Half truths, innuendo, and pseudo-science form the basis of a recent response to the Antiplanner’s recent paper, Intercity Buses: The Forgotten Mode. The basic thesis of the response is that intercity buses have a role to play in a “balanced transportation system,” but they are “no replacement for high-speed rail.”
Of course, the Antiplanner never argued that buses were a replacement for true high-speed rail. But it did show that existing bus schedules in many corridors are faster, more frequent, and charge far lower fares than Amtrak in the same corridors. Of course, there is a “replacement” for high-speed rail: it is called “air travel” and it is far faster and costs about a fifth as much per passenger mile as Amtrak’s Acela.
In any case, America 2050 says the Antiplanner ignored “one of the most powerful arguments for rail: providing an alternative to highway congestion.” I didn’t address that argument in the paper on buses because, as I’ve shown before, it’s a stupid argument. Highways move about 85 percent of all passenger travel, and more than a quarter of all ton-miles of freight in this country. If they are congested, maybe we should relieve that congestion rather than spending hundreds of billions of dollars on an elitist rail network that won’t relieve congestion and won’t carry than a tiny fraction of the number of people (and none of the freight) moved on the highways.
But we can’t fix highway congestion, says America 2050: “providing additional road space does not solve congestion; in fact it creates additional demand for driving.” That’s another stupid argument for four reasons. First, my bus paper never advocated building new roads, and if asked, I would have suggested relieving congestion using congestion pricing of roads before building new capacity.
Second, the idea that building roads creates demand is totally absurd. As the Antiplanner’s friend, Wendell Cox, says, it is akin to saying that building maternity wards leads people to have more babies.
Third, those who argue that we shouldn’t build roads because people will drive on them are effectively arguing that government shouldn’t provide anything that people will use; only what they won’t use (such as high-speed trains). If that’s the case, government should just get out of the transportation business entirely and leave it to the private sector.
Finally, most congestion is in cities, not between them, so building rail lines between cities isn’t going to help much. Of course, planners don’t want to relieve congestion anywhere because they hope congestion will persuade a few people to stop driving.
America 2050 goes on to say that “one railway with a single track in each direction has the capacity to transport as many people per hour as sixteen lanes of highway.” While I could dispute that number, even if true, capacity doesn’t matter unless people actually use that capacity. Amtrak has 6 percent of the passenger market between Boston and Washington; highways, mainly Interstate 95, have 80 percent. Interstate 95 and parallel roads probably have less than 16 lanes, yet they carry 13 times as many passenger miles.
“High-speed trains allow passengers to bypass this congestion,” America 2050 goes on to say, “bringing passengers directly into center cities.” Yes, but who wants to go directly into center cities? Less than 8 percent of American jobs and less than 1 percent of America’s population lives in city centers (which is why I call high-speed rail “elitist”). In many, if not most, urban areas, more people and more jobs are located near airports than near train stations, and virtually everyone is near a highway.
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America 2050 then challenges some Antiplanner statements that it says are “flatly incorrect.” “To count passenger miles,” says the article, the Antiplanner “uses the American Bus Association’s 2005 Motorcoach Census, which counts passenger-miles logged by intracity airport shuttles, sightseeing tours, and private commuter buses, amongst other categories that are not making cross country or intercity trips.” Critics should read the papers they are reviewing before they stick their feet in their mouths. First, I used the 2007 Motorcoach Census, but more important, I counted only those passenger miles (about a quarter of the total) attributable to scheduled intercity buses.
When comparing bus vs. rail safey, the Antiplanner “counts passenger miles only for Amtrak trains, while counting fatalities for all passenger trains, including commuter rail,” says America 2050. Hardly. National Transportation Statistics reports that commuter trains suffered about 20 to 60 fatalities per year over the past two decades; the fatalities I reported ranged from 3 to 24 per year (except in 1993 when there were 58), which obviously does not include the commuter rail fatalities. That 1993 number may have skewed my data upwards; but rail fatalities are nevertheless higher than bus fatalities per billion passenger miles.
America 2050 then goes into the question of subsidies, noting there are large subsidies to highways. “Recently, the Highway Trust Fund has received bailouts of $8 billion in 2008, $7 billion in 2009, and $20 billion in 2010.” As the Antiplanner has noted before, those bailouts were not subsidies to highways; they were subsidies to pork barrel. If Congress had not diverted a third of gas tax revenues to non-highway projects, and then mandated spending on those projects even if gas tax revenues fell short, the bailouts would not have been necessary.
