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Monthly Archives: December 2015

What Is Your Sin?

By | | Transportation
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Over at Green Car Reports, the “guide to cleaner, greener driving,” electric car advocate David Noland asks, “Which sins worse: cars or planes?” The “sin,” of course, is carbon emissions, and his answer, while interesting, is flawed in many respects.

“The passenger jet blows away the automobile in terms of efficiency and CO2 emissions per mile,” he says, a result he apparently considers surprising. But it’s not surprising at all to anyone familiar with the Department of Energy’s Transportation Energy Data Book. According to tables in the book, airlines emitted about 2,568 grams of carbon per passenger mile in 2013, while the average car emitted 3,144 grams (or 3,564 if SUVs and other light trucks are included).

But it’s not enough to show that both cars and airlines have been rapidly improving their energy efficiency. Noland wants to really blow cars out of contention, so he biases his analysis in several ways.

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Civil Rights and Fiscal Wrongs

By | | Transportation
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Are the NAACP and ACLU serious when they argue, in a lawsuit filed last week, that cancellation of the Baltimore Red Line light-rail project is a civil rights issue? Or are they just acting as a front for, or the unwitting stooges of, rail contractors and other rail proponents?

In Los Angeles, the NAACP filed a successful lawsuit against the county Metropolitan Transportation Authority for building light rail. The group argued that light rail was so expensive that the agency was forced to cut bus service to minority neighborhoods, resulting in a huge decline in transit ridership. The court ordered the agency to restore bus service, allowing ridership to recover. But in Baltimore, the NAACP seems to be arguing that cuts in bus service are worth building a billion-dollar tunnel under an African-American neighborhood.

Maybe this is a case of the NAACP’s Right Coast not knowing what its Left Coast was doing. But the heart of the complaint in Baltimore seems to be that blacks are somehow harmed because the state of Maryland chose to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on bus improvements instead of billions of dollars on one light-rail line. This suggests that the Maryland NAACP thinks dollars spent are more important than results. After all, Baltimore’s other light-rail lines are all embarrassing failures, with costs greater than projections but ridership well below projections.

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The Vision Zero Cult

By | | Transportation
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The Vision Zero Initiative seeks to reduce traffic deaths to zero–certainly a worthy goal. However, I looked throughout its web site and couldn’t find anything about how they propose to achieve that goal. Instead, there is a lot of mumbo jumbo along with a few poorly chosen statistics about how safe roads are in Sweden. The lack of specific recommendations combined with the misuse of data leads me to believe that this initiative is no better than a cult trying to get money out of gullible government officials with the promise that, if they pay enough, they’ll get a magic formula to safer streets.

The statistic they most commonly use is number of traffic deaths per 100,000 residents. The problem with this is that this number is bound to be higher in countries where people drive the most. Considering that commercial fishing is one of the most dangerous jobs in the world, you could just as well argue that countries that have totally destroyed their fisheries due to overfishing have superior policies to ones that still have healthy fisheries. However, there are better ways of improving safety than destroying the utility of whatever it is that might be dangerous.

Only by searching other web sites, including Wikipedia, do we learn Vision Zero’s secret: they make streets safer by slowing traffic down to a crawl. In other words, they greatly reduce the utility of the automobile. We know from various research that slower speeds means lower economic productivity.

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Seasons’ Greetings from Oregon

By | | Housekeeping
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What Caused the Crisis: Greed or Volatility?

By | | Meltdown
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I haven’t seen The Big Short, which opens tomorrow, but I’ve read (and own a copy of) the book and cite it in American Nightmare. Based on the trailer, the movie appears to focus on the notion that the financial crisis was caused by greed and lack of bank regulation, an idea endorsed by Paul Krugman.

As both Krugman and New York Times writer Neil Irwin point out, the movie’s notion that only a few people were able to figure out there was a housing bubble is wrong; many people realized there was a bubble (or bubbles). What the heroes or antiheroes in Michael Lewis’ The Big Short figured out was a way to profit from the bursting of the bubble. While it is possible to “short” stocks, i.e., bet that their price will go down, it normally isn’t possible to short bonds, such as the packages of mortgage bonds that banks were selling.

