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Monthly Archives: February 2013

Not in the Antiplanner’s Library

By | | Book reviews
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“We are too fat, we are too much in debt, and we save too little for the future,” says philosopher Sarah Conly on the opening page of this book. Based on this, she strongly supports the idea that government should use coercion to prevent people from harming themselves.

The Antiplanner hasn’t read and is not going to buy the book, and only partly because the list price is an outrageous $95. More important, while it might provide some insights into how nanny-state supporters think, this is one book I don’t need to read to know that it is wrong.

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Coordinating Traffic Signals

By | | Transportation
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Last week, Los Angeles became the first major city in American to coordinate all its traffic signals. The city spent $410 million coordinating signals at 4,000 intersections, or about $100,000 per intersection.

The $410 million cost is less than the cost of one mile of L.A.’s proposed Westside Subway Extension and about the same as the cost of two miles of Portland’s latest light-rail line. Yet the signal coordination will do far more to relieve congestion, save energy, and reduce air pollution than both of these rail projects put together–more, in all probability, than all rail transit projects in the United States.

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Virginia Takes Two Steps Backwards

By | | Transportation
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When Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell proposed to pay for transportation by replacing the gas tax with a sales tax, many pundits predicted it would never happen. They were only half right. Last Friday, the Virginia Senate passed a bill, already approved by the Assembly, that replaced the retail gas tax with a sales tax plus a wholesale gas tax that is almost as much as the retail tax.

The wholesale gas tax is 3.5 percent, which means that it adjusts with changing oil prices. At current gas prices, it amounts to about 14 cents a gallon, slightly less than the 17.5 cent per gallon retail tax that is being eliminated. When added to the increased sales tax that is dedicated to transportation, the result will be a significant increase in transportation funding.

It is not likely, however, to result in any significant improvements for travelers. Instead, as the Wall Street Journal notes, it is a scam that mainly benefits “unions, real estate developers and the transit lobby.”

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Proposed Anaheim Streetcar

By | | Transportation
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Anaheim is another city planning a streetcar line, in this case from the Amtrak/Metrolink station (and planned high-speed rail station) to Disneyland. Disney is reportedly enthused about the project, since otherwise it might have to provide its own buses. The consultants planning the streetcar have also no doubt convinced Disney that the streetcar is “high-capacity transit,” a term that is naturally used numerous times in the city’s alternatives analysis.

Click to download the table of contents to the alternatives analysis for the Anaheim Slow Connection.

Maybe it is due to my poor Googling skills, but I haven’t actually been able to find a page on the city of Anaheim’s web site linking to the alternatives analysis. However, I have found individual chapters of the analysis, including the executive summary, chapter 3: transportation analysis, and chapter 7: comparison of alternatives. If you want to download any of the other chapters, read the table of contents and then copy and paste http://www.anaheim.net/images/articles/4947/ChapterX.pdf into your browser, substituting the number of the chapter you want for the X.

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Skyriding to the Top of the Stupidity Pile

By | | Transportation
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Streetcars apparently aren’t stupid enough for Michael McDaniel and Jared Ficklin of Frog Design in Austin, Texas. They’ve come up with an even stupider idea: moving people around on urban networks of ski lifts. Each ski lift would consist of scores of small cars suspended from wires, and each car would carry six to twelve people.

The 152-car, 2.1-mile gondola system in Rio de Janeiro cost $74 million, goes about 8 mph, and is expected to carry up to 30,000 people per day. Flickr photo by minplanpac

They estimate that a base system could cost as little as $3 million per mile. If you insist on weighty luxuries such as air conditioning and heat, the cost rises to $12 million. They admit that in urban areas the costs are more likely to be around $24 million per mile, but say that is still less expensive than streetcars or light rail. That’s like saying french fries are healthy because they aren’t as heart-attack-inducing as eating pure lard.

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Sacramento Streetcar Scam

By | | City planning, Transportation
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Another day; another city getting scammed by the streetcar mafia. In this case, it is Sacramento, a city that has built 37 miles of light-rail lines and seen transit’s share of commuting fall from 4.1 percent in 1980, before light rail, to 3.2 percent in 2010.

In 2006, Sacramento’s metropolitan transportation plan admitted that, despite past plans focusing on “luring drivers out of their autos,” the share of transit riders was decreasing; and despite building no new roads and seeing huge increases in congestion, the amount of auto driving had doubled since 1980 (see page 3). So naturally, the plan recommended more of the same.

