Forty states have asked the federal government for a total of $102 billion for high-speed rail. This suggests that the Antiplanner’s estimate of $90 billion for the cost of the Obama high-speed rail plan was low.
Secretary of Behavior Modification Ray LaHood says that this “shows that the country is ready for high-speed rail.” Of course, all it really shows is that state bureaucrats are ready for free federal money.
You have to wonder if the American Public Transit Association (APTA), America’s own transit lobby, is embarrassed that it named the general manager of Washington Metro, John Catoe, the Outstanding Public Transportation Manager of 2009 less than a month before his railroad killed nine of his customers.
He was lauded in the award for overhauling a transit system that had recently killed six people and suffered a train derailment that injured 20. I guess his overhaul didn’t work as well as APTA thought.
The bureaucrats planning a new bridge across the Columbia River between Portland, Oregon and Vancouver, Washington have so far spent $65 million — and by this time next year, they will be up to $100 million — all without accomplishing a thing.
That could have been enough money to replace the Sellwood Bridge, which is in much worse shape, both functionally and structurally — than the Columbia River bridge, but which planners say they don’t have any money for. Maybe that’s because they are spending all their money on planning.
People like James Howard Kunstler, who is committed to the death of the suburbs, and this guy, who thinks gasoline will “inevitably” reach $20 a gallon, see only good coming from these futures. For example, the latter character thinks that expensive gasoline will cure American obesity. He doesn’t explain why the Netherlands, where gas is expensive and lots of people walk and cycle, has obesity rates that are only about 10 years behind those in the U.S.
The Antiplanner hates to disappoint anyone, but we aren’t going to be giving up our cars anytime soon. If the price of gas goes up, we’ll either find more oil or we will find substitutes for that oil. For example, MIT is developing an electric car with a new kind of batteries that can be recharged in 11 minutes. Then there’s the Tesla Model S, whose batteries can be switched out in five minutes.
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Regarding a different mode of transportation, someone has proposed a new airport on Manhattan Island, which would be a lot more convenient for many people than the airports now serving New York City. Where would it go? Why, in the largest piece of undeveloped land in Manhattan, namely Central Park. Of course, it’s a prank; if they had wanted to be taken seriously, they should have proposed to turn the park into high-density, transit-oriented developments.
The “failsafe” train control system that was supposed to prevent the June 22 accident that killed nine subway riders in Washington DC appears to be breaking down throughout the MetroRail system. Although Metro’s general manager claimed that the agency tested all of the circuits and had not found any problems, the Washington Post has uncovered documents revealing problems with at least four of the region’s five rail lines.
The good news is that reporters are finally becoming skeptical about the supposed utopian virtues of the transit industry. A FoxNews reporter found a DC bus driver reading a book while driving in traffic. DC bus drivers are some of the highest paid public employees in the nation, many earning well over $100,000 a year. But I guess that isn’t enough for them to keep their attention on their jobs.
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Meanwhile, the reporters in Portland who revealed TriMet’s expensive health insurance plans attempted to interview transit union officials for their responses, but the officials didn’t have time. They did, however, have time to make a youtube video responding to the “lies” in the news reports. They blame the lies on “right winger” John Charles, former head of the Oregon Environmental Council, current head of the libertarian Cascade Policy Institute. Isn’t it wonderful how we can just dismiss someone because they are a “right winger”? It makes things so easy; you don’t have to think about the issues themselves.
Portland’s transit agency, TriMet, spent something like $166 million on its commuter-rail line which at one time was supposed to cost $104 million. The line is now carrying fewer than 600 round trips per day. It isn’t really surprising since the line goes from nowhere to nowhere.
The agency offers free health insurance, costing as much as $1,900 per person per month, to all its employees, retirees, and their dependents. This turns out to be the best transit agency benefits package in the nation. Aside from being reminiscent of the benefits programs that sank General Motors, it is so outrageous that the president of TriMet’s board actually resigned because he felt it was so unfair to taxpayers.
The Department of Transportation has received 278 applications for high-speed rail stimulus funds. Not surprisingly, the various proposals add up to far more than the $8 billion that is available for such projects.
Six New England states want the entire $8 billion for themselves. North Carolina wants $6 billion. Oregon & Washington are hoping for $2.1 billion. Texas wants a modest $1.7 billion, mainly for planning 200-mph trains between San Antonio, Dallas, and Houston.
That’s almost $18 billion so far, and this barely scratches the surface of the proposals.
Despite all the hoopla over subprime loans and unscrupulous lenders exploiting low-income homebuyers, a new analysis by University of Texas economist Stan Liebowitz finds that subprime was not all that important in the housing crisis. Most mortgage foreclosures involved prime loans, not subprimes or loans with introductory “teaser” interest rates that soon reset upward.
Instead, the majority of foreclosures involve prime borrowers who bought houses, often with little or no down payments, thinking they would appreciate. When housing prices declined instead to the point where they were “under water” — i.e., the loans were greater than the value of the homes — many people simply walked away and let the banks foreclose.
In a housing market unfettered by government regulation, home prices rise and fall with local incomes. Unless a major industry shuts down (think oil in Houston in the 1980s, Boeing in Seattle in the 1970s, the auto industry in Michigan today), home price declines tend to be small. To guard against people leaving homes, lenders traditionally require 10 to 20 percent down payments. This insures that the equity people have in their homes will almost always be greater than the remaining mortgage.
Edward Glaeser, one of the nation’s leading urban economists, thinks that high-speed rail is a waste, especially when it is planned for areas such as Alabama and Oklahoma. Not only is this inefficent, he notes, “intercity rail travelers are wealthier than car travelers,” so subsidies to high-speed rail are regressive.
“The case for subsidizing urban mass transit, like the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority, is certainly debatable,” says Glaeser, “but it is much stronger than the case for subsidizing rail links between non-coastal cities.” Glaeser dismisses claims that high-speed rail will promote economic growth, saying that “no serious evidence supports such claims.”
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Meanwhile, a Government Accountability Office report on Obama’s high-speed rail plan raises many of the same questions posed by the Antiplanner. Noting that the Federal Railroad Administration has no reliable estimates of costs, ridership, and benefits, the GAO questions whether it is appropriate to spend billions of dollars of stimulus funds on an unknown and untested program.
As the Antiplanner previously noted, House Transportation Committee Chair James Oberstar (D-MN) and Highways and Transit Subcommittee Chair Peter DeFazio (D-OR) want to spend $500 billion on transportation over the next six years — which is about $150 billion more than is available. Fortunately, if you think their plan is a good one, DeFazio has a solution: tax futures trades in oil.
This should easily raise $150 billion, DeFazio says, and “it should be wildly popular. I mean, everybody hates speculators.” That’s the ticket: just tax people everyone hates.
