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Monthly Archives: December 2008

New Transportation Secretary

By | | News commentary
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Obama’s pick for transportation secretary, outgoing Illinois Represenative Ray LaHood, was a surprise, since the early rumors focused on liberals from large urban areas such as San Francisco or Portland. Instead, LaHood is a Republican representing Peoria, whose urbanized area population is only about a quarter million people.

Not counting Defense Secretary Gates (who considers himself Republican but is not registered in any political party), LaHood will be the token Republican in Obama’s cabinet, just as Norman Mineta was the token Democrat in Bush’s first cabinet. Though LaHood has called himself a “true conservative” — which could mean just about anything — he is highly praised by liberals such as Mark Shields.

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Portland Commuter Rail 25% Over Budget

By | | Transportation, Urban areas
29 Comments

Portland’s Westside commuter rail is $33 million over its planned budget of $133. Although just $8 million of that is due to the cost of the commuter rail cars, a recent article in The Oregonian blames the manufacturer of those cars for having “cost TriMet millions.”

The Westside commuter rail line goes from nowhere to nowhere. Actually, it goes from Wilsonville to Beaverton, but neither endpoint is a major job center. That means commuters who use the commuter rail will probably change in Beaverton to a light rail train. Faithful Antiplanner ally John Charles says this line is a loser. It is so bad that Oregon’s congressional delegation had to pass a law exempting it from Federal Transit Administration cost-effectiveness criteria restricting funding to projects that only waste a lot of money instead of a whole lot of money.

Colorado Railcar’s original demonstrator unit.
Flickr photo by AaverageJoe.

Engineering, design, construction, right of way, and signals for the project cost about $22 million more than expected, which The Oregonian mentions only in a tiny chart. Instead, the story focuses on Colorado Railcar, a company that has been promoting the idea of Diesel multiple units (DMUs), which more or less means a light-rail-like car powered by a Diesel engine powerful enough to also tow one or two unpowered cars.

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Swedes Find Rail Transit Not the Best Way to Lower Emissions

By | | News commentary
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A report from the Swedish Institute for Transport and Communications Analysis (SIKA) finds that rail transportation may reduce greenhouse gas emissions, but at an extremely high cost. The report, which was prepared at the request of the Swedish government, is available only in Swedish, but an English summary is in this news report.

The report found that rail transportation emits about 20 percent less greenhouse gases than autos, but rail service is so expensive that it would be more effective to simply improve auto technologies. Reducing one ton of greenhouse gases with rail costs $6,500, said the report, while reducing it with auto improvements can cost less than $40 per ton. Nonetheless people should also know that this will provide you with the joy of sexual pleasure as an important part of a person’s healthy life. tadalafil online in uk see for more info Ejaculation time more than 4 minutes is normal and for the most part related to men levitra generic cheap who are sixty years and above. If taken 30 minutes to 1 hour before the sexual intercourse and works better if the stomach is empty. sildenafil pfizer is widely used by millions of men throughout the world suffer from erectile dysfunction. Your physician will probably see this link low priced viagra be the one particular to determine whether you should continue making use of the drug can be harmful and it can leave bad impacts to user. The news report does not make clear whether the SIKA report accounted for greenhouse gas emissions during rail construction, but if it did not, then rail’s cost per ton would be even greater.

Bailouts and Stimuli

By | | Meltdown
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The Antiplanner doesn’t always agree with Nobel-prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz, but his take on the auto bailout makes sense. Too many bailout proponents speak as though the bailout is the difference between life and death for the Big Three. In fact, all it may mean is life or death for the value of the Big Three’s shares.

Chrysler ecoVoyager fuel-cell hybrid-electric concept car.

Most of the nation’s airlines were in bankruptcy sometime in the past decade — you probably flew one when it was in chapter 11. Shareholders were wiped out, but the planes kept flying and airline workers kept working.

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One-Acre Lots? Horrors!

By | | Regional planning, Urban areas
26 Comments

The city of Tualatin, a suburb of Portland, zoned about 300 acres of land within its borders in a low-density zone allowing 1 to 6 homes per acre. This raises the specter of up to 300 new homes on one-acre lots, a notion that is sending regional planners into fits.

“We don’t enjoy getting into this type of confrontation,” says planning professor and Metro councilor Carl Hosticka. But “it’s not fair to the other jurisdictions,” meaning the ones the complied with high-density housing goals set by Metro, Portland’s regional planning authority.

