Search Results for: rail projects

Porker of the Month?

By | | News commentary, Transportation
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A group called Citizens Against Government Waste gave Oregon Representative Earl Blumenauer the “Porker of the Month award” for wanting to raise gas taxes in order to fund bike paths. Bike paths? They’re complaining about bike paths?

The group points out that taxpayers (they don’t say if this means all taxpayers or just federal taxpayers) have spent $9.5 billion on bicycle and pedestrian facilities over the last 22 years. It neglects to mention that this is only about 1 percent of federal highway spending and about a quarter of a percent of all highway spending. Maybe I’m biased, as (like Blumenauer) I’m an active cyclist, but I find it hard to complain about this.

MIT Press recently published Fighting Traffic, by University of Virginia researcher Peter Norton, who argues that streets used to be for pedestrians, but some vast conspiracy akin to the Great Streetcar Conspiracy stole the streets and gave them to automobiles. I don’t buy Norton’s extreme view, but I do see the need to provide safe facilities for all forms of transport. If roadways were once safe for cyclists and pedestrians but now are not because they are dedicated to cars and trucks, I don’t have serious problems with spending a tiny percentage of highway user fees on safe bicycle and pedestrian ways.

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That Explains It

By | | News commentary
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As reported in the New Yorker, an OECD study finds that Americans have some of the worst problem-solving skills in the developed world. For 16-65 year olds, only Spaniards are less numerate, The problem of ED was cialis cheapest https://regencygrandenursing.com/post-acute-sub-acute-care/orthopedic-rehab increasing among men and the treatments which he finds shy to discuss with others. The massage of Overnight oil will get for men a highest pleasure and enjoyment in lovemaking sessions. levitra prices You can gain online generic cialis rock hard erection during the lovemaking time. The discontinuation of the medication should also be done as right on time as cialis prices would be prudent. and only Spaniards and Italians are less literate (see pages 259 and 264).

No wonder so many voters support billion-dollar rail projects aimed at addressing problems that could be solved by million-dollar bus projects.

Why Is This Even a Question?

By | | Transportation
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Denver’s Regional Transit District (RTD) has a tough decision to make. Should it spend under $300 million on bus-rapid transit and get an estimated 16,300 to 26,600 daily riders? Or should it spend $600 million to $700 million on a commuter train that is projected to attract 2,100 to 3,400 daily riders?

To officials in the cities of Boulder and Longmont, this is a no-brainer. Every other major city in the Denver urban area is getting a train, so therefore they need a train too, no matter what the cost and how few the riders. RTD’s general manager piously says, “we want to reach a consensus with the stakeholders,” referring to the fact that Boulder, Longmont, and other city officials only agreed to RTD’s multi-billion-dollar “SlowTracks” rail scheme in the first place on the condition that every major city would get a rail line.

While it seems absurd to spend twice as much money on a technology that will attract barely a tenth as many riders, the truth is that bus-rapid transit would perform better than trains in all of the region’s major corridors. RTD simply ignored that option in those other corridors, even when its own analysis showed that buses were better than trains (which it did every time RTD did a complete alternatives analysis).

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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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The Acela Does Not Make Money

By | | Transportation
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Trains magazine columnist Don Phillips is an unabashed enthusiast for passenger trains. Yet his latest column lashes out at Amtrak for repeatedly misrepresenting the Acela–the closest thing Amtrak has to a high-speed train–as profitable.

Amtrak Acela train entering the Washington, DC station. Flickr photo by Steve Wilson.

“Seldom in my life have I seen such a mass of misinformation spread about any one subject as is being spread now about the American passenger train,” Phillips begins. “The misinformation is spread by confused and shallow politicians, young reporters who have no idea what they are talking about, and by Amtrak officials who have learned that they can count on the first two groups to not understand their technical jargon.”

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New Boondoggles

By | | Transportation
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Back in the early 1980s, San Diego spent an average of $7 million per mile–about $17 million in today’s dollars–building two light-rail lines. In the mid-1980s, Portland spent $15 million a mile–about $28 million in today’s dollars on the eastside light-rail line.

