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New Fire Plan: Burn More Money

By | | News commentary, Public lands, Wildfire
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In the late 1990s, the Forest Service spent about $300 million a year on fire and the Department of the Interior spent another $100 million a year. Then came the 2000 Cerro Grande fire, which burned a billion dollars worth of homes in Los Alamos, NM. After that, Congress opened up the checkbook and told the agencies to spend whatever it takes to keep such a fire from happening again.

The agencies have taken full advantage of this. In 2010, the Forest Service budget for fire was $2.1 billion and USDI’s was more than $850 million. That’s just the budget; the agencies had another $500 million or so to draw upon if they ran over their budgets; if they didn’t go over their budgets, they got to keep the surplus for future years.

Here’s an indication of how expensive fire has become: In 2010, for the first time in at least 60 years, if not the entire 105-history of the Forest Service, the agency spent more money on fire than on all other national forest operations, construction, and maintenance combined.

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EUs War on Cars

By | | News commentary, Transportation
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Some people say the “war on the automobile” is a right-wing myth. Then the European Union goes and proposes to ban cars (or at least fossil-fuel-burning cars) from cities by 2050.

To complement this ban, the EU proposes to significantly increase fuel taxes (as if they were not already high enough). It also hopes to reduce air travel and, using taxes and incentives, increase rail’s share of trips over 300 kilometers (186 miles) to 50 percent. (Rail has about a 10 percent share of travel today.)

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The Washington Times Gets It Wrong

By | | News commentary, Transportation
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The Antiplanner generally appreciates the efforts of the Times, a fiscally conservative paper that tries to watchdog government agencies that waste tax dollars. But an editorial last Friday about highway user fees missed the point.

The article was written in response to Congressional Budget Office (CBO) report on highway user fees. “The claim is that driver’s aren’t paying their fair share because the $35 billion collected in federal gasoline taxes doesn’t cover highway spending,” the Times charged. That, however, is a misrepresentation of the CBO report.

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Is LaHood Admitting Defeat?

By | | News commentary, Transportation
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Last week, Secretary of Immobility Ray LaHood designated the Boston-to-Washington corridor as an eleventh high-speed rail corridor. This makes Amtrak eligible for some of the $2.4 billion in high-speed rail funds released when Florida rejected federal funds for the Tampa-Orlando route.

Of course, $2.4 billion won’t even scratch the surface of Amtrak’s $117 billion plan to speed up trains in the Northeast Corridor. But Amtrak would probably use the funds to smooth a curve or two, improve stations, or buy another couple of trainsets.

The Boston-to-Washington corridor already has the fastest trains in America, with an average speed of 81 mph between New York and Washington (but a paltry average speed of just 64 mph between Boston and New York). Since the whole point of Obama’s plan was to bring such fast trains to other parts of the country, why is the administration now inviting Amtrak and states in the Northeast Corridor to apply for rail funds?

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Teachers Union and Tea Party Agree

By | | Follow up, News commentary
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After the dispute in Wisconsin, it is hard to believe that school teachers and Tea Party members would ever agree on anything. But 150 teachers and other school advocates held a protest march in Chicago demanding an end to tax-increment financing (TIF)–something that most Tea Partiers would readily agree to.

The protesters noted that half of the $500 million going into Chicago TIF districts would otherwise go to schools, and they demanded that one TIF district business owner–a Cadillac dealer that received more than $8 million in TIF subsidies–write them a check for $4 million. The business owner asked police to arrest them instead.
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TIF advocates noted that TIF really didn’t cost the school districts anything. Under Illinois law, the schools prepare their budgets and tax rates are set sufficient to fund those budgets. The people TIF hurts are taxpayers who must pay higher rates to keep the schools running since some of the money that would have funded schools is going to subsidize developers instead. So maybe the teachers union and other groups that organized this protest should contact the Illinois Tea Party to gain their support.