It is true that highway subsidies are real (mainly at the local level), but when compared with highway usage, which is on the order of 4 trillion passenger miles and 1 trillion ton miles of freight per year, the subsidies are trivial: about a penny per passenger mile at most. Since intercity buses operate with about twice the occupancy rates of other vehicles, subsidies to them are probably much lower (and were taken into account in the numbers my paper cited). By comparison, subsidies to Amtrak are close to 30 cents a passenger mile and subsidies to most high-speed rail lines will be much more.
America 2050 concludes by saying, “Intercity buses provide a valuable service and are an important part of a complete and balanced transportation system.” Who can argue with “balanced”? With respect to buses, America 2050 would give the high-use transport corridors–the cream of any transport service–to subsidized rail, leaving the dregs to buses (which would then require subsidies to serve those dregs).
The question is: how do you measure “balanced”? Apparently, America 2050’s answer is “balanced means taking the fees you pay to drive and spending them on my favored mode of transport while you sit stuck in traffic.” By contrast, the Antiplanner’s answer is: if it can be done without subsidies, then it is balanced. Let’s just end the subsidies to all modes of transportation and see what happens.
The America 2050 article raises one more question: Just who the heck is America 2050? The web site doesn’t say except to note it is funded by Rockefeller, Ford, Surdna, and a variety of other foundations. America 2050 has never filed a report with the Internal Revenue Service, indicating it is really a front for some other group. As it turns out, its street address is identical to that of the Regional Plan Association–yet I can’t find any cross-links between the web sites of the two groups.
Almost every page on America 2050’s web site does have a link to Transportation for America, which itself is a front group for Reconnecting America. Curiously, the link goes not to Transportation for America’s web site but to Smart Growth America’s page advertising Transportation for America. Why does America 2050 promote these groups but not its own parent group, the Regional Plan Association?
The stated mission of the Regional Plan Association is to “promote the improvement of the quality of life and the economy of the New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut tri-state region.” Just how does creating a front group advocating for a national high-speed rail system, other national infrastructure projects, and megaregional planning promote the improvement of the tri-state region? One possible answer is that the Regional Plan Association figures that increases in federal transportation spending will benefit the tri-state region as much as anywhere else. Maybe they should change their name to the “Regional Pork Association.”
America 2050 wrote (with emphasis added):
While using a bus instead of an automobile may intuitively seem to ease congestion by reducing individual car trips and leaving more road space for other highway users, planners have known for decades that providing additional road space does not solve congestion; in fact it creates additional demand for driving. Indeed, despite public spending of $2.8 trillion on highways between 1982 and 2008, congestion only worsened during that period, with average time wasted in traffic increasing 340 percent to 34 hours per year.
And most of that $2.8 trillion was to maintain and preserve the highway system, not to expand it. Without a breakdown of what those dollars were spent for, the claim above is meaningless.
America 2050 also wrote (with emphasis added):
O’Toole’s main complaint about trains is that they are heavily subsidized. It is true that like all other forms of transportation, including intercity buses, rail is subsidized. According to the nonpartisan Pew Charitable Trusts’ SubsidyScope program, passenger rail received direct expenditure subsidies of nearly $2.4 billion between 2000 and 2009. This subsidy would have been greater, but Amtrak’s profitable Acela Express service generates enough revenue to support other lines, bringing in over $100 million in annual net revenue for both 2009 and 2010. This highly profitable service is exactly what Mr. O’Toole urges Americans not to build in his policy analysis.
Nothing that Amtrak runs meets my definition of “profitable.” Not even Acela. It may cover its operating costs, but that’s not the same thing as “profitable,” for profitable implies covering the capital costs in addition to the operating costs.
On a related story, how many balloons does it take to stop an entire electrified railroad?
Just one. See this story from Sweden for details.
Interesting side note; Highwayman is commenting on the America 2050 site under the name Andrew.
Anyway, we are not dealing with people who want to sit down and have a rational conversation. They’ve got their preference for rail, and facts and costs aren’t going to get in the way. This is part of a larger group that wants to fundamentally change the way Americans live, for its own selfish reasons.
What I find even more insulting about these groups is that while the Soviets found trouble successfully implementing 5 year plans, these shadow smart growth groups have doubled down and written 50 year plans. Come on! Who knows what transport modality we will enjoy in 2050? Probably not high speed rail.
