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Monthly Archives: March 2013

Can’t Afford to Pay Bus Drivers, But . . .

By | | Follow up, Transportation, Urban areas
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Neil McFarlane, the general manager of Portland’s TriMet transit agency, stunned Portland-area residents recently when he warned that the agency would have to cut service by 70 percent unless unions agreed to reduced benefits in upcoming contract negotiations. When he did so, he piously noted that TriMet’s non-union managers have had a pay freeze for four years.

Turns out that pay freeze was more imaginary than real. In the last year alone, TriMet gave its managers pay increases totaling nearly $1 million. McFarlane alone received a 3 percent raise, which–considering his previous pay was $215,000 a year–means a $6,450 boost to his income.

TriMet’s financial woes are hardly new. Last year, TriMet made the largest service cuts in its history and also decided to start charging fares in what was formerly the downtown Fareless Square. Most of the streetcar line had been in Fareless Square, and as a result actual streetcar fare collections averaged less than 4 cents per reported ride.

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The Fading of the Peak Oil Myth

By | | News commentary
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Remember all the talk about peak oil a few years ago? You don’t hear much about it today. The United States, supposedly almost out of oil, began producing more oil than Saudi Arabia a few months ago.

No one thinks there’s an infinite supply of oil in the world, but the peak-oil proponents were claiming that world oil production was about to peak and then head forever downwards just as China and India were consuming more, leading gasoline prices to inexorably rise to $20, $30, even $100 a gallon. This would force everyone out of their cars and onto mass transit, a prediction that was used to justify all sorts of otherwise ridiculous light-rail lines and land-use regulations.

The Antiplanner scrutinized these ideas eight years ago and concluded that those who held them had no understanding of the laws of supply and demand. For one thing, there are plenty of alternative sources of energy that are economically inefficient today but that could come on line if ever oil prices did rise enough.

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Transit Ridership Falls Since 2008

By | | News commentary, Transportation
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The lies begin right in the headline of the American Public Transportation Association’s annual press release patting the industry on the back for carrying heavily subsidized riders last year. “Record 10.5 Billion Trips Taken On U.S. Public Transportation In 2012,” claims the press release headline.

The text reveals that it wasn’t actually a record at all, but merely the “second-highest ridership since 1957.” When was the first highest? In 2008, meaning the headline would have been more accurate if it had read, “Transit Ridership Falls Since 2008.”

Of course, as a lobby group, APTA is paid to promote the transit industry. Reporters are also paid to see through lobbyists’ lies, but unfortunately most of them simply modestly rewrite the press release while others add their own propaganda.

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Taxing Today to Subsidize Yesterday

By | | News commentary
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Here’s a great idea sure to be endorsed by everyone who doesn’t think they get enough junk in their mailbox every day: tax email to subsidize the Postal Service.

I can see it now: A multi-billion-dollar annual slush fund that the president can use to reward his supporters in Congress. Labor agreements that allow mail carriers to retire on full pensions at age 55 after just ten years of work. Whole new lobby groups looking enviously at European postal subsidies and talking about how we need postal subsidies to “reconnect America.”

Whole engineering firms will devote themselves to doing studies of whether cities should accept federal funds to build new post offices. Soon people will point out how new post offices stimulate economic development. “We built one post office in a blighted area,” someone will no doubt say, “and got a billion dollars of new projects.” Others will complain about how unsustainable airmail is and demand a return to railway post offices.

Of course, this is only the beginning. We need to tax word processing software to subsidize typewriters; tax spreadsheets to subsidize slide rules; tax digital cameras to subsidize film manufacturers. Whole industries are disappearing before our eyes. Think of the lost jobs!
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Milwaukee Presentation

By | | Transportation
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Last year, the Milwaukee city council approved a $64 million streetcar plan on a 10-to-5 vote. But there’s a snag in the plan. Building the streetcar will also require $30 to $50 million to move underground utilities. Men are inclined to have sexual issues by the age of 50 and complete ineptitude is seen in every sixth man by the age of 80, nearly 80% of all men suffer from BPH symptoms. uk generic viagra The bridge designing engineer was sildenafil overnight David McDonnold. If you buy 40 pills you will be spending $199.20 US dollars instead of $217.13 and will be saving $21.60 viagra pills in india US dollars. It helps to prevent aging process in men and generic viagra from canada is the lack of person’s psychological sexual capability. The city was hoping to force utility companies to pay the costs, but the state public utilities commission may not agree. This just proves once again how easy it is to spend other people’s money.