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Manchester Rejects Cordon Charges

By | | Transportation
19 Comments

Last Thursday, voters in Manchester, England soundly trounced a proposal to charge a fee every time they entered the city and spend the tolls on some expensive transit projects. Under the proposal, planners drew two rings around the city. Crossing the outer ring inbound during morning rush hours or outbound during evening rush hours would cost 1 pound. Crossing the inner ring would cost 2 pounds inbound in the morning, and 1 pound outbound in the afternoon. Commuters would potentially pay as much as 5 pounds ($7.50) a day.

Flickr photo by Gene Hunt.

The money was all going to go towards transit. Almost half of it — 1.2 billion pounds (about $1.8 billion) — would have been spent on an 18-mile tram (light-rail) line. Meanwhile, a variety of other alternatives that would have done more to relieve congestion at a lower cost were left unfunded.

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Studded Tires: Ban or Tax?

By | | Transportation
30 Comments

It is supposed to snow this weekend, so a couple of days ago I drove to the central Oregon Costco to have my all-weather tires replaced with snow tires. A lot of other people had the same idea so I got to go shopping for several hours while I waited. Walking through the parking lot from the Barnes & Noble to the Whole Foods, I met several cars that audibly had studded tires, and every time I did, I would get a little angry.

First used in the U.S. in the 1960s, studded tires were supposed to provide better traction on ice than all-weather tires. However, they actually provide worse traction in most other pavement conditions. Meanwhile, “traction tires” or snow tires, whose rubber is softer than all-weather tires, work as well as studded tires on ice but much better than studded tires in other conditions. Snow tires were once much more expensive than studded tires, but now are competitively priced.

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Metro: Here to Serve You, Except When You Need Us Most

By | | Transportation
10 Comments

Washington Metrorail anticipates that at least a million people will ride the rails on inauguration day next January. To deal with the crowds, Metro plans to shut down its escalators, at least at the most popular stations, “for crowd control.”

Apparently, when the escalators are turned on, they can deliver people to the stations faster than the trains can carry them away. So much for rail being “high-capacity transit.” I guess cities that really want high-capacity transit should just build escalators and moving walkways a la Robert Heinlein.

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In lieu of telling people where the restrooms are, Metro plans to set up a whole 146 portapotties outside of “selected” rail stations. For what it is worth, as one news source calculates, that’s one portapotty for every 6,849 riders.

Infrastructure and the Economy

By | | Meltdown
20 Comments

Many members of Congress are eager to pass an infrastructure “stimulus” bill early in the Obama administration. There are many reasons to think that this is a bad idea. Such a bill is likely to do little to stimulate the economy. But it probably will do much to prolong the recovery period.

Over at Marginal Revolution, economist Tyler Cowan worries that the added debt required by an infrastructure bill will “ruin my country and cause its economy to crumble or explode.” Even if that is not true, he says, then an infrastructure project makes sense only if either the “project worth doing in its own right” or “53 percent or more of the expenditures [will] come on-line in the next nine months.”

The Antiplanner would argue that both of those should be true. If the project is not worth doing in its own right, it won’t provide much of a secondary stimulus — it will just provide a few jobs during actual construction. If the project is worth doing but not “shovel-ready,” then funding it will increase the nation’s debt but not provide any immediate stimulus.

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Groceries: How Did We Get Here?

By | | Entrepreneurs
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Last week, the Antiplanner examined the American grocery industry. That post showed that you can find at least ten different classes of grocery stores (if you count Jungle Jim’s as its own class), ranging from about 2,500-square-foot convenience stores to Jim’s 250,000-square-foot behemoth.

If some government agency tried to plan the distribution of groceries to all the households in the country, how would they do it? Would they come up with a system that offered towns as small as 1,500 people access to 30,000 different products in one store? Not likely.

We know that, in the centrally planned Soviet Union, the typical grocery store of the 1980s featured only about a dozen different products on its shelves at any given time. To buy something from one of these stores, customers had to stand in three lines: one to order the product, one to pay for it, and one to pick it up.

Fortunately, no one in America planned our system of grocery distribution. Instead, today’s supermarkets and supercenters are the product of more than a century of grocery evolution. Many of the key ideas found in today’s grocery stores can be traced to individual entrepreneurs, but it is likely that if one entrepreneur had not introduced each idea, someone else would have a year or two later.

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