Category Archives: News commentary

With phase 1 already under construction, planners now say that phase 2 of Washington’s Dulles Airport rail line will cost almost 50 percent more than previously projected. Of course, the bus-rapid transit project that most people wanted could be running today at a fraction of the cost.

One way to save money, planners say, would be to build the terminus of the project so far away from the Dulles Air terminal that hardly anyone will want to walk to or from the rail line. Of course, if no one rides it, that would also mitigate one of the other problems the rail line is going to cause: congestion on the subway route in downtown Washington.

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It’s official: fewer than 34,000 people died in highway accidents in 2009. That is the fewest highway fatalities since 1950 and the lowest fatality rate per billion vehicle miles in automotive history.

In 1910, nearly 450 people died for every billion vehicle miles driven. This declined to 150 by 1930, 72 by 1950, under 50 by 1970, just over 20 by 1990, and around 11 in 2009. Few sectors of our economy have seen such large and continuous improvements in safety.

But the recent decline is a surprise. After falling pretty steadily from a peak of 55,600 deaths in 1972, fatalities leveled off at around 41,000 deaths in 1991. Safety improvements continued, so fatality rates declined, but this was mitigated by increases in driving, so overall fatalities remained constant. As recently as 2007, 41,000 people died on the highways.

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President Obama’s new “plan“–more of a sketch, really–to “Renew and Expand America’s Roads, Railways and Runways” calls for spending $50 billion rebuilding 150,000 miles of roads, building and maintaining 4,000 miles of rail, and rehabilitating 150 miles of airport runways and installing a modern air traffic control system. Where do these numbers come from? Is $50 billion enough to do it all? Where will the $50 billion come from? The plan provides no answers to these questions.

For example, a new air traffic control system alone is expected to cost at least $20 billion. At $12.5 million a mile, rehabilitating 4,000 miles of passenger rail lines would consume all of the $50 billion. At a conservative $1 million a mile (which won’t do much rebuilding), treating 150,000 miles of roads would cost three times the $50 billion Obama proposes to spend.

Like the $8 billion that Obama proposed to spend on high-speed rail 19 months before his transportation secretary finally admitted that the administration’s high-speed rail plan would cost $500 billion, the $50 billion is obviously just a “down payment” on the plan. In short, someone just made up all these numbers, threw out $50 billion as a starting cost, and then called it a “plan.” (I wonder what the planners who read this blog think of this abuse of their professional title.)

To stretch the $50 billion, the plan calls for creating an “infrastructure bank” that would “leverage private and state and local capital to invest in projects that are most critical to our economic progress.” How would such a Trannie Mae compare with a real bank? A real bank loans money to projects that are likely to cover their costs and repay the loans, but if projects had to cover their costs, no passenger rail project would get a single dime. So Trannie Mae will instead give money away using supposedly “clear, analytical measures of performance” that “will produce the greatest return for American taxpayers.”

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The owner of a beauty shop who applied for a loan from a community development fund received a response calling her “one crazy ass bitch” and suggesting that she was under a “delusion that somehow you might be credit worthy.” The author of the letter, who was suspended for a week without pay, later wrote a letter of apology saying she was under a “heightened state of anxiety” and wrote the letter only “for my own personal release,” not to be mailed out.

Other than as a humorous example of bureaucracy at work, why is this of interest to the Antiplanner? It turns out the applicant’s business has been hit hard by light-rail construction, which is preventing customers from accessing her shop. She applied for a loan from the Rainier Valley Community Development Fund, which was created by the City of Seattle and Sound Transit (which is building the light rail) and given $50 million specifically to help businesses survive construction.

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