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Monthly Archives: August 2016

Partners or Competitors?

By | | Transportation
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Two weeks ago, the Denver suburb of Centennial announced it would subsidize transit riders to use Uber or Lyft to or from their transit stop from or to their origin or final destination. By solving the “last-mile” problem, they hope that this will make transit more attractive to Centennial residents.

A couple of days later, the Livermore Amador Valley Transit Authority announced it would do the same for transit riders in Dublin and other nearby suburbs of San Francisco-Oakland.

Through such agreements, ride-sharing services are trying to persuade transit supporters that they aren’t competitors, but potential partners with transit agencies. Some of them are buying it, while others are more skeptical. The Antiplanner thinks this is just a transition phase before the complete elimination of transit in all but a few cities.

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Amtrak Picks New CEO, Gets Loan Grant

By | | Transportation
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Amtrak has selected former Norfolk Southern CEO Charles Moorman to be its new president and CEO. Moorman will take the reigns from career bureaucrat Joseph Boardman this week.

Rail industry insiders were surprised when Boardman decided to step down in the middle of his contract. But, according to Trains magazine’s Don Philips (no link available), Boardman had alienated other officials in the organization with angry tirades and poor management.

Boardman leaves the organization with one victory: Amtrak has successfully negotiated a $2.45 billion loan from the Federal Railroad Administration. The funds will be used to buy new trains and upgrade the Northeast Corridor to operate at top speeds of 160 mph instead of the current 135 mph. Amtrak claims it will repay the loan out of revenues earned from the additional riders attracted to the new trains and higher speeds.

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Treating the Symptoms, Not the Problems

By | | Housing, Urban areas
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Portland-area politicians love to build things. In 2004, Multnomah County, the county in which Portland is located, built a new jail, called Wapato, at a cost of $58 million even though county officials knew they had no money to operate the jail. It has been empty ever since.

Now officials want to spend $60 to $100 million building a shelter for the homeless near terminal 1, a former port facility on the Willamette River. So someone came up with a bright idea: why not use Wapato Jail as a homeless shelter?

One argument against the idea is that most homeless people gravitate towards downtown. But terminal 1 isn’t downtown either. Another is that Wapato isn’t set up as a homeless shelter. But it would cost a lot less converting it to a homeless shelter than to build a brand-new one.

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Travelogue

By | | Transportation, Travels
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Interstate 405 is crossed by numerous bridges as it circles halfway around downtown Portland, and none of those bridges are estimated to be capable of withstanding a severe earthquake. Rather than update the bridges, Portland is going to spend $5.9 million building a bike-pedestrian bridge across the freeway that can survive a 9.0 earthquake. After all, Portland is the city that plans to use bicycles to rescue people after an earthquake, so it is important that bicycle overpasses be able to withstand such quakes.


The East Cliff Railway in Hastings is, at 78 degrees, the steepest inclined railway currently operating in Britain.

I could write about this in more detail, but instead I hope to entertain you with some of my favorite photos from my trip to Britain. That trip is now half-way done as I write, so I’ll probably have a second installment of photos in early September.

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A Mere $54 Billion for Light Rail

By | | Transportation, Urban areas
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Seattle’s regional transit agency, Sound Transit, wants voters to approve a tax increase so it can spend another $54 billion on new light-rail lines. The agency’s first light-rail line went 86 percent over its original projections, but the agency assures the public that it has realized that voters are so innumerate that it no longer needs to low-ball the cost estimates in order to get tax increases approved.

To promote its plan, the agency has hired Peter “Paint Is Cheaper Than Rails” Rogoff to run the agency and get federal grants. Rogoff argued in 2010 that buses can attract as many riders as trains, and that “Bus Rapid Transit is a fine fit for a lot more communities than are seriously considering it.” Of course, he must believe that rail makes more sense than buses for Seattle, or he wouldn’t have taken this $298,000 per year job (a $118,000 increase over his previous job), right?

Seattle’s first light-rail line cost $3.1 billion in 1995 dollars, or $4.8 billion in today’s dollars for about 20 miles, for an average cost of $240 million a mile. According to the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey, out of nearly 1.6 million commuters, a respectable 160,000 took the bus to work in the Seattle urban area in 2014 but fewer than 3,000 took light rail while another 7,500 took commuter rail or streetcars to work. It’s possible that some survey respondents were confused and marked streetcar or commuter rail when they meant light rail, but it is still an insignificant number.