While I do not agree with many of Mr. O’Toole’s assertions on today’s post, I would like to praise him for his continued advocacy for intercity bus transit.
I have personally seen “the forgotten mode” work wonders, particularly in regions with several small urban (10,000-200,000) areas. I too think that intercity bus is a forgotten mobility solution, and one that can work wonders for both regional transit agencies/authorities and private companies.
This is one of the Antiplanner’s best posts. It really lays it out clearly and succinctly. I cannot agree more with this sentiment: “Let’s just end the subsidies to all modes of transportation and see what happens.”
Of course, I expect some with a stake in the transfer game to rely on emotional appeals and play the greed card or to use the children or the elderly as pawns to support their personal bias.
Interesting side note; Highwayman is commenting on the America 2050 site under the name Andrew.
????
I am not Highwayman. Randall knows who I am and has my email, and I assume he knows who Highwayman is, which is someone other than me.
bennett:
Let’s just end the subsidies to all modes of transportation and see what happens.
Which should be prefaced by, “Now that we have spent untold trillions of tax dollars establishing the very existence of the air and highway modes while sitting idly by as private industry investment in rail, trolley, and bus mass transit is forced into abandonment through less than benign neglect and overall high taxation and regulatory burden,” lets just end the subsidies and see what happens.
Its like a race where one of the competitors is kneecapped by a thug just before the start and then chastised for his failure to finish.
Andrew, I wasn’t implying that you are Highwayman. I was just saying that he is commenting on that site under the name “Andrew”, which I assume is his real name. My apologies if you thought otherwise.
Andrew posted:
Which should be prefaced by, “Now that we have spent untold trillions of tax dollars establishing the very existence of the air and highway modes while sitting idly by as private industry investment in rail, trolley, and bus mass transit is forced into abandonment through less than benign neglect and overall high taxation and regulatory burden,†lets just end the subsidies and see what happens.
Are you asserting that the B&O, Pennsylvania, Union Pacific and Central Pacific Railroads were built without any help from taxpayers?
Andrew,
You make a great point! But I didn’t say the quote you referenced, it was Frank and Mr. O’Toole.
Frank wrote:
This is one of the Antiplanner’s best posts. It really lays it out clearly and succinctly. I cannot agree more with this sentiment: “Let’s just end the subsidies to all modes of transportation and see what happens.â€
I agree that it’s a good post. However, I respectfully assert that it is not reasonable to assume that all transportation subsidies can be ended – for example, the so-called “Bridge to Nowhere” between Ketchikan, Alaska and Gravina Island would have greatly improved connections between Ketchikan and its airport, which is a very important mode of transportation in that part of the world – and connecting Ketchican to the national transportation network is a reasonable thing, even though it would have required significant federal subsidy.
Of course, I expect some with a stake in the transfer game to rely on emotional appeals and play the greed card or to use the children or the elderly as pawns to support their personal bias.
I am paid by tax dollars to collect data on how well our transportation system performs. I have made that clear in the past, and I will continue to do so.
Most of the time, I find myself in agreement with what Randal says and writes, especially when tax money-burning passenger rail systems are being discussed. And I share his distaste for funding Smart Growth and related taxpayer-funded social engineering projects, which have a pretty dismal record.
Smart Growth…social engineering projects = American consumer preferences.
Wow. Who knew?
DS
Do you think we’re stupid, lying planner? Those sort of surveys are filled with questions and choices that slant the answers toward supporting smart (dumb) growth.
By the way, how’s your UW master’s degree coming along?
Dan’s a broken record. He posted the same survey twice in April, once labeling it as “the vast majority of surveys”.
The survey that Dan references shows that the vast majority wants to live in a single-family detached house, just like Dan. A large majority prefer “houses are built far apart on larger lots” that require a “rive to get to schools, stores and restaurants”, just like Dan’s neighborhood, where one of the nearest restaurants is Taco Bell. (A minority, 37%, would prefer a neighborhood with houses “built close together on smaller lots and it is easy to walk to schools, stores and restaurants”.)
Also love this question and response:
Will the next home you purchase be larger or smaller than your current home?
Larger–62%
Also striking is the fact that only 55% of the respondents were employed at the time of the survey.
There is, simply, no need to blatantly misstate the findings of the several surveys at the link (a link to people who knows what sells houses, no less), or how I presented them (feel free to post a link that contains all the surveys), unless flailing folk have to make up sh…stuff to have something to say.
