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Monthly Archives: April 2007

Special Interest Lobbys and Big Government

By | | News commentary
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The Washington Post has run a fascinating series of twenty-seven articles called Citizen K Street. It is best viewed as a history of Congressional lobbying for the past thirty years as viewed through the lense of one lobbyist’s career.

My impression is that the series was not run in the print version of the paper; instead, it is more like a blog, with one lengthy entry per day accompanied by photos and videos, and giving people the opportunity to comment. Some of the comments came from several of the leading figures in the articles.

Another way of looking at the series is a glorification of one particular lobbyist, and several of the commenters obviously viewed it that way. They called the lobbyist a “corporate fascist” (even though his main clients were universities) and proposed various laws that would somehow end all lobbying and venality in DC.

Lobbyist habitat: K Street in Washington.
Flickr photo by askpang.

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The Nation’s Worst-Managed Transit Agency Hires a New CFO

By | | Transportation, Urban areas
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After building more light-rail lines than it can afford to operate, the Santa Clara Valley Transportation Authority (VTA) has made so many service cuts that it has lost a third of its riders. VTA’s chief financial officer resigned after an outside audit (previously discussed here) criticized the agency for building expensive rail projects to politically powerful (but auto-liberated) neighborhoods without ensuring that the agency had the funds to operate the system.

Last June, angry voters turned down a sales-tax increase designed to help the agency get back on its feet and build more rail lines. Now, under pressure to prove they can be fiscally responsible, the board of directors has hired a new “temporary” CFO, paying him $13,600 for 39 weeks of work.

Excuse me, what was that? Not $13,600, you say, but $13,600 per week? For 39 weeks? That’s $530,400. The previous CFO only got $200,000 a year, meaning his weekly wages were less than a third of the new guy’s. No wonder he did such a lousy job — they weren’t paying him enough!

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Vancouver Mayor Promotes “Ecodensity”

By | | Urban areas
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From north of the border, the mayor of Vancouver BC, Sam Sullivan, wants to know why people aren’t talking more about “the link between increased urban density and the impact on our global ecology.” Uh, maybe because there isn’t one?

Oh, but there is, he says. “The science is very clear on the link between density and the environment. Densification reduces urban sprawl. When people live closer to where they work, they travel less often in carbon-emitting vehicles and they produce fewer carbon emissions.”

Simply getting people to change their light bulbs will not solve global warming, he argues. Instead, we have to pack more people in cities so they can be “sustainable.”

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Transit Follies #5: Higher Fares and Less Service in Utah

By | | Planning Disasters, Transportation
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The Utah Transit Authority (UTA), which operates transit along the Wasatch Front from north of Ogden to south of Salt Lake City, opened its first light-rail line in 1999. Since then it has added to its light-rail system and last year began building its first commuter-rail line.

Now the agency is proposing to increase transit fares by 33 percent (phased in over two years) and, at the same time, to cut many of its bus routes. This has led to a storm of protest from transit-dependent people who say the revised bus routes will greatly reduce their mobility.

Photo courtesy UTA.

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Transit Follies #4: The Kansas City Light Rail

By | | Planning Disasters, Transportation
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Today’s entry in the April Fool’s week of transit follies is a sad story of a light-rail project that threatens to destroy a transit system in spite of the wishes of the transit agency and other urban leaders. In 2006, against the recommendations of the entire Kansas City political establishment, voters approved a measure to build a light-rail line.

In 2005, Kansas City did a wonderful thing: It started a bus-rapid transit system the way bus-rapid transit ought to be done. The transit agency didn’t spend hundreds of millions of dollars building exclusive bus lanes. It didn’t buy million-dollar buses just to have a semi-futuristic look.

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Transit Follies #3: The Grand Rapids Interurban

By | | Planning Disasters, Urban areas
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Today’s installment in our April-Fool’s week of transit follies deals with an agency that runs only buses, not trains. The Rapid, also known as the Interurban Transit Partnership, runs the bus service in the Grand Rapids, Michigan urban area (which covers five cities plus Grand Rapids).

On May 8, the transit agency will ask voters to renew the property tax that supports it. But the agency isn’t satisfied with a renewal; it wants an 18-percent increase in the tax. Does it deserve it?

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News Bulletin: Terms Accepted

By | | Housekeeping
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We interrupt this week of transit follies to announce that DanS and the Antiplanner have agreed on the terms for a bet regarding measure 37.

Those who read the comments to a post about Oregon’s ballot measure 37 will remember that DanS predicted that measure 37 “will be repealed in the 2008 election or a special election in 2009.” Then, in a comment on a later post, he offered to buy the Antiplanner dinner if the ballot measure is not repealed by April 30, 2009.

After some intense negotiations (well, a couple of emails), we agreed on the following terms:

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Transit Follies #2: The Second Avenue Subway

By | | Planning Disasters, Transportation
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Today we continue our April Fools week of transit follies with the Second Avenue Subway. This hugely expensive project proves that, if Manhattan didn’t exist, no one would build it today.

Phase I of the Second Avenue Subway will extend all the way from 63rd Street to 96th Street, a distance of 2.3 miles. As the name implies, it will go underneath Second Avenue, meaning it is just two blocks from the Lexington Avenue Subway. Eventually, the city wants to extend the subway in both directions to a total length of 8.5 miles.

The cost for this modest little rail line? A mere $4.7 billion for phase I, and a total of $16.8 billion for the entire length. That works out to about $2 billion per route mile. (Since there are two miles of track per route mile, that means a mere $1 billion per mile of track.)

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Transit Follies #1: The North Shore Connector

By | | Planning Disasters, Transportation
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What better way to celebrate April Fools week than with a series of transit follies! Each day this week, the Antiplanner will describe a transit folly that is not in Portland, Denver, San Jose, or another city that I’ve harped on so much in the past. By the end of the week, I hope you will agree that transit agencies everywhere in the U.S. have been made foolish by the misincentives created by federal pork barrel.

Light-rail trains get a chuckle over how transit agencies have fooled taxpayers into supporting their ridiculously expensive rail lines.

First up is the North Shore Connector, an extension of Pittsburgh’s light-rail system. Imagine you run the Port Authority of Allegheny County, the transit agency that serves Pittsburgh, a region of about 1.5 million people. But your region’s population is declining. Pittsburgh’s population is declining. Downtown Pittsburgh is declining. Transit ridership is dropping like a stone.

So what do you do? Why, spend $435 million on a 1.2-mile extension of your light-rail line! Of course, it is so logical. Especially when most of it is other people’s money (or, as a powerful Pennsylvania state senator calls it, “OPM”).

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