Search Results for: rail projects

Getting Priorities Straight

By | | News commentary, Transportation
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Facing a $12 million to $17 million budget shortfall next year, Portland’s TriMet transit agency is cutting bus service for lack of funds. But it has enough funds to spend $250,000 on a giant sculpture of a deer with a baby face.

The agency has already cut bus service by 13 percent and light-rail service by 10 percent in the last two years. Yet it is spending at least $3 million on “art” as part of its $200-million-per-mile light-rail line to Milwaukie, one of the most wasteful rail projects ever. As a matter of policy, TriMet spends 1.5 percent of its capital expenditures on art, even though it is not required to do so.
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After all, the most important thing is to keep Portland weird, not to actually provide transportation to people who need it. In furtherance of that goal, TriMet recently hired a multicultural manager and a transit equity manager, no doubt paying both more than $100,000 a year.

TriMet asked the public for ideas to help it close its budget gap. Most of the ideas involved taxing someone else such as auto drivers or out-of-town visitors. How about ending capital-intensive projects and focusing on providing efficient transit service on routes and schedules that fill up the buses so that losses are minimized? I bet they never thought of that one.

Back in the Air Again

By | | Housekeeping
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The Antiplanner is flying to Denver today for three presentations. First, I’ll speak about the futility of government planning to a group called Hear Us Now in Thornton. The event will take place tonight at 6:00 pm at that bastion of free-markets (they don’t take TIF money), Gander Mountain, 9923 Grant, Thornton (accessible from Thornton Parkway or 104th).

Tomorrow (Wednesday, October 12), I’ll speak to the Boulder Land Use Coalition about the destructiveness of comprehensive planning. The event is from 11:30 am to 3:00 pm at the Olive Garden, 2685 Pearl Street, Boulder, and lunch is $20 per person.
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Tomorrow night, I’ll speak to Liberty on the Rocks about the environmental impacts of rail projects. This will take place at Choppers Sports Grill, 80 South Madison Street in Cherry Creek, from 7:00 to 9:00 pm. All three events are open to the public.

Then Why Did They Vote for It in the First Place?

By | | News commentary, Transportation
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A new poll finds that, if high-speed rail were on the ballot today, 62 percent of California voters would vote against it. The complete poll report also indicates that 63 percent of Californians say they would never ride it if it were built.

The poll asked people about their state funding priorities. The top priorities were education (76 percent), public safety (69 percent), and social services (65 percent). Water and irrigation (29 percent) and clean energy (18 percent) scored much lower. At 11 percent, high-speed rail was last.

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Partly based on this poll, transportation expert Ken Orski argues that “it looks like the end of the line for high-speed rail.” However, the California High-Speed Rail Authority still has several billion dollars of spending authority and the mandate to begin construction in the Central Valley by September 30, 2012 (or it will lose federal dollars). Unless the state legislature stops them, I would be more surprised if they voluntarily stopped than if they began building a train to nowhere.

The City That’s Corrupt

By | | News commentary, Urban areas
32 Comments

Portland, whose slogan, “The City That Works,” was stolen from one of the most corrupt cities in America, has been rocked by a new scandal, this one involving actual charges of bribery and under-the-table dealings. The FBI raided the home and office of the city’s parking manager to investigate allegations that he accepted large bribes to turn the city’s parking meter business over to a particular company.

These allegations apparently go back several years, but only now are being investigated in detail. What is interesting is how many Portlanders read the headlines and say, “yep, it must be true,” rather than, “this would never happen in our city.” A city that wastes huge gobs of money on silly streetcar and light-rail projects just exudes a culture prone to corruption.

“Portland is one of the most corrupt and nepotistic city governments in America,” says former Portland planner Richard Carson, who walked away from a lucrative planning job because “I just could not compromise my principles for more money.” He specifically points to the city building a light-rail line after voters rejected it twice and taking money from water user fees to spend on pork-barrel projects as examples of that corruption.

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Let the Gas Tax Expire

By | | News commentary, Transportation
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The Antiplanner has written several recent posts about Congressional reauthorization of transportation spending. But an even more imminent transportation reauthorization deadline is coming up: that for transportation revenue in the form of gas taxes. The law allowing such taxes is due to expire on September 30.

Recalcitrant Republicans held airline ticket taxes hostage for several weeks over subsidies to a baker’s dozen out-of-the-way airports. They let the debate over raising the debt limit go down to the wire. What’s to prevent them from refusing to reauthorize the federal gas tax?

