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Back in the Air Again

By | | Housekeeping
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The Antiplanner is winging it to Washington to participate in a Friday Capitol Hill briefing on transportation issues. The Antiplanner will be presenting the results of new research on the equitability (or lack of same) of federal transit funding. If you are in DC, I hope to see you Friday if not before.

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Making Density Affordable

By | | Housing, Urban areas
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The Antiplanner once wrote that “the definition of a socialist is someone who doesn’t understand that subsidizing something is not the same thing as making it affordable.” New York Mayor Bill de Blasio has often been called a socialist, and seems to fit the mold, proposing to make some housing “affordable” by confiscating money from others.

Specifically, de Blasio’s administration has demanded that, in order to get a permit to build a new school building, Collegiate School–a private school that traces its roots back nearly 500 years–must contribute enough money to build 55 units of “affordable housing.” Worse, those 55 units are estimated to cost at least $50 million (nearly $1 million per unit is affordable?), and if they cost more, Collegiate has to pay the difference. (If they cost less, the city pockets the difference.)

Even if the housing cost far less than $1 million per unit, 55 units of affordable housing aren’t going to have any influence on the affordability of New York City housing. Nor is it likely that whoever ends up living in those housing units falls into a conventional definition of the truly needy. Instead, like many of the beneficiaries of New York’s rent control and other housing laws, they will probably be middle- or upper-middle-class people who happen to be friends with the right people.

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California Housing Is Expensive

By | | Housing
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The Wall Street Journal observes that high housing costs are hurting the California economy. This brilliant conclusion is based on a report by Mac Taylor of the state legislative analyst’s office. Unfortunately, the report misses a few important details and as a result comes to entire the wrong conclusion.

Housing is expensive, the report says, because California isn’t building enough of it. Well, duh. Why isn’t it building enough? According to the report, it’s because there is a “limited amount of vacant developable land.” The solution, the report concludes, is to build higher densities in the land that is available.

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Requiem for a Streetcar Company

By | | Transportation
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The United Streetcar Company was supposed to create 300 full-time jobs and bring millions of dollars into the Oregon economy. Based on these promises, the company’s parent, Oregon Iron Works, lobbied hard to get a $4 million federal grant to build its first streetcar, which was an almost exact copy of streetcars that Portland had purchased from the Czech Republic for $1.9 million apiece. The Oregon congressman who earmarked the grant for the company confidently predicted that it would sell a billion dollars worth of streetcars to American cities in the next twenty years.


United Streetcar received $4 million to build this prototype car. The car never worked very well and fixing it cost another $3 million. Wikipedia photo by Steve Morgan.

The state of Oregon then put up $20 million in lottery money, which Portland used to order six new streetcars. Various problems forced the company to more-or-less arbitrarily reduce the order to five streetcars for the same price. “You’re not getting less,” gushed the company president unapologetically, “I actually think you’re getting more.” She later took a job as Deputy Assistant Secretary of Commerce for manufacturing, proving once again that it’s not what you know, it’s who you know.

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Rail Transit Debates

By | | Transportation
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Debate over the Maryland Purple Line continues. The governor is expected to make a decision in a few months.

Debate over a proposed streetcar in Sacramento begins. The measure will be voted on by local residents in May.

Debate begins over funding for two new light-rail lines in Vancouver, BC. Proponents include a council of suburban mayors, all of whom no doubt hope that light-rail lines will eventually be built to their cities. (The Antiplanner will have more to say about this one in a few days.)
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$10 Billion for a Bus Terminal

By | | Transportation
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As if it isn’t bad enough that New York City is spending $2.2 billion a mile building a new subway, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey says that replacing the Port Authority Bus Terminal will cost $8 billion to $10 billion. That estimate is up from a mere $800 million a year ago.


Some have called the Port Authority Bus Terminal one of the ten ugliest buildings in the world. Wikipedia photo by Roger Rowlett.

Port Authority officials “hope” that the federal government will pay for most of it, just as the feds paid three-fourth of the cost of the World Trade Center transit hub, which came in at $2.8 billion. Much of the current terminal is used for parking, shops, advertising, and other income-producing activities, yet it still manages to lose $100 million on operations.

