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Monthly Archives: March 2014

Megaprojects Invite Corruption

By | | News commentary, Transportation
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FBI agents posed as transit-oriented developers willing to bribe the mayor of Charlotte to get his support for a streetcar line, light rail, and related projects. The now-ex-mayor Patrick Cannon gladly accepted bribes in exchange for lying to investors and pushing city planning agencies to fast track the developments. When on the city council, Cannon had opposed construction of a streetcar line, but mysteriously changed his vote when he became mayor.


Who did developers bribe to get this project completed?

The Antiplanner isn’t enthusiastic about police entrapments, but this case brings to light one of the seamier sides of rail transit. These projects cost so much that they make some sort of corruption, if only in the form of campaign contributions, mandatory. The FBI sting has to raise questions about other rail projects and developments, especially considering the current U.S. Secretary of Transportation was the mayor of Charlotte just prior to the one who was stung.

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The Transit Train Wreck

By | | News commentary, Transportation
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Investigators have concluded that the driver of the CTA train that crashed at O’Hare earlier this week slept through the stop. Moreover, she apparently had a record of falling asleep at work before. However, investigators also concluded that two back-up systems that should have stopped the train before it crashed even without a waking driver failed as well.


We’ve spent roughly $1 trillion since 1970 for not much return. Capital spending before 1990 is not available, but probably followed a trajectory similar to operating subsidies (i.e, operating costs minus fares). Click image to download a spreadsheet with these and other data mentioned in this post.

Meanwhile, the American Public Transportation Association (APTA) defends its claim that recent ridership statistics represent a genuine “shift in American travel behavior.” While it admits that per capita ridership has declined since 2008, it blames that on the recession. It prefers to go back to 1995, “because after that year, ridership increased due to the passage of the landmark ISTEA legislation and other surface transportation bills which increased funding for public transportation.” Effectively, APTA argues that people will ride transit if you subsidize them enough, and so therefore subsidies should be increased still further.

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Crash at O’Hare

By | | News commentary, Transportation
8 Comments

Investigators have narrowed down the cause of Monday’s Chicago Transit Authority train crash at O’Hare Airport to either “operator fatigue” or a failure of the rail line’s automated safety systems. Neither explanation is very reassuring.

On one hand, taxpayers are paying more than $200 million a year to pay Chicago train and bus riders some of the highest wages in the nation, only (it is alleged) to have them fall asleep at the metaphorical wheel. On the other hand, the Chicago Transit Authority wants to spend $2-$4 billion “increasing the capacity” of some of its rail lines when it can’t afford to maintain the rail lines that it has now. Back in 2007, the agency said it needed more than $16 billion to bring its rail lines up to a state of good repair, and since then it hasn’t found more than a small fraction of that amount.
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Many people from medium-sized urban areas who visit Chicago wonder why their city can’t have a rail system like that–a system that is deeply in debt, has a huge maintenance backlog, and is suffering from declining ridership. The truth is that rail transit doesn’t work anywhere in the United States except possibly Manhattan, and even there it is questionable.

Hoodwinking Reporters

By | | News commentary, Transportation
7 Comments

Nearly two weeks after the American Public Transportation Association issued its deceptive press release about 2013 transit ridership, some reporters are still being fooled. Just two days ago, for example, NPR did a story claiming commuters are “ditching cars for transit in record numbers.”

Ironically, NPR begins its story in Chicago, where (APTA data reveals) 2013 transit ridership declined by 2.7 percent from the year before. “Throughout the entire country, just about every public transportation system saw hikes in ridership,” the story incorrectly claims. In addition to Chicago, transit systems in Albuquerque, Atlanta, Austin, Baltimore, Boston, Charlotte, Dallas, Kansas City, Louisville, Memphis, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Portland, San Antonio, and Washington DC all lost riders in 2013. Don’t NPR reporters check their facts?

While reporters might be fooled, three urban planning professors writing in the Washington Post weren’t. “The association’s numbers are deceptive,” they say, and any claims that the nation is “moving away from driving” is “misguided optimism.” In fact, they continue, “transit is a small and stagnant part of the transportation system.”

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Who’s Counting the Costs?

By | | Transportation
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Per capita incomes in Flint, Michigan, are only about half the national average, and poverty rates are three times the national average. So what does the city’s transit agency do? Why, spend $2.4 million for a $327,000 bus.


Zero emissions? Not really. Flickr photo by Earthworm.

Of course, this is a special bus: instead of being powered by Diesel fuel, it is powered by hydrogen fuel cells. And everyone knows that hydrogen power has zero emissions. The transit agency is so happy with the bus that it wants to order up to 30 more.

