Monthly Archives: February 2007

The Government Accountability Office (which I still think of by the easier-to-say and more accurate name of General Accounting Office) has identified a number of federal programs that are “high risk due to their greater vulnerabilities to fraud, waste, abuse, and mismanagement.” This year, it has added transportation to this High-Risk Series.

“Revenues from traditional funding mechanisms may not keep pace with demand,” says the GAO. This problem is compounded by “the absence of a link between federal grant funding levels and specific performance-related goals and outcomes, resulting in little assurance that federal funding is being channeled to the nation’s most critical mobility needs.”

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The Christian Science Monitor has another puff piece about streetcars and how Portland’s streetcar attracted “around $2.5 billion” worth of development. I don’t need to repeat again that this development was really attracted by other subsidies.

The article quotes Urban Land Institute researcher Robert Dunphy, who says that streetcars are not transportation but “amenities.” The article says that “most streetcars operating today — with the exception of those in larger cities such as Portland or San Francisco — fall into that category.”

But San Francisco doesn’t have any streetcars (unless you count cable cars, which are quite a different beast) and Portland’s streetcar is clearly an amenity. I suspect the writer is confusing streetcars and light rail. Another recent article about the wasteful San Jose BART extension confused light rail with commuter rail.

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How do Americans respond when gasoline prices go up? A recent survey finds that many people make an extra effort to find low-cost gas dealers. But very few — only 11 percent — say they respond by driving “a lot less.”

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The Bush administration is proposing to give $130 million in grants to cities that want to build electronic toll systems they can use to reduce congestion. Electronic tolling can help congestion by allowing road managers to charge more during busy periods and make sure the roads never get congestion.

Congestion pricing is an amazingly simple and low-cost solution to congestion. Everyone expects airline tickets to cost more at Christmas and Thanksgiving and hotel rooms to cost more in the summer (except in Florida where they cost more in the winter). So we are all used to the idea of congestion pricing.

Unfortunately, most of us are also used to the idea of driving on toll-free roads, so any proposal to turn an existing free road into a congestion-priced road is met with stiff resistance. The Wall Street Journal warns that some people are going to call such tolls a “tax” to build political opposition.

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