Reining in the Tax-Gobbling Menace

By | | City planning, News commentary
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Rahm Emanuel, the newly elected fiscally conservative mayor of Chicago, wants to “overhaul” that city’s tax-increment financing program, which he says “morphed from a tool for blighted economic communities into an all-purpose vehicle.” TIF was first used in Chicago by Mayor Harold Washington in the 1980s, whose goal was to help blighted neighborhoods.

Critics say that the second Mayor Daley, however, used TIF as a “private slush fund” to reward developers and punish disobedient aldermen. Chicago’s 180 TIF districts cover nearly a third of the city and siphon $500 million a year away from schools and other programs.

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It’s Still Dead

By | | News commentary, Transportation
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Sometimes I feel like Chevy Chase proclaiming, week after week, that Franco, by which I mean Florida’s high-speed rail, is still dead. Yet people are still trying to revive Florida’s high-speed boondoggle. The latest is a just-released ridership projection showing that the rail line, if built, would earn an operating profit as soon as it opened.

The original projections (see page 9) estimated that the Tampa-to-Orlando train would carry 2.7 million riders in 2015 and 3.2 million in 2020. Based on fares of about $20 a ticket and operating costs of about $50 million a year, the line would initially require an operating subsidy but would cover its operating costs after 2020.

The new projections say the train would carry 3.2 to 3.6 million riders in 2016. That’s enough riders to cover its operating costs right away–assuming the cost and fare projections are correct. The new analysis uses the same costs and fares as the state’s.

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Why Do Reporters Love Trains So Much?

By | | News commentary, Transportation
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As C.P. Zilliacus noted in one of his comments yesterday, Slate published an article subtitled, Why Do Conservatives Hate Trains So Much?. The writer, David Weigel, covered most of the bases, but a couple of clarifications are in order.

First but not foremost, Weigel seems to confuse passengers with passenger miles when he writes, “Amtrak got $2.2 billion in pure subsidies in 2010 and carried 28.7 million people, for around 13 cents per passenger, although some researchers estimate the annual cost at closer to 30 cents. Highways got $42 billion in funds in fiscal year 2010, but far more people use them; the estimate puts cost at between 1 cent and 4 cents per driver.”

I told him that Amtrak subsidies are nearly 30 cents per passenger mile (not per passenger), and road subsidies are about a penny a passenger mile (not per driver). Even his arithmetic is wrong: $2.2 billion in subsidies divided by 28.7 million passengers is $76 per passenger, not 13 cents. I’m not even sure where he got the $2.2 billion in subsidies; I think it was closer to $1.7 billion in 2009. Maybe this is one reason why reporters like trains so much: they can’t do the arithmetic.

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The Chinese Have a Phrase for It

By | | News commentary, Transportation
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A new trend in Chinese is to turn an active verb into a passive verb–usually with a sinister context–by prefixing the character “bei” (pronounced “bay”). For example, bloggers who have been censored will say they’ve been bei huh-shyeh, or “harmonized”–a reference to the Chinese government’s efforts to create a “harmonious society.” This new, and formerly ungrammatical, usage of bei has become so popular that Chinese education ministry declared bei to be the “character of the year” for 209.

One frequent use of this character is to combine it with Gao Tie, which means high-speed train (literally, “fast iron”). Bei GaoTie means high-speed railroaded, or “being forced to take expensive high-speed trains” because conventional (and affordable) service is not available. High-speed train fares are typically three times as much as conventional fares, but with high-speed trains taking some of the business of conventional trains, conventional train service is often reduced.

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LaHood: Amtrak Makes Money

By | | News commentary, Transportation
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Speaking in Indiana last week, Secretary of Immobility Ray LaHood said Amtrak’s success shows that American should build high-speed rail. “Amtrak is doing very well,” claimed LaHood. “They’re making money, that wasn’t true a few years ago.”

This led BoydGroup, an aviation consulting firm, to say, “This guy is lost in space.” BoydGroup points out that Amtrak lost $1.4 billion in 2010, which is actually underreported because Amtrak counts state subsidies as “revenues.”

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