Search Results for: peak transit

Taxing Commuters Living Abroad

By | | News commentary
29 Comments

Governing magazine has a great idea for cities that are hard up for cash: tax suburban commuters. After all, those leeches live outside the city but depend on the city to provide them with jobs. Thus, they should pay a tax for a privilege of working in the city.

Just to make sure they get people coming and going, cities like Detroit also want to tax reverse commuters. That is, they want suburban employers to deduct taxes from the pay of their employees who happen to live in Detroit.

These are both great ideas if the goal is to hasten the fiscal demise of the cities. After all, think how well the cities would be doing if all the employers in the cities moved to the suburbs. The cities wouldn’t have to pay to provide urban services to those employers, but they also wouldn’t collect any property or other taxes from the businesses. Would they be better or worse off? If you think they would be worse off losing those jobs, then a commuter tax is redundant since the city is better off having the jobs without the commuter tax. (The same rationale applies to a reverse commuter tax on city residents who work in the suburbs.)

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Porker of the Month?

By | | News commentary, Transportation
16 Comments

A group called Citizens Against Government Waste gave Oregon Representative Earl Blumenauer the “Porker of the Month award” for wanting to raise gas taxes in order to fund bike paths. Bike paths? They’re complaining about bike paths?

The group points out that taxpayers (they don’t say if this means all taxpayers or just federal taxpayers) have spent $9.5 billion on bicycle and pedestrian facilities over the last 22 years. It neglects to mention that this is only about 1 percent of federal highway spending and about a quarter of a percent of all highway spending. Maybe I’m biased, as (like Blumenauer) I’m an active cyclist, but I find it hard to complain about this.

MIT Press recently published Fighting Traffic, by University of Virginia researcher Peter Norton, who argues that streets used to be for pedestrians, but some vast conspiracy akin to the Great Streetcar Conspiracy stole the streets and gave them to automobiles. I don’t buy Norton’s extreme view, but I do see the need to provide safe facilities for all forms of transport. If roadways were once safe for cyclists and pedestrians but now are not because they are dedicated to cars and trucks, I don’t have serious problems with spending a tiny percentage of highway user fees on safe bicycle and pedestrian ways.

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Back in the Air Again

By | | Housekeeping, Regional planning, Transportation
7 Comments

The Antiplanner is flying to Salt Lake City today to speak at a legislative forum tomorrow sponsored by the Sutherland Institute. The topic will be Utah’s 30-year transportation plan. Since the Antiplanner is skeptical about our ability to know things even five years in advance, you can imagine what I’ll be saying about a 30-year plan.

Thursday, I’ll be in Olympia, Washington to speak at a Senate Governmental Operations Committee work session about growth-management planning. My main message will be that growth-management created many more problems than it solved. Most important, according to Coldwell Banker, the price of a 2,200-square-foot house in Seattle is more than three times the price of a similarly sized house in Houston.

However, despite me being very imaginative in coming up with reasons for not studying the subject, I could never tadalafil india cialis come close to Calvin’s reason of not doing his Math homework. Pineal Gland – Located at the center of the brain, it was investigated on whether the intake of it. brand cialis canada pfizer viagra mastercard devensec.com The drug is safe for consumption for most people. If you are suffering from porn-induced erectile dysfunction, it is advised to take up some simple exercises like jogging, walking, swimming viagra uk sales and stretching. Friday I’ll be in Lake Oswego, Oregon, talking about a proposed “high-capacity transit” line to Tigard, Oregon. The term high-capacity transit is a joke, as Portland’s light-rail system can’t run more than two cars in a train (due to the city’s short blocks) and no more than 20 trains an hour. At 150 people per car, that’s 6,000 people per hour. A good busway could move nearly ten times that many people.

In any case, if I get a chance, I’ll try to post some updates over the next few days.

The Megabus Revolution

By | | Transportation
17 Comments

One of the many excellent speakers at this year’s American Dream conference was Dale Moser, CEO of Coach USA and Megabus. Coach USA is owned by Stagecoach, one of the two large private transit companies that emerged when Britain privatized much of its transit industry. (The other is First Group, which among other things owns Greyhound.)


Just seven years after it began, Megabus covers scores of cities in the East, South, and Midwest as well as several in the California market. Click image for a larger view.

