Category Archives: News commentary

Why is it that certain technologies inspire such religious passion in people? A wacky proposal to spend billions of dollars building a maglev rail line from Pittsburgh Airport through downtown Pittsburgh to one of its suburbs has enough traction that the Pennsylvania House Transportation Committee recently held hearings on it.

Someone might be excused for thinking that maglev would be the solution to traffic problems around the airports in Atlanta, Dallas, or other fast-growing regions. But Pittsburgh? Which, as Wendell Cox notes, is the only major U.S. urban area that is losing population? What is the point? Evidently, the point is to spend lots of money, which seems to be the name of the game for politicians — especially in Pennsylvania.

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“The Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority [MBTA] is in danger of collapsing under its own operating expenses and debt obligations, to the point that it can’t even pay for repairs that are vital to basic safety,” reports the Boston Globe. That conclusion is based on an official review of the MBTA that Governor Deval Patrick entrusted to former John Hancock CEO David D’Alessandro.

Up through the 1990s, the MBTA was funded by the state, with the agency effectively presenting a bill for its deficits to the legislature each year. Concerned that this failed to give transit officials incentives to control costs, the legislature in 1999 decided to give MBTA a fixed 20 percent share of state sales tax revenues and told it to operate out of those revenues. This was supposed to lead to reduced operating costs and greater investments in the long-term health of the system.

As the D’Alessandro report documents, this isn’t what happened. First, most costs, such as fuel, were outside of MBTA’s control. Even costs that were under MBTA’s control, such as payroll, ended up increasing far faster than planned. Meanwhile, the sales taxes that were supposed to fund MBTA’s deficits fell short of expectations. The result, over an eight-year period, was a $558 million shortfall.

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Transit ridership has fallen in 2009, which the American Public Transportation Association blames mainly on the recession. But in Washington, DC, where the economy is doing well thanks to the growth of big government, ridership has fallen by 3 percent, leading to serious financial problems for Washington Metro.

Yet the financial problems described in the above article barely scratch the surface. As the FTA noted in a report last spring, Washington Metro and rail transit agencies in five other cities — New York, Boston, Chicago, Philadelphia, and San Francisco — collectively have a $50 billion maintenance backlog. TRUTH: There are three different phases of chiropractic care – Saving Money on your Overall Health Care Costs Thirty-one million Americans have lower back pain at any given time. deeprootsmag.org cialis online overnight Testosterone is the male sex hormone that guides the functioning of excessive proteins that is necessary for plenty of cancer on line cialis cells. What a joy when the vision is buy levitra professional corrected, sight clear. Chocolate is a top supplement for aphrodisiac. 3. cialis tablets 100mg At current rates of spending on maintenance, says the report, these rail systems will continue to deteriorate. This explains situations like trains catching on fire.

A new study published by the Cascade Policy Institute provides more evidence that the automobile is a key part of the nation’s economy. Though some may scoff that libertarian Cascade Policy is merely a part of some “right-wing conspiracy,” the study’s author, Randall Pozdena, is one Oregon’s most respected economists.

People in wealthy economies drive more; people who drive more live in wealthier economies. “What causes what?” asks Pozdena; do wealthier people drive more or does more driving make people wealthier? Based on his own research and a review of the literature, the answer, he finds, is “bidirectional causality”; that is, “VMT and the economy ’cause’ each other.”

Because of this, he concludes dryly, “policy interventions that reduce VMT will have an effect on the economy.” In particular, he means, reducing VMT will have a negative effect on the economy.

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Apple Computer has agreed to spend nearly $4 million fixing up a run-down subway station and bus turnaround lane next to a planned Apple Store in Chicago. Given the precarious state of the Chicago Transit Authority’s finances — the agency is something like $16 billion behind in its rail maintenance — this may be the answer to the transit system’s needs.

Soon to be the Apple Subway Stop.

In exchange for its $4 million, Apple not only gets a nicer neighborhood for its store, it gets first right of refusal for naming rights to the subway station “if the CTA later decides to offer those rights.” In other words, Apple will have to pay even more to call it the Apple subway station.

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When Obama endorsed the Federal Railroad Administration‘s 8,600-mile high-speed rail plan, the Antiplanner predicted that rail advocates would not be satisfied with such a small system. For one thing, the FRA system reached only 33 states. For another, as a system of unconnected corridors it failed to connect such key cities as New York and Chicago or Chicago and the West Coast. Although self-proclaimed high-speed rail “experts” say that high-speed rail only makes sense in 300- to 600-mile corridors, the Antiplanner argued that politics would lead Congress to insist that lines be built across the country.

Sure enough, a group calling itself the U.S. High Speed Rail Association has proposed a 17,000-mile network that connects both coasts and appears to reach 43 — possibly 44 (West Virginia is unclear) — states. The route map includes lines from Chicago to Seattle and San Francisco (via St. Louis, Kansas City, and Denver) and Dallas to Los Angeles (via Albuquerque, Phoenix, and San Diego).

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Denver’s FasTracks rail plan gets deeper and deeper into trouble. The fragile coalition of municipal officials supporting the plan has been threatened by a new proposal that would give some lines priority over others. No one seems to think that voters will ever approve the tax increase RTD, Denver’s transit agency, says it needs to the complete system.

The Denver Post published another article questioning whether commuter rail makes sense, following up a previous article questioning light rail. “Besides being pricey to install,” says the Post, rail lines “are pricey to maintain, and other alternatives exist that would clear clogged roadways (and the air) at least as effectively,” namely buses. So “we think RTD ought to return to the drawing board.”

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