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Eliminating the Carbon Emissions of 3 Million Cars

By | | News commentary
16 Comments

Indoor marijuana production uses 1 percent of U.S. electricity, enough to produce the carbon emissions of three million cars. Meanwhile, the federal government is working hard to eradicate marijuana production from national forests. Reports suggest that such production is harmful to wildlife.

So how about a win-win solution? First, legalize marijuana at both the state and federal levels. Second, let the Forest Service pick some national forest locations where marijuana cultivation won’t harm wildlife or other values, then collect royalties on that cultivation, with 25 percent being kept by the Forest Service and the rest going to the federal treasury. Marijuana users win. Wildlife wins. The Forest Service and federal taxpayers win. The climate wins, or at least carbon dioxide emissions are reduced. Who could object to that?
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Of course, marijuana doesn’t have to be grown on national forest lands. People grow it there for the same reason they grow it indoors: it’s illegal and they hope for some secrecy. This nation has a billion acres of agricultural lands, only 400 million of which are used for growing crops. When marijuana is completely legalized, most will be grown outdoors on private farms just like any other crop. So if you want to blame marijuana smokers for contributing to climate change, blame the prohibitionists instead.

To Save Energy, Take an Intercity Bus

By | | Transportation
25 Comments

The American Bus Association is releasing its latest annual Motorcoach Census today, and it strikes quite a blow at those who support increased funding for Amtrak. A “motorcoach” is a long-distance bus longer than 35 feet whose passenger deck is typically elevated above luggage bays. The census counts only private buses available for public use; transit agency buses and private buses used only for private use, such as Google commuter buses, are not counted.


Click image to download the report.

Most intercity buses are motorcoaches, but motorcoaches are also used for charters, tours, commuting, airport service, and other purposes. According to the survey, slightly more than 30 percent of the more than 1.9 billion motorcoach miles traveled in 2012 were scheduled, intercity buses.

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Another High-Cost, Low-Capacity Transit Line

By | | Transportation
6 Comments

Panama City is opening a new rail transit line this month, but the Antiplanner’s review of the project found a significant flaw: though it cost as much to build as a heavy-rail line, it’s capacity to carry people is less than a light-rail line. The city says it can move about 15,000 people an hour, which is not very many considering that the city estimates nearly 100,000 people enter the city during a one-hour period on weekday mornings. But the 15,000 is at crush capacity, and I estimate a more realistic number is about half that.

As with the Mumbai monorail, I have to ask: if you are going to the expense of building a heavy-rail line, why are you providing the capacity of a light-rail line or less? One answer is the city expects the low-capacity trains to be full, thus giving the impression that the project is a great success.

I’ve never been to Panama City, and early responses to my review suggest that the bus-rapid transit alternative I propose wouldn’t work on Panama City streets. But I suspect it would cost a lot less to modify a few of the streets to allow more buses that could move a lot more people than the rail line will be able to handle.
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Prospects for Mileage-Based User Fees

By | | Transportation
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“We focus on mileage-based user fees as if they are an end, but they are really just a vehicle to an end,” Jack Basso, chair of the Mileage -Based User Fee Alliance, told the audience at what the group hopes will the first of an annual series of conferences. While everyone in the audience could agree with that statement, there was a sharp division over what should be the real purpose of such fees.

For Robert Atkinson, who recently chaired the National Transportation Infrastructure Financing Commission, the purpose of such fees is to give transportation users incentives to use the transportation system efficiently and transportation providers incentives to manage it efficiently. Such fees, he pointed out, would make it easy to use congestion pricing to relieve or eliminate the waste of traffic jams. Moreover, creating a “platform” for such fees would allow a variety of new groups to manage roads. Private parties could build and toll roads in congested areas. Neighborhood associations could take over street maintenance.

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Back in the Air Again

By | | Follow up, Transportation
20 Comments

The Antiplanner is in Washington, DC, today attending a conference on mileage-based user fees. When my plane landed in DC at 3:50 pm, I turned my cell phone on and got a voice mail that Lars Larson wanted to interview me on his radio show about yesterday’s transit numbers. We arranged to have the interview begin at 4:20.

That put me in a dilemma. I had a meeting in the city at 5:30 and wanted to drop my luggage off at my hotel in Roslyn. If I waited to the the radio show before leaving the airport, I’d be late for my meeting. So I hustled to take the subway to Arlington and hoped I’d arrive before 4:20, as cell service doesn’t extend underground.

Roslyn is five station stops from National Airport. As I’m thinking about the irony that I’m depending on public transit to get to an interview where I expect to be critical of public transit, our train pulls into the third stop, which is the Pentagon. People stand up to get off the train, but the doors don’t open. The crowd of people outside the train who want to get on grows, but the doors don’t open. I’m afraid I’m going to miss my interview, and the doors won’t open. Finally, the driver makes an incomprehensible announcement and the train leaves–and the doors never opened. I no longer felt that riding transit to criticize transit was so ironic.

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