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It’s Not an Affair; It’s a Committed Relationship

By | | Transportation
9 Comments

USA Today asks, “Is USA’s love affair with the automobile over?” The Antiplanner is always irked when someone calls people’s use of cars a “love affair,” because it implies that driving is irrational. In fact, people’s use of cars is entirely rational, as they are the fastest, most-convenient, least-expensive of getting between most places inside of an urban area as well as for journeys up to a few hundred miles.

Ironically, USA Today quotes a study from the Department of Transportation (previously cited here) that pretty much concluded that the very slight (2.4%) decline in driving since its 2007 peak was almost entirely due to the economy, and not a change in tastes. USA Today pretty much ignores that conclusion so they can underscore opinions by car-haters from US PIRG who want to divert even more highway user fees to transit and other modes of transportation.

If there is any reason for a decline in driving other than the economy, it is demographics. Baby boomers are retiring and retired people don’t drive as much, especially during rush hour. The ratio of workers to non-workers is declining, so rush-hour traffic might be a little better. That doesn’t mean there is no reason to try to fix congested roads; roads that are congested today are bound to remain congested in the future unless something is done such as implementing congestion pricing.

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The Dallas Green Line Is Brown

By | | Transportation
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“The Dallas-Fort Worth region is currently designated as a serious non-attainment area for ozone by the Environmental Protection Agency,” says page 1-8 of the final environmental impact statement for Dallas’ Northwest Corridor rail project. This is also known as the Green Line extension of an existing low-capacity rail (formerly known as light rail) line.

“The project corridor [is] one of the most congested highway corridors in the region,” the FEIS adds, noting that “Travel time delay and congestion levels in the corridor are increasing.” So naturally, the Dallas Area Slow Transit (DAST) decided to build a $1.8 billion, 28-mile low-capacity rail line to solve these problems. (For some reason, the FEIS and DAST’s web site erroneously call the agency “Dallas Area Rapid Transit,” but there is nothing rapid about low-capacity rail.)

So how well does $1.8 billion worth of low-capacity transit do at solving problems of congestion and air pollution? Not well at all, at least if you believe the FEIS, which was written by proponents of the project. According to page 4-13, it takes virtually no cars off the road. However, it has a huge impact on intersections: according to page 4-16, seventeen intersections that will have A, B, or C levels of service without the project will have D, E, or F with the project. At least one goes all the way from A to F.

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A Modest Proposal

By | | Transportation
10 Comments

The Antiplanner has been reading lots of rail transit plans lately and it strikes me that the standard jargon for different kinds of rail systems is confusing. Most people think that the terms “light” and “heavy” rail refer somehow to weight, when they don’t. By extension, if trains look heavy, they must be heavy rail.

This results in the most confusion between heavy rail and commuter rail. Both use the same weight of rails, so lots of people call commuter rail “heavy rail.” In fact, weight has nothing to do with it–most light-rail lines are built with the same weight of rails as heavy-rail lines.

As the Antiplanner has noted before, the terms “light” and “heavy” really refer to carrying capacity. Light rail is short for “light-capacity” rail while heavy rail is short for “heavy-capacity” rail. The confusion results because the term “heavy” is rarely used to mean “high” while “light” is rarely used to mean “low.”

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Presentations

The Antiplanner gives about three dozen presentations a year on a variety of topics. Most of the presentations below include a summary of the narration in the notes section. All of the charts in these presentations are in the public domain and may be freely distributed or used in your own presentations. I make every effort to use photographs that are in the public domain or under a creative commons license, but may have accidentally included some that are copyrighted, so it is best to try to find the photo’s origin before publishing the photos. If you find any that are copyrighted, let me know and I’ll take them down.

Land-Use Presentations

Presentations about planning in Lafayette, Louisiana: the Lafayette Comprehensive Plan (40 megabytes); the Lafayette Unified Development Code (14 megabytes); a somewhat different version of the presentation on the Lafayette Unified Development Code made before the Lafayette city/parish council (12 megabytes, all in Powerpoint format).

Maintaining the Texas Miracle by protecting property rights (8.0-MB PowerPoint show), given on January 8, 2015 in Austin, Texas.

