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DC Metro’s Accelerating Decline

By | | Transportation, Urban areas
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Washington Metro Rail ridership in the second quarter of 2016 (the fourth quarter of Metro’s fiscal year) declined a whopping 11 percent. The drop in ridership started before major service disruptions in order to do track maintenance began in June: ridership in May, for example, was 9 percent lower on weekdays and 20 percent lower on weekends than in 2015.

Bus ridership for the quarter was 6 percent lower than in 2015. For all of F.Y. 2016, rail ridership was 7 percent lower and bus ridership 4 percent lower than in F.Y. 2015.

Metro officials offered several explanations for the decline, including lower gas prices, loss of public confidence in the system’s reliability and safety, and the early blooming of cherry blossoms that normally attracts many tourists. But ridership has declined in every year since 2012, suggesting that at least some of the decline is irreversible.

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More on Housing and Inequality

By | | Housing
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NPR tells the story of the impact of the 2008 financial crisis on black middle-class families: on average, they lost a much larger share of their wealth than whites. But NPR fails to relate this to land-use regulation that is promoted by whites who consider themselves “progressives.”

Similarly, a Trulia analysis of differences in housing prices among cities lamely credits the differences to “a lack of housing construction” in some regions, without suggesting why those regions aren’t building housing. Trulia also suggests that these trends are leading to “regional inequality” without mentioning inequality among individuals.

These issues are largely corrected in a new paper by Joel Kotkin, who makes it clear that “progressive policies” such as urban-growth boundaries are causing the high housing prices in some regions and, in turn, growing income inequality. Kotkin points to MIT economist Matthew Rognlie’s research showing that housing is the principle cause of growing inequality in both the United States and Europe.
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The Land of Skinny Roads and Skinny Houses

By | | Housing
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Much of England and Wales reminds me of the Willamette Valley where I grew up: rolling hills covered with forests, farms, and cities. But Britain’s infrastructure would look completely out of place in most of the United States, being dominated by narrow roads and small houses. As an example of skinny roads, here’s a car parked in a small hamlet in Norfolk.


Parking in what Americans would consider the middle of the road, completely blocking one lane of traffic, is considered completely normal in Britain.

Because there is no parking strip and no shoulders, the car is blocking one entire lane, turning the two-lane road into a single-lane road. This is not unusual; auto drivers do this all the time everywhere from busy roads in resort areas to big cities. Parking appears to be first-come, first-served, so if someone parks on the north side of a street, no one will park on the south side (which would completely block the road) of that part of the street, but they might park on the south side a few car lengths away. The Antiplanner has already complained about the country’s narrow roads; the rest of today’s post will focus on housing.

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Rail Transit’s Endless Hunger for Money

By | | Transportation
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In 2008, Santa Clara County voters approved a sales tax increase to build a BART line to San Jose. But cost overruns have forced the county’s Valley Transportation Authority (VTA) to go back to the voters for yet another tax increase. To make it more attractive, it says only a quarter of the tax increase will go to BART while the rest will be used for highways, bikeways, and some transit projects.

As described in the San Jose Mercury-News, the list of projects looks balanced: $1.5 billion for BART, $1.2 billion for street repairs, $1.85 billion for highways, $1.0 billion for CalTrains, $500 million for “transit for vulnerable and underserved populations,” and $250 million for pedestrian and bikeway improvements. A closer look at the measure, however, reveals that it is anything but balanced.

The $1.2 billion for “street repairs” is actually going to go for “complete streets” programs, which means taking away street capacity from cars and giving it to transit, bikes, and pedestrians. A significant chunk of the $1.85 billion for highways will actually go to constructing bus-rapid transit lanes, and some may even go for a new light-rail line. Motor vehicle users will be lucky to see any projects that actually relieve traffic congestion.

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Between a Rock and a Hard Place

By | | Transportation, Urban areas
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The Federal Transit Administration has informed Honolulu Area Rapid Transit (HART) that it will not help cover cost overruns associated with the agency’s 20-mile rail line. The project was originally supposed to cost about $5.1 billion, which was already ridiculously expensive, but now is projected to cost at least $8 billion and possibly as much as $11 billion.

The FTA has a long-standing policy that it won’t help cover cost overruns (a policy that is sometimes overturned by Congress). But in this case, the FTA has added a new twist. In light of the cost overruns, HART has proposed to build just part of the project, leaving uncompleted the five miles of the line that would have attracted the most riders. But the FTA says that, in that case, it won’t be giving HART $1.55 billion that the agency is counting on. That means HART won’t even be able to complete the part of the project that it planned.

