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Jobs vs. Jobs

By | | News commentary
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President Obama’s state of the union speech yesterday focused on creating jobs (a word he used at least 25 times). On the same day, Steve Jobs presented Apple’s revolutionary and magical iPad. Which will have a more positive effect on people’s lives?

Let’s look at their track records. When President Bush was inaugurated as president, 130 million Americans had jobs. By the time he left office, it was 134 million, not a big increase, but not a decline either.

The first thing President Obama did was to persuade Congress to pass a $787 billion stimulus package in order to “save jobs.” As of December, only 130.9 million workers still had jobs, 3.4 million less than when Obama took office. You can blame that on Bush, you can blame it on whatever you want, but the fact is that Obama promised to create jobs and instead we lost millions of them. At least some people would argue that one reason the economy hasn’t recovered more quickly is that businesses are unwilling to make investments in an unpredictable political environment.

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The Transit Corollary to the Peter Principle

By | | News commentary, Transportation
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A dozen people were killed by Washington Metro trains in 2009. Earlier this month, John Catoe, the head of Washington Metro, graciously agreed to “take the fall” for these accidents by resigning his position as of April 2. The accidents weren’t really his fault; Catoe had been hired three years ago to help the agency deal with safety and reliability issues that were serious then; his crime was failing to fix the problems.

A two-year period of relative stability after he was hired led the American Public Transportation Association to give Catoe its outstanding transit manager award for turning the agency around. Then a series of crashes, deaths to workers, revelations about near-accidents and maintenance failures, and — most recently — the near-deaths of safety inspectors revealed that Catoe’s apparent success was largely an illusion.

Metrorail illustrates the Antiplanner’s corollary to the Peter Principle (“employees tend to rise to their level of incompetence”). The transit version of the Peter Principle is that “successful bus transit agencies rise to their level of incompetence when they build rail lines.”

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TriMet’s Latest Big Lie

By | | News commentary, Transportation, Urban areas
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TriMet’s $166 million “Westside Express Service” (WES) commuter rail is a miserable failure. After going 60 percent over budget, it is carrying only about 600 round trips per day. The amortized value of the capital cost alone is enough to buy every one of those commuters a brand-new Toyota Prius every year for the next 30 years. Those Priuses would be cleaner than the WES too.

Click for a larger view. Thanks to Steve Schopp for the photo.

So naturally TriMet wants to “celebrate WES” so much that it is advertising this great project on the back of its buses. Note that it isn’t asking people to actually ride the train, because that would never happen — no offense to Wilsonville, Tualatin, or Tigard, but from a transportation view the train goes from nowhere to nowhere, which kind of explains why hardly anyone rides it.

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Estes Park Repeals TIF District

By | | News commentary
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In what leaders hope to be the start of a movement, nearly 61 percent of voters in the city of Estes Park, Colorado decided to abolish the city’s urban-renewal district. The measure, which was put on the ballot through an initiative petition, also requires voter approval before the city creates another one.

Supporters of the urban-renewal district made the usual
claim that tax-increment financing doesn’t cost anything. In fact, it takes money that would otherwise go to schools and other urban services and puts it in a slush fund for city officials to use to benefit favored developers.

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LaHood Eliminates Cost-Efficiency Rules

By | | News commentary, Transportation
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Last week, Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood announced that federal transit grants would now focus on “livability.” Buried beneath this rhetoric is LaHood’s decision to eliminate the only efforts anyone ever made to make sure transit money isn’t wasted on urban monuments that contribute little to transportation.

Back in 2005, then-Secretary Mary Peters stunned the transit world when she adopted a “cost-effectiveness” rule for federal transit grants to new rail projects. In order to qualify, transit agencies had to receive a “medium” cost-effectiveness rating from the FTA, meaning they had to cost less than about $24 for every hour they would save transportation users (either by providing faster service to transit riders or by reducing congestion to auto drivers). This wasn’t much of a requirement: a true cost-efficiency calculation would rank projects that cost $0.50 per hour much higher than projects that cost $23.50 per hour; under Peters’ rule, they were all ranked the same. But any projects that went over the $24 threshold (which varied with inflation — by 2009 it was up to $24.50) were ruled out.

