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What He Said

By | | News commentary, Transportation
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Economic journalist Robert Samuelson has a brilliant piece about the inadequacy of the deficit-reduction plan from the Bowles-Simpson Fiscal Responsibility and Reform Commission. It’s not enough to merely trim budgets, says Samuelson. We need a “new public philosophy,” one that rejects the idea that people are entitled to federal subsidies for everything from mass transit to social security.

“It’s not in the national interest to subsidize mass transit, because most benefits are enjoyed locally,” Samuelson said in the portion of the article most pertinent to topics raised by this blog: “If the locals want mass transit, they should pay for it.” This is actually not a new philosophy but one that most Americans intuitively understood before the so-called Progressive Era.

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More Overbudget Rail Projects

By | | News commentary, Transportation
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The planned Honolulu rail line is likely to go at least 30 percent over its projected costs, and ridership is likely to be 30 percent less than forecast, according to a new report commissioned and released by Hawaii’s governor. The report cost $350,000, which means it commands more respect than if one of the Antiplanner’s faithful allies had written it for free. (Actually, one of the Antiplanner’s faithful allies, Tom Rubin, did help write the report–but not for free.)

The report says the rail line, which the city projected would cost $5.5 billion, is likely to cost at least $1.7 billion more. While local voters approved a sales tax increase to pay for the line, the report projects that tax will be insufficient to pay for the rail line. Over the next 30 years, “The total capital and operating subsidy paid by local taxpayers” on top of the sales tax “is estimate to range from $9.3 billion . . . to $14.5 billion.”

“Transit system usage and fare revenue are likely to be substantially lower than is project,” adds the report, “since the Plan’s projection would require an unprecedented and unrealistic growth in transit utilization for a city that already has one of the highest transit utilization rates in the country.” Update:The full report is downloadable from a state web site. Continue reading →

CHSRA Chair: “Our Engineers Are Incompetent”

By | | Follow up, News commentary, Transportation
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The California High-Speed Rail Authority approved the Train to Nowhere, a plan to build the first leg of the high-speed rail line from a small town to no town. I suppose you have to start somewhere, but given the likelihood that the state won’t get any more federal funds, this seems like an exercise in folly.

Meanwhile, emails revealed that Curt Pringle, the chair of the California High-Speed Rail Authority (and mayor of Anaheim), thinks that the authority’s engineers are incompetent. “I do not think that the engineers working on the Anaheim to LA segment are capable of doing the work,” wrote Pringle last January. They “don’t live in the real world.” Continue reading →

Gold-Plated High-Speed Rail

By | | News commentary, Transportation
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Recently, someone asked the Antiplanner why Amtrak’s high-speed rail plan is so expensive. They were referring to a proposal published in late October to increase speeds in Amtrak’s Boston-to-Washington corridor to 220 mph.

The plan calls for spending $117 billion in the 427-mile corridor, for an average cost of nearly $275 million per mile. That’s almost ten times Florida’s projected cost of $30 million per mile and close to three times California’s projected cost of about $95 million per mile. Wikipedia reports that France kept the cost of one line down to $25 million per mile, but only by making compromises with grades and curvature. Continue reading →

Fast Train to Nowhere

By | | News commentary, Transportation
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The federal government’s most recent $900 million grant to the California High-Speed Rail Authority came with a string attached: most of the money had to be spent, not in Los Angeles or San Francisco where most potential rail patrons are located, but in the central valley. Handed out just before the election, the grant was a blatant attempt to help the re-election effort of U.S. Representative Jim Costa. It might have made a difference, for despite the fact that Costa’s district leans heavily Democrat, he won over an unknown Republican candidate by a mere 3,000 votes.

But now California has to deal with the fact that it only has enough funds to build a high-speed train to nowhere. The authority expects to vote tomorrow on whether to start construction from Borden to Corcoran. To be fair, the route would go through Fresno, but it wouldn’t take anyone in Fresno to anywhere they might want to go at a high speed: Borden is barely a dot on the map, while Corcoran is the home of Charles Manson and his fellow prisoners.


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Megabus Business Booming

By | | News commentary, Transportation
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Ridership on Megabus is “well up from last year,” and starting in about two weeks the company plans to expand service to several new cities. Megabus will then serve nearly 50 major cities, all with virtually no subsidies.

Megabus near Chicago Union Station.
Flickr photo by compujeramey .

Meanwhile, high-speed rail nuts want to spend tens to hundreds of billions of dollars of public money on trains that, for the most part, won’t run faster than Megabus and for many years won’t be running at all. In contrast, Megabus has low start-up costs and can tailor services to local demand.

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Where Do We Draw the Line?

By | | City planning, News commentary
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“How much is sustainability worth?” asks Pulitzer-prize winning reporter Nigel Jaquiss. “Try $65 million in public money.” That’s how much taxpayers will be spending on a $72 million “green” building in downtown Portland. At $462 a square foot, it will be “perhaps the most expensive office space ever built in Portland.”

The director of the Oregon Environmental Council defends the building as something that can “leverage long-term outcomes,” whatever that means. But she would defend it, since the state is promising OEC, 1000 Friends of Oregon, and other left-wing environmental groups office space in the building at low rents that are guaranteed to stay fixed for decades.

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GOP Advances Two Decades

By | | News commentary, Transportation
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A left-wing blog accuses Republicans of wanting to “bring transport policy back to the 1950s.” At least, the GOP is two decades ahead of where the Democrats wanted to go, considering that 110-mph intercity trains and light rail both date back to the 1930s, and streetcars to several decades earlier.

Denver Zephyr traveling at 90 mph in 1939. Otto Perry photo. The train’s average speed of about 65 mph was far greater than the so-called high-speed trains proposed for Ohio (average 38.5 mph) or Wisconsin (average 59 mph).

The truth is that Republicans are proposing to be far more fiscally responsible than the Dems. Where House Transportation Committee chair James Oberstar proposed a $500 billion spending bill when less than $300 billion was available to spend, Republicans say they will spend no more than is actually available.

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Obama’s High-Speed Bus Plan

By | | News commentary, Transportation
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Note the cost savings: $15 billion for high-speed rail vs. $46,000 for high-speed buses. More evidence of the wastefulness of high-speed rail.

Urban Sustainability

By | | News commentary
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Portland, Oregon is full of sustainability advocates who look forward to petrocollapse and “experiment” with such things as country living and learning to live as voluntary peasants. Two such sustainability advocates are trained engineers and have a blog promoting urban gardening and raising chickens as if these were somehow new ideas.

Apparently, these engineers have discovered a new means to sustainability: robbing banks. Police allege they had already robbed two banks and had plans to rob a third when they put up their latest post about pickling beets “found” (quotation marks theirs) in a farmer’s field.

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Thanks to Bojack for pointing this out.