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Monthly Archives: February 2012

The Future of New Starts

By | | Transportation
13 Comments

Should federal transportation funds be distributed to states and cities based on fixed criteria, such as population and land area, or should they be handed out based on the political whims of whoever is in power at the moment? While Republicans in Congress are moving in the former direction, the Obama administration is moving towards the latter approach.

Last week, the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee passed a surface transportation reauthorization bill that would use formulas to distributed almost all federal gas taxes. Among other things, this would eliminate the New Starts transit fund, a multi-billion-dollar annual fund that gives cities incentives to plan high-cost rail transit projects, so they can get “their share” of federal dollars, when low-cost buses would work just as well.

Meanwhile, the Obama administration has published draft rules revising the New Starts planning process by making the criteria for transit funding more vague (and therefore more political) than ever before. Where House Republicans would take the politics out of transit funding by turning transit grants into formula funds, the administration’s new rules make transit funding more political than ever by creating vague new criteria that cities can use to justify rail transit projects.

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The Seductive Appeal of Value-Capture Finance

By | | Regional planning, Transportation, Urban areas
23 Comments

Today, the Antiplanner is in North Carolina, where transit agencies seem to be competing to plan the wackiest, most-expensive rail transit lines that few people will ever use. Right now, the leading contender must be Raleigh, which (according to a paper by UNC-Charlotte transport professor David Hartgen and transit accountant Tom Rubin) is planning a light-rail line that will cost $33 per trip and a commuter-rail line that will cost $92 per trip.

The Antiplanner, however, is in Charlotte looking at a proposed commuter-rail line that is expected to cost more than $450 million to start up and is projected to carry only about 5,600 trips (meaning 2,800 round trips) a day in 2025. The Antiplanner calculates that, for about the same price as the rail line, taxpayers could give every one of the 2,800 riders a brand-new Toyota Prius every other year for the life of the rail project.

This rail line is such a dog that not even the Federal Transit Administration will help pay for it. So the Charlotte Area Transit System (CATS) is proposing that local cities and counties cover half the costs, while the other half would be shared by CATS and the state of North Carolina. Under a proposed financial plan, five cities and two counties are to use “value capture” to raise their half of the money.

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Crushed to Death by Red Tape

By | | Follow up, News commentary
38 Comments

The Antiplanner’s friend, Ann Brower, barely survived last February’s earthquake in Christchurch when a building fell on her bus, killing the driver and seven other passengers as well as four pedestrians. Now it turns out that the building had been known to be unsafe for nearly 30 years. The owner wanted to demolish it but couldn’t because the city considered it a “heritage building” and any work on it had to tramp through mountains of red tape.

Brower testified before a Royal Commission last week, and noted in a radio interview that numerous experts considered the building unsafe.

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One Down, 48 to Go

By | | News commentary, Regional planning
4 Comments

“Building better communities” was the slogan of the California Redevelopment Association. But the critics charged that redevelopment agencies “deprived tens of thousands of working and lower-income residents of their homes and livelihoods while granting vast subsidies to billionaires.” In the end, the social justice questions didn’t matter, but the subsidies did, so to save the state billions of dollars a year, California redevelopment agencies shut down for good last week.

The agencies had $30 billion worth of outstanding debts to private parties which will still be repaid out of tax-increment finance (TIF) revenues. But these repayments will only use about half of the $5.7 billion in TIF revenues the agencies collected each year, so now the other half will be returned to schools and other entities that rely on property taxes. Since the state has to make up the difference when schools lost money to TIF, the state ends up saving billions of dollars a year. As the debts are paid off, the state will save even more money.

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Mica Introduces Surface Transportation Bill

By | | News commentary, Transportation
33 Comments

House Transportation & Infrastructure Committee Chair John Mica introduced a proposed surface transportation bill yesterday. Titled the American Energy & Infrastructure Jobs Act, the bill contains something to make everyone happy as well as things to make everyone unhappy.

To please Senate Democrats, who want to keep spending more than the government is collecting in gasoline and other transportation taxes, the bill proposes to spend $260 billion over five years. That’s at least $10 billion a year more than revenues.

To please Tea Party Republicans, who want to reduce pork barrel spending, the bill contains no earmarks, consolidates or eliminates 70 different programs, and eliminate mandates that states spend highway money on bike paths and other non-highway programs. To please rail nuts, the bill streamlines the rail planning and approval process. To please the energy industry, the bill mandates approval for the Keystone pipeline.

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