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Monthly Archives: January 2014

Time Running Out for TriMet

By | | Transportation, Urban areas
10 Comments

Portland’s transit agency, TriMet, is building one of the most expensive light-rail lines ever and is planning several more. Yet the agency is running out of money. The cost of maintaining rail lines grows rapidly as they approach 30 years of age, and TriMet’s oldest line was opened for business 28 years ago.


Click image to download the Secretary of State’s audit of TriMet (5.6-MB pdf).

An audit of TriMet by Oregon’s Secretary of State finds that the agency is already falling behind its maintenance needs. A decade ago, it was completing 92 percent of track maintenance and 100 percent of signal maintenance on time. Today those numbers have fallen to 53 percent for track and 72 percent for signals.

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Porker of the Month?

By | | News commentary, Transportation
16 Comments

A group called Citizens Against Government Waste gave Oregon Representative Earl Blumenauer the “Porker of the Month award” for wanting to raise gas taxes in order to fund bike paths. Bike paths? They’re complaining about bike paths?

The group points out that taxpayers (they don’t say if this means all taxpayers or just federal taxpayers) have spent $9.5 billion on bicycle and pedestrian facilities over the last 22 years. It neglects to mention that this is only about 1 percent of federal highway spending and about a quarter of a percent of all highway spending. Maybe I’m biased, as (like Blumenauer) I’m an active cyclist, but I find it hard to complain about this.

MIT Press recently published Fighting Traffic, by University of Virginia researcher Peter Norton, who argues that streets used to be for pedestrians, but some vast conspiracy akin to the Great Streetcar Conspiracy stole the streets and gave them to automobiles. I don’t buy Norton’s extreme view, but I do see the need to provide safe facilities for all forms of transport. If roadways were once safe for cyclists and pedestrians but now are not because they are dedicated to cars and trucks, I don’t have serious problems with spending a tiny percentage of highway user fees on safe bicycle and pedestrian ways.

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Journals of Irreproducible Results

By | | News commentary
24 Comments

The Antiplanner has long enjoyed humor magazines, such as the Journal of Irreproducible Results. But now, reports the New York Times, it turns out that many if not most scientific journals are journals of irreproducible results. Eager to be published, many scientists appear to have an “unconscious bias” and “nudge . . . the data so it supports the hypothesis, even if just barely.”

“For most study designs and settings,” says (ironically) a peer-reviewed study, “it is more likely for a research claim to be false than true. Moreover, for many current scientific fields, claimed research findings may often be simply accurate measures of the prevailing bias.” The problem is so bad that Nature has a special web page with links to nearly twenty articles it has published on the subject.

This shouldn’t be a surprise. When I hear about research saying things like dogs poop facing north or south, or foxes are more likely to catch mice when pouncing in the northeast or southwest direction, I have to be skeptical. More broadly, when studies show that wine or chocolate is good for the heart or that cell phones cause brain cancer, I strongly suspect that the margins are so tiny (“people who use cell phones are 0.1 percent more likely to get brain cancer!”) as to be worthless.

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Protesting Private Buses

By | | City planning, Urban areas
25 Comments

One of the more ridiculous debates going on this month is the protests over Google and other companies providing commuter bus services for their employees in the San Francisco Bay Area. No one ever comments on how much better it is for the environment that people are taking buses to work instead of driving. No one ever comments on how the fact that at least 18,000 people take private buses to work is a devastating indicator of the failure of the region’s expensive transit system.


Protesters object to “illegal use of public infrastructure,” referring to private buses stopping at public bus stops. But the real issue is revealed by the “Stop Displacement Now” sign. Click for a larger view. Flickr photo by C.J. Martin.

Instead, the debate is about gentrification. The protesters fear that high-paid Silicon Valley employees are driving up the cost of housing in San Francisco by buying homes currently being rented, evicting the renters, and moving in.

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The Importance of Homeownership

By | | City planning
49 Comments

People sometimes ask the Antiplanner if smart growth is just a plot by liberal Democrats to force more people to live in cities, where they will become liberal Democrats. Normally my answer is that people don’t become liberal because they live in cities; instead, they live in cities because they are liberal. After all, I didn’t see any reason why living in a dense urban environment would tend lead to people to vote Democrat.

A recent Boston Globe blog post causes me to rethink this, however. Patrick Smith normally writes about air travel, but on Monday he was upset enough by something happening in his neighborhood that he deviated from this mission. Apparently, a homeowner near the rental home Smith lives in wants to cut down “an old, beautiful, and perfectly healthy tree” on the homeowner’s property.

Smith thinks this will “adversely affect the quality of life for me and several of my neighbors.” He suggests that “at a certain point, a tree is no longer one person’s private property per se, and belongs to the community.” Smith thinks that property owners should be restricted as to what they do with their trees.

