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Monthly Archives: September 2016

Is Mobility a Right or a Privilege?

By | | Transportation
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Michael Lind, a co-founder of left-leaning New America, is urging the federal government to create universal mobility accounts that would give everyone an income tax credit, or, if they owe no taxes, a direct subsidy to cover the costs of driving. He argues that social mobility depends on personal mobility, and personal mobility depends on access to a car, so therefore everyone should have one.

This is an interesting departure from the usual progressive argument that cars are evil and we should help the poor by spending more on transit. Lind responds to this view saying that transit and transit-oriented developments “can help only at the margins.” He applauds programs that help low-income people acquire inexpensive, used automobiles, but–again–thinks they are not enough.

Lind is virtually arguing that automobile ownership is a human right that should be denied to no one because of poverty. While the Antiplanner agrees that auto ownership can do a lot more to help people out of poverty than more transit subsidies, claiming that cars are a human right goes a little to far.

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San Diego Boondoggle Funded

By | | Transportation
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Thirty-five years ago, San Diego kicked off the light-rail fad when it opened the San Diego Trolley, the nation’s first modern light-rail line. The city paid $18.1 million for the right of way and $87.5 million to build 13.5 miles of rail line. Two years later, they double-tracked the line bringing the total cost, including right of way, to $137.35 million, or just slightly more than $10 million a mile. In today’s dollars, that would be $23 million a mile.

Now San Diego is planning a new light-rail line that will cost a mere $2.17 billion for 10.9 miles of line, or slightly less than $200 million a mile–and that’s only if there are no cost overruns. That’s more than eight times the cost per mile of the first line. Ridership is likely to be no greater and probably less than the first line. Despite the high cost, the Federal Transit Administration has agreed to fund half the cost.

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Not Just Economists

By | | Housing
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A few months ago, the Antiplanner listed more than a half-dozen papers by economists showing that growth constraints make housing less affordable. Yet many planners still deny that relaxing those constraints will make housing more affordable.

Now a paper by law professor Michael Lewyn makes exactly the same point, and responds directly to arguments made by advocates of growth constraints. Lewyn is far from a free marketeer, having written articles about controlling sprawl, encouraging walkability, and supporting infill development. But he apparently puts affordability above the fuzzy environmental goals of smart-growth planning.
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Lewyn’s paper uses different terms than I would use, blaming land-use regulation on NIMBYs instead of urban containment. I think that NIMBYism is a result, not a cause, of the kind of comprehensive planning that leads to unaffordable housing. But that’s merely a quibble; the significance of Lewyn’s paper is that more people–and not just economists–realize that urban containment is a morally unacceptable policy.

The Who-Gets-to-Decide Crisis

By | | News commentary
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“There is now a consensus that the United States should substantially raise its level of infrastructure investment,” writes former treasury secretary Lawrence Summers in the Washington Post. Correction: There is now a consensus among two presidential candidates that the United States should increase infrastructure spending. That’s far from a broad consensus.

“America’s infrastructure crisis is really a maintenance crisis,” says the left-leaning CityLab. The “infrastructure crisis is about socialism,” says the conservative Heritage Foundation. “There is no widespread crisis of crumbling infrastructure,” says libertarian Cato Institute. “The infrastructure crisis . . . isn’t,” agrees the Reason Foundation.

As Charles Marohn, who classifies himself as a traditional conservative, says, the idea that there is an infrastructure crisis is promoted by an “infrastructure cult” led by the American Society of Civil Engineers. As John Oliver noted, relying on them to decide whether there is enough infrastructure spending is like asking a golden retriever if enough tennis balls are being thrown.

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Asking the Right Questions About Infrastructure

By | | Transportation
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“The American economy is a growth Ponzi scheme where we try to . . . generate a short-term illusion of wealth by having our cities, neighborhoods and families take on enormous long term liabilities,” says Strong Towns founder Charles Marohn in an interesting article about the so-called infrastructure crisis. What he calls the “Infrastructure Cult” leads the nation to go deeply into debt building more and more infrastructure without ever asking “why do these investments not generate enough productivity — enough real return — to be sustained?”

Marohn and the Antiplanner have had our differences in the past. Marohn thinks the suburbs are dead. He thinks most urban arterials, which he derisively calls “stroads,” should be designed downwards in ways that will vastly reduce mobility.

When addressing an issue such as infrastructure, it is important to ask the right questions. So far as I’ve quoted above, Marohn has done so. However, I fear he will miss one important question, which is: How should we measure whether particular infrastructure investments generate enough productivity to be worthwhile?

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Amtrak’s Gold-Plated Trains

By | | Transportation
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Amtrak’s plan to use most of the $2.45 billion “loan” it received from the Department of Transportation to buy new high-speed trains for the Northeast Corridor has come under fire from, of all people, a high-speed rail advocate named Alon Levy. The new trains will cost about $9 million per car, which Levy points out is nearly twice as much as France is paying for Eurostar train cars. The reason for the high cost is that the new trains can go more than 200 mph and tilt on curves more than any previous trains.

