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Monthly Archives: October 2013

The Megabus Revolution

By | | Transportation
17 Comments

One of the many excellent speakers at this year’s American Dream conference was Dale Moser, CEO of Coach USA and Megabus. Coach USA is owned by Stagecoach, one of the two large private transit companies that emerged when Britain privatized much of its transit industry. (The other is First Group, which among other things owns Greyhound.)


Just seven years after it began, Megabus covers scores of cities in the East, South, and Midwest as well as several in the California market. Click image for a larger view.

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Yellow Journalism at the L.A. Times

By | | News commentary, Transportation
6 Comments

Every experiment with vehicle-mile pricing that has ever been done protected driver privacy. In most if not all experiments, devices used to calculate charges did not even keep track of where users were; only what they owed. Legislation introduced in Congress to shift to vehicle-mile pricing set privacy as a top priority. Yet the Los Angeles Times ominously writes about “black boxes” that “possibly” will tell the government where you are driving or have driven.

Given concerns over the NSA and other government agencies that have admitted they are keeping track of our emails and other communications, privacy is a legitimate concern. Yet given the concerted efforts by supporters of vehicle-mile pricing to protect privacy, it is irresponsible of the L.A. Times to make a big deal of this.

The article quoted several people pointing out that gas taxes don’t work anymore, if they ever did, but ended up quoting someone saying Congress should just raise those gas taxes so that drivers won’t have to “be concerned about their privacy.”

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Back in the Air Again

By | | Housekeeping, Regional planning
6 Comments

The Antiplanner is flying to Washington, DC, today for the Preserving the American Dream conference. Postings may be thin next week as this conference will consume much of my time.

Coincident with the conference, the Cato Institute will release The Gateway to 10,000 Illnesses by Robert Boyd, D.O., (biocranialinstitute.com) which is a challenge to the broad world of medicine and promises a reassessment of the causative processes of many disorders, has been released world-wide in eBook form. buy viagra online Even when the condition of impotence is tied to physical issues, there can be psychological underpinnings, which must be discount pfizer viagra addressed along with successful treatment of the physical causes. We can also understand the theory of life buying cheap cialis look at here satisfaction by using the medicine. There are many institutes out there but very few that can meet your requirements. viagra prescription deeprootsmag.org my latest paper on the follies of sustainability planning. Readers can get a preview of the paper, which argues that sustainability planning is not a cost-effective way of saving energy, reducing greenhouse gas emissions, or solving other problems.

Central Planning for Freight

By | | Transportation
12 Comments

It’s not enough that urban planners are messing up passenger travel in cities. Now they want to “reduce urban impacts” of freight transport. This report, with its discussion of “modal shifts” and “Freight villages,” reads like someone took a smart-growth plan for rail transit and transit-oriented developments and simply did a bunch of finds-and-replaced.

The report includes numerous comparisons of the costs of truck vs. rail freight. Rail is less expensive than trucks–if you have high volumes moving from point A to point B. But rail simply cannot compete with trucks for low volumes moving from many origins to many destinations. That’s why most rail shipping today is coal, grain, or containers–all things that can go from one of a few origins to one of a few destinations.

The fundamental problem with this report is the same as is found in most anti-auto reports: it treats trucks as the problem rather than treating the impacts of trucks. Are trucks noisy? Yes, but muffling the noise works better than trying to limit truck traffic. Do they pollute? Yes, but we know that pollution can be cleaned up at the exhaust pipe more effectively than by reducing miles of travel. Do trucks add to congestion? Sure, but treating congestion with variable-priced roads, signal coordination, and similar road improvements works better than trying to reduce driving.
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Should Transit Be Regional?

By | | Regional planning, Transportation
4 Comments

The Indianapolis Chamber of Commerce thinks a regional (as opposed to county) transit agency will help Indianapolis compete with regions such as “Minneapolis and Salt Lake City that offer extensive transit systems.” The Antiplanner disagrees, pointing out that the Indianapolis urban area is already growing twice as fast as Minneapolis or Salt Lake City, and higher taxes aren’t going to help.

Unmentioned is the fact that “regional transit” is generally a euphemism for rail transit, and that the proposal for a regional Indianapolis transit agency includes a plan for a low-capacity rail line. Basically, someone wants to spend a lot of money on obsolete transportation.
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Only about 17,000 Indianapolis-area workers live in households that lack cars. I’m not saying this should be done, but it would cost less, and do more for regional vitality, to give every one of those households a new Toyota Prius than to build a low-capacity rail line. With or without rail, Indianapolis doesn’t need regional transit.

