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FAST Act Repoliticizes Transportation

By | | Transportation
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Last week’s Congressional passage of the 1,301-page Fixing America’s Surface Transportation (FAST) Act represents, for the most part, a five-year extension of existing highway and transit programs with several steps backwards. Once a program that was entirely self-funded out of dedicated gasoline taxes and other highway user fees, over the past two-and-one-half decades the surface transportation programs has become increasingly dependent on deficit spending. The FAST Act does nothing to mitigate this, neither raising highway fees (which include taxes on Diesel fuel, large trucks, trailers, and truck tires) nor reducing expenditures.

If anything, deficit spending will increase under the FAST Act, which will spend $305 billion ($61 billion a year) over the next five years. Highway revenues, which were $39.4 billion in F.Y. 2015, are not likely to be much more than $40 million a year over the next five years, so the new law incurs deficits of about $20 billion a year. The law includes $70 billion in “offsets”–funding sources that could otherwise be applied to reducing some other deficit–which won’t be enough to keep the program going for the entire five years.

Aside from deficit spending, the greatest mischief in federal surface transportation programs come from competitive grants. When Congress created the Interstate Highway System in 1956, all federal money was distributed to the states using formulas. But in 1991 Congress created a number of competitive grant programs, supposedly so the money would be spent where it was most needed. In fact, research by the Cato Institute and Reason Foundation showed that Congress and the administration tended to spend the money politically, either in the districts represented by the most powerful members of Congress or where the administration thought it would get the greatest political return for its party.

The 2012 surface transportation law contained no earmarks and turned all but two major competitive grant programs into formula funds, thus taking the politics out of most transportation funding. This upset some members of Congress because they could no longer get credit for bringing pork home to their districts. So it is not surprising that the FAST Act goes backwards, putting more money into political grants than ever before.

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Transit Down, Driving Up to Downtown Portland Jobs

By | | Transportation, Urban areas
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The Portland Business Alliance’s latest survey of downtown Portland employers shows a massive decline in transit commuting and a massive increase increase in commuting by car to downtown jobs between 2013 and 2014. The 2013 survey found that about 44,800 downtown workers commuted by transit and 36,600 commuted by car; in 2014 transit declined to 38,600 while auto increased to nearly 46,400.

At least some of this shift is likely due to survey error. As the above chart shows, 2013 numbers showed a huge increase in transit commuting combined with a sharp decline in auto commuting, both deviating from trend lines from previous years. The Antiplanner didn’t find 2013’s numbers to be credible, and this year’s survey bears that out.

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Take the T Out of TOD and What’s Left?

By | | City planning, Transportation
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The latest issue of the University of California Transportation Center’s Access magazine has an article that asks, “Does Transit-Oriented Development Need the Transit?” Noting that previous studies found that people who live in TODs are less likely to own cars, the authors dare to ask if the observed changes in travel behavior had anything to do with having rail transit near the TOD.

Since you are reading this here, the answer, of course, is “no.” Instead, the biggest influence on travel behavior is the presence or absence of parking. (The paper didn’t mention the self-selection issue, which is that differences in travel behavior are largely accounted for by the fact that people who don’t want to drive are more likely to live in TODs than people who do.)

In any case, whatever benefits may come from TODs, the authors conclude, “may not depend much on rail access.” That’s good news, the authors claim, because rail lines are expensive to build, so the benefits of TODs could be attained without that expense.

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Confusing Cause and Effect

By | | Housing, Regional planning
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“National housing prices have risen much faster than construction costs since the 1990s,” says Paul Krugman (agreeing with Obama’s economist, Jason Furman), “and land-use restrictions are the most likely culprit.” While Krugman is right about this, he confuses cause and effect in several other parts of his article, “Inequality and the City.”

His first problem is when he credits (or blames) urban gentrification on, “above all, the national-level surge in inequality.” In fact, as MIT economist Matthew Rognlie has shown, it is the other way around: the increase in inequality has resulted from the surge in housing prices.

Krugman’s next problem is when he asks, “why do high-income Americans now want to live in inner cities, as opposed to in sprawling suburban estates?” The answer that he misses is: most don’t. The regions where housing prices have risen fastest–San Francisco, Los Angeles, Seattle, Portland, Boston, New York–are ones where suburban growth is stifled by growth boundaries or some other form of land-use regulation. Without that stifling regulation, more high-income families would live in the suburbs, just as they do in regions that don’t have that regulation.

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Affordability Baffles Planners and Politicians

By | | Housing
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The Washington, DC, public housing authority has figured out how to solve the region’s affordability problems: Evict people from public housing, convert the dwellings into luxury homes, sell them at a profit, then use the profits to build more affordable housing. This cycle can be repeated endlessly, especially since it won’t really solve the problem.

The housing authority claims it is only selling homes at “scattered sites,” especially ones in “more desirable neighborhoods,” while it concentrates the subsidized homes in what must be less-desirable neighborhoods. In other words, it is increasing income segregation, exactly the opposite of the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s goal of promoting more integration of both races and incomes. Apparently, DC’s housing authority didn’t get the memo.

