Search Results for: peak transit

Back in the Air Again

By | | Housekeeping
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The Antiplanner is flying to San Antonio today for the first leg of a three-city trip to talk about smart growth and rail transit. Early next week will find me in St. Petersburg, followed by three days in Austin.

Tomorrow–Thursday, September 4–I’ll be speaking to the San Antonio Tea Party about what the city should do now that it has decided not to build the streetcar. The meeting is from 6 pm to 8 pm at the Old San Francisco Steakhouse, 10223 Sahara Drive.
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I’ll try to post St. Petersburg and Austin meetings here soon.

Robots Want Your Job

By | | News commentary
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America has more than three million transportation workers, more than any other occupational group, and they are all about to lose their jobs to self-driving vehicles. They might fight it, says this video, but “the workers always lose; economics always wins.”

Fortunately, the creator of this video doesn’t understand economics (for example, it is not something that wins or loses). He equates humans with horses, saying that horses never expected that they would lose their jobs to motor vehicles, but as it turned out their population peaked in 1915 and has been declining ever since.

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So Much for Baby Boomers Downsizing

By | | Housing
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Smart-growth planners justify their preoccupation with multifamily housing on the notion that, not only do Millennials prefer such housing, but as Baby Boomers become Empty Nesters, they too will prefer such housing. This is based on a logical fallacy:

  1. Most people in multifamily housing have no children
  2. When their children leave home, Baby Boomers will no longer have children
  3. Therefore, most Baby Boomers will prefer multifamily housing.

The reality, of course, is that even most Millennials live in suburbs, not dense inner cities–and even more aspire to eventually own their own home. So to presume that Baby Boomers will suddenly move to multifamily housing, out of possible nostalgia for their younger years, is absurd.

This is confirmed by a recent analysis of census data published by Fannie Mae. The share of Baby Boomers with children living at home declined from more than 24 percent in 2006 to 12 percent in 2012. Yet the share of Baby Boomers who live in single-family homes has fallen by just 0.3 percent from their peak, and remain today above the share before the financial crisis.

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Cut Saturday Mail to Fund Highways?

By | | Transportation
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The Highway Trust Fund will be out of money in a few months, mainly because Congress insists on spending more than it takes in. To avert this supposed crisis, Republican leaders are proposing to cut Saturday deliveries of mail and use the savings to replenish the trust fund.

There’s actually a tiny grain of Constitutional sense behind this proposal. The original legal justification for federal involvement in highways, back when members of Congress actually cared about such things, was that the Constitution authorizes Congress “to establish Post Offices and post Roads.” If the “post roads” aren’t paying for themselves, then who better to pay for them than the post offices?

In this sense, the Republican proposal is slightly more rational than President Obama’s proposal to use the increased revenues from a corporate income tax reform that will eliminate loopholes but reduce corporate tax rates. The administration predicts reducing rates will reduce corporate tax obligations in the long run but closing loopholes will increase revenues in the short run (interesting how Obama is promising corporations lower taxes after he is out of office in exchange for higher taxes when he is still in office). Obama wants to use some of those increased revenues to supplement the Highway Trust Fund.

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Critique of Austin Light-Rail Proposal

By | | Transportation
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The Cato Institute has published a critique of the city of Austin’s proposal to build a 9.5-mile light-rail line that would cost nearly $1.4 billion (which was briefly discussed here). “Austinites make more than six million person trips per day, of which the light-rail line would carry less than a third of a percent,” says the critique. “Yet constructing the light-rail line would consume 5 percent of the region’s transportation budget for the next 25 years, and operations and maintenance would increase the cost still further.”

The proposed line is only one of several that the city wants to build. Yet projected ridership for the first line is expected to be less than 20,000 people per day and no more than 2,500 people per hour at its peak. As an associated op ed in the Austin American Statesman points out, since ordinary buses can move far more people than that, there is no reason to build rail. (A similar op ed looks at a light-rail proposal for St. Petersburg, Florida; a more generic op ed is here.)

Not surprisingly, “Project Connect” (the planning agency representing the city and Capital Metro) claims that light rail has a higher capacity than buses. To reach this conclusion, it made the absurd assumption that an exclusive bus lane can support no more than one bus every three minutes, allowing buses to carry no more than about 1,300 people per hour. In fact, ordinary city streets, much less exclusive bus lanes, can support far more than one bus every three minutes. Planners are clearly biased in favor of the expensive rail option, as based on this one fact alone they concluded that rail was the appropriate solution for Austin.

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In Memory of Common Sense

By | | Regional planning, Transportation
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Happy Memorial Day. Today, the Antiplanner feels a need to mourn common sense, which seems to have died a few decades ago. In place of common sense, we have plans that amount to little more than fantasies, rent-seeking special interest groups, and an environmental movement ready to defend any amount of subsidies to corporations that claim to be green.

One example of the death of common sense is the stubborn insistence on the part of planning advocates that restricting the supply of land for housing doesn’t increase home prices; that growing prices in regions with restricted supply are solely due to demand. This has most recently been challenged by economist Thomas Sowell and The Economist magazine, but I doubt they changed any minds.

Another example of the death of common sense is the eagerness of public officials to spend phenomenal amounts of money building transit systems that will carry very few people. Houston, for example, has so far spent $587 million on a 3.3-mile light-rail line, which reporters say equals $3,000 an inch–and the line isn’t even yet complete. The first modern light-rail line in America, San Diego’s Blue line (sometimes called the Tijuana Trolley), cost less than $10 million a mile in 1981, equal to about $17 million a mile today, and was of questionable value then. Yet Houston’s line, which costs ten times as much per mile, will be capable of carrying no more people than San Diego’s.

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Light-Rail Complaints

By | | Transportation
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Early tests reveal that the Twin Cities’ new light-rail cars require 67 minutes to go the 11 miles from downtown Minneapolis to downtown St. Paul for an average speed of 10 miles per hour. Metro Transit managers say they expect to get the time down before the line opens for service on June 14, but the 39 minutes promised on the agency’s web site seems unattainable considering they have added three stops since the line was originally planned. Even 39 minutes is less than 17 mph, hardly a breathtaking speed.

Buses currently do the same trip in a mere 26 minutes. Some people are mildly outraged that the region has spent $100 million per mile to get slower service. Too bad they weren’t outraged when the line was being planned.

Officials say that most people won’t ride the entire distance, and what really counts “is that these new Green Line passengers have a very high quality and reliable ride.” For that, they needed to spend a billion dollars.

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Prospects for Mileage-Based User Fees

By | | Transportation
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“We focus on mileage-based user fees as if they are an end, but they are really just a vehicle to an end,” Jack Basso, chair of the Mileage -Based User Fee Alliance, told the audience at what the group hopes will the first of an annual series of conferences. While everyone in the audience could agree with that statement, there was a sharp division over what should be the real purpose of such fees.

For Robert Atkinson, who recently chaired the National Transportation Infrastructure Financing Commission, the purpose of such fees is to give transportation users incentives to use the transportation system efficiently and transportation providers incentives to manage it efficiently. Such fees, he pointed out, would make it easy to use congestion pricing to relieve or eliminate the waste of traffic jams. Moreover, creating a “platform” for such fees would allow a variety of new groups to manage roads. Private parties could build and toll roads in congested areas. Neighborhood associations could take over street maintenance.

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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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