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Monthly Archives: July 2013

French Train Crash Caused by Human Error

By | | News commentary, Transportation
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French rail officials say that “human error has already been ruled out” as a cause of the train crash that killed six people last week. But it was a human error, or at least a political error: the error was for the government to put most available resources into building new high-speed rail lines while it let existing lines deteriorate.

Officially, the cause of the crash was a piece of a switch that apparently broke while the train was going through the switch. But that probably happened because the piece that broke was old and worn out.

While the French Transport Minister claimed that “there was no indication that a lack of investment in maintaining the system’s infrastructure was at fault” for this particular crash, he admitted that most of the conventional rail infrastructure is more than 30 years old, meaning it needs to be replaced. “The situation is severe,” the minister added, “with the degradation in recent years of traditional train lines, due to a lack of resources.”

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Repeat After Me: Cost-Effectiveness

By | | Regional planning, Transportation
27 Comments

Someone named Willis Eschenbach has a blog post arguing that a carbon tax is “crazy” because it will have a negligible effect on how much Americans drive. He observes that the carbon taxes he’s “seen discussed are on the order of $20-$30 per ton” of CO2, and calculates that a tax of $28 per ton equals about 25 cents per gallon of gasoline.

He further calculates that increasing the cost of gasoline by 25 cents reduces per capita driving by about 100 miles per year. Since Americans drive an average of about 10,000 miles per year, this is only 1 percent. “They want to impoverish the poor for that?” he asks.

There are several errors in his analysis, but when I tried to point them out in comments I got lost in an effort to enter a valid on-line name and password. So I’ll just discuss them here. First, let me say that I’m not convinced that anthropogenic climate change is serious enough to warrant huge changes in our society. But if I were, a revenue-neutral carbon tax would be the most sensible change.

Eschenbach’s most important error is his implicit assumption that the best way to measure the effects of a carbon tax on greenhouse gas emissions is by the number of miles of per capita driving. In fact, I’ve argued for years that reducing per capita driving is not a cost-effective way of reducing greenhouse gas emissions, and Eschenbach’s analysis reinforces that: large reductions in driving would require much higher taxes than most analysts believe are necessary to reduce emissions.

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Job-Killing Living Wages

By | | City planning
35 Comments

Washington DC’s city council has “tentatively” passed an ordinance that would raise the minimum wage from $8.25 ($1 more than the federal minimum wage) to $12.50 per hour. But this ordinance only applies to “non-union shops that are at least 75,000 square feet and whose parent companies gross above $1 billion annually.” Guess what company fits that description.

The left excuses this discrimination by calling it a “living wage” ordinance. But why is it that only employees of WalMart, and not employees of smaller retail shops, supermarkets, restaurants, or other businesses?

Ironically, over the last decade three successive Washington DC mayors worked hard to attract WalMart to build stores in inner-city neighborhoods. WalMart was reluctant to build in those areas due to crime, but finally agreed to open six stores in the district. “We’ve been praying for food in this neighborhood for about 40 years,” said the resident of one neighborhood where WalMart was planning to build.

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Operation Flower Destruction

By | | Follow up, Transportation, Urban areas
7 Comments

Washington Metro trains catch fire. The trains are supposed to be run by computers, but since a June, 2009 crash the Washington Metropolitan Area Transportation Authority (WMATA) hasn’t trusted the computers, so it has human drivers who aren’t any more trustworthy.

With numerous elevators and escalators out of service and frequent train breakdowns, WMATA is subject to increasingly harsh criticism from even its usual friends at the Washington Post. Even WMATA’s high-paid general manager admits the agency is only half done with the repairs it has scheduled (which are probably less than it needs).

So what does the agency have its employees do? How about spend a day ripping out all of the flowers that a self-styled Phantom Planter put in at the Dupont Circle subway station? Because it would be horrible if non-agency approved flowers bloomed in red, white, and blue, as the planter expected would happen next month.

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Happy Independence Day

By | | Mission
9 Comments

The Antiplanner wishes everyone an enjoyable holiday.

It would be nice to live in a free country where the government doesn’t spy on its own citizens, lie about it, and then try to prosecute the person who caught them in the lie.

It would be nice to live in a responsible country where people tried to find the best solutions to problems rather than use those problems as a way of promoting their preconceived agendas.
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It would be nice to live in a tolerant country where mobility, homeownership, private property rights, and wealth creation were celebrated rather than demonized.

We don’t live quite in that country, but I encourage everyone to use Independence Day to resolve to make our country that way. Best wishes for the rest of the year.

Carmaggedon? Not!

By | | News commentary, Transportation
17 Comments

Many including CNN predicted that the BART strike would “paralyze San Francisco.” “Public transit in San Francisco came to a screeching halt Monday morning as Bay Area Rapid Transit unions went on strike,” says CNN.

Not exactly. First, BART accounts for less than a third of the region’s transit commuters. Buses account for more than half, and the buses didn’t go on strike.

Second, BART just doesn’t carry enough people to lead to paralysis even if all of them drove instead (and in fact many rode buses). As a state highway patrol officer noted, “If I didn’t know there was a BART strike, I wouldn’t have thought anything was different after looking at the traffic.”

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Is the Columbia River Crossing Finally Dead?

By | | News commentary, Transportation, Urban areas
7 Comments

The Washington legislature refused to fund the state’s share of a proposed bridge across the Columbia River, proving that at least a few Pacific Northwest politicians still have an ounce of common sense. That doesn’t include the Oregon legislature, which had agreed to put up more than $400 million for the project.

As a result of the Washington legislature’s decision, the Columbia River Crossing office is closing its doors after having spent something like $200 million on a stupid plan for a new bridge that wasn’t going to be tall enough for existing river traffic and whose main goal was to send a low-capacity rail transit line from Portland to Vancouver, Washington.

The two bridges that the new bridge was supposed to replace don’t really need replacement. While one was built in 1913 (and the other in 1958). the older of the two could probably have been replaced for about half a billion dollars if it were really necessary. But the proposed new bridge and associated projects were projected to cost $3.4 billion.

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