Search Results for: rail projects

Sticking It to Your Employer

By | | Follow up, News commentary, Transportation
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Many people seem to think that high-speed rail won’t work in Florida but still makes sense in the Boston-to-Washington corridor. For example, in a commentary on Governor Scott’s decision to cancel the Florida high-speed train, Michael Barone writes in the Washington Examiner,

“I have written rather extensively about the foolishness of most high-speed rail projects. Personally, I would love to see a really high-speed train from Washington to New York, one much faster than the current Acela, with speeds comparable to those of France’s TGV and Japan’s bullet train. As a business traveler I would be willing to pay (i.e., would be willing to have my employer pay) the high fares necessary to cover all or most of the cost of such service.”

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High-Speed Train Wreck

By | | Follow up, News commentary, Transportation
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Secretary of Immobility Ray LaHood says the administration’s high-speed rail fantasy won’t be derailed. But remember, this is the guy who said “there is no stopping” high-speed rail in Wisconsin a few months before the November election–and then he killed Wisconsin’s project himself when the “wrong party’s” candidate won the governorship.

Wikipedia commons photo of the world’s deadliest high-speed train accident by Nils Fretwurst.

Republicans remain skeptical and say they want to cancel the program. Even middle-of-the-road transportation commentator Ken Orski, who once wrote enthusiastically about high-speed rail and who is no antiplanner, argues (in a free email newsletter that he doesn’t post on line) that the administration’s plan is “a $53 billion high-speed rail program to nowhere.”

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Crying Over Cancelled Trains

By | | Transportation
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There is much weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth over the so-called high-speed train in Wisconsin. A Madison newspaper that calls itself “the Progressive Voice” claims that Governor-elect Walker’s promise to cancel the Milwaukee-to-Madison train is economic treason. That makes sense if you agree with Paul Krugman that the federal government should spend a few more trillion dollars on “stimulus” projects that few people will ever use. For those who think that the national debt plus social security obligations plus medicare obligations are likely to bankrupt the nation if not immediately fixed, the real economic treason would be to build the rail line.

Labor unions and other rail activists held a candlelight vigil last night to “save the train” and the thousands of jobs it would supposedly produce. If they really want to create jobs, they should bring back stagecoaches and riverboats.

The fact that, after spending nearly a billion dollars, the average speed of this supposedly high-speed train will be only 59 mph doesn’t seem to bother people. Nor do they fret about the fact that the subsidies to each train rider will be more than $100. Continue reading →

Interpreting the Election Results

By | | News commentary, Regional planning, Transportation
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Tea party supporters do not agree on a lot of issues, but are firm on two things: cutting government spending and protecting property rights. What do the election results mean for the future of land-use and transportation planning?

On one hand, many of the results look promising for supporters of property rights and efficient (user-fee-driven) transportation policies.

  • Wisconsin rail skeptic Scott Walker, who promised to cancel the state’s moderate-speed rail project, soundly trounced the pro-rail incumbent governor.
  • Ohio elected fiscal conservative John Kasich, who is also a rail skeptic, as governor, probably dooming that state’s moderate-speed rail plans.
  • Florida appears to have elected fiscal conservative Rick Scott as governor. He will probably take a hard look at that state’s high-speed rail programs.
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TIGER II Rips Another Hole in the Federal Budget

By | | News commentary, Transportation
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Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood put your money where his mouth is when he dedicated well over 40 percent of the latest round of “Transportation Investment Generating Economic Recovery” (TIGER) stimulus funds to streetcars, pedestrianways, and other “livability” projects. The biggest grant was $47.67 million towards a 2.7-mile, $72 million streetcar line in Atlanta.

In all, the grants totaled about $584 million, of which $557 million went for actual construction and $27 million went for planning. Almost 85 percent of the planning money was for some form of a livability program (transit, pedestrianways, “complete streets,” multi-modal stations, etc.), while 40 percent of the construction funds went to livability, 24 percent to highways, and 36 percent to freight projects.

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Planning Student Proves Consultants Are a Waste of Money

By | | News commentary, Transportation
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Spending around $1,000, 20-year-old Daniel Jacobson, a Stanford University undergraduate student, has written a 140-page streetcar feasibility study for Oakland, California. The city of Oakland itself had already spent $300,000 on a streetcar study back in 2005, and planned to spend another $330,000 for further study this year.