Debate with Myron Orfield (11.6-MB PowerPoint or 10.5-MB PDF version) on September 24, 2014, in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

Presentation made to the San Antonio Tea Party about smart growth and transit issues in PDF (35 MB), PowerPoint format without videos (40 MB) or PowerPoint format with videos (122 MB).

Presentation about the Twin Cities Thrive plan made to the Southwest Metro Tea Party in Chanhassen on August 4, 2014, downloadable as a Zip file (111 MB including video) or PPT file (32 MB, no video)

Presentation about Plan Bay Area downloadable as a 16-MB PDF or a 57-MB zip file containing the PowerPoint show plus two videos of driverless cars. This presentation is considerably longer than the one used in the debate (below).

Presentation at the Canadian Property Rights Conference in Ottawa on September 14, 2013 (11.6-MB PDF).

Review of Plan Bay Area, a short (10-minute) presentation given as a part of a debate over the future of the San Francisco Bay Area (5.3-MB PowerPoint). The same presentation as a 3.1-MB PDF with the narrative in notes.

Freedom of Movement, presentation given at the Educational Policy Conference in St. Louis, January, 2013 (20 MB)

Land-Use Regulation and Housing, 350-slide presentation given to the Professional Land Surveyors of Oregon, Salem, January, 2013 in PDF (49 MB) or in PowerPoint format with videos (89 MB)

Smart Growth and Property Rights in California, presentation given in Camarilla, June, 2012 (67 MB)

Smart Growth and Property Rights, presentation given in SeaTac, Washington, March, 2012 (82 MB)

Debate with James Howard Kunstler, presentation given at Brown University, Providence, April 2010 (30 MB) — Same presentation in PDF (30 MB)

Smart Growth and Property Rights in Montana, presentation given in Bozeman in February, 2010 (16 MB) — Same presentation in PDF (16 MB)

The Best-Laid Plans, presentation made in Wichita, February, 2010 (26 MB)

The Costs of Smart Growth in Portland is a companion to my 2001 book, The Vanishing Automobile. Though it is a decade old, it can still be useful, especially as it comes fully narrated. The narration also makes it 128 MB, so be prepared for a long download unless you have a really fast connection.

The Costs of Smart Growth in San Jose is a fully narrated version of the Portland show prepared for San Jose. It is 216 MB so will take even longer to download. However, you can play either the Portland or San Jose shows for the public by hooking your computer to a projector and speakers.

Tax-Increment Financing Presentations

Tax-Increment Financing in Louisiana, presentation given in Lafayette, LA in June, 2011 (20 MB)

Tax-Increment Financing in Idaho, presentation given to the Idaho Freedom Foundation in Boise in November, 2009 (13 MB)

Streetcar Presentations

Milwaukee Streetcar Plan Critique, presentation given in Milwaukee in March, 2013 (18 MB) — Same presentation in PDF (15 MB)

Critique of San Antonio Streetcar Plan, presentation given in San Antonio, November, 2012 (61 MB)

Boise streetcar presentation given to the Idaho Freedom Foundation in Boise in December, 2011 (11 MB)

American Nightmare Presentations

American Nightmare, presentation given about housing issues in Atlanta in March, 2013 (13 MB) — Same presentation in PDF (10 MB)

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Faster, Cheaper, Safer, and More Convenient, the keys to insuring that transportation spending leads to economic growth (66-MB PowerPoint show with videos); show given on January 8, 2015, in Austin, Texas

Here is a 14-MB PDF of an October 8, 2013 presentation given in Bakersfield, California on why high-speed rail won’t relieve congestion and what we should do instead. The videos of self-driving cars that were in the presentations are in this 10-MB zip file.

Gridlock, presentation about the Antiplanner’s book given in Albuquerque to the Rio Grande Foundation, May, 2010 (35 MB) — also download media files to get video (53 MB)

Gridlock, presentation about the Antiplanner’s book given in Dallas to the National Center for Policy Analysis, April, 2010 (29 MB) — also download media files to get video (63 MB)

Rail Transit Presentations

A presentation on the failed Norfolk light rail and the plan to extend it to Virginia Beach, given in Virginia Beach on October 16, 2014 (33-MB PDF).