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Mica Would Cut Transport Funds by 30%

By | | News commentary, Transportation
10 Comments

Fiscal austerity is the theme of House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee Chairman John Mica’s long-awaited proposal for reauthorizing federal surface transportation funding, which he released Thursday. Unlike the 2005 reauthorization and President Obama’s proposed reauthorization, Mica’s proposal, which is supported by other Republican subcommittee chairs but has been blasted by Democrats, calls for spending no more than revenues.

That means a bill that is less than half as large as Obama’s proposal, and about 30 percent smaller (in real dollars) than the 2005 bill. Gas tax revenues and other federal highway user fees (mainly a tax on truck tires) total about $35 billion a year, which over six years with inflation is expected to produce about $230 billion. This is well short of the $480 billion that Obama wanted to spend and also a painful drop from the $50 billion a year spent by the 2005 law. Mica blamed the shortfall on new House rules that says Congress can’t spend more than revenues.

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Demand for Free Money Continues to Grow

By | | Transportation
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The demand for rail transit “is strong all across the country,” says a new report from Reconnecting America. How do they know? They simply added up all the “planned and proposed fixed-guideway transit projects” they could find.

They found a total of 643 projects (1-mb Excel spreadsheet) in about 80 urban areas whose total costs were estimated to be $233 billion. Of these, 43 are under construction, 95 are in the engineering phase, 108 are doing an alternatives analysis, 358 are “future plans,” and 39 are “stalled.” If all of these projects were built, the group promises, they “would connect 3.5 million more jobs to transit, an increase of 25 percent.”

Wowee! Spending more than a quarter of a trillion dollars (plus cost overruns) would connect transit to 2.5 percent of all jobs in the country. At that price, it would cost a mere $8.2 trillion to connect the remaining 82.5 percent of jobs to transit. That makes perfect sense in a Bizarro world considering Congress just killed President Obama’s high-speed rail plan to supposedly connect 80 percent of Americans for a mere half a trillion dollars.

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Is LaHood Admitting Defeat?

By | | News commentary, Transportation
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Last week, Secretary of Immobility Ray LaHood designated the Boston-to-Washington corridor as an eleventh high-speed rail corridor. This makes Amtrak eligible for some of the $2.4 billion in high-speed rail funds released when Florida rejected federal funds for the Tampa-Orlando route.

Of course, $2.4 billion won’t even scratch the surface of Amtrak’s $117 billion plan to speed up trains in the Northeast Corridor. But Amtrak would probably use the funds to smooth a curve or two, improve stations, or buy another couple of trainsets.

The Boston-to-Washington corridor already has the fastest trains in America, with an average speed of 81 mph between New York and Washington (but a paltry average speed of just 64 mph between Boston and New York). Since the whole point of Obama’s plan was to bring such fast trains to other parts of the country, why is the administration now inviting Amtrak and states in the Northeast Corridor to apply for rail funds?

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Reallocating Florida’s HSR Grant

By | | Transportation
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When Ohio and Wisconsin elected governors who promised to cancel those states’ high-speed rail projects, Secretary of Immobility Ray LaHood redistributed the federal grants to those projects to other states (including $342 million to Florida) before the new governors even took office. Now that Florida has also cancelled its high-speed rail project, LaHood is being a little more careful with where he spends the freed-up dollars.

Instead of arbitrarily handing out the money to other states, the Federal Railroad Administration has announced a new competitive grantmaking process. As faithful Antiplanner ally Wendell Cox writes, the FRA has some very strict requirements in the grants.

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Why Do Reporters Love Trains So Much?

By | | News commentary, Transportation
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As C.P. Zilliacus noted in one of his comments yesterday, Slate published an article subtitled, Why Do Conservatives Hate Trains So Much?. The writer, David Weigel, covered most of the bases, but a couple of clarifications are in order.

First but not foremost, Weigel seems to confuse passengers with passenger miles when he writes, “Amtrak got $2.2 billion in pure subsidies in 2010 and carried 28.7 million people, for around 13 cents per passenger, although some researchers estimate the annual cost at closer to 30 cents. Highways got $42 billion in funds in fiscal year 2010, but far more people use them; the estimate puts cost at between 1 cent and 4 cents per driver.”

I told him that Amtrak subsidies are nearly 30 cents per passenger mile (not per passenger), and road subsidies are about a penny a passenger mile (not per driver). Even his arithmetic is wrong: $2.2 billion in subsidies divided by 28.7 million passengers is $76 per passenger, not 13 cents. I’m not even sure where he got the $2.2 billion in subsidies; I think it was closer to $1.7 billion in 2009. Maybe this is one reason why reporters like trains so much: they can’t do the arithmetic.

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