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Monthly Archives: May 2011

Driverless Cars vs. High-Speed Rail

By | | Transportation
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The Los Angeles Times says the California high-speed rail project “is a train wreck” that has become “a monument to the ways poor planning, mismanagement and political interference can screw up major public works.” But the newspaper still favors “Obama’s inspiring vision of a nation crisscrossed by bullet trains, providing cleaner, safer and cheaper competition to airlines and reducing reliance on gas-guzzling automobiles” because “the benefits still outweigh the costs.”

Apparently, all it takes is a totally unrealistic vision to persuade people supposedly as sophisticated as the editors of the LA Times. The truth is bullet trains are far more expensive than airlines (75 cents vs. 15 cents a passenger mile); Amtrak’s safety record is far worse than the airlines (1.4 vs. 0.1 passenger fatalities per billion passenger miles); and cleaner depends on the energy source (and powering trains with renewable energy won’t help much if all those trains do is displace some other energy consumer who therefore relies on fossil fuels). As for “reducing reliance on gas-guzzling automobiles,” the state’s own extremely optimistic numbers show that California high-speed rail won’t displace more than 2 or 3 percent of the state’s auto driving; and by the time it is built, autos won’t be guzzling that much gas anyway.

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The Wrong Measures

By | | News commentary, Transportation
20 Comments

Late last week, with great fanfare, the Brookings Institution released a new report on “Transit and Jobs in America.” Too many people, the report found, live too far away from a transit stop, so it urged more investments in transit so that more people can use it.

Data in the report itself discredited this logic. As noted on page 21, the metro areas with the highest “combined ranking of access to transit and employment” are:

1. Honolulu
2. San Jose
3. Salt Lake City
4. Tucson
5. Fresno
6. Denver
7. Albuquerque
8. Las Vegas
9. Provo-Orem
10. Modesto

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LaHood Lied about Michigan HSR

By | | Follow up, News commentary, Transportation
24 Comments

When Immobility Secretary Ray LaHood gave $200 million to Michigan for high-speed rail last Monday, he claimed this grant would bring “trains up to speeds of 110 mph on a 235-mile section of the Chicago to Detroit corridor, reducing trip times by 30 minutes.” That’s a lie. In fact, the state itself says the top speed will only be 79 mph, and the money will only save 12 minutes.

Photo courtesy of Michigan View.

Some journalists even got conned into thinking that the money would reduce travel times in the corridor by 50 minutes. In fact, the state says it will need nearly $1 billion more to bring the tracks up to 110-mph standards–and that’s not counting the cost of locomotives and railcars.

The Antiplanner explains this in detail in Michigan View, a political news site published by the Detroit News.

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Memphis Blues

By | | City planning
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The Antiplanner has never visited Memphis, so when I was watching a video of the flooding in Memphis, I was surprised to see a huge pyramid. “Looks like a government boondoggle to me,” I said.

Flickr photo by Exothermic.

Sure enough. The Pyramid Arena opened in 1991 after being built at a cost of $65 million which was “publicly financed” by the city of Memphis and Shelby County. It is supposedly the sixth-largest pyramid in the world. Significantly, four of the five larger pyramids (all in Egypt) were also government boondoggles, the only exception being the Luxor Hotel in Las Vegas. “Though it was a controversial architectural undertaking at the time,” says one web site, “most Memphians have come to accept, if not appreciate, the Pyramid.”

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TSA Helps Kill High-Speed Trains

By | | News commentary, Transportation
6 Comments

One of the punchlines of President Obama’s 2011 State of the Union address had to do with high-speed rail: “For some trips,” he said to “laughter and applause,” “it will be faster than flying–without the pat-down.”

Now the Transportation Security Administration has announced a new policy that will eliminate this frequently used but inane argument for high-speed rail. Under the new policy, “trusted flyers” whose names were drawn from airline frequent-flyer lists would have a special bar code printed on their boarding passes. This would make them eligible to go through a fast lane without removing shoes, taking laptops out of their cases, and passing through an ordinary metal detector rather than a full body scanner.

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Latest High-Speed Rail Grant

By | | Follow up, News commentary, Transportation
3 Comments

Secretary of Immobility Ray LaHood announced yesterday the latest–and possibly last–round of high-speed rail grants, this one from redistribution of the $2.4 billion rejected by the state of Florida. As the Antiplanner noted in March, LaHood could have given the entire $2.4 billion to California, sending a signal that the administration remains serious about building a true high-speed rail network.

