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Negative on Positive Train Control

By | | Transportation
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The National Transportation Safety Board hasn’t made any final determinations, but it’s looking more like the September 29 New Jersey train crash could have been prevented by positive train control (PTC) systems that Congress has mandated but the railroads have failed to install. This is going to lead to a spate of articles accusing New Jersey Transit and other railroads and transit agencies of dragging their feet in installing PTC. Yet the Antiplanner isn’t positive that positive train control is the best way to make rail lines safer.

According to National Transportation Statistics table 2-39, since 1990 an average of 8 passengers and 26 railroad employees have been killed per year in accidents, many of which could have been prevented by positive train control. Meanwhile, an average of 416 people per year have been killed when struck by trains at grade crossings and another 354 have been killed when struck by trains because they were trespassing on tracks. None of those deaths could have been prevented by positive train control.

That suggests that positive train control, which the Association of American Railroads says is likely to cost $10 billion, may not be the most cost-effective way of making railroads safer. Every death is tragic, but if the $10 billion the railroads have to spend to save 34 lives a year could have been spent improving grade crossings and fencing off railroad rights of way, it might be able to save hundreds of lives per year instead.

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Combining MPOs Won’t Fix Planning Failures

By | | Regional planning
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In The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Jane Jacobs defined a “region” as “an area safely larger than the last one to whose problems we found no solution.” A proposed rule published by the Obama administration would take the next step in this process, demanding that planning organizations for what were once multiple regions combine or coordinate to produce single regional plans for their now enlarged regions.

The rule states that if multiple metropolitan planning organizations (MPOs) exist within a single urbanized area, they must merge or jointly prepare single transportation plans for their area. According to a DOT estimate, about a third of metropolitan planning organizations are affected by the proposed rule.

Congress requires that MPOs write and update two key plans: the long-range (20-year) transportation plan, which must be updated every five years; and the short-term (4-year) transportation improvement plan (TIP), a list of projects the MPO wants to fund, which must be updated every year. As defined by the Census Bureau, urbanized areas often cross state boundaries. However, since MPOs are designated by state governors, they generally do not cross state boundaries. This means the New York urbanized area has separate MPOs for the New York and New Jersey parts of the area, while the Philadelphia urbanized area has three separate MPOs. These would all have to work together to write single long-range plans and TIPs to submit to the federal government.

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Sorry, Mr. President, But the System Is Rigged

By | | News commentary
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President Obama has a lengthy commentary in the Economist, which that magazine-that-calls-itself-a-newspaper says is an “open letter to his successor. The Economist also describes the essay as “centrist,” as it criticizes Bernie Sanders’ leftism as much as, if not more than it criticized Trump.

But the article isn’t really centrist. Instead, Obama is defending the liberal (in a classical sense of the term) consensus in favor of free trade, relatively open borders, and mostly free markets. That is what liberals believed in during the nineteenth century, and it is what both the liberal and conservative elites believe today, which is why neither Bill Clinton nor George Bush questioned these ideas.

This election year, in fact, is the first time in many decades–perhaps more than a century–that a candidate who challenged these ideas won a major party nomination for president. While Trump openly challenged the open borders ideas, Sanders gained a lot of votes by challenging the free-market ideas. Brexit and similar votes in Europe show this isn’t unique to the United States: many people are feeling disenchanted with the liberal consensus.

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A City Is Not a Fugue

By | | Book reviews
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If you want a book demonstrating that smart growth is based on mumbo-jumbo, half-truths, and outright fabrications, there are few better examples than The Well-Tempered City. Jonathan Rose is a real estate developer who happens to be married to the sister of New Urbanist architect Peter Calthorpe. Rose claims to have been at the 1996 meeting where the term “smart growth” was coined, though he doesn’t mention that one of the reasons for choosing the name was so its supporters could tar anyone who disagreed with them for favoring “dumb growth.”

Full disclosure: The publisher gave me a copy of this book on the condition that I write a review in my blog, so anything positive I say about the book should be taken with a grain of salt. I told the publisher my review might not be too positive, but they seemed to think a bad review was better than none at all. As it turned out, the book is far worse than I suspected, as I usually expect a semblance of reason from people I disagree with. I could find none in The Well-Tempered City.

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To BnB or Not to BnB

By | | Housing, News commentary
7 Comments

Last February, the Austin city council voted to stop licensing short-term rentals (via AirBnB or similar services) of homes that are not occupied by the homeowner. This has led the Texas Public Policy Foundation to sue, saying this violates people’s property rights.

Members of the city council argued that unoccupied short-term rental houses often get turned into noisy, “party houses” and that the use of those homes for short-term rentals made housing more expensive for everyone else. The first point might be legitimate, but no owner or renter wants to see their home trashed and so it is likely to be self-policed. The second point isn’t legitimate at all; it is Austin’s over regulated land-use rules that make housing there unaffordable.
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New Infrastructure We Can Let Crumble

By | | Transportation
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Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump both say they want to spend more to fix America’s supposedly crumbling infrastructure. But if Congress passes an infrastructure spending bill, this is the kind of thing it will be spent on: digging two tunnels for Interstates 84 and 91 in Hartford, Connecticut. This project is being promoted by Representative John Larson (D-CT), who is obviously looking forward to the day when Democrats control the White House and at least one house of Congress.

