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Monthly Archives: April 2013

Densifying Houston

By | | Housing
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Houston doesn’t have zoning, which means that it doesn’t say how land can be used. As far as the city is concerned, you can buy land anywhere in the city and use it for commercial, retail, industrial, multi-family, or single-family residential. (About half of all residential areas in Houston have protective covenants limiting uses.)

This is a city that needs more affordable “workforce housing”? This three-bedroom, 2-1/2 bath, 2,140-square-foot house on a 7,500-square-foot lot is currently for sale in Houston for $60,000.

Though it doesn’t regulate how you use your land, Houston does have some basic development codes such as minimum lot sizes, set back requirements, and height limits that vary from neighborhood to neighborhood. Now, in an effort to compete for newcomers against its suburbs, Houston is considering the first changes to its development code in 14 years.

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The Dallas Green Line Is Brown

By | | Transportation
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“The Dallas-Fort Worth region is currently designated as a serious non-attainment area for ozone by the Environmental Protection Agency,” says page 1-8 of the final environmental impact statement for Dallas’ Northwest Corridor rail project. This is also known as the Green Line extension of an existing low-capacity rail (formerly known as light rail) line.

“The project corridor [is] one of the most congested highway corridors in the region,” the FEIS adds, noting that “Travel time delay and congestion levels in the corridor are increasing.” So naturally, the Dallas Area Slow Transit (DAST) decided to build a $1.8 billion, 28-mile low-capacity rail line to solve these problems. (For some reason, the FEIS and DAST’s web site erroneously call the agency “Dallas Area Rapid Transit,” but there is nothing rapid about low-capacity rail.)

So how well does $1.8 billion worth of low-capacity transit do at solving problems of congestion and air pollution? Not well at all, at least if you believe the FEIS, which was written by proponents of the project. According to page 4-13, it takes virtually no cars off the road. However, it has a huge impact on intersections: according to page 4-16, seventeen intersections that will have A, B, or C levels of service without the project will have D, E, or F with the project. At least one goes all the way from A to F.

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Only $379 Million Per Mile

By | | Transportation
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Yesterday, the Phoenix airport proudly opened its “Sky Train,” a 1.7-mile automated rail line connecting the terminal to the nearest low-capacity rail station. This is only the first step: a 0.7-mile extension will open in 2015 and a 2.5-mile extension is supposed to open in 2020.

Click image for a larger view. Flickr photo by Nick Bastian.

Total project cost is $1.58 billion, up from a 2003 cost projection of $700 million (about $900 million in today’s dollars). Assuming no more cost increases, that’s about a 75 percent overrun.

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Baltimore’s Red Line Low-Capacity Rail Project

By | | Transportation
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Last week, the Antiplanner looked at Maryland’s Purple Line low-capacity rail (formerly known as light rail) project and showed that it both increased congestion and wasted money. Today, I’ll take a quick look at Baltimore’s Red Line low-capacity rail project, which is also being planned by the Maryland Department of Transportation (MDOT).

Some think MDOT wants to build the Red Line mainly for political parity: since it is planning the Purple Line in the DC metro area, it has to have a companion project in the Baltimore area. There may be some validity to this rumor as the Red Line is an even greater turkey than the Purple line.

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A Modest Proposal

By | | Transportation
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The Antiplanner has been reading lots of rail transit plans lately and it strikes me that the standard jargon for different kinds of rail systems is confusing. Most people think that the terms “light” and “heavy” rail refer somehow to weight, when they don’t. By extension, if trains look heavy, they must be heavy rail.

This results in the most confusion between heavy rail and commuter rail. Both use the same weight of rails, so lots of people call commuter rail “heavy rail.” In fact, weight has nothing to do with it–most light-rail lines are built with the same weight of rails as heavy-rail lines.

As the Antiplanner has noted before, the terms “light” and “heavy” really refer to carrying capacity. Light rail is short for “light-capacity” rail while heavy rail is short for “heavy-capacity” rail. The confusion results because the term “heavy” is rarely used to mean “high” while “light” is rarely used to mean “low.”

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Will Obama Cause Another Bubble?

By | | Housing
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“The Obama administration is engaged in a broad push to make more home loans available to people with weaker credit,” says the Washington Post, and some people fear that will lead to another housing bubble. In fact, there are going to be more housing bubbles; the Obama administration is contributing to them; but not through policies promoting subprime lending.

