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It’s Going to Be a Bumpy Ride

By | | Transportation, Urban areas
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Last December, Honolulu’s rail transit project was estimated to be $700 million over budget. Now they are saying it is closer to a billion. Never fear, however: the state legislature just agreed to extend a half-percent excise tax, which was supposed to expire in 2022, indefinitely for five years to pay for the rail and its cost overruns.


Due to many sinkholes and other soil problems, the elevated Honolulu rail line looks to be a bumpy ride.

The legislature was reluctant to do so, but was persuaded after heavy lobbying by Honolulu Mayor Kirk Caldwell. Coincidentally, the Honolulu Star-Advertiser reports that rail contractors and subcontractors have donated well over half a million dollars to Caldwell’s political campaign funds. This doesn’t include sub-subcontractors, which are so numerous that even the transit agency doesn’t know how many there are, much less who they are. (The story is behind a paywall, but it says prime contractors and their principals and employees have given the mayor nearly $324,000 while subcontractors have given nearly $243,000.)

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Peak Automobile?

By | | Transportation
19 Comments

Ever since some alarmist came up with the economically nonsensical term peak oil, we’ve been inundated with peak this, that, and the other thing. There’s peak helium. How about peak phosphorus?

More recently, the term has been twisted from a supply issue to a demand issue, such as peak smart phone. And now, peak car. Yet, reading about peak car, the Antiplanner can’t help but feeling that this is neither a supply nor a demand issue but more wishful thinking on the part of city officials who are doing their best to create auto-hostile environments.

Millennials don’t drive? It turns out that’s not true, just as it isn’t true that Millennials avoid the suburbs.

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The Cost of Regulation in San Diego

By | | Housing, Urban areas
2 Comments

Last week, economists at the Fermanian Business & Economic Institute released a report estimating that government regulation increase San Diego housing prices–for both buyers and renters–by an average of about 40 percent. The report says that only 16 percent of San Diego County has been developed (the 2010 census says 18.5 percent), and almost all of the remaining land is off-limits to homebuilders. Yet, the report notes, a significant portion of that land “is geographically suitable for development.”

Although the land shortage is responsible for much of the regulatory cost, there are other costs as well. “The time involved in what is often a prolonged and complicated process . . . can add 15% or more to the price of a new house,” or more than a third of the total regulatory cost, says the report. This process can take 12 years or more before developers can start building a single home. Of course, the Antiplanner has argued that cities can only get away with imposing such an onerous process if they have shut off most vacant land from development through urban-growth boundaries and other regulatory tools.

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Making Transportation Less Wasteful and Unfair

By | | Transportation
3 Comments

The Antiplanner traveled from Louisiana back to Oregon yesterday and didn’t have time to write a lengthy post. So here is an op ed for your consideration. It briefly summarizes a report about federal funding of rail transit published by the Cato Institute last week.

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Spokane Rejects Transit Tax

By | | Transportation, Urban areas
21 Comments

Voters in the Spokane, Washington area appear to have rejected a proposed 50-percent increase in the sales tax used to support transit by a small margin this week. At the latest count, the vote was 50.5 percent against the tax and 49.5 percent in favor of it.

Click image to download the “public education” flyer distributed by Spokane’s transit agency.

A few hundred votes remain to be counted, but almost all of them would have to favor the tax to turn the election around. The measure lost despite the fact that the transit agency used taxpayer dollars to promote the measure with a one-sided “information mailer” distributed to voters. Tax proponents vowed to bring the tax back to the voters, saying that those who supported the tax did so with “a strong majority.”

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Lafayette Presentations

By | | Housing, Regional planning, Transportation, Urban areas
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Lafayette, Louisiana would seem to be the last place in the world that you would expect to adopt a smart-growth plan. Yet the city adopted one recently and is now beginning to implement it by revising its zoning code. The Antiplanner believes that this code will make housing and other developments more expensive and slow the economic growth of Lafayette.

I suspect the problems can be traced to a decision made a couple of decades ago to consolidate the city and parish government. The argument at the time was that most people lived in one of six Lafayette cities and towns, and the few people scattered across the rural parts of the parish couldn’t afford to maintain the roads and other infrastructure. Consolidation was supposed to fix that.

