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Monthly Archives: December 2014

A Streetcar Named Liar

By | | Transportation, Urban areas
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Everything you’ve heard from the city of Portland about its streetcar lines is a lie. That seems to be the conclusion of the latest review of the operation by the city of Portland’s own city auditor.

Portland Streetcar, the private organization contracted to run the streetcar for the city, claims to have met the city’s on-time goals. The audit finds that it hasn’t. Portland Streetcar claims to have increased ridership by 500,000 riders in fiscal year 2014. The audit finds that that Portland Streetcar overstated ridership by 19 percent and actually ridership was 1.1 million trips less than claimed.

The auditor is also unimpressed by claims that the streetcar has generated billions of dollars worth of economic development. “Based on studies [Portland Bureau of Transportation] provided to us,” says the audit, “we conclude this research has yet to describe a causal relationship of how streetcars may affect economic development.” In other words, it’s just another fabrication.

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The Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Falling Gas Prices

By | | Transportation
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A left-coast writer named Mark Morford thinks that gas prices falling to $2 a gallon would be the worst thing to happen to America. After all, he says, the wrong people would profit: oil companies (why would oil companies profit from lower gas prices?), auto makers, and internet retailers like Amazon that offer free shipping.

If falling gas prices are the worst for America, then the best, Morford goes on to say, would be to raise gas taxes by $6 a gallon and dedicate all of the revenue to boondoggles “alternative energy and transport, environmental protections, our busted educational system, our multi-trillion debt.” After all, government has proven itself so capable of finding the most cost-effective solutions to any problem in the past, and there’s no better way to reduce the debt than to tax the economy to death.

Morford is right in line with progressives like Naomi Klein, who thinks climate change is a grand opportunity to make war on capitalism. Despite doubts cast by other leftists, Klein insists that “responding to climate change could be the catalyst for a positive social and economic transformation”–by which she means government control of transportation, housing, and just about everything else.

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High-Speed Rail from Dallas to Ft. Worth?

By | | Transportation
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In the hierarchy of dumb projects, building a high-speed rail line to connect two cities that are just 32 miles a part would rank very high. Yet the Texas Department of Transportation and the Federal Railroad Administration are proposing just that: a line from Dallas to Ft. Worth. They are currently asking for comments on the scope of the environmental impact statement, due next Monday, December 15.

Not surprisingly, the biggest beneficiary of this project, so far, is Parsons Brinckerhoff, which seems to have its fingers in every ridiculous rail project in the country. One of the company’s employees is acting as “communications manager” for the project and delivering PowerPoint presentations about it to the public.

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Portland Housing: Density at Any Cost?

By | | Regional planning, Urban areas
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Portland’s regional planning agency, Metro, recently released its 2014 Urban Growth Report, which projects that the region will gain 300,000 to 500,000 new residents between 2010 and 2035. The report suggests that it may not be necessary to expand the region’s urban-growth boundary to house those new residents because people are willing to live in smaller homes on smaller lots.

That’s an extremely distorted view of the future, says Gerard Mildner, an associate professor of real estate finance at Portland State University’s Center for Real Estate. In a paper titled, Density at Any Cost (which was also published in the Center for Real Estate’s quarterly report), Mildner argues that Metro’s report “distorts economic data and will lead the region to make decisions that will harm economic growth.”

Not only will Metro’s vision make single-family housing more expensive, says Mildner, it will increase the cost of rental housing. Contrary to claims that more people want to live in smaller quarters, achieving Metro’s goals will require “multi-billion dollar unfunded mandates on local government to subsidize housing and transportation projects.” Nor will Metro’s plans be good for the environment, since they will just lead a lot of people to move “from our region to places in the southeast and southwest United States where carbon emissions will be higher” because those places require more air conditioning and use more fossil fuels to generate electricity.

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Death to the Purple Money Eater

By | | Transportation
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Maryland’s Governor-Elect Larry Hogan has promised to cancel the Purple Line, another low-capacity rail boondoggle that would cost taxpayers at least $2.4 billion to build and much more to operate and maintain. The initial projections for the line were that it would carry so few passengers that the Federal Transit Administration wouldn’t even fund it under the rules then in place. Obama has since changed those rules, but not to take any chances, Maryland’s current governor, Martin O’Malley, hired Parsons Brinckerhoff with the explicit goal of boosting ridership estimates to make it a fundable project.