How much would these tunnels cost? A mere $10 billion, estimates Larson, who promises that “It’s not remotely close to what the Big Dig was.” No, the Big Dig was only supposed to cost $2.8 billion. Since it eventually cost $14.5 billion, will the Hartford dig end up costing $40 billion?

The purpose of the tunnels is to relieve congestion since there is supposedly no room to add capacity to the existing, above-ground highways. I suspect Larson hasn’t considered overhead solutions such as the Selmon Expressway in Tampa, which added three lanes without taking any new right of way by being built in the median strip of an existing highway. It cost about $7 million a lane mile, far less than a tunnel.

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Transportation Safety

By | | Transportation
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Last week’s commuter train crash in New Jersey has left people wondering how safe our transportation system really is. We can answer this question with data from National Transportation Statistics, which show passenger miles, fatalities, and injuries by mode of transportation since 1990.

Mode1990-1999Last 10 YearsChange
Scheduled Air0.30.0-92.5%
Highway10.88.0-31.3%
Bus5.14.4-13.9%
Light Rail14.013.5-3.4%
Heavy Rail7.64.5-40.5%
Commuter Rail11.78.9-23.7%
Amtrak35.933.2-7.5%
Table One: Fatalities per billion passenger miles by mode. As noted in the text, the most recent decade is 2005-2014 except for commuter rail, which is 2003-2012. Sources: Calculated from National Transportation Statistics, tables 1-40, 2-1, 2-34, and 2-35.

The statistics show transit data only through 2012, but the Federal Transit Administration has safety data for the years since then. Unfortunately, the Federal Railroad Administration, not the Federal Transit Administration, monitors commuter rail safety, and it doesn’t seem to publish those numbers, so we only have them through 2012.

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Your Government at Work

By | | Housing, Urban areas
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The city of Portland, which likes to call itself “the city that works,” subsidized the renovation of a 50-unit downtown apartment building. The apartments will now be made available to people who earn less than $15,400 a year.

“In Portland, we strongly believe that downtown should be a place where people of all incomes can live,” said city commissioner Dan Saltzman. One problem with that philosophy, as Willamette Week‘s Nigel Jaquiss points out, is that the city spent $514 per square foot renovating those apartments. For a lot less money, it could have built twice as many brand new apartments elsewhere in the city.

In many ways, Portland is the model for nearly all of the policies advocated in the White House policy paper described here yesterday: minimum-density zoning, streamlined permitting for developers who want to build high densities; all single-family neighborhoods put in zones allowing accessory dwellings; lots of neighborhoods zoned for high-densities and multifamily housing; tax-increment financing and property tax abatements to subsidize density; and elimination of off-street parking requirements (which is the only policy discussed in detail by a Washington Post article about the White House paper). Yet, despite doing all of the things that the White House recommends to make housing affordable, Portland politicians claim that the city is suffering from a terrible housing crisis. Of course, most of the ideas proposed to solve the crisis, such as rent control and inclusionary zoning, will just make it worse.

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More Regulation Won’t Make Housing Affordable

By | | Housing, Regional planning
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A new Housing Policy Toolkit from the White House admits that “local barriers to housing development have intensified,” which “has reduced the ability of many housing markets to respond to growing demand.” The toolkit, however, advocates tearing down only some of the barriers, and not necessarily the ones that will work to make housing more affordable.

“Sunbelt cities with more permeable boundaries have enjoyed outsized growth by allowing sprawl to meet their need for adequate housing supply,” says the toolkit. “Space constrained cities can achieve similar gains, however, by building up with infill.” Yet this ignores the fact that there are no cities in America that are “space constrained” except as a result of government constraints. Even cities in Hawaii and tiny Rhode Island have plenty of space around them–except that government planners and regulators won’t let that space be developed.

Instead of relaxing artificial constraints on horizontal development, the toolkit advocates imposing even tighter constraints on existing development in order to force denser housing. The tools the paper supports include taxing vacant land at high rates in order to force development; “enacting high-density and multifamily zoning,” meaning minimum density zoning; using density bonuses; and allowing accessory dwelling units. All of these things serve to increase the density of existing neighborhoods, which increases congestion and–if new infrastructure must be built to serve the increased density–urban-service costs.

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How Long Before Cars Drive Themselves?

By | | Mission
8 Comments

Raj Rajkumar, a self-driving vehicle researcher at Carnegie Mellon, warns that self-driving cars are being over-hyped. Despite promised by Ford, Nissan, and other companies, they are actually many years away.

Ford’s promise to have fleets of self-driving cars in cities by 2021 is deceptive, the critics say. “Dig into the statements and press for details,” says the Wall Street Journal, “and a Ford spokesman says that car will only be self-driving in the portion of major cities where the company can create and regularly update extremely detailed 3-D street maps.”

However, that is exactly what the Antiplanner said a few months ago. As the Antiplanner noted at the time, a company called Here has already mapped two-thirds of all paved roads in the United States, and updates its maps every day. It seems likely that all paved roads will be mapped by 2021.

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