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Monthly Archives: November 2018

The Grinch?

By | | Transportation
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The “New Normal”: Transit Is Off the Rails

By | | Transportation
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A wheel fell off one of the cars on a Boston commuter train Tuesday morning, leading to delays and frustrated commuters. The main injury was to the reputation of Keolis, the French company that has a $2.7 billion contract to operate Boston commuter trains for eight years.

Keolis may not be entirely at fault, however, as the Boston transit system has been neglected for years and has a multi-billion-dollar maintenance backlog. “It’s a really unfortunate situation that we inherited with this incredible dis-investment in the system,” says an MBTA official. “The good news is, we have tripled our expenditure to about $900 million a year.” The article quoting the official doesn’t say how they are spending $900 million a year, but given the context, he must mean maintenance and capital replacement. However, this is hard to verify considering MBTA hasn’t posted an annual budget since 2016.

Whatever they are spending on maintenance, it may be too little, too late. Boston transit ridership has been dropping, down 2 percent in the most recent quarter and 13 percent since 2014 (according to the most recent National Transit Database update). As an MBTA officials observes, “This type of ridership trend is in line with a national trend.” Continue reading →

Why Americans Prefer SUVs

By | | Transportation
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The news that General Motors is going to stop producing a lot of cars has created a lot of confusion, making it appear that GM is near failure. In fact, this announcement parallels a similar one from Ford earlier this year and one from Chrysler in 2016: all three companies are focusing on SUVs and other truck-like vehicles rather than cars. The main difference was that GM, unlike Ford and Chrysler, accompanied its announcement with a list of several factories that it planned to close.

The reality is that Americans have good reasons to prefer SUVs over cars, and GM, Ford, and Chrysler are simply responding to market demand. One of the most important advantages SUVs have is comfort: because they are taller, they have a higher hip point or H-point, meaning riders are sitting upright with their feet well below their hips instead of sticking out in front of them.

Before World War II, most cars had a high hip point, and it wasn’t until after the war that low-hip-point popular vehicles (as opposed to sports cars) were pioneered by Studebaker and Kaiser. Curiously, the vehicle regarded as the first SUV, the Willys Jeep station wagon, was also made by Kaiser for many years. Continue reading →

Dumb Trains

By | | Transportation
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Economist Mike Arnold argues that the Sonoma-Marin “SMART” commuter train is “falling short of its promises,” and those who say it is doing well are using “alternative facts” (or, as Colbert would say, “truthiness”). Among other things, he says that, of 26 commuter rail operations in the U.S., SMART’s ridership ranks only number 23.

That might not be fair considering that many commuter rail systems operate over far greater distances than SMART, whose line is 43 miles long. For a better idea of how the SMART train stacks up, I compiled data for other new commuter-rail operations below. I left out legacy operations in New York, Chicago, Boston, Philadelphia, and CalTrains in San Francisco as these are all going to do far better than most of the new ones. I also left out Amtrak’s Downeaster, which is an intercity (Boston-Portland) train that the FTA includes in its database as it has received from FTA funding. I included lines the FTA calls “hybrid rail” such as trains in Austin and Portland as the local transit agencies often call these commuter rail. All of the data are from the 2017 National Transit Database except for the SMART train, which didn’t begin operating until FY 2018; for this I took data from Arnold’s article.

TrainWeekday
Trips		Route
Miles		Trips/
Mile		PM/VRM
(Occupancy)
LA Metrolink51,27634015132
FL TriRail13,9997618434
DFW Trinity7,4132827025
DC-Virginia19,0029121059
DC-Maryland34,09723614542
Seattle Sounder17,2178021758
SD Coaster4,970519828
MSP North Star2,819358235
Denver A Line20,9562874836
Orlando SunRail3,4131621320
SCL FrontRunner17,5846029323
Nashville Star1,082176623
NM Rail Runner2,825575028
Altamont4,985717051
NJ River Line8,6332830531
SD Sprinter8,2671650932
Portland WES1,7981512223
Austin MetroRail2,904329043
DFW A-Train1,841218814
SMART2,4004356~15

Continue reading →

The Camp Fire

By | | Wildfire
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When the Antiplanner looks at before-and-after aerial photos of the fire in Paradise, California that killed at least 84 people, the first thing I think is that, like last year’s Santa Rosa fire, the houses were built too closely together. This made it impossible, short of building a home exclusively of concrete, to defend homes from fire. Once one house caught on fire, its neighbors would be ignited by the radiant heat of the first.

As described in a Los Angeles Time article, the best way to prevent such “structure to structure ignition” is to build homes at least 100 feet apart. California law in fact requires that homeowners provide a 100-foot perimeter of “defensible space,” but the law doesn’t require that homes be built 100 feet apart. As the Times notes, the “100-foot requirement stops at the property line.”