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Denver’s RTD Makes the Case for Lying

By | | Transportation, Urban areas
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Denver RTD Makes the Case for Public-Private Funding, says Progressive Railroading. In fact, Denver’s Regional Transit District is making the case for lying to the voters about everything possible in order to get as much of their money as possible.

The first lie was that FasTracks, Denver’s rail transit plan that Progressive Railroading calls “one of the largest transit expansion programs in the country,” would cost $4.7 billion. Soon after the election, RTD admitted the real cost would be $7.9 billion. Thanks to the recession, the cost has supposedly fallen to $6.9 billion, but none of these estimates include interest and other finance charges.

The second lie was that RTD would build six new light-rail or other rail lines. In order to get the support of all of the suburban mayors in the region, RTD had to promise to build all the lines at once, as mayors realized that any that were deferred to later would probably never be built. Today, RTD realizes that the Northwest line to Boulder and Longmont is just far too expensive and will carry too few riders to be worthwhile. But that applies to the rest of them too, it’s just that RTD doesn’t have enough money to build them all.

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Driving Reaches Record Levels

By | | Transportation
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Americans drove more than three trillion miles in 2014, exceeding this number for the first time since 2007 and for only the third time in history. Actually, this isn’t quite a record, as the Department of Transportation estimates Americans drove 3.016 trillion miles in 2014 vs. 3.031 trillion in 2007. But if the American Public Transportation Association can get away with calling 2014 ridership levels a “record” even though it is only the 45th highest level of transit ridership in the past 103 years, then we can call 2014 driving a record when it is the second-highest level of driving in history.

Low gas prices may be responsible for the surge in driving in December–a 5 percent increase over December 2013. But the chart above shows that driving began to accelerate in April, while the chart below shows that gas prices didn’t begin falling until August, so improvements in the economy must be responsible for much of the increase.

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Already Built, DC Streetcar May Be Shut Down Before It Opens

By | | Transportation
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Washington’s H Street streetcar line may be shut down before it even begins operation. In testing since last fall, the line has already experienced collisions with 11 automobiles and one railcar spontaneously combusted.

DC has already spent $200 million on the project and once had planned to spend a total of $2 billion on streetcar lines in the district. But, aside from accidents, testing revealed that the streetcars created major congestion problems and slowed down buses that carry people to work on H Street. The city predictably blames most of the accidents on the auto drivers, but if the city hadn’t put the streetcar there, most of the accidents never would have happened.

“I’m not going to ask for money from the citizens of this jurisdiction nor from this council for something I can’t manage,” says the director of the district’s Department of Transportation. The city has asked the American Public Transportation Association–hardly an unbiased source–to review the streetcar project.

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Todd Litman Misses the Point

By | | Transportation
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Denver’s light rail hit and critically injured another pedestrian last week, temporarily shutting down most of the city’s light-rail trains. Meanwhile, transit apologist Todd Litman calls the Antiplanner’s assessment of light-rail dangers “a good example of bad analysis.” Light rail is more dangerous than cars and buses, he says, only because “light rail transit only operates in dense city centers where there are frequent interactions between various road users.” He suggests that cars and buses “might” be nearly as dangerous in similar situations.

The argument that “light-rail only operates in dense city centers” is questionable, but even if it were true, cars are still safer in those areas, which Litman could have learned by checking available data from the Department of Transportation. Highway Statistics table FI-220 lists highway fatalities by road type. Table VM-2 lists vehicle miles of travel by road type. We can divide through to compare fatality rates per billion miles of travel. Most of the vehicle miles are cars and light trucks containing an average of 1.67 people per vehicle (table 16).

The data show that motor vehicle accidents kill about 6.8 people per billion passenger miles on local urban streets, the most dangerous streets in urban areas. Urban collectors have only 3.6 fatalities per billion passenger miles; freeways just 2.5 to 2.8; and other arterials 4.6 to 5.9. All of these are well below light rail’s 12.5 fatalities per billion passenger miles. Commuter rail, incidentally, has 8.7 fatalities per billion passenger miles, while heavy rail and buses both work out to 4.5 fatalities per billion.

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