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Monthly Archives: March 2013

Portland’s Creative Class Gets to Work

By | | News commentary, Urban areas
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Thanks to the industriousness of Portland’s creative class of young, well-educated people, Oregon now has the third-highest food stamp rate of any state in the country. As shown in the chart below, Oregon was disgustingly below average in the 1990s, but shot up in 2001, the year the Portland streetcar opened, and has been in the top three since about 2009. Today, it is behind only Louisiana and Mississippi (and, it might be noted, DC), states well known for their hard work and creativity.

It wasn’t easy for Oregon to achieve the status of being number three. Back in the 1990s, most Oregonians on food stamps were rural residents put out of work by the decline in federal land timber sales. But that can only go so far, as there aren’t that many sawmills left that remain to be put out of business. So the creative class got to work, making Oregon one of the first states to distribute food stamps in the form of an debit card so there would be no stigma put on those using it. In fact, the card is called the “Oregon Trail” card, thus identifying food-stamp recipients with the brave pioneers who first settled Oregon 170 years ago.

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More California HSR Follies

By | | Transportation
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Quentin Kopp, the man who more than any other single person is probably most responsible for the California high-speed rail project, now says the project is illegal and has filed a declaration in court saying so. In response, the California High-Speed Rail Authority–which was created by a law Kopp wrote and which Kopp later headed–is suing Kopp, California farmers who oppose the project, the Antiplanner, and, well, any other skeptics in an effort to get a court order giving it $8 billion to start construction on the train to nowhere.

Kopp’s argues that the authority has “mangled” the original plan for a 220-mph rail line in order to keep costs down. That original plan, which was supposed to cost $45 billion, is now expected to cost somewhere closer to $117 billion. Since the authority doesn’t have that money, it has adopted instead a $68 billion plan to build a “blended” system that uses some existing tracks and some new tracks. But the trains on this system won’t go from San Francisco to Los Angeles in 4 hours and 40 minutes as the law requires.

Of course, the authority doesn’t have $68 billion either, so the likelihood of this blended plan ever being completed is slim. But it needs a plan of some kind in order to justify spending the $8 billion it does have building a line in California’s relatively thinly populated Central Valley.

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New Boondoggles

By | | Transportation
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Back in the early 1980s, San Diego spent an average of $7 million per mile–about $17 million in today’s dollars–building two light-rail lines. In the mid-1980s, Portland spent $15 million a mile–about $28 million in today’s dollars on the eastside light-rail line.

The Antiplanner is convinced that neither of these expenditures was worthwhile. Yet their cost is but a pittance compared to what transit agencies are spending today. For example, the 2013 New Starts projects include 26 different commuter rail, light-rail, and heavy-rail plans.

Of the seventeen light-rail plans, not a single one is expected to cost less than $50 million per mile, and only one is less than $60 million. The average cost of all seventeen is $138 million per mile. Even taking out three very expensive projects–mostly underground–that cost an average of $727 million per mile, the remaining light-rail plans cost $110 per mile.

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Spending Millions on Transit; Getting Thousands in Value

By | | Transportation
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A $112 million transit center in Silver Spring, Maryland, is years behind schedule due to serious construction flaws. After detecting the flaws, Montgomery County officials halted construction and hired en engineering firm to look at the center.

That firm’s report found that the pillars supporting the three-level center are inadequate to hold the buses that are supposed to use one of the levels; the concrete covering the steel reinforcement bars is so thin that the center will probably rust out in about 12.5 years, instead of the 50 years for which it was designed; and the center doesn’t meet fire standards.

Really, why does Silver Spring need an expensive, three-level transit center anyway? They could have fit everything they wanted in a ground-level, surface parking lot that would have cost far less than $112 million. This is simply another case of transit going for the high-cost solution to any problem.

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The Railroaded Not Taken

By | | Transportation
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Reeling from a scandal in which ministry employees allegedly embezzled at least $28.5 million, China has dismantled the Ministry of Railways and replaced it with a state-owned company. Managers of the new China Railway Co. had hoped that they would be given the Ministry’s assets but not its debt. However, the government says they will have to deal with its debt as well–all $428 billion of it (2.66 trillion yuan).

China’s high-speed fail.

Restructuring will not save China from that debt, which either taxpayers or creditors will have to cover–it certainly won’t be repaid out of rail fares. The debt is roughly $73 million for each of the 5,840 miles of high-speed rail lines built by the Ministry. This suggests that China got off cheap considering that California is planning to spend close to $300 million per mile for its high-speed rail, while Amtrak wants to spend $345 million per mile ($151 billion divided by 438 miles) building a new Boston-to-Washington high-speed rail line.