Apparently, that still didn’t work, because now they want to try something new. Since light rail wasn’t fixing any problems, they want to build 18 miles of streetcar lines costing $816 million, or $45 million a mile. The plan calls for a $125-$135 million “starter line” of 2.55 miles that will also share 0.75 miles of rails with light rail, reducing the light-rail line’s capacity to move people, which isn’t an issue because so few people ride the light rail.

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Three More Reasons Not to Ride Transit

By | | Transportation
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1. They’re Listening to Everything You Say

Portland’s TriMet has acquired new buses that automatically record rider conversations. It wasn’t something the agency particularly wanted; it just “came standard with the new buses,” says a spokesperson.

Under Oregon law, unless you obtain a warrant, you can’t record a conversation without the permission of all parties. Not to worry; TriMet’s buses are posted with signs warning “Security cameras with audio on board.” Apparently, TriMet considers that anyone who boards automatically consents to be recorded.

2. You’ll Make Their Lawyers Rich

The Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority revealed that it has paid 84 victims of the 2009 crash that killed nine people and injured dozens more a total of $1.6 million–an average of $19,000 each. At the same time, it paid its attorneys $7.5 million in fees to deal with lawsuits stemming from the crash that resulted from its own inadequate maintenance.

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Why High-Speed Trains Are a Ridiculous Fantasy

By | | News commentary, Transportation
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High-speed rail supporter Alfred Twu has gotten a lot of attention for having boldly drawn a map of where he thinks high-speed trains should go. Never mind that Twu’s map is even more absurd than Obama’s plan. What’s sad is that the romance of trains still manages to hold peoples’ attention long after passenger trains have become technologically and economically obsolete.

Slate calls this the “liberals’ dream [of] what America’s high-speed rail network looks like.”

Anybody can draw a map, and that map is likely to reflect their own particular preferences. The Antiplanner’s ideal high-speed rail line would connect my home in Camp Sherman, Oregon (population 380) with Cato’s offices in Washington, DC. Of course, I tend to move about every eight or nine years, so by the time the rail line was finished the only potential regular customer would be gone. But just think of the jobs that would be created!

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Stressful and Unpredictable

By | | News commentary, Transportation, Urban areas
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Portland traffic is “stressful and unpredictable,” according to one of the co-authors of the Texas Transportation Institute’s urban mobility report. In fact, by some measures, Portland has the sixth-most-congested freeways in the nation, after DC, New York, Los Angeles, Bridgeport, and (strangely) Provo-Orem.

There are other measures by which Portland isn’t quite so bad, though overall Portland ranks 17th even though it is the 23rd largest urban area. The significance of the freeway number is that it is based on actual measurements of traffic by Inrix, while most of the other measures are calculated based on estimates of miles of driving and lane miles of roads. The Antiplanner has never trusted these calculations because a lane mile of highway built in 2000 has a far greater capacity to move traffic than one built in 1950. Thus, the measure that ranks Portland sixth-worst is probably one of the most reliable in the report.
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Portlandia supporters, of course, attempt to double-talk their way out of this. The mobility report, says one, “ignores differences in trip distances among metro areas and how trip distances have changed over time.” The Texas people disagree, saying they do take distances into account. Moreover, a look at census data reveal that the average Portland commuter takes 24.2 minutes to get to work, which about the same as in other urban areas of similar size (Minneapolis is 23.4 minutes; Denver is 25.7; St. Louis is 23.6; Cincinnati is 22.8; San Antonio 23.8). Since census data also show that 85 percent of Portland-area commuters still take autos to work, Portland’s investments in transit and bike paths have, at best, merely nibbled at the edges of the problem.

Congestion King

By | | News commentary, Transportation
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The Texas Transportation Institute has released its annual urban mobility report, and Washington, DC once again takes the crown of wasting the most time and fuel per commuter. Though the urban mobility report makes some questionable claims about the congestion relief provided by urban transit, not even DC’s expensive Metro rail system has kept traffic from costing the average auto commuter $1,400 a year in wasted time and fuel.

Of course, one reason DC is number one in congestion is that, with the growth of government during the recent recession, it has enjoyed far more job growth than most other major urban areas. Yet, if rail transit really were such a good way to relieve congestion, it should have been able to absorb that growth.

Instead, the rail system operated by the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority (WMATA) is actually losing capacity as maintenance shortfalls force the agency to run smaller trains and those trains become less reliable. Last summer, when passengers on the Green line were stranded and had to walk along the rail line in the summer heat, WMATA promised that the agency would improve its safety procedures and keep people better informed.

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