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Sacrificing Safety

By | | Transportation
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The Wall Street Journal points out (search for “Bay Area Shutdown” if this link doesn’t work) that the BART employees who are on strike represent an industry that has seen one of the steepest declines in worker productivity in history. By just about any measure–transit trips per worker, revenues per worker-hour, costs per passenger mile–the transit industry has gone backwards more than a century in both labor and capital efficiency.

The really scary thing, at least if you are a transit rider, is that the result of this strike will be that BART, along with other transit agencies, will sacrifice safety in order to politically accommodate its workers. Many public employees have fat pensions and guaranteed health-care for life, but if paying for these things forces your local planning department to not pass a few new rules or your local library to buy a few less books, no one is going to be particularly damaged.

However, transit agencies–and especially rail transit agencies–can and do cut maintenance budgets in order to keep the money flowing to workers with cushy jobs. This is because of the asymmetry in union-employer negotiations when the employer is a public agency that reports to elected officials who depend on union support to get elected. In the case of transit, this asymmetry is both local and national in scope, as federal law requires that transit agencies keep unions happy in order to be eligible for federal grants.

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Courts May Have Last Word on Trains

By | | Transportation
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A county judge says the California high-speed rail project violates the law approved by voters in 2008. But he won’t decide to issue an order halting the project until after another hearing, for which a date hasn’t yet been set.


The Reason Foundation’s Adrian Moore and Antiplanner friend Wendell Cox discuss California high-speed rail.

The Contra Costa Times lists many of the ways the project as planned today violates the 2008 ballot measure: the construction cost has doubled; the projected ticket prices have gone up; the speeds are slower; and the projected opening date is already nine years behind schedule. But the judge only rules that the project had failed to complete its environmental review and find funds to finance the entire project, not just a few miles in the Central Valley.

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Hyperloop’s Real Problem

By | | Follow up, Transportation
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Most reviews of Elon Musk‘s hyperloop plan focus on technical questions. Will it cost as little as he estimates? Could it move as fast as he projects? Could the system work at all?

None of these are the real problem with the hyperloop. The real problem is how an infrastructure-heavy, point-to-point system can possibly compete with personal vehicles that can go just about anywhere–the United States has more than 4 million miles of public roads–or with an airline system that requires very little infrastructure and can serve far more destinations than the hyperloop.

Musk promises the hyperloop will be fast. But fast is meaningless if it doesn’t go where you want to go. Musk estimates that people travel about 6 million trips a year between the San Francisco and Los Angeles urban areas, where he wants to build his first hyperloop line. But these urban areas are not points: they are huge, each covering thousands of square miles of land.

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High Speed and Low Budgets

By | | News commentary, Transportation
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While it is possible that Spain’s train crash that killed some 80 people was due to a broken rail or other equipment failure, most experts looking at the video below think the problem was simply high speeds. The video shows a train going an estimated 125 mph around a corner designed for 50 mph.

Much attention has been focused on the train’s driver, who apparently has been known to post photos of train speedometers at high speeds (but not more than the speed limits), suggesting he might have been less than fully attentive. But where was the positive train control system, which should have warned the driver and automatically slowed the train if the driver failed to do so?

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Unfeasibility Study

By | | Transportation
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As Detroit enters bankruptcy, an Indiana rail passenger group frets that its state hasn’t wasted enough money on pipe dreams. So it is publicizing a so-called feasibility study for a high-speed rail line from Columbus to Chicago. The study proposes to spend $1.3 billion improving CSX tracks to run trains at 110 to 130 mph, resulting in a Chicago-Columbus trip as short as 3-3/4 hours, or an average speed of about 80 mph.

I say “so-called” feasibility study because it seems like a real feasibility study would take the trouble of asking if it were feasible to operate passenger trains at 110 mph on the same tracks as freight trains when CSX, which owns the track, says 90 mph is the fastest it will allow passenger trains on its tracks “unless freight and passenger traffic were separated.” The study calls for running 24 trains a day (12 each way), which is probably more than CSX wants even at 90 mph.

The feasibility study ignores these limits and simply assumes 130 mph is possible. Everything that follows is just as speculative and unrealistic.

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French Train Crash Caused by Human Error

By | | News commentary, Transportation
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French rail officials say that “human error has already been ruled out” as a cause of the train crash that killed six people last week. But it was a human error, or at least a political error: the error was for the government to put most available resources into building new high-speed rail lines while it let existing lines deteriorate.