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The Antiplanner’s Library: Zoned in the USA

By | | Book reviews
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A review of this 2014 book on Amazon says, “Hirt explains that in the early 20th century, pro-zoning interests argued that zoning was a means of increasing homeowners’ property values and excluding lower socio-economic classes.” Since that’s not far from one of the conclusions of American Nightmare, I was intrigued to see if she followed the same line of reasoning as the Antiplanner or reached that conclusion from a different direction.

Click image to go to the book publisher’s web page for this book. Click the link above (“2014 book”) to buy this book from Abehbooks.com.

It turns out the reviewer was wrong; Hirt briefly quotes others who argue that zoning “serves as a local immigration law that protects the rich from the poor” (p. 45), but it is hardly the focus of her book. Instead, her main question as an immigrant from eastern Europe herself is: why do Americans zone for such low densities and a separation of residential from other uses when Europeans seem perfectly happy living above stores and across the street from amusement parks? She also correctly observes that, relative to the rest of the developed world, Americans have moderate homeownership rates but high rates of single-family detached housing (p. 20), and wonders why this is the case as well.

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Vilsack to Congress: Give Me More Money or I’ll Let the West Burn

By | | Public lands, Wildfire
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Congress rejected the Forest Service plan to give the agency access to up to $2.9 billion a year to suppress wildfires. In response, Secretary of Agriculture threatened to let fires burn up the West unless Congress gives his department more money. In a letter to key members of Congress, Vilsack warned, “I will not authorize transfers from restoration and resilience funding” to suppress fires. If the Forest Service runs out of appropriated funds to fight fires, it will stop fighting them until Congress appropriates additional funds.

This is a stunning example of brinksmanship on the part of an agency once known for its easygoing nature. Since about 1990, Congress has given the Forest Service the average of its previous ten years of fire suppression funds. If the agency has to spend more than that amount during a severe fire year, Congress authorized it to borrow funds from its other programs, with the promise that Congress would reimburse those funds later. In other words, during severe fire years, some projects might be delayed for a year–hardly a crisis.

Yet Vilsack and the Forest Service are intent on turning it into a crisis. In a report prominently posted on the Forest Service’s web site, the agency whines about “the rising costs of wildfire operations”–that cost not being the dollar cost but the “effects on the Forest Service’s non-fire work.”

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Nice Work If You Can Get It (and Keep It)

By | | Transportation, Urban areas
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Stephen Banta, the CEO of Phoenix’s Valley Metro transit agency, resigned in disgrace after revelations that taxpayers paid for him to fly first class around the world, stay in $600-per-night hotel rooms, and take elected officials out to expensive dinners trying to woo them into supporting light rail. After resigning, he then tried to rescind his resignation, apparently wanting to negotiate a better golden parachute.

This tactic apparently worked, as the Valley Metro board has agreed to pay him $265,000 if he leaves on January 4. That’s approximately his average annual pay.

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2014 Transit Database Posted, Then Withdrawn

By | | Transportation, Useful Data
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The nation’s transit industry carried about 1 percent more trips and passenger miles in 2014 than in 2013. But to carry that many, industry operating costs grew by 7 percent and maintenance costs grew by 2 percent. For that increase in operating costs, vehicle revenue miles grew by less than 3 percent.

Transit is thus becoming increasingly expensive to operate and maintain per rider: the operating cost of single trip grew from $3.81 to $4.04, a 6 percent increase. Fares, meanwhile, grew by just 2 percent, and the industry as a whole collected just $15.1 billion in fares while spending $42.4 billion on operations, $11.0 billion on maintenance, and $6.0 billion on capital improvements.

These numbers are from the 2014 National Transit Database that the Federal Transit Administration posted last week. The numbers are only tentative, however, as the FTA took the numbers down this week (though some of the data are still available if you know where to look for them–see below). Moreover, a few key spreadsheets were missing from the data that were posted.

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Cars Saving Energy Faster Than Transit

By | | Transportation, Useful Data
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The average automobile on the road in 2013 used 1.2 percent less energy per mile than in 2012, according to table 2-15 of the latest edition of the Department of Energy’s Transportation Energy Data Book. Both cars and light trucks achieved about the same gain.

Click image to download a 12.9-MB PDF of the data book. Click here to access individual spreadsheets of all the tables and charts in the data book.

In contrast, says the datebook, the average transit bus used 0.9 percent more energy per mile in 2013 than in 2012. Worse, the average number of people on board transit buses declined slightly, so buses used 1.0 percent more energy per passenger mile.

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