The Antiplanner is convinced that neither of these expenditures was worthwhile. Yet their cost is but a pittance compared to what transit agencies are spending today. For example, the 2013 New Starts projects include 26 different commuter rail, light-rail, and heavy-rail plans.

Of the seventeen light-rail plans, not a single one is expected to cost less than $50 million per mile, and only one is less than $60 million. The average cost of all seventeen is $138 million per mile. Even taking out three very expensive projects–mostly underground–that cost an average of $727 million per mile, the remaining light-rail plans cost $110 per mile.

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Forest Planning & Transit Planning

By | | Public lands, Transportation
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In 1985, the Hoosier Environmental Council hired the Antiplanner to review the Hoosier National Forest plan, which called for clearcutting most of the southern Indiana federal forest. My review uncovered a document admitting that planners had fabricated data to justify money-losing timber sales. Looking at the plan that was then in effect, I discovered that the forest had attempted to meet legal requirements for public involvement by having the forest’s own soils scientist and biologist review the plan.

Wildflowers in the Hoosier National Forest. Forest Service photo.

Since this proved that the existing plan was illegal, and the proposed new plan was not credible, the Forest Service responded to my visit by shutting down the Hoosier Forest’s timber program for more than a decade. Even after that time, it cut very little timber compared to what it had been cutting before 1985.

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Coordinating Traffic Signals

By | | Transportation
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Last week, Los Angeles became the first major city in American to coordinate all its traffic signals. The city spent $410 million coordinating signals at 4,000 intersections, or about $100,000 per intersection.

The $410 million cost is less than the cost of one mile of L.A.’s proposed Westside Subway Extension and about the same as the cost of two miles of Portland’s latest light-rail line. Yet the signal coordination will do far more to relieve congestion, save energy, and reduce air pollution than both of these rail projects put together–more, in all probability, than all rail transit projects in the United States.

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Goodbye Ray LaHood

By | | News commentary, Transportation
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Secretary of Immobility Ray LaHood has announced his intention to leave office as soon as a replacement can be found. Aside from an admirable emphasis on safety, LaHood’s main legacy will be a weakening of the cost-effectiveness requirements for transit grants so that, now, the most ridiculously expensive transit projects can get federal funding.

As a result, more than 100 metropolitan areas are lining up with proposals for insanely expensive rail projects. While this is good news to snobs who think that the only real transit is on rails, it is bad news for taxpayers as every rail project funded means money is being wasted that could otherwise have been put to good use.
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Naturally, there is plenty of speculation about who Obama might select to replace LaHood. Some of the names include Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa; Oregon Representative Earl Blumenauer; and former Minnesota Representative James Oberstar, all of whom support the administration’s pro-transit, anti-auto agenda. The Antiplanner is hoping for Blumenauer, the current godfather of Portland’s light-rail mafia, as his move into another job would shake up Oregon’s power structure in ways that might prove positive in the end.

Confusing Inputs with Results

By | | Transportation
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Why do liberals confuse inputs with outputs? Matthew Yglesias raves about how wonderful Los Angeles is for building more rail transit, even though the city’s last burst of rail construction resulted in a 17 percent decline in transit ridership.

A Los Angeles attorney named Robert Garcie provides an antidote to Yglesias’ rantings. He notes that LA’s transit agency “spends almost twice as much on rail to carry about one fourth as many passengers” as buses. LA transit ridership recovered only when a court order directed the city’s transit agency to restore the bus service it had cut to pay for rail. When that order expired, it started new rail projects, cut bus service, and ridership is again decreasing.

Meanwhile, Cleveland reporter Angie Schmitt thrills to the fact that, even though big cities such as Boston, Chicago, and Washington can’t afford to maintain the rail systems they have, smaller cities such as Grand Rapids, Ft. Collins, and Savannah want to build their own rail systems that they won’t be able to afford to maintain. Schmitt writes for DCStreetsBlog, a popular blog known for its support of “livability,” whatever that is.

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