Sydney Subway Fantasies

One thing I learned about on my recent trip to Australia was a proposal to build five “metro” (i.e., subway) lines in Sydney. The first line on the agenda is expected to cost AU$12.5 billion (which, at current exchange rates is US$12.5 billion) for 38 kilometres (which, at U.S. exchange rates, is 24 miles), or about half a billion dollars a mile.

The fact that $12.5 billion is about three-fourths of the money that New South Wales plans to spend on transport over the next fifteen years doesn’t bother transit officials a bit. In fact, I suspect they are rather proud of it.

One plan is to privatize New South Wales’ government-owned electric utility to fund the metro. That’s a great way to waste public assets. It might be better to keep the electric utility public until the state’s leaders come to their senses.
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Of course, some naysayers think that the metro plan is just a fantasy. Sydney isn’t dense enough to support a subway, and this particular plan is infeasible from an engineering viewpoint. The scuttlebutt I heard in Sydney is that the tunnels they want to build in (they already have tunnels and it will still be half a billion a mile?) are too steep for the railcars they want to run. Other scuttlebutt says that the plan has only been raised because it is an election season.

How dense does a city have to be to justify a subway? The Baltimore, Los Angeles, and Miami subways are pretty much failures. New York’s subway works, but the cost of building new ones is (or should be) prohibitive. But here is a subway that actually makes a profit. (Sorry about the annoying pop-up ad.) Not that any of us would enjoy riding it.

The Millionaire’s Tax Can Solve Everything

New York’s so-called congestion pricing plan (aka the cordon tax) seems to be dead, so some Democrat in Albany has come up with an alternative way of funding transit: the millionaire’s tax. The plan calls for raising $5 billion in five years for mass transit by putting a 3/4-percent income tax surcharge on all New Yorkers who earn more than a million dollars a year. New York Governor Paterson has announced a blue-ribbon commission to study the proposal.

Yeah, tax the rich — that’s the ticket. Why didn’t anyone think of that before? After all, the rich benefit so much from mass transit, so of course they should pay its extraordinary costs. Much better to soak the rich than to try to find a way to make transit work at a lower cost (such as by not doing such foolish things as building the Second Avenue Subway).

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Value Pricing, Not Congestion Pricing

Want to discredit a good idea? Implement a bad idea but name it after the good idea. That is what New York City is doing with its so-called congestion pricing scheme.

If you think density relieves congestion, try driving around Manhattan.
Flickr photo by 708718.

What Mayor Bloomberg proposes is to charge every car that enters south Manhattan between 6 am and 6 pm weekdays. He would then spend the money on mass transit. To be accurate, this should be called a cordon tax — that is, you pay a tax when you pass a line (a cordon).

True congestion pricing differs in several ways. First, with congestion pricing you pay for the use of a road, not for crossing a line. Second, with congestion pricing, the price varies depending on the amount of traffic there is. If it is constant all day long, it will fail to smooth out the peaks and valleys in traffic flows. Third, a congestion fee (as a opposed to a tax) would be spent on things that relieve congestion rather than on subsidies to other people.

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Transit Ridership Grows by 2.1%

The American Public Transportation Association (APTA) reports that 2007 transit ridership reached “10.3 billion trips . . . the highest level in 50 years, representing a 2.1% increase over the previous year.” APTA’s press release quotes its president, William Millar, saying, “Now with gas prices predicted to rise to $4 a gallon, there is a greater urgency for higher federal funding to expand U.S. public transportation systems so Americans have an affordable transportation choice.”

The Antiplanner is willing to admit that 2.1 percent is not miniscule. But let’s put APTA’s numbers into context. I’ll try not to repeat the points I made in response to APTA’s press release about 2006 transit ridership, most if not all of which are still valid.

APTA admits that high gas prices, not federal investments into transit infrastructure, are playing a large role in boosting ridership. The federal government has invested billions of dollars in transit every year since before 1990, yet transit ridership actually dropped every year from 1990 through 1995 (when gas prices were low), so more federal investments are not going to make much difference.