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Electric Cars Not So Green

By | | Transportation
21 Comments

A new study published in Environmental Science and Technology argues that increased numbers of electric vehicles over the next four decades will not result in a “clear and consistent trend toward lower system-wide emissions.” The reason, of course, is that it takes energy to produce electricity, and much of that energy comes from burning fossil fuels.


Maybe not green enough to be worth the wait.

Of course, we can increase the production of “renewable” electricity. But if we increase the demand for that electricity by driving electric cars, then we’ll still have to burn fossil fuels to supply electricity for other purposes such as light and heat. It might make more sense to use renewable electricity to replace fossil fuels in electrical generation while working to make fossil-fuel-powered cars more energy efficient.

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Still No Infrastructure Crisis

By | | Transportation
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Another year, another spate of stories about how America’s infrastructure is crumbling and how we need to raise taxes to repair it. Here’s the reality: Infrastructure that is funded out of user fees is in good shape; infrastructure that is funded out of taxes is not. Those who benefit from tax-supported infrastructure want the people who use user-fee supported infrastructure to pay more taxes so the former can continue to enjoy their obsolete systems at little cost to themselves.

Oregon Representative Earl Blumenauer wants to increase gas taxes by 15 cents a gallon–nearly double what they are now–to fund transportation infrastructure. But America’s highways, which support the users who pay those gas taxes, are in good shape. The number of structurally deficient bridges is rapidly declining and the average smoothness of pavement is improving.

It’s not hard to see that doubling gas taxes also doubles the money going into rail transit and other slush funds. The Federal Transit Administration said in 2010 that transit agencies suffer from a $78 billion maintenance backlog, and the total has likely increased since then since the agencies were spending less than necessary to keep systems in their current state of poor repair.

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Housing Is Key

By | | Housing, Regional planning
20 Comments

Washington state property rights advocates have taken inspiration from Florida’s repeal of its 1985 growth-management mandate (counties in Florida are now allowed but not required to practice growth management). Since Washington’s 1991 law was modeled on the Florida law, it is possible that the Northwest state could follow Florida’s example.

The Senate Governmental Operations Committee is holding a work session on this question, and my written testimony emphasizes that the costs of the greatly exceed its benefits, especially since most of the benefits are imaginary. On Monday, Dan said it might be more useful if I were to talk about the tunnel under Seattle, but that’s not the subject of the hearing.

That tunnel is expected to cost $4.25 billion, and it may be a boondoggle, but this is actually peanuts compared with the cost growth management has imposed on housing. In 2012, about 8,000 new homes were built in the Seattle-Tacoma area. Those homes probably cost at least $200,000 more apiece than they would have without growth management, a total cost of about $1.6 billion. Of course, even more homes were being built each year before 2008, so the total cost over several years could quickly reach $10 billion.

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Utah’s Greatest Transportation Need

By | | Mission, Regional planning, Transportation
8 Comments

The Antiplanner has been asked to talk about “Utah’s Unified Transportation Plan: 2011-2040,” prepared by the Utah Department of Transportation, Utah Transit Authority, and metropolitan planning organizations for Logan, Orem, Salt Lake-Ogden, and St. George. While that’s an impressive title and seemingly an impressive line-up of planning organizations, this is not a plan at all. Instead, it is just a wish-list of projects that the agencies would like taxpayers to fund.

Rational planners are supposed to set goals, identify a broad range of alternative ways of meeting those goals, estimate the benefits and costs of each alternative, use that information to develop an alternative that provides the most cost-effective approach, and then monitor to make sure the plan is really working as expected. This so-called unified plan, however, has no alternatives, no estimates of benefits, no cost-effectiveness analysis, no monitoring of past plans, and no evidence that any of this sort of information was used in coming up with the list of projects that dominates the document.

On top of that, trying to write a unified plan for all state transportation facilities, regional transit systems, and metropolitan areas makes the task all the more difficult. Of course, each agency that contributed to this unified plan has written its own plan and this wish-list is merely a summation of those plans. But I strongly suspect the plans written by the agencies are just as bad.

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Back in the Air Again

By | | Housekeeping, Regional planning, Transportation
7 Comments

The Antiplanner is flying to Salt Lake City today to speak at a legislative forum tomorrow sponsored by the Sutherland Institute. The topic will be Utah’s 30-year transportation plan. Since the Antiplanner is skeptical about our ability to know things even five years in advance, you can imagine what I’ll be saying about a 30-year plan.

Thursday, I’ll be in Olympia, Washington to speak at a Senate Governmental Operations Committee work session about growth-management planning. My main message will be that growth-management created many more problems than it solved. Most important, according to Coldwell Banker, the price of a 2,200-square-foot house in Seattle is more than three times the price of a similarly sized house in Houston.

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In any case, if I get a chance, I’ll try to post some updates over the next few days.