HART says it is examining its alternatives and hopes to have a viable proposal before FTA by the end of the year. But it probably isn’t looking closely at the most reasonable alternative, which is to completely abandon the project. While it has already sunk several billion into it, abandoning it would save taxpayers billions more in construction costs not to mention an estimated $126 million a year in operating costs. Since the city of Honolulu spends less than $185 million per year operating about 100 bus routes, $125 million is a phenomenal amount of money to spend on just one rail route.
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Partners or Competitors?

By | | Transportation
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Two weeks ago, the Denver suburb of Centennial announced it would subsidize transit riders to use Uber or Lyft to or from their transit stop from or to their origin or final destination. By solving the “last-mile” problem, they hope that this will make transit more attractive to Centennial residents.

A couple of days later, the Livermore Amador Valley Transit Authority announced it would do the same for transit riders in Dublin and other nearby suburbs of San Francisco-Oakland.

Through such agreements, ride-sharing services are trying to persuade transit supporters that they aren’t competitors, but potential partners with transit agencies. Some of them are buying it, while others are more skeptical. The Antiplanner thinks this is just a transition phase before the complete elimination of transit in all but a few cities.

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Amtrak Picks New CEO, Gets Loan Grant

By | | Transportation
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Amtrak has selected former Norfolk Southern CEO Charles Moorman to be its new president and CEO. Moorman will take the reigns from career bureaucrat Joseph Boardman this week.

Rail industry insiders were surprised when Boardman decided to step down in the middle of his contract. But, according to Trains magazine’s Don Philips (no link available), Boardman had alienated other officials in the organization with angry tirades and poor management.

Boardman leaves the organization with one victory: Amtrak has successfully negotiated a $2.45 billion loan from the Federal Railroad Administration. The funds will be used to buy new trains and upgrade the Northeast Corridor to operate at top speeds of 160 mph instead of the current 135 mph. Amtrak claims it will repay the loan out of revenues earned from the additional riders attracted to the new trains and higher speeds.

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Treating the Symptoms, Not the Problems

By | | Housing, Urban areas
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Portland-area politicians love to build things. In 2004, Multnomah County, the county in which Portland is located, built a new jail, called Wapato, at a cost of $58 million even though county officials knew they had no money to operate the jail. It has been empty ever since.

Now officials want to spend $60 to $100 million building a shelter for the homeless near terminal 1, a former port facility on the Willamette River. So someone came up with a bright idea: why not use Wapato Jail as a homeless shelter?

One argument against the idea is that most homeless people gravitate towards downtown. But terminal 1 isn’t downtown either. Another is that Wapato isn’t set up as a homeless shelter. But it would cost a lot less converting it to a homeless shelter than to build a brand-new one.

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Travelogue

By | | Transportation, Travels
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Interstate 405 is crossed by numerous bridges as it circles halfway around downtown Portland, and none of those bridges are estimated to be capable of withstanding a severe earthquake. Rather than update the bridges, Portland is going to spend $5.9 million building a bike-pedestrian bridge across the freeway that can survive a 9.0 earthquake. After all, Portland is the city that plans to use bicycles to rescue people after an earthquake, so it is important that bicycle overpasses be able to withstand such quakes.


The East Cliff Railway in Hastings is, at 78 degrees, the steepest inclined railway currently operating in Britain.

I could write about this in more detail, but instead I hope to entertain you with some of my favorite photos from my trip to Britain. That trip is now half-way done as I write, so I’ll probably have a second installment of photos in early September.

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A Mere $54 Billion for Light Rail

By | | Transportation, Urban areas
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Seattle’s regional transit agency, Sound Transit, wants voters to approve a tax increase so it can spend another $54 billion on new light-rail lines. The agency’s first light-rail line went 86 percent over its original projections, but the agency assures the public that it has realized that voters are so innumerate that it no longer needs to low-ball the cost estimates in order to get tax increases approved.

To promote its plan, the agency has hired Peter “Paint Is Cheaper Than Rails” Rogoff to run the agency and get federal grants. Rogoff argued in 2010 that buses can attract as many riders as trains, and that “Bus Rapid Transit is a fine fit for a lot more communities than are seriously considering it.” Of course, he must believe that rail makes more sense than buses for Seattle, or he wouldn’t have taken this $298,000 per year job (a $118,000 increase over his previous job), right?

Seattle’s first light-rail line cost $3.1 billion in 1995 dollars, or $4.8 billion in today’s dollars for about 20 miles, for an average cost of $240 million a mile. According to the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey, out of nearly 1.6 million commuters, a respectable 160,000 took the bus to work in the Seattle urban area in 2014 but fewer than 3,000 took light rail while another 7,500 took commuter rail or streetcars to work. It’s possible that some survey respondents were confused and marked streetcar or commuter rail when they meant light rail, but it is still an insignificant number.

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