In Portland, which has been known to have its own issues with raising rents on so-called affordable housing, the city just passed another rule that will make housing less affordable. After cheering developers for tearing down homes and building apartments or several smaller homes, the backlash against the practice has grown so strong that the city council has decided to charge developers $25,000 for every house they tear down. That’ll make housing more affordable (Not)!

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The Art of the Deal

By | | Transportation, Urban areas
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Over at Market Urbanism, economist Emily Washington argues that Washington, DC’s Silver Line was the result of a deal between property owners, urban planners, and Washington Metro (WMATA). The result was a new rail transit line that harmed just about everyone except those who were party to the deal.

Washington’s tale is correct in general, but my memory of it differs in the particulars. She is right that the main pressure for the Silver Line came from the owners and developers of Tysons Corner, who wanted to build more high-rise housing, hotels, retail, and office space. Fairfax County wouldn’t approve these plans because the area wasn’t served by adequate transportation.

Far from favoring the rail project, however, Fairfax County planners recognized that too few people would ride the rail line to support the proposed new developments. Though the planners questioned the new plans, they were overruled by the county supervisors.

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Water Planning, California Style

By | | Planning Disasters, Urban areas
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Thanks to the wonders of government planning, San Diego County residents have to pay more for water they are not allowed to use. California, as everyone knows, is suffering a drought, so the state legislature mandated water conservation statewide, whether it is needed or not.

San Diego is one place where it isn’t needed, as that county has 99 percent of its normal amount of water. Yet residents are still required by state law to “let their grass die.” The costs of providing water haven’t declined, so the reductions in water usage due to mandatory conservation measures have forced the county water authority to raise its rates to cover those costs.

But it gets worse. San Diego is about to get an overabundance of water that is more costly than ever as a new $1 billion desalination plant is about to open that will increase the county’s water supply by as much as 10 percent. The plant is privately financed, but was built only after the county signed a contract agreeing to buy water from the plant whether it needed it or not. The water authority expects to spend $114 million next year buying water that was previously costing it only $45 million. This has led it to increase in water rates yet again.

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Happy Thanksgiving

By | | Housekeeping
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The Antiplanner dogs, Smokey, Zephyr, and Buffy, wish you a happy Thanksgiving. Buffy will be 17 in a few days and is still going strong. The long-haired dogs are thankful for our An online course lets you take it on your own is never a good idea. viagra cheap usa Kamagra Jelly is not an aphrodisiac and stimulation will be needed to online viagra prescription check out for more produce erection. Your doctor will assess your health and prescribe the best treatment for impotency canadian viagra generic in the males. How purchasing cialis online should one consume Kamagara? Kamagra medicine is easy to relapse. first snow of the season.

I am thankful for my faithful readers and all of their polite comments (not so much the impolite ones). I hope you all have a wonderful and safe holiday.

Self-Driving Car Update
How Soon Will We Get Self-Driving Cars?

By | | Transportation
15 Comments

The big question about self-driving cars is “when?” On one hand, there are rumors that Google will start selling its self-driving cars next year. While even the Antiplanner doesn’t think that’s realistic, Ford is promising self-driving cars in 2019 and other manufacturers are saying 2020.

On the other hand, many are saying that, due to liability concerns and technical problems with such factors as rain and snow, it will take much longer than that. Another study predicts that, even if the first self-driving cars enter the market in the next decade, it will take several decades after that for them to dominate the roads.

The Antiplanner has written on this before, but the more I learn, the more I am convinced that the first self-driving cars will be for sale by 2020 and that they will be the dominant form of travel within not much more than a decade after that.

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$1.3 Billion and Still Not Competitive

By | | Transportation
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Progressive Railroading, which has never met a passenger train subsidy it didn’t like, claims that, after six years and $1.3 billion, work on moderate-speed rail service between Chicago and St. Louis is “nearing the finish line.” Since the trains will go a maximum of 110 miles per hour, it isn’t true high-speed rail; Progressive Railroading calls it “higher-speed rail” while the Antiplanner prefers the term “moderate-speed rail.”

It turns out that Illinois is also approaching “the finish line” at moderate speeds. After nearly six years of work, Illinois has trains running at 110 mph on only one 15-mile segment of the 284-mile trip. The “final phases” of the project will be completed “within the next few years,” the magazine says vaguely.

When it is done, trains that currently take 5 hours 20 minutes will finish the trip in “about” 4 hours 30 minutes, for an average speed of 63 mph. Google maps says people can drive the distance in 4 hours 20 minutes, so the train will still take more time than driving. Plus, of course, the train probably won’t go where most people want to go as there just aren’t that many businesses or residences within walking distance of either Chicago Union Station or St. Louis’ Amtrak station. If you are driving alone, the $27 cost of an Amtrak ticket is enough to pay the marginal costs of driving; if you have some passengers, you’ll save money even counting all the costs of driving.
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