Presentation in St. Petersburg about the proposed Pinellas light rail (18-MB PDF)

Presentation in Austin about the proposed Austin light rail (24-MB PDF)

Presentation about light rail made to residents of St. Paul’s Daytons Bluff neighborhood on August 5, 2014, Zip file (82 MB with video) or PPT file (39 MB, no video)

Presentation about transit and transportation made to the Metro North Chamber of Commerce, Coon Rapids, Minnesota on August 6, 2014, Zip file (98 MB with video) or PPT file (15 MB, no video)

Light-Rail Transit in St. Petersburg, presentation given in St. Petersburg, April, 2012 (78 MB)

Critique of Proposed Honolulu Rail Project, presentation given in Honolulu, February, 2012 (17 MB)

Critique of Columbia River Crossing and Vancouver Light Rail, presentation in Vancouver, Washington, October, 2011 (12 MB)

Light-Rail Transit in Vancouver, Washington, presentation given in Vancouver, March, 2010 (14 MB)

Light-Rail Transit in Tampa, presentation given in Tampa, September, 2010 (26 MB)

Can Rail Transit Save Energy and Reduce Greenhouse Gas Emissions? presentation given in Washington, DC, April, 2008 (13 MB)

Other Transportation Presentations

Presentation about transportation planning and property rights given to the Spokane Chapter of the Citizens Alliance for Property Rights on May 22, 2015 (31.2-MB Powerpoint format).

A review of a proposed transit plan and tax increase for Spokane in PowerPoint (13.5 MB) or PDF format (9.0 MB).

A presentation on autonomous vehicles, mass transit, and long-range transportation planning given on Capital Hill on October 15, 2014 (20-MB PDF).

A presentation about high-speed rail, with particular reference to the proposed “Zip Train” from Minneapolis to Rochester, given on August 8, 2014 in PDF (18 MB).

A presentation on an Indianapolis transit plan can be downloaded as a 16-MB PDF.

Ending Congestion by Refinancing Highways, presentation in Washington, DC, May, 2012 (2 MB)

The Case for Privatizing Transit, presentation given in Washington, DC, July, 2011 (40 MB)

Rails Won’t Save America, presentation on high-speed rail and rail transit given at MIT in November, 2010 (46 MB) — also download media files to get video (40 MB) — Same presentation in PDF (64 MB)

Transportation Reauthorization, presentation given in Washington, DC, September, 2009 (13 MB)

The Case Against High-Speed Rail, presentation given to the Heritage Foundation, Washington, DC, June 2009 (9 MB)

Virginia Takes Two Steps Backwards

By | | Transportation
7 Comments

When Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell proposed to pay for transportation by replacing the gas tax with a sales tax, many pundits predicted it would never happen. They were only half right. Last Friday, the Virginia Senate passed a bill, already approved by the Assembly, that replaced the retail gas tax with a sales tax plus a wholesale gas tax that is almost as much as the retail tax.

The wholesale gas tax is 3.5 percent, which means that it adjusts with changing oil prices. At current gas prices, it amounts to about 14 cents a gallon, slightly less than the 17.5 cent per gallon retail tax that is being eliminated. When added to the increased sales tax that is dedicated to transportation, the result will be a significant increase in transportation funding.

It is not likely, however, to result in any significant improvements for travelers. Instead, as the Wall Street Journal notes, it is a scam that mainly benefits “unions, real estate developers and the transit lobby.”

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Skyriding to the Top of the Stupidity Pile

By | | Transportation
23 Comments

Streetcars apparently aren’t stupid enough for Michael McDaniel and Jared Ficklin of Frog Design in Austin, Texas. They’ve come up with an even stupider idea: moving people around on urban networks of ski lifts. Each ski lift would consist of scores of small cars suspended from wires, and each car would carry six to twelve people.

The 152-car, 2.1-mile gondola system in Rio de Janeiro cost $74 million, goes about 8 mph, and is expected to carry up to 30,000 people per day. Flickr photo by minplanpac

They estimate that a base system could cost as little as $3 million per mile. If you insist on weighty luxuries such as air conditioning and heat, the cost rises to $12 million. They admit that in urban areas the costs are more likely to be around $24 million per mile, but say that is still less expensive than streetcars or light rail. That’s like saying french fries are healthy because they aren’t as heart-attack-inducing as eating pure lard.

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