Unfortunately, urban planners’ mania for density makes it difficult, if not impossible, for California developers to lay out homesites on one-acre lots, which would insure at least 100 feet between homes. While I don’t know the situation in Paradise, population data indicate that much of the growth of the city has been since 1970, when many California cities and counties began limiting low-density development. Continue reading →

Why San Antonio Shouldn’t Spend More on Transit

By | | Transportation
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“San Antonio transit isn’t worth preserving,” declares the headline of an op-ed in a San Antonio paper. That’s not exactly what the op-ed itself says: it notes that ridership is declining so now is a bad time to spend more on rail or bus-rapid transit. Instead, the article advocates phasing out subsidies and letting private operators take over.

The Antiplanner is still on the road, speaking in Sacramento tonight. It is also referred to as a weekend away with their partner. soft viagra tablets Other procedures of plastic surgery are lip enhancement, levitra generic india liposuction, butt augmentation, Rhinoplasty, hair restoration, Botox fill and pediatrics. If you find any sort of allergic reaction due to pill cheap viagra no rx then immediately talk to the doctor about it. Fat cells are engaged in the switching of testosterone viagra generico mastercard into estrogen in males, which plays the responsibility of preserving bone solidity. The air here is filled with smoke from the Camp fire. I hope to take a closer look at this fire and report on it either Friday or early next week. In the meantime, have a happy and safe Thanksgiving.

How Much Density Is Enough?

By | | Regional planning
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Portland New Urbanist Joe Cortright has rarely seen a high-density development he didn’t like. Like Marxist economists who always begin their papers by referring to quotations from Karl Marx, Cortright takes his cues from Jane Jacobs.

Most recently, he argues that the reason why most Millennials, along with most people of almost all other categories, live in suburbs is that they are forced to do so by evil zoning rules that prohibit that densities that people actually prefer. Or, as he put it, there is a “pent-up demand for more urban neighborhoods that can’t be satisfied because of zoning.”

He bases his claim on a survey of people in Atlanta and Boston asking whether they would prefer to live in a walkable neighborhood or an auto-oriented neighborhood. More people in Atlanta preferred auto-oriented neighborhoods, and 90 to 95 percent of the auto-oriented people in both cities actually lived in auto-oriented neighborhoods. However, in Atlanta, just 48 percent of people who said they preferred walkable neighborhoods were able to live in such neighborhoods, compared with 83 percent in Boston. Cortright attributes the shortfall in walkable neighborhoods to zoning. Continue reading →

Amtrak and Securities Fraud

By | | Transportation
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Amtrak claims that its FY 2018 operating losses were the “lowest in decades” at a mere $168 million. However, there is no way to verify this because Amtrak has not yet published its FY 2018 financial reports.

Private companies are not allowed to drop hints about their financial health before the official results are released to the public. Elon Musk and Tesla got fined $40 million for securities fraud after sending out tweets before the release of Tesla’s annual report. But Amtrak gets away with the same sort of fraud that it commits in a blatant effort to boost its political standing.

Here are the numbers in Amtrak’s press release: total revenues were $3.38 billion; capital investments were $1.46 billion; and operating losses were $168 million. An AP story adds that Amtrak received $1.9 billion in federal subsidies. But what do these numbers mean? Continue reading →

California Romance Forums

By | | Housekeeping
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On Monday the Antiplanner announced a road trip to publicize Romance of the Rails, but didn’t have details for next weeks forums in California. Here they are.

Monday, November 19: 7:00 pm (registration begins at 6:15), Black Bear Diner, 415 E. El Camino Real, Sunnyvale. Sponsored by the Silicon Valley Taxpayers Association. Click here for more information and to preregister; $25 charge for members of SVTA, $35 for non-members, includes dinner and a beverage.

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If you are in the Bay Area or Sacramento, I hope to see you at one of these events.

Rotaries Gone Wild

By | | Transportation
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Are roundabouts, also known as rotaries or traffic circles, a safe and efficient way of getting vehicles through intersections or a dastardly plot to force people to stop driving by so increasing congestion that other modes will seem more attractive? The answer could go either way depending on the specific roundabout. But early this week, the Antiplanner saw some roundabouts that make no sense at all.

Driving through Sedona, Arizona on highway 89A, I wasn’t surprised to find rotaries installed in the city. Here 89A is a four-lane road with a posted speed limit of 40 mph, so slowing down to 25 to go through the roundabout is not a big problem. Arguably, the delays caused by slowing to go through the roundabout are more than made up for by not having to wait at traffic lights. Continue reading →