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How Does Kansas City Measure Success?

By | | Transportation, Urban areas
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The $102 million Kansas City streetcar is supposed to be a great success. Projected to carry 2,900 people per weekday in its first year, it actually attracted 6,800 people per weekday in its first few months of operation. In fact, the cars are supposedly so crowded that the city is ordering two more cars.

On the other hand, the city so far hasn’t dared to charge fares. When Atlanta began charging fares, ridership fell more than 50 percent. It is hard to claim success with a straight face when you are giving something away. In addition, the ridership projections did not count event-related riders, while actual ridership numbers include a “large event-related market.”

The streetcars go through downtown Kansas City, an area that was already gentrifying with $6 billion worth of new development before the decision was made to build the streetcar line. Despite claims that the streetcar stimulated this development, the reality is that the streetcar goes through the heart of an urban redevelopment area that has benefited from tax-increment financing. Continue reading →

Happy Independence Day:
May There Be Many More

By | | Mission
3 Comments

At 241 years, the United States claims to have the oldest continuously operating national government in the world. Some worry that it’s time will soon run out, probably due to some form of self-destruction.

About 25 years ago, the Antiplanner had an epiphany. In the previous two decades working for environmental groups, I had learned that government was not always the best way to protect the environment. What I realized in 1992 was that two of the biggest, if not the biggest, threats to the environmental resources I cared about were the national debt and deficit spending. Deficit spending allowed people to do harmful things to the environment that they could not afford to do without subsidies. The growth of the national debt appeared to be leading toward a crisis that was likely to put any environmental concerns on the back burner.

Since then, the national debt has quintupled (tripled after adjusting for inflation), growing from 66 percent to 106 percent of GDP. Deficits have grown from $340 billion in 1992 to well over a trillion dollars in the first four years of the Obama administration, falling to about $644 billion this year. Continue reading →

Denver Solves a Problem

By | | Transportation
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Since it opened a little more than a year ago, Denver’s airport rail lines, known as the A Line, has had a serious safety problem: the crossing gates aren’t reliable. Now Denver’s Regional Transit District (RTD) claims it has solved the problem, which is transit-speak for they haven’t solved the problem; they’ve just given up.

According to Denver Transit Partners, the private consortium that built and operates the line, “the problem with the crossing technology is impossible to fix.” Instead of fixing it, they’ve gotten a waiver from the Federal Railroad Administration to allow them to run the trains anyway–provided they have human flaggers at every crossing, which costs about $6 million a year.

Supposedly the crossing gate system is incompatible with the positive train control that the federal government also requires. The Antiplanner doesn’t claim to be an expert on railroad signal technology, but the basic principles behind positive train control were developed more than 100 years ago by Frank Sprague, the electrical genius who also developed the first workable electric streetcar, the first electric rapid transit system, and the first high-speed electric elevators. Continue reading →

Light Rail for Las Vegas?

By | | Transportation, Urban areas
5 Comments

On the same day that the Antiplanner debated rail transit with Vukan Vuchic, the Las Vegas Sun announced that transit planners there are once again studying light rail. Las Vegas is the nation’s third-largest urban area not to have spent large amounts of money on rail transit: Detroit has a people mover and is building a streetcar line; Tampa has a streetcar; and Las Vegas has a monorail connecting casinos, but none of these were megaprojects (and all should be considered failures).

Rather than pat themselves on the back for avoiding the cost headaches that come with light rail, the city’s Regional Transportation Commission is considering an $800 million light-rail line vs. a $350-million bus-rapid transit line. Officials should look at Denver, where the bus-rapid transit line provides faster service than any of the region’s rail lines; is the only line that didn’t have huge cost overruns and did greatly exceed ridership projections; and whose buses share space with cars so the line relieves congestion for everyone, not just a handful of train riders.

Professor Vuchic maintains that light rail is somehow essential for urban livability. Cities that built light rail, he said, created pedestrian friendly streets. On one hand, light rail kills three times as many pedestrians as buses, per billion passenger miles carried, so I don’t consider that very friendly. On the other hand, any actions that can be taken to create a pedestrian-friendly environment are completely independent of what kind of transit is provided. Continue reading →

Richard Florida Supports Trump’s Urban Policies

By | | Regional planning
9 Comments

Like so many urbanists, Richard Florida went into a “state of shock” on the election of Donald Trump. And yet, on reflection, he ends up agreeing with Trump’s basic principles regarding the cities.

Even if Clinton had won, he realized, “we would have been unlikely to see anything like the sweeping new set of urban policies that I’d recommended” in his books. As a result, he reached the “stunning” conclusion that, “When it comes to urban policy and much else, the federal government is the wrong vehicle for getting things done and for getting them done right.”

