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Monthly Archives: November 2011

Brown’s Folly

By | | News commentary, Transportation
8 Comments

Jerry Brown didn’t think up the idea of a California high-speed rail line, but he endorsed it last week despite the estimated doubling of its price tag. Brown has recommended that the legislature release funds so construction can begin in 2012.

“Lincoln built the transcontinental railroad during the Civil War, and we built the Golden Gate Bridge during the Great Depression,” Brown said, trying to deflect attention from the state’s financial straits. Bad examples. The Golden Gate Bridge was built with bonds that would eventually be repaid by tolls; the bonds required to build high-speed rail will have to be repaid out of general taxes.

Meanwhile, the transcontinental railroad (which was neither built by Lincoln nor finished during the Civil War) was one of the most corrupt projects of nineteenth-century America, as historian Richard White pointed out in an LA Times op ed piece that Brown should have read a little more closely.

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Everybody Wants a Streetcar

By | | News commentary, Transportation
29 Comments

The streetcar craze is just insane. Los Angeles wants one; so does San Antonio. It was bad enough when cities all over the country were building light rail, an expensive, obsolete form of transportation that at least has the virtue of providing slightly better service than the local buses it usually replaced. But streetcars have no redeeming transportation value at all; they are hardly faster than walking, they are far more expensive than buses; and (because, for safety reasons, they cannot operate as close together) their capacity is much lower than a bus line.

Yet at the rate things are going, in a few years more cities will have streetcars than light rail. Cincinnati is further along than most other cities; Sacramento is talking about one; Tucson is building one; and Atlanta apparently hasn’t wasted enough money on its flop of a heavy-rail line, so it is talking about streetcars. Even normally sensible Kansas City is talking about streetcars.

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Meeting with a Regional Planner

By | | Regional planning
11 Comments

An Aussie who calls himself the Unconventional Economist, also known as Leith van Onselen, created and posted this little cartoon about dealing with regional planners. He based much of it on a script by another blogger named Ross Elliot.

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The Unconventional Economist, by the way, has written an impressive series of articles on housing bubbles and policies in various countries, including Canada, China, Germany (one country that didn’t have a bubble), the Netherlands, New Zealand, Sweden, and the United Kingdom. He has also written about U.S. housing markets, including California, Phoenix, and Texas, and of course plenty of posts about Australia. The Antiplanner agrees with almost everything he says, which means many readers of this blog will not.

Max Crashes

By | | Transportation, Urban areas
7 Comments

Vancouver voters apparently bought claims that C-Tran needed a tax increase to maintain bus service. Meanwhile, TriMet is so eager to reach Vancouver that it crashed a light-rail train into the buffers at the end of the line that could eventually cross the Columbia.

Few knew about the accident until someone sent the security camera video to a bus driver who posted it on his blog. When the Oregonian asked TriMet about it, “the agency said the video didn’t exist and denied knowing about the incident,” then suspended the driver for “invading privacy laws.” Isn’t security camera footage taken by a public agency public information? In any case, no one was hurt as there were only “a couple of people” on board. That’s why they need so-called “high-capacity transit”?

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Another Lying Transit Agency

By | | News commentary, Transportation
15 Comments

Tomorrow, Vancouver Washington voters will be asked to raise sales taxes in order to “preserve existing bus service.” Without the sales tax increase, says C-Tran, the transit agency, “C-TRAN would need to implement a system-wide service reduction of about 35 percent by early to mid 2013.”

It turns out that is a lie. An accountant named Tiffany Couch has scrutinized C-Tran’s budget and projected costs and revenues and concluded that existing taxes are sufficient to maintain bus service for many years.

So why does C-Tran say that service will decline without the tax increase? The answer, says Couch, is that C-Tran has already decided it wants to build a light-rail line connecting with Portland’s light rail. Without the tax increase, C-Tran will have to cut bus service in order to pay for the light rail.

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The Cost of Auto Accidents

By | | News commentary, Transportation
12 Comments

Auto fatalities dropped in 2010 below 33,000, less than in any year since 1949. But AAA has just published an alarming report arguing that the cost of auto crashes is $300 billion a year. Since Americans spend only about $900 billion per year (select table 2.5.5 and add lines 54, 57, and 116) buying, operating, and maintaing cars, this makes accidents appear to be a significant portion of the cost of driving.

AAA’s worthwhile goal is to promote auto safety, but the report also feeds anti-auto arguments about the hidden costs of driving. Since auto critics also misuse AAA’s estimates of the cost of driving, it is worth reviewing this new report.

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Free Bus to Atlanta

By | | News commentary, Transportation
9 Comments

Megabus, which serves the Midwest and Northeast, is starting service in the South and to celebrate it is giving away 10,000 tickets to or from Atlanta and eleven other cities. Even if you don’t get a free ticket, when the Antiplanner checked there were still seats on many routes for $1 to $3.

Megabus’ new service connects Atlanta to Birmingham, Charlotte, Chattanooga, Gainesville, Jacksonville, Knoxville, Memphis, Mobile, Montgomery, Nashville, and Orlando. Buses to Knoxville, Mobile, Nashville, and Orlando stop once; the rest are non-stop.

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High-Speed Fail, v. 2.0

By | | News commentary, Transportation
20 Comments

Ninety-eight point five billions dollars. That’s the new cost of California’s high-speed rail line from Los Angeles to San Francisco, according to a business plan released yesterday by the California High-Speed Rail Authority.

At least, that’s the cost reported (a half day in advance of the plan’s release) by the Los Angeles Times. The reason why the cost has more than doubled from previous estimates is that the Authority is now proposing to not finish the line until 2033 (vs. 2019 in the previous plan–see p. 52), and the added years of inflation make the cost higher in “year-of-expenditure” (YOE) dollars. When adjusted for inflation to today’s dollars, the cost is “only” $65 billion.

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Republicans Caving on Reauthorization

By | | News commentary, Transportation
13 Comments

It would seem like Republicans hold all the cards in the debate over transportation reauthorization. It seems most likely that they will gain seats in both House and Senate next fall if not capture the Senate majority.

House Republicans have said they want to spend no more money than is flowing into the Highway Trust Fund, less than $40 billion a year. Senate Democrats say they want to keep spending at current levels, which is closer to $55 billion a year, for two years, then start the debate all over again. To make this work, says transportation observer Ken Orski, the Senate plan would completely drain the $19 billion in the Highway Trust Fund and then find another $12 billion somewhere.

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It is time for the Tea Parties to take some action. I hope that Republicans who support the Democratic plan will face some opposition in their next primary elections.