Obama’s 2012 Transportation Budget

“The Obama administration’s embrace of high-speed rail . . . ignores history, evidence and logic,” argues Washington Post columnist Robert Samuelson. “The case against it is overwhelming. The case in favor rests on fashionable platitudes. High-speed rail,” he concludes, “is not an ‘investment in the future’; it’s mostly a waste of money.”

Yet Obama’s 2012 budget proposal, released yesterday, proposes to increase annual spending on high-speed rail by $8 billion. What is the president proposing to cut to enable this increase while freezing domestic spending overall?

The answer: housing. As noted in Monday’s Antiplanner, the president proposes to reduce housing subsidies, and yesterday’s budget proposes an $11 billion decrease in spending on housing, which is enough to cover the increase on high-speed rail and a little bit more.

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Another Smart-Growth Plot?

“Under Obama’s proposal, fewer to own homes,” reported the Antiplanner’s local paper. The paper was reprinting an article from the New York Times, whose original headline was the slightly less inflammatory, “Administration calls for cutting aid to homebuyers.”

Is this another smart-growth plot to restrict homeownership only to the wealthy? Or is it a rational response to the recent financial crisis? The article is based on a report from the Department of Housing and Urban Development on reforming the home finance market.

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High-Speed Train Wreck

Secretary of Immobility Ray LaHood says the administration’s high-speed rail fantasy won’t be derailed. But remember, this is the guy who said “there is no stopping” high-speed rail in Wisconsin a few months before the November election–and then he killed Wisconsin’s project himself when the “wrong party’s” candidate won the governorship.

Wikipedia commons photo of the world’s deadliest high-speed train accident by Nils Fretwurst.

Republicans remain skeptical and say they want to cancel the program. Even middle-of-the-road transportation commentator Ken Orski, who once wrote enthusiastically about high-speed rail and who is no antiplanner, argues (in a free email newsletter that he doesn’t post on line) that the administration’s plan is “a $53 billion high-speed rail program to nowhere.”

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High-Speed Pork

President Obama proposes to spend $53 billion on high-speed rail over the next six years, or nearly $9 billion a year. No one knows where this money will come from, especially in view of Obama’s proposed spending freeze. Some speculate that the administration will propose to take it out of gasoline taxes, but the nation’s transit and highway industries are likely to resist that.

Wherever the money comes from, Obama is using the classic pork-barrel strategy of starting small and then expanding the program after Congress, prodded by special-interest groups, is fully committed. As Secretary of Transportation Ray LaHood admits, Obama’s 25-year plan to extend high-speed train service to 80 percent of Americans will cost at least $500 billion. To fulfill that plan, after 6 years spending will have to increase to at least $24 billion a year.

Whatever happened to the spending freeze?
Flickr photo by SignalPAD.

Naturally, some people love the plan. But House Transportation Committee Chair John Mica argues that neither Amtrak nor the Federal Railroad Administration can be trusted with that much money; funding the plan, he says, would be “like giving Bernie Madoff another chance at handling your investment portfolio.”
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Are Earmarks Dead?

Congressional leaders have promised a two-year moratorium on earmarks. Some in Congress are even trying to get the money back for orphaned earmarks, i.e., earmarks that have not yet been spent. There are usually lots of orphaned transportation projects because the states are not really interested in doing earmarks that override their own priorities.

It remains to be seen how serious Congress is about this. The hexennial surface transportation reauthorization should take place in the next two years, and it is hard to believe Congress will resist putting earmarks into it. While no earmarks were included in transportation reauthorization bills before 1982, the number grew rapidly after then, reaching more than 7,000 in the 2005 bill.

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Will Congress simply agree to whatever the FTA says are the best projects? Or will it override the FTA recommendations? We’ll know in a few months how serious Congress is about the no-earmarks rule.

Have an Opinion? You’re Violating the Law!

A group of neighbors asked state highway officials to install traffic signals on a road near their Raleigh, North Carolina suburb. They buttressed their request with an eight-page analysis of the highway complete with maps and traffic projections.


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The state was so impressed that it agreed to install the traffic signals, right? Wrong. Instead, the state’s chief traffic engineer accused the neighbors of “practicing engineering without a license” and asked the state engineering board to investigate and possibly fine the local residents.

None of the neighbors purported to be engineers; none of them earned any money contributing to the report. But, said the state traffic engineer, the report “appears to be engineering-level work,” and obviously, no one should be allowed to do “engineering-level work” unless they are a state-certified engineer. Even the director of the state engineering licensing board agreed that the neighbors were violating the law if their “engineering-quality work” led to anyone being misled about the need for traffic lights.

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Ending Urban Redevelopment

Despite pressure from cities, Jerry Brown stands firm in his proposal to end redevelopment agencies, a plan he says will immediately save the state $1.7 billion a year, and more than double that after 2012.


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Meanwhile, the Idaho Freedom Foundation publishes a report proposing to eliminate urban renewal in that state. Urban-renewal agencies in Idaho collect more than $50 million in property taxes that could otherwise go to schools and other agencies. The big savings will be in stopping the growth in urban-renewal districts, which Idaho cities are creating at the rate of five per year.

High-Speed Rail Hearings

You know that Congress is serious about getting the facts about high-speed rail when it holds a hearing on high-speed rail in Grand Central Station. Rail advocates proposed to extend the Northeast Corridor rail system to Springfield. Videotaping is often discouraged at Congressional hearings, but fortunately the Antiplanner was able to obtain the video of this hearing shown below.


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As noted in this advertisement for a rail system in North Carolina, the arguments for high-speed rail and urban rail transit are much the same: the costs are really, really high (“jobs!”), the transportation is convenient (if you happen to be going to one of the few places it goes and are willing to walk when you get there), and it is very affordable (provided you have billions in “stimulus” money).

Is It Real or Is It Portlandia?

If you buy more than $50 worth of stuff, Office Depot will deliver for free. But they might deliver it in a carbon-spewing truck, so the city of Portland has given a $6 million, five-year contract to a delivery company that promises to deliver office supplies by electric-powered tricycles.

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As Bojack says, “It’s dopier than any parody that Fred Armisen will ever appear in.”

Yield to Transit’s Moral Superiority

Everyone knows that transit is morally superior to automobiles, so it is no surprise to see state legislatures passing laws requiring auto drivers to yield to buses when they are pulling into traffic from bus stops. The stated reason for the law–that “the inability of buses to get quickly back into the traffic flow after a stop was hurting their on-time performance”–doesn’t hold water: if buses can’t meet the timetable, change the timetable.

Yield-to-bus laws will not significantly increase transit ridership, but they will create major problems for everyone else. Giving buses a traffic advantage over cars will probably actually increase traffic congestion. This number does not include all those men who are suffering from a long term erectile viagra properien learningworksca.org problems. But, you have to consider or clutch the services of the perfect service provider through online. viagra without prescription free If you are in good health, then 100mg Zenegra tablets can be perfect to give desired overnight delivery cialis results. And with that form of HGH comes risks, some of which are almost equally as risky as the side effects produced by drugs like tadalafil wholesale. It will also lead to more accidents as many motorists will not understand why buses have the right-of-way in situations where other vehicles would not. But such considerations are unimportant when the powers that be decide that it is essential to give an advantage to the less-than-2-percent of motorized passenger travel (in Denver) that uses transit over the 98 percent that uses autos.