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Monthly Archives: July 2018

Can Government Shrink?

By | | News commentary
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“Limited government” is one of the key goals of the Cato Institute and libertarians in general. Research shows that “small governments . . . report better economic performance than big governments.” But it is one thing to compare two governments side by side. It is quite another thing to actually reduce the size of government.

Recent events suggest that shrinking government may be impossible. A slight majority of voters in Britain agreed to leave the European Union motivated, at least in part, by the idea that big-government bureaucrats in Brussels shouldn’t dictate policy to people in the United Kingdom. Yet actually carrying out an exit is proving to be far more difficult than imagined.

Similarly, Donald Trump campaigned for president on a promise that he would “drain the swamp,” which the Antiplanner interprets to mean reduce the size of the federal government. Many Republican members of Congress also claim to support smaller government. Yet, under a Republican Congress, deficits and debt are increasing. Meanwhile, Trump’s solution to many problems is to throw money at them. Continue reading →

Music City Star Still Falls Short

By | | Transportation, Urban areas
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The Middle Tennessee Regional Transportation Authority reported that ridership on its Music City Star commuter train showed a “substantial increase” in its latest fiscal year (which ended June 30, 2018). The agency claimed that the train carried 269,296 passengers in F.Y. 2018 vs. 258,360 in F.Y. 2017.

The Antiplanner isn’t sure why a 4 percent increase is considered “substantial,” especially since the population of Wilson County, which is served by the train, grew by 3 percent. At least it is bucking the trend of transit ridership decline, but that’s not necessarily a reason to celebrate either.

When the train was planned in 2004, it was projected to carry an average of 1,900 weekday riders in its first year and cost $3 million a year to operate (about $3.6 million in today’s dollars). In fact, more than a decade after it opened, it is still carrying less than 1,200 weekday riders, while its operating costs are at least $5.2 million a year (plus it cost about 40 percent more to start up than anticipated). High costs and low ridership mean the costs per rider are around 130 percent greater than expected. Fares, of course, are not, and covered only 17 percent of operating costs in 2016. Continue reading →

The Consultant Report on Why Seattle’s
Latest Streetcar Line Is Late Is Late

By | | Transportation
5 Comments

Construction of Seattle’s latest streetcar line is late and over budget, so the mayor halted construction and hired a consultant to find out why. Now the consultant report itself is late.

The city knew that the problem had to do with the fact that construction turned out to be more complicated than the city anticipated. Now the consultant says that figuring out the problem turned out to be more complicated than the consultant anticipated.

Seattle shouldn’t have had to pay a consultant $146,000 to figure out the problem. The problem is simple: streetcars are stupid. They are obsolete technology. When invented in 1888, they averaged 8 mph. Now, after 130 of technological improvements, they average 8 mph. The tracks intrude into the streets, creating problems for other utilities and cyclists. When one breaks down, the others can’t go around it. Continue reading →

Welcome to Buckeye

By | | Housing
8 Comments

In a master-planned community called Tartesso, homebuilder D.B. Horton is building and selling homes for as little as $82 a square foot. Considering that the city of Portland, which is hardly the nation’s least-affordable housing market, thinks that $651 a square foot is “affordable housing,” how does D.B. Horton manage to build homes for less than one-seventh of that cost?

Tartesso is located in the Phoenix suburb of Buckeye, which is the biggest city in America you’ve probably never heard of: at 392 square miles, it’s has the fifteenth-largest area of any city in America. But many of the bigger ones are more counties than cities; really, only Los Angeles, Houston, San Antonio, Oklahoma City, and Phoenix itself occupy more land. Continue reading →

Peasant Stories

By | | Transportation
3 Comments

News flash: A state-sponsored company in China has announced that has developed an electric typewriter that is faster than an IBM Selectric. HCN (whose motto is “we’re one step beyond IBM”) plans to sell an electric typewriter that allows typists to type more words per minute than any previous electric typewriter.

This demonstrates that the United States is falling behind in the critical electric typewriter race, just one more field in which other countries are demonstrating their technological superiority. IBM hasn’t even made a Selectric typewriter in the United States since the 1980s, which must be another example of manufacturing jobs being shipped overseas. Members of Congress have reacted by proposing to tax word processing software so that the federal government can raise the billions of dollars needed to restore American technological superiority in this vital field.

Sounds ridiculous? Of course. Yet how is this different from saying that, because China, Japan, France, and Spain are losing money on new high-speed rail lines, we need to lose money building high-speed rail lines as well? Perhaps we should tax airlines to subsidize high-speed rail in the same way that some cities and states are taxing ride hailing to subsidize public transit. Continue reading →

Can Transit Save Itself by Going Driverless?

