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Monthly Archives: September 2012

Join a Transit Agency; See the World

By | | News commentary, Transportation
25 Comments

Taxpayers have paid for the “mostly advisory” CEO of the Utah Transit Authority (UTA) to travel to more than ten countries and seventeen American cities in the last eighteen months. John Inglish was UTA’s general manager until two years ago, when he was replaced and kicked upstairs to a newly created position “as severance.”

“Nice severance,” comments a reporter for the Salt Lake Tribune, who notes that UTA is paying Inglish $364,400 a year (compared with $319,360 for his replacement general manager, Michael Allegra) even though Inglish has no day-to-day responsibilities for the agency. Allegra himself travels a lot, taking 1.4 trips per month, but not as much as Inglish, who averages 1.6 trips a month.

These two are not the only UTA officials who travel a lot at taxpayers’ expense. The entire UTA board traveled to Portland to see its transit operations. The board chair has been to Australia, Hong Kong, Switzerland, and numerous American cities.

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New Report on Self-Driving Cars

By | | Transportation
6 Comments

The Center for Automotive Research and KPMG have published a new report predicting the self-driving cars may be on the market as soon as 2019–if, however, the government takes action aimed at improving auto safety.

The report notes there are two approaches to self-driving cars. One, which it calls the “sensor-based solution,” is represented by the Google car and requires that each car have all sensors on board to detect everything in its surroundings. The other approach, which the report calls “connectivity based solutions,” relies on car-to-car (C2C) and car-to-infrastructure (C2I) communications to help cars navigate.

The report suggests that sensor-based solutions are “not cost-effective for mass market adoption” and require far better maps of streets and highways. It is true, as previously noted here, that the the “light detection and ranging” (LIDAR) device mounted on top of the Google car and other self-driving cars currently costs about $70,000. But that cost may come down, and Google seems committed to mapping the nation, state-by-state, to standards that self-driving cars will require.

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Reviving TIF in California

By | | Regional planning
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Last year, California Governor Jerry Brown persuaded the state legislature to shut down redevelopment districts whose use of tax-increment financing was eating into school and other local budgets and, by turn, into the state budget which was forced to make up for school losses to redevelopment. This year, the legislature has quietly been sneaking TIF back into the law.

Recall that TIF works by capturing all the growth in tax collections–whether that growth is due to new development or simply to inflation–and using that money to subsidize developers. Schools and other property-tax funded agencies lose because their costs increase, but their revenues within the TIF districts do not.

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Fortunately, at least a few writers are urging Brown to veto any bill that comes out of the legislature. I hope he does.

The Truth About GM and Chrysler

By | | News commentary
26 Comments

VP candidate Paul Ryan has been accused of lying when he claimed that Obama broke a promise by letting a Wisconsin auto factory close, when in fact the factory closed before Obama took office. Although that isn’t precisely what Ryan said, there is some validity to the accusation that his statement was deceptive.

But numerous Obama supporters are playing just as loose with the facts when they say that, if Obama hadn’t rescued GM and Chrysler, far more factories would have closed permanently. That is simply untrue. While news agencies have fact-checked some of the things being said at the Democratic convention, I haven’t seen any challenges of this claim.

Both GM and Chrysler were headed for bankruptcy. If they had gone bankrupt under chapter 11, most of their factories would have stayed open and they would have continued making and selling cars. Bankruptcy would have allowed the companies to avoid interest and dividend payments for a time, and to renegotiate union contracts. Under bankruptcy laws, stockholders would have lost the value of their stocks, but bond owners–who have first claim to company assets and profits–would have been paid off, if not in whole than at least in part.

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Class Warfare in 2012

By | | News commentary
30 Comments

Liberals accuse Republicans of engaging in class warfare. Conservatives accuse Republicans of engaging in class warfare. Cynics accuse both parties of existing “solely to hurl rhetoric at each other and pander to the the most ignorant of their base constituencies.”

While the Antiplanner is sympathetic to the cynical view, I also think the idea of class deserves more attention than most Americans give it. Too many people use the term “middle class” when they mean “middle income,” which is something quite different. Classes have distinct cultural values, which may be quite independent of income. Classes also tend to be rigid, with various barriers prevent people from moving from one class to another, whereas income levels like “1 percent-99 percent” are quite porous.

The Antiplanner sees four main classes in America today. The upper class includes people who are so wealthy that work is merely an option. Perhaps only 1 or 2 percent are in this group (which is not the same as the “1 percent” which includes people who do work but earn large amounts). The middle class includes people (and their families) whose work involves thinking more than labor. For the most part, they are college educated, which allows us to estimate their numbers: just under 30 percent of working-age Americans have bachelor’s degrees. The underclass includes people who are permanently poor, not just people who are between jobs or recent college graduates who do not yet have jobs (who are included in Census Bureau poverty numbers). Around 10 percent of Americans fall in this category.
Finally, the remaining roughly 60 percent consists of working class people (and their families), whose work is physical or repetitive rather than knowledge-based.

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Oahu Rail Construction Halted

By | | Transportation, Urban areas
9 Comments

The City of Honolulu was so anxious to start construction of its $5 billion rail line before voters could elect an anti-rail mayor that it began without completing the legally required archeological surveys. Only about a quarter of the surveys have been done, and the rest won’t be completed before the end of the year. As a result, the state Supreme Court has put a stop to construction until those surveys are done.

The city argues that delaying construction will simply make the rail line even more expensive. But that’s what happens when you fail to comply with a law that, no doubt, rail advocates would have eagerly used to delay any new highway construction.
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As University of Hawaii engineer Panos Prevedouros notes, costs have already nearly doubled from estimates made in 2002. Mayoral candidate Ben Cayetano, who won a plurality but not quite a majority in the recent primary, argues that improving the bus system would do more to provide mobility at a far lower cost.