Levy is a transportation writer who takes a highly mathematical approach to reviewing proposals and who says he is for “good transit” but against boondoggles. He says the problem with the expensive new trains is that Amtrak tracks can’t support trains that are as fast as they can go, and in order to support such fast trains, they would have to reduce curvature so much that they wouldn’t need to tilt as much as the new trains. Levy argues that Amtrak should have spent less on the trains and more on the infrastructure needed to boost speeds. As another high-speed rail advocate put it, “They need to speed up the slow bits first, which isn’t something you do by blowing money on trains.”

Amtrak hopes that Democrats will sweep Congress this November and give it the $290 billion it wants to rebuild the Northeast Corridor to higher speeds. But, as Levy points out in other articles, Amtrak’s Northeast Corridor plans are far more expensive than they need to be.
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DC Metro’s Accelerating Decline

By | | Transportation, Urban areas
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Washington Metro Rail ridership in the second quarter of 2016 (the fourth quarter of Metro’s fiscal year) declined a whopping 11 percent. The drop in ridership started before major service disruptions in order to do track maintenance began in June: ridership in May, for example, was 9 percent lower on weekdays and 20 percent lower on weekends than in 2015.

Bus ridership for the quarter was 6 percent lower than in 2015. For all of F.Y. 2016, rail ridership was 7 percent lower and bus ridership 4 percent lower than in F.Y. 2015.

Metro officials offered several explanations for the decline, including lower gas prices, loss of public confidence in the system’s reliability and safety, and the early blooming of cherry blossoms that normally attracts many tourists. But ridership has declined in every year since 2012, suggesting that at least some of the decline is irreversible.

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More on Housing and Inequality

By | | Housing
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NPR tells the story of the impact of the 2008 financial crisis on black middle-class families: on average, they lost a much larger share of their wealth than whites. But NPR fails to relate this to land-use regulation that is promoted by whites who consider themselves “progressives.”

Similarly, a Trulia analysis of differences in housing prices among cities lamely credits the differences to “a lack of housing construction” in some regions, without suggesting why those regions aren’t building housing. Trulia also suggests that these trends are leading to “regional inequality” without mentioning inequality among individuals.

These issues are largely corrected in a new paper by Joel Kotkin, who makes it clear that “progressive policies” such as urban-growth boundaries are causing the high housing prices in some regions and, in turn, growing income inequality. Kotkin points to MIT economist Matthew Rognlie’s research showing that housing is the principle cause of growing inequality in both the United States and Europe.
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The Land of Skinny Roads and Skinny Houses

By | | Housing
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Much of England and Wales reminds me of the Willamette Valley where I grew up: rolling hills covered with forests, farms, and cities. But Britain’s infrastructure would look completely out of place in most of the United States, being dominated by narrow roads and small houses. As an example of skinny roads, here’s a car parked in a small hamlet in Norfolk.


Parking in what Americans would consider the middle of the road, completely blocking one lane of traffic, is considered completely normal in Britain.

Because there is no parking strip and no shoulders, the car is blocking one entire lane, turning the two-lane road into a single-lane road. This is not unusual; auto drivers do this all the time everywhere from busy roads in resort areas to big cities. Parking appears to be first-come, first-served, so if someone parks on the north side of a street, no one will park on the south side (which would completely block the road) of that part of the street, but they might park on the south side a few car lengths away. The Antiplanner has already complained about the country’s narrow roads; the rest of today’s post will focus on housing.

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Rail Transit’s Endless Hunger for Money

By | | Transportation
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In 2008, Santa Clara County voters approved a sales tax increase to build a BART line to San Jose. But cost overruns have forced the county’s Valley Transportation Authority (VTA) to go back to the voters for yet another tax increase. To make it more attractive, it says only a quarter of the tax increase will go to BART while the rest will be used for highways, bikeways, and some transit projects.

As described in the San Jose Mercury-News, the list of projects looks balanced: $1.5 billion for BART, $1.2 billion for street repairs, $1.85 billion for highways, $1.0 billion for CalTrains, $500 million for “transit for vulnerable and underserved populations,” and $250 million for pedestrian and bikeway improvements. A closer look at the measure, however, reveals that it is anything but balanced.

The $1.2 billion for “street repairs” is actually going to go for “complete streets” programs, which means taking away street capacity from cars and giving it to transit, bikes, and pedestrians. A significant chunk of the $1.85 billion for highways will actually go to constructing bus-rapid transit lanes, and some may even go for a new light-rail line. Motor vehicle users will be lucky to see any projects that actually relieve traffic congestion.

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