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Monthly Archives: May 2014

$80 Million a Mile for a Piece of Junk

By | | Transportation
8 Comments

The latest cost estimate for the proposed 4.5-mile Arlington, Virginia streetcar has risen to $358 million, or $80 million per mile. This puts it in the same ballpark as light rail, as current light-rail projects in Dallas, Minneapolis, Phoenix, Sacramento, and Salt Lake City are costing $50 million to $80 million per mile (though the average for all current light-rail projects is nearly $110 million).


A model of the proposed Arlington streetcar. Local taxpayers will be lucky if the rail supporters in the Arlington County Department of Environmental Services will be satisfied playing with the model instead of forcing taxpayers to build the real thing.

What would Arlington get for all this money? Proponents, such as Arlington County manager Barbara Donnellan, still call streetcars “high-capacity transit” even though streetcars have about the lowest capacity of any transit system imaginable. Heck, minivans can probably move about as many people per hour as streetcars.

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Obama’s Stealth Transportation Bill

By | | News commentary, Transportation
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In order to highlight the need for a new transportation bill, President Obama is visiting the Tappan Zee Bridge today (which, ironically, is likely to increase delays to commuter). Tappan Zee is one of about 10,000 bridges that–like the Skagit River bridge that collapsed almost a year ago–is considered “fracture critical,” meaning the destruction of one key part could lead the entire bridge to fall down. However, the state of New York is currently building a replacement bridge that will not have this fault.


The destruction of just one part of this bridge could cause the entire center span to collapse. On the other hand, the bridge has lasted 59 years, and probably could last quite a few more without anything destroying one of the fracture-critical parts. The bridge may be in poor condition for a number of reasons, but being fracture-critical is not one of them. Flickr photo by waywuwei.

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Driven by Data, Not Wishful Thinking

By | | City planning
28 Comments

The Antiplanner has a rule: anytime someone mentions how wonderful a transit-oriented development is or will be, just Google the name of that development with the words “tax-increment financing.” So, when Atlantic Cities writer Rebecca Burns breathlessly praises the Atlanta BeltLine as a “magical TOD,” I immediately looked it up.

It turns out the development is expected to eventually receive a modest $1.7 billion in tax-increment financed (TIF) subsidies. Total subsidies will be even more: of the $337 million in subsidies to date, only $120 million are from TIF. That’s not magic; that’s crony capitalism. If you want magic, go to Disneyland, which only cost $17 million (not billion) to build in 1955, which is less than $150 million in today’s dollars. (Disney World cost about $331 million in 1973 which, converted to today’s dollars, is in the ballpark of $1.7 billion–but it was virtually all privately financed.)

Regular readers know that the Antiplanner is not fond of TIF. Though public officials like to portray it as “free money,” in fact it takes money from schools, fire, and other property-tax-supported services. At best, TIF doesn’t stimulate development of an urban area; it only influences where that development will take place and what it will look like. If the development would have taken place anyway–perhaps in another location and at lower densities–then the taxes earned by the development would have gone to schools, etc. if there had been no TIF. At worst, TIF actually slows the growth of an urban area by increasing the tax burden or reducing the quality of urban services.

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Transportation Cliff or Pothole?

By | | Transportation
22 Comments

Recent news reports have zeroed in on Washington’s next cliff, the transportation cliff that is expected to happen when the federal Highway Trust Fund runs out of money sometime this summer. Most of these articles have a hidden agenda: to increase spending for transit even though transit now gets 20 percent of federal surface transport dollars but carries little more than 1 percent of the travel carried by automobiles (about 55 billion passenger miles by transit vs. 4.3 trillion passenger miles in cars and light trucks). This article will help explain the politics of the transportation cliff.

1. Why are we about to go off a transportation cliff?

Since 1956, federal highway programs have been paid for out of federal gasoline taxes. These taxes go into the so-called Highway Trust Fund (“so-called” because it’s not very trustworthy) and then are distributed to the states for highway construction and maintenance. In 1982, Congress began dedicating a small but growing share of gas taxes to transit. Today, more than 20 percent of federal gas taxes are spent on transit, and there is no guarantee that the remaining 80 percent goes for highways, as Congress often diverts some to such things as bike paths, national park visitor centers, museums, and other local pork barrel.