After throwing various temper tantrums, transit agencies responded in one of four ways. Those close to the $24 threshold went back and cooked their books to either slightly reduce the cost or slightly increase the amount of time the project was supposed to save. Those that were hopelessly far away from the $24 threshold, but had powerful representatives in Congress, obtained exemptions from the rule. These included BART to San Jose, the Dulles rail line, and Portland’s WES commuter train. Those that didn’t have the political clout either shelved their projects or, in a few cases, tried to fund them without federal support.

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Mercury News Gets It Wrong Again

By | | News commentary, Transportation
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The San Jose Mercury-News has long been a booster of ridiculously expensive rail transit projects such as Bart to San Jose. This week, it has a five-part series on the woes facing Bay Area transit agencies.

First, it tells us that, thanks to lower gas prices combined with higher transit fares, “commuters are leaving mass transit for their cars.” Maybe that wouldn’t have been a problem if the paper hadn’t encouraged the region to build such a high-cost transit network.

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Surprise: Another Light-Rail Line Is Over Its Budget

By | | News commentary, Transportation
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“Norfolk leaders want an audit to figure out why its light rail project has gone $108 million over budget,” reports the Associated Press. The city doesn’t need to spend money on an audit. The reason for the overrun is obvious: It’s a rail-transit construction project.

As if that isn’t enough, the line was planned by Parsons Brinckerhoff (PB), the company that planned most of the rail transit lines that have gone over budget in the past 50 years. PB also planned and helped build the Big Dig, another urban-planning project that went way over budget.

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Driving, Transit, Cycling Down

By | | News commentary, Transportation
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Any smart-growther enjoying a moment of schadenfreude over recent reports of a decline in driving have to recognize that transit ridership is also down. Moreover, the city of Portland, which likes to think of itself as the bicycle capital of the United States, reports that cycling is down as well.

The actual numbers are revealing. Portland estimates that cycling in 2009 was 5 percent less than in 2008. The American Public Transportation Association says that transit ridership in the first nine months of 2009 was 3.8 percent less than the same period in 2008. Meanwhile, driving the first nine months of 2009 is actually 0.2 percent greater than the same period in 2008.

If it is greater, then why the reports of a decline in driving? They are based on a rolling twelve-month average, and the twelve months ending in October, 2009 included the months immediately following the panic and crash of 2008. But thanks to lower fuel prices, 2009 beat 2008 in five of the first nine months of each year despite unemployment.

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Gee, Krugman’s Graphs Look Like the Antiplanner’s

By | | News commentary, Planning Disasters
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Comparing housing prices in Los Angeles with those in Atlanta using a graph very similar to those used by the Antiplanner, Paul Krugman remakes the point that the United States did not have one housing bubble: it had many. And, he adds, the bubbles were caused by land-use regulation, while places that did not have government constraints on land did not have bubbles.

The Economist makes the point, previously made by the Antiplanner (on p. 115 of Best-Laid Plans, that volatile housing prices reduces mobility and increases unemployment rates. When home prices drop and homebuyers find themselves “underwater,” some won’t leave even for better jobs elsewhere because they can’t afford to lose the house.
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Unfortunately, most of the people who commented on the Economist article conclude that this means people are better off renting than buying. This may be true if you live in a region infested by smart-growth planners. But in relatively free housing markets, buying remains better for most of those who can afford the down payment — not because of the economic return you get from buying but because homeowners enjoy a higher quality of life.

The News Report from Hell

By | | News commentary
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This is not really about antiplanning, but as a rail fan I am offended by this story about Amtrak weather delays. Far be it from the Antiplanner to defend Amtrak, but the NBC News reporter who wrote it just has his facts wrong.

He says the California Zephyr arrived in Chicago “almost 24 hours late” after a journey of “nearly five days” from Sacramento. “Almost 24 hours” turns out to be 19 hours, but the train normally takes less than 50 hours to go from Sacramento to Chicago, so how could the trip have taken five days?

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