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Monthly Archives: April 2013

Obama Nominates Streetcar Advocate for Secretary of Transportation

By | | News commentary, Transportation
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America’s transportation system will continue to grind to a halt under Obama’s pick for transportation secretary, Anthony Foxx. Currently mayor of Charlotte, NC, Foxx supports streetcars and other obsolete forms of transit.

It is a measure of the glacial pace of America’s political system that Obama had nearly sixteen months’ notice that current Secretary LaHood planned to step down at the end of Obama’s first term, yet the president required another full three months before finding a replacement. If the administration has anything to say about it, American travelers will move at the same glacial pace: the streetcars that Obama, LaHood, and Foxx want to fund are slower than most people can walk.

Transit advocates often point to Charlotte as an example of a successful low-capacity rail line. With success like this, I’d hate to see a failure: the line cost more than twice the original projection; generates just $3 million in annual fares against more than $20 million in annual operations and maintenance costs; and collects of an average of just 77 cents per ride compared with nearly a dollar for other light-rail lines. Now Charlotte wants to extend the line even though a traffic analysis report predicts that the extension will dramatically increase traffic congestion in the corridor (see pp. 54-56).

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New Low-Capacity Boondoggle Opens

By | | Transportation, Urban areas
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Last Friday, Denver’s Regional Transit District (RTD) opened the West line, its latest low-capacity rail (formerly known as light-rail) line. Officials gave opening speeches claiming that they built the West line “within the adopted budget” and, at the end of the day, sent a memo to RTD’s board bragging that the new line carried 35,000 passengers on the opening day, well above the projected 20,000 per weekday.

Of course, the reason they carried so many people is that the line was free on the first two days. But RTD officials can hardly open their mouths without some lie coming out.

Start with the claim that they built it under budget. As the Antiplanner pointed out in an op ed in yesterday’s Denver Post, when RTD decided to build the rail line in 1997, it projected a cost of $250 million ($350 million in today’s money). As of 2009, the “adopted budget” was for $710 million, more than twice projected. The actual cost ended up being $707 million, allowing RTD to say it was under the budgeted $710 million but still more than twice the projected cost.

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Michigan Is Full of Nuts

By | | Transportation
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Michigan state representatives Bill Rogers and Wayne Schmidt have set up a task force studying the possibility of a solar-powered, magnetically levitated, high-speed rail line between Detroit and Lansing. A group calling itself the Interstate Traveler Company claims that it can privately finance the entire $1.3-billion cost of the line, and it expects to earn enough profits to be able to give half its gross revenues to the state in exchange for letting them build the lines along interstate highway rights of way.

Interstate Traveler estimates that this 60-mile system connecting Ypsilanti, Willow Run, and Detroit Airport will cost $920 million to build but earn $1.3 billion in annual revenues. But how will the tracks fit into the tunnels that go under the Detroit Airport taxiways? Click image for a larger view.

Interstate Traveler claims it has enough financial backing already to buy an old General Motors factory to use in building the components that will eventually become mag-lev tracks and vehicles. Interstate Traveler’s founder, someone named Justin Sutton, casually talks about spending billions of dollars building additional lines connecting Detroit to Ypsilanti and Ann Arbor, and officials in Ypsilanti seem to take him seriously.

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The 2014 New Starts Recommendations

By | | Transportation
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A few weeks ago, the Antiplanner took a quick look at the Federal Transit Administration’s 2013 New Starts program. Now the agency has released its 2014 New Starts Report, which includes eight new projects.

Four of the eight projects are bus-rapid transit, which can mean anything from running buses on existing streets to building expensive new busways. A proposed BRT in El Paso appears to be closer to the former as it is projected to cost $43 million for a 17-mile route, or less than $3 million per mile. At the other extreme, a BRT in Lansing is projected to cost $215 million for an 8.5-mile route, or more than $25 million per mile. This is undoubtedly a huge waste.

Two of the remaining four projects are extensions to existing light-rail lines. Denver proposes to spend $211 million building a 2.3-mile extension of one of its light-rail lines. At $92 million per mile, this is less than the national average for light rail, but still outrageously expensive, especially considering Denver built its first couple of light-rail lines for less than $30 million per mile.