This, of course, is exactly why Trump and his supporters want to end federal funding of urban programs. Unfortunately, Florida doesn’t really understand the reasons for the blue-red divide, arguing it has more to do with gay rights and homophobism than economic stagnation and declining working-class jobs. Continue reading →

Back in the Air Again

By | | Transportation, Travels
5 Comments

The Antiplanner is in Philadelphia today for the World Metrorail Congress. Apparently, one of the conference organizers thought it would be a good idea to have the It is believed that men with ED have low DHEA in their blood. levitra discount The flowers are order generic viagra http://deeprootsmag.org/2019/08/19/robert-neubeckers-little-plane-that-could/ bell shaped and vary in color (white, pale yellow, purple). You can also buy Kamagra UK over the internet let the sufferers save their valuable time and hard useful deeprootsmag.org generico cialis on line work . It is a high quality generic purchase viagra medicine that comes in a soft-gel capsule. Antiplanner debate University of Pennsylvania Professor Vukan Vuchic about the future of transit. Needless to say, I will take the position that its future is very short.

Saving Energy While Liberating the Poor

By | | Transportation
10 Comments

Last week, the Antiplanner argued that transit is going extinct and, rather than fight this trend, regional officials should find ways to smooth the transition. One way of doing so is to improve the mobility of low-income workers.

Transit advocates love to use phrases like oil dependency and auto dependency to suggest that automobiles are environmental disasters that have reduced our freedom. In fact, the 2015 National Transit Database shows that the only transit systems use less energy per passenger mile than driving are those in New York, Chicago, Atlanta, San Francisco-Oakland, Portland, and Honolulu, while automobiles have liberated Americans, giving them far more mobility and economic opportunities than the people of any other country.

Unfortunately, not everyone enjoys the benefits of this liberation. According to the 2015 American Community Survey, about 5 million workers who take transit to work live in households with either no or one car. About 2 million of those are in New York City and most of them presumably choose to live without cars, but it may be reasonable to estimate that about 2 to 3 million workers nationwide take transit because they can’t afford a car. Continue reading →

New Driving Data

By | | Transportation, Useful Data
1 Comment

The Federal Highway Administration has just released urban highway statistics for 2015, including the miles of roads and daily vehicle miles of driving by road type and “selected characteristics” for each urban area, including population, land area, freeway lane miles, and similar information. These data are quite useful as they allow interregional comparisons as well as, when combined with past data, a look at trends over time.

For example, the Los Angeles urban area is more than twice as dense as the Houston urban area, yet both report the same number of miles of driving per capita (see population note below). Though there is a weak correlation between density and driving, it isn’t as strong or as certain as urban planners would like you to believe.

As published by the FHwA, each table of more than 400 urban areas is divided into nine worksheets of 50 urban areas. Since this is clumsy, I’ve copied-and-pasted them into one worksheet each, which you can download for the miles of roads and selected characteristics. Continue reading →

The Transit Apocalypse

By | | Transportation
19 Comments

With declining ridership, growing costs, and increasing competition, the nation’s transit industry is on the verge of complete collapse. The trends leading to this collapse appear to be permanent, yet transit officials across the country are pretending they are only temporary. Instead of preparing for the collapse, they are simply seeking more subsidies.

The Antiplanner has witnessed in the collapse of an industry before, and the results are not pretty. I spent the first two decades of my career fighting money-losing timber sales on federal forests. Between 1990 and 2000, those sales declined by 85 percent, turning communities built around sawmills that purchased federal timber into near-ghost towns.

Some communities could see the handwriting on the wall and made the transition to a recreation economy. Bend, Oregon, near where the Antiplanner currently lives, is thriving as a resort and recreation town, with one of the fastest-growing populations in the country. Coos Bay, Oregon, near where the Antiplanner used to live, turned up its nose at the recreation economy, saying its high-paid union millworkers would not be satisfied flipping burgers and changing bed sheets. The area is currently depressed and–despite outstanding beauty and recreation opportunities–its population is stagnant.

Like timber communities, transit cities have the choice of preparing for or denying the impending collapse. Those that prepare for it will enable a smoother transition to future transportation systems while those that deny it will create huge problems for local taxpayers. Continue reading →

Response to Congestion Report

By | | Transportation
9 Comments

Two weeks ago, the Center of the American Experiment published a report by the Antiplanner showing that traffic congestion in Minneapolis-St. Paul was the deliberate result of the region’s Metropolitan Council’s plans to increase congestion in order to get more people to ride transit, walk, or bicycle. The Antiplanner quoted Met Council documents saying that it was not going to try to relieve congestion, cited budgetary numbers showing that more than 80 percent of capital spending was going for transit systems that carried less than 1.5 percent of travel while less than 10 percent went for roads that carried 90 percent.

Since the report was released, Met Council supporters have issued a couple of responses, including one yesterday. What do they say?

  1. Let’s spell Cato Institute with a K as in Kato. Get it? KKK? Right wing? Ha ha!
  2. Don’t believe anything the Antiplanner says; he doesn’t even have a degree in urban planning. (Thank Edwin Mills for that.*)
  3. Congestion is actually a good thing; be glad you have it.

Continue reading →