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Forest Planning & Transit Planning

By | | Public lands, Transportation
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In 1985, the Hoosier Environmental Council hired the Antiplanner to review the Hoosier National Forest plan, which called for clearcutting most of the southern Indiana federal forest. My review uncovered a document admitting that planners had fabricated data to justify money-losing timber sales. Looking at the plan that was then in effect, I discovered that the forest had attempted to meet legal requirements for public involvement by having the forest’s own soils scientist and biologist review the plan.

Wildflowers in the Hoosier National Forest. Forest Service photo.

Since this proved that the existing plan was illegal, and the proposed new plan was not credible, the Forest Service responded to my visit by shutting down the Hoosier Forest’s timber program for more than a decade. Even after that time, it cut very little timber compared to what it had been cutting before 1985.

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Creative But Not Productive

By | | Transportation
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One of the claims made by Indianapolis transit advocates was that improved transit would help the region “compete for jobs and talent.” They cited a study by a group called CEOs for Cities that found that “Young adults with a four-year degree are 94% more likely to live in close-in urban neighborhoods than their counterparts with less education.”

This is the old Richard Florida idea that cities should strive to attract the “creative class” of well-educated people that want to live in lively cities with walkable, transit-intensive neighborhoods. Ninety-four percent sounds like a big number, but let’s put this into context.

The CEOs for Cities study defined “close in” as neighborhoods near downtowns housing an average of less than 5 percent of urban area populations. “Young adults” includes people in the 25- to 34-year-old age class. The 2010 Census found that about 31.5 percent of this age class has a four-year degree or better. If this group is 94 percent more likely to live close in than their cohorts without a four-year degree, then less than 7.5 percent of young, well-educated adults live “close in.” This is less than 2.5 percent more than might be expected if the population was evenly distributed by education class.

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Indianapolis Presentation

By | | Regional planning, Transportation
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Indygo, Indianapolis’ transit agency, offers one of the lowest levels of transit service of any urban area of its size in the Midwest–only Omaha’s is lower. The proposed Indy Connect plan calls for changing this by making a $1.3 billion capital investment and more than tripling Indygo’s operating from about $50 million to $175 million a year. A key feature of the plan is to have communities outside of Marion County–which is the current limit of Indygo’s services–join in a regional transit district.

Proponents say the plan will make Indianapolis more competitive, relieve congestion, and reduce air pollution. Yesterday, I gave a presentation arguing that the plan wouldn’t accomplish any of those goals. Instead, I urged the region and state to save money by contracting out existing transit services; legalizing private transit operations; and encouraging cities outside Marion County to start their own cross-county transit service, which would probably offer better service at a lower cost than a regional transit district could provide.
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My presentation can be downloaded as a 16-MB PDF. Feel free to use this shows or any of the shows downloadable by clicking on the new “presentations” link above.

Living a Fantasy Means Not Counting Costs

By | | Transportation
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Slate writer Jeremy Stahl wants everyone to know that he has a fantasy of riding high-speed trains that pay for themselves (at least their operating costs) and cut greenhouse gas emissions, and he doesn’t understand why other people don’t support that fantasy. He specifically mentions the Antiplanner, who he dismisses for being “conservative.”

Slate lists Stahl as its “social media editor,” and he probably does a great job at that. But he apparently isn’t a numbers guy. You don’t have to be “conservative” or totally innumerate to know that the real world, and not the fantasy he wants to live in, has a limited amount of money and resources. Making decisions about how to effectively spend those resources requires more than just fantasizing how you would like things to be.

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Back in the Air Again: Indianapolis

By | | Housekeeping, Transportation
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The Antiplanner is going to Indianapolis this week to talk to people about a proposed transit plan. The plan, which was written by the Chamber of Commerce rather than Indy’s transit agency, calls for creating a regional transit district (IndyGo, the city’s transit agency, only covers one county) and running several “rapid transit” lines that are billed mainly as bus-rapid transit but that might use light rail on one route where a rail right-of-way is owned by local governments.

The plan is expected to require more than $1.3 billion in capital investments, and the transit system will then require more than triple the operating subsidies–from $43 million in 2011 to $140 million when the plan is fully implemented. Of course, if they actually build a light-rail line, the total costs are likely to go much higher.

In reading through a PDF version of the plan, I was struck by a one-sentence summary of the basic justification for the plan: “A robust regional transit system is necessary to spur our region’s continued economic growth, to preserve our ability to compete for jobs and talent, and to address growing challenges with congestion and air quality compliance” (page 5).

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