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The Best for the Most Ridiculous

By | | Transportation
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The lyrics to what some people claim is the best rock-and-roll song in history were the inspiration for what some say is the best newspaper headline in history. The article is about one of the most ridiculous ideas in history, which is spending more than $150 million rebuilding a former rail line from Armagh (population under 15,000) to Portadown (population 22,000), in Northern Ireland.

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The Antiplanner is not Irish enough to have ever actually visited Armagh or Portadown, and I don’t have data about Northern Ireland that is separate from Great Britain. But it seems likely that transport habits are not much different in Northern Ireland than in the rest of Ireland, and Eurostat says that trains carry less than 3 percent of passenger travel in Ireland, while cars move 84 percent and buses do the rest (click on “Modal split of passenger transport”; Eurostat doesn’t separate out air travel). Building a rail line between two small cities is not going to change that, and even if it did, there any no reason to think that taxpayers will get any benefits from funding it. Of course, reason usually has nothing to do with these rail proposals, so naturally some people want to do it anyway.

Importing Boston’s Failures to Honolulu

By | | Transportation, Urban areas
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One of the intriguing things about rail transit is how much more the CEOs of rail transit agencies get paid than those of bus-only agencies. Yet that high pay comes with a high risk of failure and disgrace, as it is much more difficult to build and run rail lines than to simply manage bus service.

Case in point: Dan Grabauskas, CEO of Honolulu’s “rapid transit authority” and the highest-paid city official in Honolulu. What did Grabauskas do to merit this position?

It turns out that his main qualification is having helped run the Boston rail system into its present deteriorated condition. In 2009, Grabauskas resigned from that position in disgrace. Some claim he was forced out by a Democratic governor for the sin of being appointed by the previous Republican governor, yet there is no doubt that Boston’s rail lines were in terrible shape, with frequent delays, at least two recent crashes (including one blamed on rusty signal wires that killed a train operator), and miserable customer service.

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Back in the Air Again

By | | Housekeeping, Regional planning
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The Antiplanner will be in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho today speaking at a conference that seeks to find a balance between property rights and clean water. Golf courses, waterfront homes, and other developments along Lake Coeur d’Alene spill nitrogen, phosphorous, and other nutrients into the lake, leading to algal blooms that can cause serious problems.

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To prevent this, some propose that the county regulate or limit new development. But the Antiplanner argues that any regulations should apply equally to existing developments. Instead of regulation, I propose a system of tradable pollution rights, in which every waterfront property owner starts out with a right to a tiny amount of pollution. Those who don’t pollute could sell to those who do, and those who pollute in excess of their rights would be severely fined.

The Jones Act: Another Form of Economic Repression

By | | Transportation
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As a transportation expert, the Antiplanner was invited to join a radio show about the effects of the Jones Act on Hawaii. I’m not an expert on the Jones Act but was able to do some quick research.

The Jones Act gives Matson, which has regular service between the San Francisco Bay Area and Hawaii, and Horizon an oligopoly in shipping to and from Hawaii. Wikipedia photo by Aykleinman.

For those who don’t know, the Jones Act, officially known as the Merchant Marine Act of 1920, requires that any waterborne shipments between two U.S. ports must be done on ships built in the United States and at least 75 percent owned and crewed by U.S. citizens. The law’s goal of protecting the U.S. merchant marine fleet has largely failed: when the act was passed, the United States had thousands of large cargo vessels plying the seas; today it has less than 200.

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Living in the Fourth-Most Economically Repressive State

By | | Regional planning
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According to the index of economic freedom, only California (of course), New Jersey, and New York are more repressive than Hawaii. Much of Hawaii’s (and California’s) repression comes from the land-use regulation, which makes building a home or starting or expanding a business very expensive.

The Antiplanner has told this story before, but briefly, most of Hawaii’s land is controlled by a few corporations and families. For the first half of the 20th century, these landowners argued that they could not sell their land for homes or other uses because it was too valuable as farms. They sometimes leased land to people who built houses on it, but people could lose their right to use the land at any time.

In 1954, the Democrats took control of the state legislature promising land reform, such as by taking land from the large landowners by eminent domain and selling to more people or at least forcing the landowners to sell land to leaseholders. Instead of keeping that promise, when they took office, the Democrats joined with the large landowners so that anyone who wanted to develop land had to make key members of the legislature one of their partners.

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Back in the Air Again

By | | Housekeeping
3 Comments

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