Neither subprime lending nor other federal policies caused the housing crisis that led to the 2008 financial crisis. Too few people understand this because they still view U.S. housing as a single market. But unlike labor or food or cars, housing is not something that you can easily pick up and move to somewhere that may place a higher value on it. Oil can be easily and fairly cheaply transported, so there is a world oil market; but housing markets are strictly local.

Nearly eight years ago, Alan Greenspan famously said the United States was not suffering from a housing bubble. He has take a lot of heat for that, but he was right. His exact words were, “Although a ‘bubble’ in home prices for the nation as a whole does not appear likely, there do appear to be, at a minimum, signs of froth in some local markets where home prices seem to have risen to unsustainable levels.”

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Regional Transit for Indy?

By | | Transportation
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The Antiplanner was invited back to Indianapolis yesterday to testify to the Senate Tax and Fiscal Policy Committee on a proposal to create a regional transit agency for Indianapolis. Currently, the transit agency is limited to serving Marion County, but Indianapolis suburbs extend well beyond that county’s limits.

While this seems like a no-brainer, it is not. Proponents of regional transit have made it clear that they want to build a light-rail line that will cost well over a billion dollars and either bus-rapid transit on dedicated lanes or light-rail lines in other parts of the region. Even if that weren’t the case, the regional transit idea is just another case of “bigger is better,” when in fact allowing smaller transit agencies to cross county lines if that is where their patrons want to go could be far more efficient.

If they are not, you will viagra canada know, and move on. Women, who are consuming anti depressants, mood stabilizers and birth control pills, they have also given complaints including https://pdxcommercial.com/property/1105-portland-avenue-gladstone/1105-portland-ave-brochure/ viagra effects women dry vagina, low sex drive, lack of libido and inability to have one. There are viagra online in india many men who are suffering from this problem. For instance, buy generic viagra if you are diabetic, controlling your sugar levels effectively. The Antiplanner argued that the regional transit plan is likely to make Indianapolis more congested, at a higher cost, yet won’t help transit riders, particularly low-income riders who lack access to cars. While it probably had nothing to do with anything I said, as soon as I was done with my testimony, the committee unanimously voted to send the proposal to an interim study committee, effectively deferring it for another year.

You can download my testimony in PDF (2.8 MB) or Word format.

The Purple Money Eater

By | | Transportation
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The Antiplanner is particularly interested in the cost effectiveness of transit projects, and Maryland’s Purple Line is a prime example of an agency selecting just about the least cost-effective alternative. According to the DEIS, the cost of attracting one new rider to the “TSM” alternative is about $9; the low- and medium-cost BRT alternatives are about $14; the high-cost BRT is about $20; and the light-rail alternatives range between $22 and $24. The preferred alternative is the second-most expensive and, at $23 per new rider, the second-least cost-effective.

Put another way, the preferred alternative attracts about 134 percent more riders than TSM, but to get those riders the annualized cost is more than six times greater. Relative to the TSM alternative, the cost of getting one more transit rider on the preferred alternative is almost $34. At this rate, someone who makes a daily round-trip each work day under the preferred alternative who wouldn’t have under TSM would cost taxpayers nearly $16,000 a year.

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Purple Congestion Eater–or Congestion Maker?

By | | Transportation
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Residents of Montgomery County, Maryland, are skeptical of a proposed light-rail line known as the “purple line” (to distinguish it from the DC area’s Red, Orange, Blue, Yellow, and Green heavy-rail lines). AAppropriately so: The Antiplanner has reviewed the draft environmental impact statement (DEIS) and found it to be biased and misleading.

Click on image to download entire, 37-MB DEIS. Click on the link in the above paragraph to go to the DEIS web page where you can download selected chapters.

The DEIS considers seven alternatives to doing nothing: one called “transportation system management” (TSM), which is basically improving bus service without significant new infrastructure; low-, medium-, and high-cost bus-rapid transit; and low-, medium-, and high-cost light rail. (Planners call these “low-, medium-, and high-investment alternatives, but it is only an investment if you get a return.) For a route of about 16 miles, the capital costs range from $5 million per mile for TSM to $92 million per mile for high-investment rail.

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