The last time the Antiplanner looked at the Purple Line, the draft EIS (written by a team led by Parsons Brinckerhoff) was out and it projected the line would carry more than 60,000 trips each weekday in 2030. This is far more than the 23,000 trips per weekday carried by the average light-rail line in the country in 2012. Despite this optimistic projection, the DEIS revealed that the rail project would both increase congestion and use more energy than all the cars it took off the road (though to find the congestion result you had to read the accompanying traffic analysis technical report, pp. 4-1 and 4-2).

A few months after the Antiplanner made these points, Maryland published Parsons Brinckerhoff’s final EIS, which had a new, but still optimistic, ridership projection: 65,000 riders per day in 2030. This seems totally unrealistic when compared with light-rail lines today.

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Champions at Making Promises

By | | News commentary, Regional planning
31 Comments

The White House has applauded Portland and fifteen other local governments as “climate action champions” for promising to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Perhaps the White House should have waited to see whether any of the communities managed to meet their goals before patting them on the back.

Take Portland, for example. The Northwest city’s modest goal is to reduce Portland and Multnomah County emissions by 80 percent from 1990 levels by 2050. Planners claim that, as of 2010, the city and county had reduced emissions by 6 percent from 1990 levels. However, this claim is full of hot air as all of the reductions are due to causes beyond planners’ control.

Almost two-thirds of the reduction was in the industrial sector, and virtually all of that was due to the closure in 2000 of an aluminum plant that once employed 520 people. The closure of that plant hasn’t led anyone to use less aluminum, so all it did was move emissions elsewhere.

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Making War on User Fees

By | | Transportation
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The Highway Trust Fund hasn’t worked, says a new report from the Eno Transportation Foundation, so Congress should consider getting rid of it and funding all transportation out of general funds. In other words, the transportation system is breaking down because it has become too politicized, so solve the problem by making transportation even more politicized.


Click image to download this 3.2-MB report.

Eno (which was founded by William Phelps Eno, who is known as the “father of traffic safety”) claims this report is the result of eighteen months work by its policy experts. They should have worked a little longer, as the report’s conclusions would only make things worse.

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Oregon Office of Economic Ignorance

By | | Housing, Urban areas
15 Comments

The Oregon Office of Economic Analysis recently published a four-part economic assessment of the “Portland housing bubble.” Written by an economist named Josh Lehner, the assessment looks at a lot of data but misses the elephant in the room, which is how land-use regulation has affected Portland housing.

Housing prices have risen to pre-financial-crisis levels, says Lehner, and Portland’s rental market has an inordinately low vacancy rate. New construction of both single- and multi-family homes is mostly at the high end. Lehner looks at these facts with alarm, but it never occurs to him that there is a simple remedy: end all of the land-use restrictions.

Land-use regulation not only makes housing more expensive, it makes housing prices more volatile, that is, more prone to bubbles. This is because, when supply is limited, a small increase in demand translates to a large increase in price rather than an increase in supply. Conversely, a small decrease in demand translates into a large decrease in price.

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Streetcar Troubles

By | | Transportation
20 Comments

The Washington Post has a story on Oregon’s United Streetcar company, which is supposedly geared up to manufacture 24 streetcars a year but has only managed to sell 18 and delivered all of them late. The story comes complete with photos of federal officials like Tim Geithner wearing ill-fitting sack suits like soviet commissars as they inspect the heavily subsidized factory.

For the Post, the story is not so much that the streetcars were delivered late, or that they were ineptly built, or that they cost $4 million while the Czech streetcars that they copied only cost $1.9 million. Although the article alludes to these problems, what appears to upset the Post the most is that giving millions of dollars in subsidies to an Oregon company that never built a transit vehicle in its life didn’t miraculously create a manufacturing powerhouse that is exporting streetcars all over the world. For some reason, other countries don’t want to pay twice as much for streetcars that are delivered late and fail to live up to promised specifications.

United Streetcar only managed to sell streetcars to three cities–Portland, Tucson, and Washington, DC–and they all signed contracts before the company developed its track record of late deliveries. Given that record, it isn’t surprising that other cities that are thinking about streetcars aren’t planning to buy Oregon.

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