers–while New Jersey is number 1, Virginia is number 3 and Maryland number 7.
  • Federal contracting dollars to the DC area have increased from $4 billion in 1980 to more than $80 billion in 2011.
  • “When asked if her neighbors had felt the impact of the recession, [the owner of the $2.8 million home] smiled quietly and said she didn’t think so.”

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When government gets big, a few people get rich, and the gap between the rich and the poor widens. Do you suppose that’ll convince some Democrats to support federal budget cuts? Not too likely.