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Trains Are Sometimes Crowded

By | | Transportation
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British trains are sometimes crowded, especially around London. The Antiplanner was lucky to leave London in a nearly empty train, but other trains have been standing room only. I stood for nearly two hours on a train from Westbury to Newport the other day.

According to Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn, overcrowding is evidence that the government should return the privatized trains to public operation. He rode a Virgin Rail train out of London and tweeted that he couldn’t find a seat.

In response, Richard Branson released videotapes showing that Corbyn had boarded the train and walked past empty seats. Corbyn’s staff later said he wanted two empty seats so he could sit next to his wife. Of course, he could have reserved two seats next to each other in advance, but he didn’t do that. Probably he would rather be mad.

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Self-Driving Cars Edge Closer

By | | Transportation
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People who remain skeptical of self-driving cars simply aren’t paying attention. The biggest news in the past week is that Ford’s chief executive, Mark Fields, has pledged that his company will have “fleets” of totally self-driving cars–with no steering wheels or pedals–in American cities by 2021.

His wording makes it appear that Ford will not only sell the cars to consumers, but offer Uber-like car-sharing services itself. To help it reach this goal, Ford recently purchased SAIPS, an Israeli company specializing in machine learning and sensing.

General Motors, meanwhile, spent $1 billion acquiring Cruise Automation, a company that the Antiplanner considered to be pretty fly-by-night. This company had promised to turn any 2012 or later Audi into a self-driving car for $10,000. I think all it really did was add adaptive cruise control and lane centering, so cars could drive themselves on freeways, but not on city streets, nor could they navigate from one place to another. Yet GM appears to have been impressed.

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National Cycle Route 2

By | | Transportation, Travels
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Greetings from Frome (which rhymes with broom, not dome), Britain (which rhymes with ten, not plain). Last week the Antiplanner praised a “bicycle superhighway,” or what I would call a “bicycle boulevard,” that was set up in London. On Saturday, I got a taste of the rural version of this superhighway, but I was much less impressed.

The national cycle routes were set up by, or at least documented by, Sustrans (which presumably is short for “sustainable transportation”), a non-government (but partly government-funded) organization. On my ride from Brighton to Dover, I got to see and use some of National Cycle Route 3, one of more than 100 such routes in Britain.

Before describing the route, I have a bone to pick with Sustrans. The organization has a map of its routes on line, but it is made to not be easily copied, and is useless for detailed, on-the-ground directions. It sells paper maps, but as a cyclist, I don’t want to have to unfold a map everytime I come to a crossroads. It doesn’t make PDFs of its maps available, just paper. How sustainable is that?

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Cycle Superhighway 3

By | | Transportation, Travels
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On my way from my Airbnb to Victoria Station I found Cycle Superhighway 3, which has become very popular since it opened five or six years ago. Mostly marked in blue with lanes that were sometimes a bit narrow, it seemed to use mainly local streets (often punctuated by overly large speed humps) or parts of very wide sidewalks along arterials or collectors. It didn’t seem to take lanes away from existing arterials or collectors.


One of the less-busy segments of Cycle Superhighway 3.

After determining a route, the main cost to the city was paint and putting in bicycle-friendly traffic signals. The “superhighway” took me from east London to the London Tower; from there, another route followed the Thames River. Although this route was dedicated exclusively to bicycles, it was also interrupted by annoyingly large speed humps.
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Forward into the Past Via VIA

By | | Transportation, Urban areas
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The San Antonio urban area has about 1.9 million people today and, if it keeps growing at recent rates, will add 1.6 million more by 2040. VIA, the region’s transit agency, gets most of its money from a one-half-cent sales tax, so by 2040 it will get about 80 percent more tax revenues.


Click image to download this 40-MB PDF.

The agency is hungry for more, however, so it has written a long-range plan called Vision 2040. Actually, to call this a plan is generous; it is actually more of a sales brochure, as it doesn’t consider any alternatives, any impacts of the proposal, or any real information about costs. Instead, it merely says that it wants increased taxes to provide bus-rapid transit on exclusive bus lanes and possibly light rail–in other words, transit infrastructure that might have been useful a few decades ago, but certainly won’t be useful a few decades from now.

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