Sacrificing Safety

By | | Transportation
5 Comments

The Wall Street Journal points out (search for “Bay Area Shutdown” if this link doesn’t work) that the BART employees who are on strike represent an industry that has seen one of the steepest declines in worker productivity in history. By just about any measure–transit trips per worker, revenues per worker-hour, costs per passenger mile–the transit industry has gone backwards more than a century in both labor and capital efficiency.

The really scary thing, at least if you are a transit rider, is that the result of this strike will be that BART, along with other transit agencies, will sacrifice safety in order to politically accommodate its workers. Many public employees have fat pensions and guaranteed health-care for life, but if paying for these things forces your local planning department to not pass a few new rules or your local library to buy a few less books, no one is going to be particularly damaged.

However, transit agencies–and especially rail transit agencies–can and do cut maintenance budgets in order to keep the money flowing to workers with cushy jobs. This is because of the asymmetry in union-employer negotiations when the employer is a public agency that reports to elected officials who depend on union support to get elected. In the case of transit, this asymmetry is both local and national in scope, as federal law requires that transit agencies keep unions happy in order to be eligible for federal grants.

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Mayor Bloomberg Doesn’t Understand Economics

By | | Housing, News commentary
8 Comments

Mayor Bloomberg says New York City’s lack of affordable housing is a sign of a vibrant economy, because it proves people want to live there. Despite his reputation in the business world, he obviously doesn’t understand the laws of supply and demand.

“Somebody said that there’s not enough housing,” Bloomberg said on a radio show. “That’s a good sign.” Housing is only scarce, he said, because “as fast as we build, more people want to live here.”

In fact, as the Antiplanner has previously shown, high housing prices do not prove that lots of people really find an area desirable. Instead, they are more a sign of government barriers to housing.

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BART Strike Today?

By | | News commentary, Transportation
4 Comments

San Francisco BART employees were going to go on strike a couple of months ago, but Governor Brown invoked a “60-day cool-off period.” It seems unlikely that 60 more days of negotiations could resolve the issues–and they didn’t, as workers are expected to on strike today.

BART says that it needs $15 billion to rejuvenate its system over the next few years. To cover this cost, it wants workers to pay more into their pension and health care plans. Despite a proposed 12 percent pay raise over four years, the workers refused. Unions offered to go into binding arbitration, but BART management–probably fearing that arbitrators wouldn’t see BART’s maintenance problem as having anything to do with worker pay–refused.
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Even Bay Area commuters who used to love BART are beginning to understand the problems. First, BART employees, like most transit employees, have a cushy deal to begin with, and arbitrators would be reluctant to cut it back. More important, rail transit is just too damn expensive, and the costs never go away. Outside of places with Tokyo- or Hong Kong-like densities, nobody can really afford to run a passenger rail system, and those who try are going to find themselves in the same bind as BART is in today.

The Politics of Gridlock

By | | News commentary
12 Comments

The Antiplanner is glad to see that Republicans decided to take my advice and back off on the showdown over the debt ceiling. But this still leaves the question of why our government is suffering from so much gridlock and how we can prevent it in the future.

Fortunately, left-leaning journalist Ezra Klein over at the Washington Post has some answers. Apparently, gridlock is all the fault of the tea parties. The tea parties forced the House to pass a “no-earmarks” rule, which means Congressional leaders can’t use earmarks to bribe members of Congress to vote for stupid laws.

Second, tea parties (and others) have forced Congress to make its decisions transparent, that is, open to public scrutiny. The inability of members to make back-room deals is apparently reducing Congress’ ability to function.

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Debt Crisis? What Debt Crisis?

By | | News commentary
10 Comments

A few weeks ago, pundits were predicting dire consequences if the government shut down. As near as I can tell, except for the National Park Service acting more thuggish than usual, nothing really happened. People are still getting their social security checks. American soldiers are still getting killed in Afghanistan. Some government web sites have annoyingly shut down, as if it costs more to run a web site that provides information than it does to operate a site that only says it will refuse to provide that information.

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This debt clock seems to be off, as the current debt ceiling is just under $16.7 trillion. But it shows how fast Congress is spending money.

Now the predictions about what will happen if Congress refuses to increase the debt ceiling are even more dire. I don’t really buy that either. Investors know that this is just a political spat; if they believe that the United States can support more than $16.7 trillion worth of debt, they’ll believe it just as much a few weeks from now as today.

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