Today, the roads are in worse shape than ever, both in the city and the parish, and congestion is a major local problem. When the parish asked for a tax increase to improve roads, the parish council at that time refused to guarantee that the money would actually be spent on roads, so the voters rejected the increase.

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A New Definition of Insanity

By | | Transportation, Urban areas
7 Comments

An insanely expensive light-rail project in Minnesota just got more insane. The cost of the Southwest light-rail line, which had previously been estimated at $1.65 billion for 15.7 miles, or just over $100 million a mile, is now estimated to cost $341 million more, or just shy of $2 billion. That’s $126 million a mile, or more than seven times the inflation-adjusted cost of the initial San Diego Trolley, the nation’s first modern light-rail line.

Considering that freeways with many times the capacity of a light-rail line can be built for about $10 million a mile, spending more than $100 million a mile on light rail makes no sense at all. The only way people could support it is if they have no understanding of numbers, which explains why many politicians do support it. The good news is that some in Minnesota are having second thoughts about the Southwest line, including Governor Mark Dayton (who professed to be “shocked and appalled,” though he doesn’t say why he wasn’t appalled at the previous price) and Metropolitan Council chair Adam Duininck.

As the Antiplanner has previously noted, Eden Prairie, the destination of this line, is one of the wealthiest suburbs in the Twin Cities area. In order to provide “transit equity,” regional transit planners have promised to build a few bus shelters in poor neighborhoods. That’s so equitable.
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It Really Was Just the Economy

By | | Transportation
15 Comments

The Antiplanner is in Lafayette, Louisiana today to talk about urban planning. I’ll be speaking tomorrow about the city & parish’s current plans and proposed new development code.

In the meantime, Bloomberg reports that Millennials want to own and drive cars about as much as their parents’ did–it was just the poor economy holding them back. Of course, they’d rather drive “cool” cars such as Teslas or Priuses rather than Cadillac Escalades. But drive they will.

In other news, Amtrak’s accounting tricks are catching up to it, as illustrated by an escalator in Penn Station that went out of order in January and hasn’t been fixed yet. In order to make it appear that its trains are more profitable than they really are, Amtrak defined “maintenance” costs as capital improvements. It then went to Congress and bragged that its operating subsidies were smaller than ever–but it needed huge capital subsidies, which Congress failed to give it.

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U.S. Land Worth More Than $23 Trillion

By | | Housing, News commentary
6 Comments

A new study from the Bureau of Economic Analysis estimates that America’s land, exclusive of buildings or other improvements, was worth nearly $23 trillion in 2009. It has undoubtedly increased since then. The analysis, which was summarized in a Wall Street Journal blog post yesterday, presents estimates by state (for the lower 48 states only) broken into three categories: federal, developed, and agricultural.

Nationwide, the three categories add up to about 76 percent, leaving 24 percent in an implied “other” category. However, in a few states, the three categories add up to more than 100 percent, suggesting that developed federal lands are counted both in the developed and the federal categories. There may also be some overlap between federal and ag land.

Most of the important data are found in table 3, which the Antiplanner transferred to a spreadsheet for a more detailed review. The table shows that, nationally, ag land is estimated to be worth an average of about $2,000 an acre. However, it is worth much more–$5,000 to $16,500 an acre–in a few smaller eastern states including Connecticut, Delaware, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New Jersey, and Rhode Island. The higher values in these states probably reflect the competition for that land by exurbanites.

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A Source of Humiliation

By | | Transportation
11 Comments

Japan has test-run a mag-lev train at faster than 600 kilometers per hour, a fact that is ” further humiliating the US rail industry,” says Business Insider. As an American, I feel totally humiliated by this test.

After all, after spending more than $100 billion (about $350 million per mile) on infrastructure that will require millions of dollars of precision maintenance each year, Japan will have a Tokyo-Osaka train whose normal top speed of 500 kph will be barely 60 percent as fast as the cruising speed of a Boeing 737-600 and less than 55 percent as fast as the cruising speed of a Boeing 787. Compared with mag-lev, those airplanes require hardly any infrastructure: a few acres of approximately smooth runways, a few air terminals, and air traffic control.

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