By | | Transportation
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With ridership declining, fare revenues are also declining, and these revenues provide an average of one-third of transit agency operating funds. One way transit agencies can save money is to go driverless. While driverless buses are several years away, driverless rail lines have been around for quite some time.

The International Public Transport Association defines three levels of automated transit: level 4 requires no human operators; level 3 requires a human operator just for emergency situations; and level 2 requires a human operator for emergencies and to close the doors. Level 1 is unautomated.

Most airport trains in the United States are level 4. While BART and Washington Metro could have been level four, unions demanded at least “one employee per train,” so they were operated as level 2. Since the 2009 crash, which was caused by failure to maintain the computer system, most DC Metro lines have been operated as level 1. Honolulu’s rail line is supposed to be fully automated, but it isn’t certain it will ever be finished as its cost is proving to be far greater than expected. Continue reading →

Can Transit Survive Driverless Ride Hailing?

By | | Transportation
6 Comments

Should cities be building new transit infrastructure when driverless cars may be just around the corner? That’s the question asked by a New York Times article last Friday. The answers provided by a range of experts were far more balanced than a previous Times article about transit, which took for granted that transit was good and anyone skeptical of it was bad.

Last Friday’s report was far more broad minded. “Don’t build a light rail system now,” it quoted a venture capitalist as saying. “Please, please, please, please don’t” until we see how driverless cars “plays out.”

The article also quoted driverless car supporter Brad Templeton, who has promoted “robocars” for years, arguing that driverless cars can move people far more efficiently than forms of transit. Templeton claims that transit supporters are people who “just believe there is something pure and good about riding together, that it must be the right answer.” Continue reading →

Florida Influencers Are Ignorant Idiots

By | | Transportation
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More than 9.1 million people worked in Florida in 2016. Of those, 8 million of them drove to work. More than half a million worked at home. Only 187,000, just 2 percent, took transit to work. More Floridians walked or bicycled to work than took transit.

Yet a survey of 50 people who the Miami Herald dubs “the Influencers” — supposedly the state’s leading figures — found that 80 percent of them believe that increasing funding for transit should be the state’s top infrastructure priority. This only proves that these so-called influencers don’t know what they are talking about and shouldn’t be allowed to influence anything.

Miami-Ft. Lauderdale-West Palm Beach has already spent $1.2 billion on a commuter-rail line that carries fewer than 7,000 commuters to work each day. Miami also spent well over a billion dollars on a so-called rapid-transit line whose revenues cover only 20 percent of its operating costs. As if that’s not bad enough, Miami spent $153 million on a people-mover system that costs another $40 million a year to operate and maintain yet earns no fare revenues. Continue reading →

Light Rail Average Cost Is $202 Million/Mile

By | | Transportation
4 Comments

Here’s a fun question to think about: what will be the last rail transit project built in America? Will it be one of the projects currently on the Federal Transit Administration’s current list of grant projects? Or will some other city come up with a doofus proposal after all of the projects on the current list are either done or, better, cancelled?

For fiscal year 2019, the FTA proposed to fund just ten projects, including eight new construction projects and two improvements to existing transit lines. One of the eight new projects, Portland-Milwaukie light rail, is actually already finished and many of the others are partly finished.

While the Trump administration’s official policy is that it will not give out any new construction grants, the process has several stages before projects reach the construction phase, including project development and engineering. The administration has added at least ten new projects to the development or engineering phases. The current list has a total of 66 projects. Continue reading →

The Wildfires of Summer

By | | Wildfire
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It’s the height of summer, which means the Antiplanner is thinking about hiking in nearby national forests before they get filled with smoke from wildfires. This year has already seen 3.4 million acres burn, mostly in the South and the Rocky Mountains. That’s slightly more than average, but big fires in the Pacific Coast states have yet to come.

A friend of mine forwarded to me a copy of a letter from a retired logger to his Congressional delegation criticizing the Forest Service and other federal land agencies for their firefighting tactics. He remembers when firefighters engaged in “direct attack,” meaning they drove or hiked to the edge of the fire, built a fire line (which means removing all vegetation from an area that is at least several feet wide), and then worked to keep the fire from crossing that line. Firefighters still build firelines today, but, he observes, they typically do it “miles (in places 10 or more) from the actual fire.”

That has been my observation as well, and I believe the change came about as a result of Colorado’s South Canyon Fire, in which fourteen firefighters who were engaged in direct attack were killed in what is known as a “burnover.” Basically, the fire jumped across the firelines and surrounded them. Continue reading →