Making up stuff (and omitting other broken-record statements) aside, the fact is that when folk have an actual choice, they’d like to have something to walk to and a shorter commute and a non-tickytack neighborhood. That’s what the surveys find. No need to hand-flap or dissemble away from that.
So folks want a large house in a walkable neighborhood that cuts down their time spent driving. So what?
And since we know that walkable neighborhoods held their value better (and had fewer foreclosures and waiting lists to get in) than the McSprawl neighborhoods, we have both stated and revealed preference findings that frustrate the worldviews of small-minority ideologies. Twofer.
Dan
The whole argument really is that you can’t predict the future reliably. So you can’t plan for a distant future and expect satisfactory ends. Planning transportation as to what it will be like in 50 years is rather absurd.
Who knows we may have transporters by then.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KnUqGTNezME
Let’s see.
“blatantly misstate”…check
“flailing”…check
“make up sh…”…check
“broken-record statements”…check
“McSprawl neighborhoods”…check
“small-minority ideologies”…check
“Twofer”…check
mentally ill planner…double check!
You forgot:
hand-flap
dissemble
to have something to say
As for McSprawl neighborhoods, Dan’s trying to hand-flap away from the fact that he lives in a suburban neighborhood has a walk score of 11! Car dependent to the max!
Second, the idea that building roads creates demand is totally absurd.
Well, this depends if you’ve got a congestion charge or VMT tax in place or not. If not, creating new free road space does increase road usage, just as releasing free ice cream increases ice cream usage.
Thank you for the transparent and clumsy try at changing the subject away from the fact you made sh– up, Frank.
Why don’t you make up something else implicitly dishonest – how much I loooovee the neighborhood while you’re at it? Why don’t you, oh, I don’t know: mischaracterize some more about the findings of the surveys? What else can you do to flap your hands and distract away from increasingly, American consumer preferences refute the worldview of some minor ideology? You can do it, Frank. More spam to soothe the cognitive dissonance.
DS
What exactly am I making up?
Clicking on the link you provided leads to a page with a link to a pdf.
Here are some questions and results pulled from that PDF:
Page 3:
Q4. Which of the following best describes the place where you live:
City – downtown, with a mix of offices, apartments, and shops
5%
City – more residential neighborhood
19%
Suburban neighborhood with a mix of houses, shops, and businesses
26%
Suburban neighborhood with houses only
19%
Small town
14%
Rural area
16%
DK/REF
1%
Q6. Right now, if you could choose, which of the following would you prefer to live in:
Single-family detached house
80%
Single family attached house or townhouse
7%
An apartment or condominium
8%
A mobile home
2%
Something else
1%
DK/REF
1%
Imagine for a moment that you are moving to another community. These questions are about the kind of community you would like to live in. Please select the community where you would prefer to live: (RANDOMIZE, ROTATE A/B)
Q8a. (SPLIT SAMPLE A, n=1,026) Community A: Houses are built far apart on larger lots and you have to drive to get to schools, stores and restaurants, or
Community B: Houses are built close together on smaller lots and it is easy to walk to schools, stores and restaurants.
Community A
61%
Community B
37%
DK/REF
2%
Now I have a few questions for statistical purposes only.
D0. Are you currently employed?
Yes
55%
No
44%
DK/REF
1%
D8b. (IF D8=YES n=376) Will the next home you purchase be larger or smaller than your current home?
Larger
62%
Smaller
14%
Same size
23%
DK/REF
1%
Come on, Dan. What am I making up? Please enlighten me. Stop using your catch phrases and tell me specifically what I made up in #15?
Sorry Frank, don’t expect an answer. But based on the material you quoted, it’s strange that Dan somehow deduced that most people want smart growth. I guess it’s a matter of “interpreting” the numbers correctly and taking the right dosage of your preferred planner’s opiate.
Frank, you made it up that a sample link to several surveys was something characterized by me as ‘vast majority of surveys’. You made it up by implying that the traditional suburban model was the result in the Realtor survey; alternatively, maybe you just don’t know how to read the results and were confused (some contradictory findings in teh surveh of the new normal, surely). You made it up that…well…I don’t really know – maybe that the large house thing is seen as the opposite of what…oh…I don’t know, something that socialists want.