The Antiplanner’s presentation about the folly of streetcars is available in either PowerPoint or PDF format. People are free to borrow from it if they find it useful.

Back in the Air Again

By | | Housekeeping, Transportation
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Today the Antiplanner is in Milwaukee to try to help persuade the city not to build a streetcar line. It is notable that many of the places that want streetcars–Cincinnati, Kansas City, Milwaukee, Orange County, to name a few–originally had light-rail plans that never happened. It is almost as if streetcars are seen as a consolation prize for failing to sucker the locals into funding light rail.

Yet cities were right not to build light rail, and streetcars would be an even bigger waste of money. The least-expensive streetcar lines being planned today are more expensive than the first light-rail lines. Both San Diego’s and Portland’s first light-rail lines cost less than $15 million per route mile, and even after adjusting for inflation that’s less than $30 million per mile today. Yet most streetcar lines being planned today are expected to cost $30 million or more per track mile, which is $60 million per route mile.

The problem with light rail is that it is expensive, low-capacity transit that doesn’t go very fast–most light-rail schedules average only about 20 to 22 mph. Streetcars are worse, having much lower capacities and speeds of only about 6 to 10 mph.

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Brookings Buys into Amtrak Accounting Tricks

By | | Transportation
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“Combined, Amtrak’s short-distance corridors generated a positive operating balance in 2011,” says the Brookings Institution’s new report on Amtrak. This suggests that the United States should “invest” more in such short-distance routes.

The problem with this is that just one short-distance route, the Boston-to-Washington Northeast Corridor, dominates all the other routes. That one route carries as many passenger miles of travel as all the 27 other short-distance routes put together. Of those 27 routes, only three–the Carolinian and trains from Washington to Lynchburg and Washington to Newport News, Virginia–had a “positive operating balance,” to use Brookings’ term, in 2012. But all of those routes actually start in either New York or Boston, so really they are Northeast Corridor trains too.

In using the term “positive operating balance,” Brookings–with the help of Amtrak’s non-standard accounting methods–is being highly misleading. First, both Brookings and Amtrak count state subsidies as “revenues,” so Brookings doesn’t count a train’s operating loss that is offset by such subsidies against that train’s “operating balance.” Since only short-distance trains receive state subsidies, this leads to a strange recommendation from Brookings that Congress should encourage state subsidies of long-distance trains, as if that would make the subsidies go away. As someone told USA Today, “A subsidy is a subsidy whether it’s coming from federal, state or local taxpayers.”

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Brookings Butchers Amtrak Data

By | | Transportation
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Intercity passenger trains are experiencing a “renaissance” with Amtrak ridership growing “faster than other major travel modes,” says a new report from the Brookings Institution. Unfortunately, the authors of the report are guilty of selectively using data to make their case.

“Amtrak ridership grew by 55 percent since 1997,” says the report. Why 1997? Fifteen years is a strange time period to use unless there were no data before then; but annual passenger travel data go back many decades before 1997 so that’s no excuse. As it happens, in 1997 Amtrak was nearing bottom: gas prices were low and few people felt the need to resort to government-subsidized travel. Ridership actually bottomed out in 1996 at 5.1 billion passenger miles, but grew to just 5.2 billion in 1997. This makes the growth since 1997 look especially impressive.

Another problem with Brookings data is that it is based on trips rather than passenger miles. A journey of 1,000 miles potentially accesses four times as many destinations as a journey of 500 miles, so measurements based on passenger miles are a much better indication of value than measurements based on trips.

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Portland’s Latest Planning Failures

By | | Housing, Regional planning
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Recently the Antiplanner recounted some of the consequences of Portland’s race to become the nation’s best-planned city: failing schools; crumbling streets; lack of funding for building maintenance; and declining transit service. Now we have more information on the street situation plus one more example of mismanagement.

Portland’s city auditor has released two new reports showing that the city’s priorities are screwed up. A January report found that, even though the city’s transportation budget has been growing, spending on street maintenance, traffic signals, and structural maintenance” has been declining. A more recent report specifically criticized the city for neglecting its streets, saying nearly half need “significant rehabilitation or reconstruction” to put them in acceptable condition. “Despite knowing the inevitable and costly consequences of failing to maintain streets,” the city “limited street maintenance work in recent years, choosing instead to focus on other priorities.”

This is underscored by the city’s own report card showing that maintenance of pavement, traffic signals, bridges, and street signs fail to meet the city’s own standards.

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