Congress reauthorizes this spending every few years. Traditionally, an authorization bill provides a spending ceiling. But the 2005 reauthorization bill made spending mandatory, meaning the ceiling was also the floor. When the 2008 financial crisis led to a reduction in driving, gas tax revenues failed to keep up with spending. Since then Congress has had to supplement gas taxes with about $55 billion in general funds in order to keep the Highway Trust Fund from running out of money.

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Profits Protect Consumers

By | | Transportation
6 Comments

The British Labour Party has what it thinks is a great idea: renationalize British rail operations. These were semi-privatized in the 1990s, leading to a huge increase in rail ridership–especially relative to passenger rail on the continent, where ridership is stagnant.

The Labour Party is following that quaint old socialist idea that profits are a waste and that government takeover would allow those wasted profits to be diverted into reduced fares and better services. They claim that nationalizing “would mean hundreds of millions currently lost in private profit would be available to fully fund a bold offer on rail fares.”

If this were true, then Amtrak, the New York Metropolitan Transit Authority, and pre-priviatization BritRail would all have generated plenty of revenues to fund their operations and maintenance. But they didn’t and don’t; instead, they require huge subsidies and even then offer poor service due to unfunded maintenance backlogs.

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That’ll Teach ‘Em

By | | Transportation, Urban areas
26 Comments

King County Metro is having a banner year in terms of sales tax revenues, collecting $32 million, or almost 7.5 percent, more than anticipated. But the agency still petulantly plans to eliminate 72 bus routes and reduce service on 84 other routes because voters rejected a tax increase a couple of weeks ago.

The unanticipated revenue could provide half the money the agency says it needs to maintain bus service. But rather than keep the buses running, it says it will put that extra revenue in a “rainy day fund.” “Isn’t Metro’s rainy day happening right now?” asks the Washington Policy Center. In addition to using those revenues to keep some of the buses running, the Policy Center suggests that Metro cut costs by, among other things, buying regular buses instead of expensive hybrid-electric buses.

“Diesel buses are dirtier and cost more to operate,” chides a Seattle blogger. But, as the Antiplanner has documented before, the tiny cost savings from using hybrid buses comes nowhere near repaying their operating costs. Transit agencies that buy hybrid buses are letting ego blind them to the reality that hybrid buses just aren’t very efficient.

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Putting a Human Face on Congestion

By | | Transportation
39 Comments

Few problems are as costly as traffic congestion. According to the Texas Transportation Institute, it costs commuters more than $100 billion per year. Studies in a number of cities suggest that costs to businesses are roughly equal to that, for a total annual cost of around $200 billion. Yet it is hard to persuade people that the only effective solution–variable tolls aimed at preventing ttraffic from reaching congested levels–should be implemented.

Atlantic Cities may have found the literal poster-children that could do it: premature babies. According to research reported in an article by Brooklyn resident Sarah Goodyear, tolls that reduce congestion also reduce air pollution (a fact the Antiplanner has often pointed out) which in turn reduces the number of babies born prematurely.
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Because a quarter of all U.S. housing is located near congested highways, ending that congestion and the resulting pollution “could reduce preterm births by as many as 8,600 annually, for a cost savings of at least $444 million per year,” estimates a MacArthur Foundation policy brief. Now, $444 million is only 0.2 percent of the total cost of congestion, but it might be the 0.2 percent that will get people to accept that they should pay more to use roads during peak periods of the day just as they pay more to use airlines, hotels, telephones, and other services during peak periods–and that would benefit everyone except for the people who enjoy watching other people sit in traffic.

Portland Streets Continue to Deteriorate

By | | Transportation, Urban areas
19 Comments

Portland’s streets, bridges, sidewalks, and traffic signals are in desperate need of maintenance, reports the city’s Bureau of Transportation. Yet the city is putting its transportation dollars towards building more streetcar lines.


Bike-friendly city? A Portland cyclist is attended (and eventually hospitalized) after a crash resulting from incomplete paving around a storm drain. Flickr photo posted by Ralph Bodenner (who was also the injured cyclist).

Last year, the Bureau of Transportation reported that nearly half the city’s streets were in poor or very poor condition. Thanks to continued neglect, they have breached the 50 percent threshold: in 2013, 54 percent were poor or very poor, while the share in good or very good condition shrank from 30 to 26 percent (see page 32 of the above-linked report).

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