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Monthly Archives: February 2011

High-Speed Pork

By | | News commentary, Transportation
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President Obama proposes to spend $53 billion on high-speed rail over the next six years, or nearly $9 billion a year. No one knows where this money will come from, especially in view of Obama’s proposed spending freeze. Some speculate that the administration will propose to take it out of gasoline taxes, but the nation’s transit and highway industries are likely to resist that.

Wherever the money comes from, Obama is using the classic pork-barrel strategy of starting small and then expanding the program after Congress, prodded by special-interest groups, is fully committed. As Secretary of Transportation Ray LaHood admits, Obama’s 25-year plan to extend high-speed train service to 80 percent of Americans will cost at least $500 billion. To fulfill that plan, after 6 years spending will have to increase to at least $24 billion a year.

Whatever happened to the spending freeze?
Flickr photo by SignalPAD.

Naturally, some people love the plan. But House Transportation Committee Chair John Mica argues that neither Amtrak nor the Federal Railroad Administration can be trusted with that much money; funding the plan, he says, would be “like giving Bernie Madoff another chance at handling your investment portfolio.”
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Are Earmarks Dead?

By | | News commentary
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Congressional leaders have promised a two-year moratorium on earmarks. Some in Congress are even trying to get the money back for orphaned earmarks, i.e., earmarks that have not yet been spent. There are usually lots of orphaned transportation projects because the states are not really interested in doing earmarks that override their own priorities.

It remains to be seen how serious Congress is about this. The hexennial surface transportation reauthorization should take place in the next two years, and it is hard to believe Congress will resist putting earmarks into it. While no earmarks were included in transportation reauthorization bills before 1982, the number grew rapidly after then, reaching more than 7,000 in the 2005 bill.

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Will Congress simply agree to whatever the FTA says are the best projects? Or will it override the FTA recommendations? We’ll know in a few months how serious Congress is about the no-earmarks rule.

Have an Opinion? You’re Violating the Law!

By | | News commentary
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A group of neighbors asked state highway officials to install traffic signals on a road near their Raleigh, North Carolina suburb. They buttressed their request with an eight-page analysis of the highway complete with maps and traffic projections.


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The state was so impressed that it agreed to install the traffic signals, right? Wrong. Instead, the state’s chief traffic engineer accused the neighbors of “practicing engineering without a license” and asked the state engineering board to investigate and possibly fine the local residents.

None of the neighbors purported to be engineers; none of them earned any money contributing to the report. But, said the state traffic engineer, the report “appears to be engineering-level work,” and obviously, no one should be allowed to do “engineering-level work” unless they are a state-certified engineer. Even the director of the state engineering licensing board agreed that the neighbors were violating the law if their “engineering-quality work” led to anyone being misled about the need for traffic lights.

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Congestion Coalition Wins in Virginia

By | | Transportation
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The urban mobility discussed here yesterday found that the Washington DC urban area has the fourth-worst congestion in the nation, costing more than $4 billion a year. That congestion will continue to get worse thanks to the efforts of anti-highway groups who appear to have successfully stopped the construction of high-occupancy/toll (HOT) lanes along I-395.

HOT lane opponents convinced Arlington County to oppose the new lanes, arguing that they would increase air pollution. In fact, by relieving congestion, they would reduce air pollution.

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Urban Congestion Report

By | | Transportation
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The Texas Transportation Institute recently published its latest urban mobility report, rating the amount of congestion in each of more than 100 urbanized areas. The report also estimates total congestion costs in 439 urbanized areas.

The Antiplanner has taken previous reports with a grain of salt because congestion estimates were based on formulas rather than on actual measurements of traffic delays. This report, for the first time, incorporates information from actual traffic speeds. The authors say they have backtracked this new methodology to the year 2000, but data before then (which go back to 1982) rely on the old methods. There does not appear to be a significant discontinuity between 1999 and 2000, which suggests either that the old methodology wasn’t too bad or the new data don’t play a huge role in the calculations.

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Ending Urban Redevelopment

By | | City planning, Follow up, News commentary
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Despite pressure from cities, Jerry Brown stands firm in his proposal to end redevelopment agencies, a plan he says will immediately save the state $1.7 billion a year, and more than double that after 2012.


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Meanwhile, the Idaho Freedom Foundation publishes a report proposing to eliminate urban renewal in that state. Urban-renewal agencies in Idaho collect more than $50 million in property taxes that could otherwise go to schools and other agencies. The big savings will be in stopping the growth in urban-renewal districts, which Idaho cities are creating at the rate of five per year.

High-Speed Rail Hearings

By | | News commentary
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You know that Congress is serious about getting the facts about high-speed rail when it holds a hearing on high-speed rail in Grand Central Station. Rail advocates proposed to extend the Northeast Corridor rail system to Springfield. Videotaping is often discouraged at Congressional hearings, but fortunately the Antiplanner was able to obtain the video of this hearing shown below.


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As noted in this advertisement for a rail system in North Carolina, the arguments for high-speed rail and urban rail transit are much the same: the costs are really, really high (“jobs!”), the transportation is convenient (if you happen to be going to one of the few places it goes and are willing to walk when you get there), and it is very affordable (provided you have billions in “stimulus” money).