Of course, the Jacobson’s study is filled with fabricated data, false assumptions, and phony calculations. But most readers will be too dazzled by the beautiful graphics to notice. Besides, any $300,000 professional feasibility study would contain the same fabricated data and calculations.

The biggest fabrication, of course, is the inevitable claim that building a streetcar will lead to economic redevelopment. There is not a chance in hell that spending $100 million or more on a 2-1/2-mile streetcar line would lead to any economic development, and even if it did, it would only be development that would have taken place somewhere in the Oakland area anyway. But any streetcar study is going to make this claim because that is the only way to justify spending tens of millions of dollars on a nineteenth-century technology that is slower, less flexible, and more dangerous to have on the streets than buses that cost far less.

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FTA Wants Your Comments

By | | Follow up, News commentary, Transportation
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Last January, Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood announced that he was replacing rules that required that federal transit grants had to be “cost effective” with rules promoting “livability.” Yesterday, the Federal Transit Administration asked for your comments on this proposal.

The FTA doesn’t have new rules yet; it just wants to know what you think of the idea. Considering that the head of the FTA has revealed that he is skeptical of expensive rail projects, especially when cities can’t afford to maintain and operate the systems they have, they might genuinely be interested in some new ideas. After all, how livable can a city be where lots of people have given up their cars for transit only to find that the transit agency has stopped running for lack of funds?

Speaking of costly transit, the Tennessee Center for Policy Research has just published a new paper on the cost of transit in that state. The paper also shows how Tennessee transit systems use more energy and emit more greenhouse gases, per passenger mile, than cars or even SUVs. The only really efficient transit system, the paper shows, is vanpooling, which is the closest thing most transit agencies have to actual automobiles.

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Freedom of Choice and Mobility

By | | Transportation
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A new group called Mobility Choice claims to support the use of free-market tools to reduce America’s dependence on foreign oil. Their Blueprint for achieving this goal has a somewhat realistic understanding of the limits to using transit to achieving this goal.

“Public transit is often inefficient, inconvenient, and uneconomic,” the paper admits. The blueprint includes market tools such as HOT lanes and congestion pricing. The plan also suggests that, if we want to provide transit for low-income people who lack access to autos, vouchers make more sense than funding giant transit bureaucracies. All these ideas have been endorsed by the Antiplanner.

As if to further gain free-market credibility, the blueprint quotes an article published by the Cato Institute a dozen years ago. Despite the article’s title (“How Government Highway Policy Encourages Sprawl”), however, it does not really support the blueprint’s argument.

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Don’t Let Your Senator Become a Committee Chair

By | | News commentary
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Members of Congress take it for granted that they can do their states and districts a lot of good by ascending to the chairs of powerful committees. Indeed, a new study from the Harvard Business School finds that states receive 40 to 50 percent earmark spending when a senator from that state becomes chair of a major committee, while the increase for house chairs is about 20 percent.

At the same time, the researchers were surprised to find that a shift in chairs led to a significant decrease in corporate spending within a state. Companies reduced capital investments by 15 percent and also reduced research and development programs. These reductions continue so long as the senator or representative remains chair, and are only partially reversed when the senator or representative resigns. Both large and small firms reduce their spending, though the largest reductions were found in firms that are geographically concentrated (i.e., had a large share of their operations in a single state or district).

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Unsustainable Transportation

By | | News commentary, Transportation, Urban areas
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Is is possible that some transit advocates are figuring out that financial sustainability is a prerequisite for sustainable (meaning non-automobile) transportation? You would think so from a recent article about the San Francisco Bay Area’s transportation problems.

The Metropolitan Transportation Commission‘s annual report projects that the region needs to find $1 billion a year to support transit. Since 1997, the Bay Area’s transit funding has increased by more than 50 percent (net of inflation), yet transit service has grown by only 16 percent and ridership by just 7 percent. “That is a terrible return on our region’s transit investment,” the annual report points out, “and it should cause us to think long and hard before committing future funds to such a low-yield strategy.” As a result, the report concludes, “the current transit system is not sustainable.”

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