Officially, the cause of the crash was a piece of a switch that apparently broke while the train was going through the switch. But that probably happened because the piece that broke was old and worn out.

While the French Transport Minister claimed that “there was no indication that a lack of investment in maintaining the system’s infrastructure was at fault” for this particular crash, he admitted that most of the conventional rail infrastructure is more than 30 years old, meaning it needs to be replaced. “The situation is severe,” the minister added, “with the degradation in recent years of traditional train lines, due to a lack of resources.”

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High-Speed Rail in Court

By | | Transportation
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Last Friday, opponents of California’s high-speed rail line told a California state judge that the California High-Speed Rail Authority has not met all the requirements to start building the first stage of the state’s high-speed rail line. As approved by voters in 2008, the law requires, among other things, that the authority identify the “sources of all funds to be invested in the corridor, or usable segment thereof” and hat the “authority has completed all necessary project level environmental clearances necessary to proceed to construction.”

So far, the authority only has funds to build a portion of the “minimum operable segment” from Madera to the San Fernando Valley and environmental clearances for only 29 miles of this segment. Opponents argued that the authority could not begin construction until it met these requirements.

The state did not attempt to refute these contentions but merely argued that when the legislature authorized the sale of $2.6 billion in bonds it effectively negated these legal requirements. The plan “was deficient,” admitted the deputy attorney general who argued the case. “The Legislature looked at it and said, we would like more, but this is what we’ve got and it made its decision. Those are political decisions that I can’t comment on.” As a result, she added, the judge has no authority to overrule the legislature.

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Who’s Crazy?

By | | Transportation
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The Antiplanner’s faithful ally, Robert Poole of the Reason Foundation, told a Congressional committee last week that highway user fees should be dedicated to highways and any federal subsidies to transit should come out of other funds. Unfortunately, we have become so used to the idea that everything should be subsidized that advocates of transit subsidies could get away with calling Poole’s ideas “crazy talk.”

Why is it crazy to think that user fees should go to the infrastructure that the users are using? I suppose the transit lobby thinks that some of the money people pay for clothes at Wal-Mart and J.C. Penneys should go to subsidize Paris fashions. Or that some of the money people spend on ordinary groceries should subsidize gourmet restaurants.

After all, transit–at least the kind of transit these people want–is a luxury, not a necessity. They want expensive transit systems aimed at getting relatively well-off people out of their cars. To pay for these systems, they want to tax the more-than-92 percent of mostly ordinary people who have and use cars as their primary modes of transportation.

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More California HSR Follies

By | | Transportation
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Quentin Kopp, the man who more than any other single person is probably most responsible for the California high-speed rail project, now says the project is illegal and has filed a declaration in court saying so. In response, the California High-Speed Rail Authority–which was created by a law Kopp wrote and which Kopp later headed–is suing Kopp, California farmers who oppose the project, the Antiplanner, and, well, any other skeptics in an effort to get a court order giving it $8 billion to start construction on the train to nowhere.

Kopp’s argues that the authority has “mangled” the original plan for a 220-mph rail line in order to keep costs down. That original plan, which was supposed to cost $45 billion, is now expected to cost somewhere closer to $117 billion. Since the authority doesn’t have that money, it has adopted instead a $68 billion plan to build a “blended” system that uses some existing tracks and some new tracks. But the trains on this system won’t go from San Francisco to Los Angeles in 4 hours and 40 minutes as the law requires.

Of course, the authority doesn’t have $68 billion either, so the likelihood of this blended plan ever being completed is slim. But it needs a plan of some kind in order to justify spending the $8 billion it does have building a line in California’s relatively thinly populated Central Valley.

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The Railroaded Not Taken

By | | Transportation
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Reeling from a scandal in which ministry employees allegedly embezzled at least $28.5 million, China has dismantled the Ministry of Railways and replaced it with a state-owned company. Managers of the new China Railway Co. had hoped that they would be given the Ministry’s assets but not its debt. However, the government says they will have to deal with its debt as well–all $428 billion of it (2.66 trillion yuan).

China’s high-speed fail.

Restructuring will not save China from that debt, which either taxpayers or creditors will have to cover–it certainly won’t be repaid out of rail fares. The debt is roughly $73 million for each of the 5,840 miles of high-speed rail lines built by the Ministry. This suggests that China got off cheap considering that California is planning to spend close to $300 million per mile for its high-speed rail, while Amtrak wants to spend $345 million per mile ($151 billion divided by 438 miles) building a new Boston-to-Washington high-speed rail line.

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