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Megabus: $1 from New York to Boston or Washington?

Megabus is a spin-off from a U.K. company of the same name that is offering bus service along the lines of RyanAir and other European cut-rate airline companies. It is offering a few $1 seats along selected routes.

Take Megabus to Chicago from Cincinnati, Cleveland, Columbus, Detroit, Indianapolis, Milwaukie, Minneapolis, or St. Louis.
Flickr photo by femaletrumpet02.

Most seats will go for around 10 cents a mile. For example, tickets for the 525-mile trip from Chicago to Kansas City are around $55 — if you want to go tomorrow. But when I chose this itinerary for a month from now the web site quoted me $43 for a daytime ticket, $15 for a nighttime bus. By comparison, Amtrak starts at $50.

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Miami’s Rail Folly

Back in 1984, Miami opened a 20-mile elevated rail line. The line was so expensive, and ridership so poor, that the city never did much to expand the line (though it is getting in line for $1.4 billion in federal handouts for proposed expansion).

Flickr photo by .Zickie.

Now the railcars the run on the line are worn out. The transit system was supposed to overhaul the cars nearly a decade ago, but deferred it for lack of funds. Now it has to choose between spending $300 million on repairs or $350 million on a new fleet.
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Flickr photo by ASurroca.

The Antiplanner suggests a third alternative: junk the system. Ridership has grown by a mere 26 percent since 1990. During the same time period, regional bus ridership has grown by 69 percent. Miami transit riders would do a lot better if some of that $300 or so million were put into bus improvements, Miami taxpayers would be glad to see the rest left in their pockets, and Miami sightseers would enjoy seeing more of the sky.

Notes from All Over

Here is another downtown boom that is not doing as well as expected. Housing prices are falling everywhere, but more in the downtown area than in the rest of the region.

Bob Poole points out that the National Surface Transportation Policy Commission is only one of two commissions that Congress created to study transportation issues. The other deals with infrastructure finance, and it put out an interim report that takes a serious look at a wide range of alternative funding mechanisms. The commission invites comments on their work to date.

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Meanwhile, opponents of real solutions to congestion have to reach pretty far to argue against them. We can’t let “foreign dollars come in and buy infrastructure in this country that American people put down.” Why not, if it will reduce congestion? “The nation long ago settled that roads are public goods.” Yes, and look at how well that worked (hint: congested, falling apart, underfunded).

Correlation vs. Causation

An recent article in the American Conservative magazine observes that home prices have gone up more in blue states while housing has remained more affordable in red states. Republicans are more likely to get married and have more children, the writer argues, so they want to live in places where they can afford a house with a yard.

Or is it, as Dave Barry once suggested, that living in suburbs and paying property taxes turns people into Republicans? Is the war on sprawl a plot by Al Gore aimed at boosting the fortunes of the Democratic Party?
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Melbourne to Relieve Housing Shortage

Australia has some of the least-affordable housing in the English-speaking world. But the premier of Victoria has announced that his state’s government will make 90,000 new home sites available for housing by rezoning land in the Melbourne urban area.

Housing in Melbourne.Flickr photo by Mark Larrimore.

As near as I can tell from the stories, he is not proposing to expand Melbourne’s urban-growth boundary, but to immediately reclassify lands in what American planners would call the “urban reserve” for housing. He also promises to streamline the approval process so as to take a full year off the time it takes to get a permit to build. Of course, once the 90,000 home sites are taken up, the government may have to expand the boundary for real if it wants to keep housing affordable.

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Americans Buy Less Gasoline — Everybody Panic! (Not)

The Wall Street Journal reports that the nation’s gasoline consumption has dropped by 1.1 percent from the previous year’s levels. No doubt the end-of-the-suburbs crowd will use this to justify their claims.

Are Americans ready for $4 a gallon gas?
Flickr photo by slworking2.

The problem is that, though people may be buying less gasoline, they aren’t driving any less. According to the latest report from the U.S. Department of Transportation, driving through October of 2007 was almost exactly the same as in 2006, which was a little more than in 2005.

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