So anyway, the latest Realtor survey (and the other one I included) is the opposite of what was the implication by CPZ above:
o Only one in ten (12%) say they would prefer a suburban neighborhood with houses only.
o Six in ten (59%) would choose a smaller house and lot if it meant a commute time of 20 minutes or less.
o 77% places to take walks, 66% easy walk to places.
o Over prior survey, 5% more people this year said their community needed more public transportation, 4% more wanted more walkable amenities.
o 88% more value on the quality of the neighborhood than the size of the home.
o 41% largest house you can afford.
o 87% privacy from neighbors.
o 56% wanted the community that described SG.
o 50% see improvements to existing public transportation rather than new roads and developments.
Hardly results that show that folks want the big house on a half-acre. Just like all the other surveys I’ve linked to over the years here.
Not that big of a deal, really. Not a socialist dream. Not a radical shift to high-rises, just tired of the drive and the ticky-tack, and just a neighborhood where you don’t have to drive to go to the bathroom, as Florida sez:
Thanks!
DS
People spend years dreaming of what house they want, talking to friends and family, looking at houses, comparing the options, etc. They invest a large portion of their wealth in their decision.
People spend two minutes filling out surveys responding to hypothetical slanted surveys.
but Dan spent so much time harrumphing and hand flapping as he wrote his long-winded response. Shouldn’t that account for anything??
CPZ:
Are you asserting that the B&O, Pennsylvania, Union Pacific and Central Pacific Railroads were built without any help from taxpayers?
Most certainly there was assistance. For some individual lines, usually the first one in an undeveloped area in the early to mid 1800’s. Generally these investments were repaid to the government entities that made them (the PRR was bankrolled by the City of Philadelphia), or the railroad bought out the government interest, and the government profited by the selling of its sections of land along the line and the economic development that followed. And of course, the railroads paid lots and lots of taxes.
“Frank, you made it up that a sample link to several surveys was something characterized by me as ‘vast majority of surveys’.”
The rest I provided is from the 2011 Community Preference Survey by the National Association of Realtors
If I’m wrong, please show me how I’m wrong rather than throwing a temper tantrum and accusing me of making things up. Or perhaps you’re suffering from NPD and can’t help it.
According to surveys, most people want to shop at stores with the convenience of 7-11, the service of Tiffany’s, and the prices of the Dollar Store.
Meanwhile, Wal-Mart became the largest company and employer in the world, and Planners have 10,000 reasons why that is impossible.
Saying that rail is bad, because it’s rail & road is good, because it’s road doesn’t prove any thing.
Every mode has it’s good points and bad points.
Also CPZ, on the Sunday there was a expressway tunnel collapse in Canada. Thankfully no one was hurt.
http://www.windsorstar.com/news/Transport+Quebec+under+fire/5191122/story.html
hypothetical slanted surveys.
Aside from that being the standard, expected, typical answer for many years when someone doesn’t like the same result across multiple surveys, do show how all the surveys are slanted and the same general findings can be twisted out of many different people. Show the slanted wording and give us an example of non-slanted. Since you can speak to the issue of survey design, of course.
DS
Frank, as I said, (feel free to post a link that contains all the surveys).
Thaaaaaaaaanks!!!!!!
DS
Not really sure what the Dan/metrosucks/Frank squabble (I almost wrote debate, but it doesn’t seem fitting) has to do with the post, but. . .
at the very minimum, couldn’t you all agree that there is at least some market demand for “smart growth” neighborhoods, and as libertarians, “smart growth” neighborhoods should not be illegal to build, as they are now under many zoning regimes?
There’s a lot of common ground between progressive, planner-types and anti-regulation libertarians that seems to frequently go unnoticed. Things like eliminating minimum parking requirements, eliminating lot size requirements, allowing all sorts of uses within a single district, eliminating maximum density standards, putting curb parking at market prices, and halting municipal support for building out subsidized infrastructure into new sub-developments should be common-sense reforms that small-government advocates and sustainable development advocates alike could get behind, no?
Danny,
I’m not sure either. Narcissism might have something to do with it.
And I agree with your last sentence.
couldn’t you all agree that there is at least some market demand for “smart growth†neighborhoods, and as [such], “smart growth†neighborhoods should not be illegal to build, as they are now under many zoning regimes?
This is what the planners here say. Therefore, it must be Wrong.
DS
This is what the planners here say. Therefore, it must be Wrong.
Considering your (planners’) track record so far, it’s a safe assumption.
Unless you’re planner like Robert Moses, metrosucks & O’Toole hate you!