Instead, LaHood gave only $300 million to California high-speed rail, and instead gave the lion’s share–$800 million–to Amtrak and several eastern states for the Northeast Corridor–a corridor that wasn’t even on the original high-speed rail list until LaHood added it in March. Most of the rest of the money went for minor improvements in track to allow trains to run slightly faster than they run today, or for stations, locomotives, passenger cars, and similar facilities that will pretty much operate at conventional speeds.

California expects to use the $300 million to build another 20 miles of rail line in the state’s Central Valley, on top of the 65 miles or so that are already funded. The Central Valley is the least-expensive portion of the planned 420-mile route that includes two mountain crossings and more than 100 miles through urban areas. Since the state has little more than 10 percent of the money it needs to complete the San Francisco-Anaheim route, giving it $300 million is not going to help it complete the project. Yet California politicians claim they are thrilled with the grant.

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Notes from All Over

By | | News commentary
16 Comments

The Economist published an article claiming that traffic is worse in the United States than Europe and lamenting that the U.S. was not building high-speed rail. Wendell Cox responds with a data-filled article basically showing that everything The Economist said was wrong.

John Charles of the Cascade Policy Institute just published Light Rail, Streetcars & the Myth of “High Capacity Transit,” showing that light-rail has a market share of about 2 percent of travel to so-called transit-oriented shopping areas along Portland light-rail lines and a 20 percent market share to major events such as Trailblazer basketball games and other major events. Curiously, despite the title, he never actually compares light-rail capacities with bus capacities. “Light rail” is not short for “light-weight rail” but “light-capacity rail”; a bus lane can move far more people per hour than a light-rail line, which is why light rail makes no sense anywhere in the world unless your goal is to waste a lot of money.

This is especially true in Portland where short blocks limit trains to just two cars. Moreover, four Portland light-rail lines–to North Portland, the airport, Gresham, and Clackamas–must all cross the Steel Bridge, which can only handle 30 trains an hour each way. That means most of these lines will get just eight trains an hour; at 300 people per train, that’s just 2,400 people per hour. A bus lane can move ten times that many people (600 buses per hour times 40 people per bus) without even requiring any of the passengers to stand in the aisles.

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Obama’s Reauthorization Proposal

By | | Transportation
16 Comments

Over the next six years, the Obama administration proposes to spend $253 billion on highways; $119 billion on mass transit; $53 billion on “high-performance” passenger trains; $28 billion on “livability”; and $25 billion on an infrastructure bank. At least, those are the numbers that can be found in a copy of an undated bill representing the Obama administration’s proposal for reauthorizing federal surface transportation spending that was recently distributed by a publication called Transportation Weekly. The publication also released a section-by-section analysis of the bill.

Under the bill, total spending over the next six years (2012 through 2017) would be about $480 billion, which is roughly twice as much as the federal government expects to collect in gas taxes and other existing highway user fees. The bill makes several references to a “new energy tax” that might make up some of the difference.

Currently, almost all federal spending on surface transportation comes from federal taxes on motor fuel, heavy trucks and trailers, and truck tires. When Congress created the Interstate Highway System in 1956, it also created the Highway Trust Fund and dedicated these taxes to that fund. This fund sunsets every six years unless reauthorized, and each reauthorization gives Congress a chance to tinker with the fund.

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Building Micro-Homes in Portland

By | | Housing, News commentary, Urban areas
60 Comments

Okay, it is one thing for someone who wants to live within a block of Central Park to pay $700 a month for a 90-square-foot “apartment.” But now a major homebuilder, D.R. Horton, is building 364- to 687-square-foot micro-homes in Portland.

“You can’t just keep going farther from the city and acquiring farm land,” says Portland advertiser Jim Beriault. Well, actually, you could if it weren’t for that pesky urban-growth boundary. Oregon (which is 98-percent rural) has plenty of land, and there are plenty of urban areas that are much bigger than Portland.

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Ending the Mortgage Interest Deduction

By | | Housing
12 Comments

Realtors and home builders strongly defend the mortgage interest deduction as a way of increasing homeownership, which is supposed to be a good thing. But does it really work that well?

Edward Glaeser doesn’t think so. While he agrees that there are social benefits to increasing homeownership, he notes that the mortgage-interest deduction mainly benefits the wealthy, who are almost always homeowners anyway. He also finds that, while the subsidy has changed significantly over the years, those changes have not been reflected by changes in homeownership.

Charging taxes on interest is double taxation because the people who earn the interest also have to pay taxes on it. So, as Wikipedia notes, when Congress created the income tax in 1913, it allowed people to deduct the interest from all personal loans, not just mortgages. But in 1986, Congress (no longer worried about double taxation) repealed that deduction for all loans other than home loans. The stated reason for leaving that deduction was to promote homeownership.

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