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The 2014 New Starts Recommendations

By | | Transportation
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A few weeks ago, the Antiplanner took a quick look at the Federal Transit Administration’s 2013 New Starts program. Now the agency has released its 2014 New Starts Report, which includes eight new projects.

Four of the eight projects are bus-rapid transit, which can mean anything from running buses on existing streets to building expensive new busways. A proposed BRT in El Paso appears to be closer to the former as it is projected to cost $43 million for a 17-mile route, or less than $3 million per mile. At the other extreme, a BRT in Lansing is projected to cost $215 million for an 8.5-mile route, or more than $25 million per mile. This is undoubtedly a huge waste.

Two of the remaining four projects are extensions to existing light-rail lines. Denver proposes to spend $211 million building a 2.3-mile extension of one of its light-rail lines. At $92 million per mile, this is less than the national average for light rail, but still outrageously expensive, especially considering Denver built its first couple of light-rail lines for less than $30 million per mile.

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The Best for the Most Ridiculous

By | | Transportation
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The lyrics to what some people claim is the best rock-and-roll song in history were the inspiration for what some say is the best newspaper headline in history. The article is about one of the most ridiculous ideas in history, which is spending more than $150 million rebuilding a former rail line from Armagh (population under 15,000) to Portadown (population 22,000), in Northern Ireland.

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The Antiplanner is not Irish enough to have ever actually visited Armagh or Portadown, and I don’t have data about Northern Ireland that is separate from Great Britain. But it seems likely that transport habits are not much different in Northern Ireland than in the rest of Ireland, and Eurostat says that trains carry less than 3 percent of passenger travel in Ireland, while cars move 84 percent and buses do the rest (click on “Modal split of passenger transport”; Eurostat doesn’t separate out air travel). Building a rail line between two small cities is not going to change that, and even if it did, there any no reason to think that taxpayers will get any benefits from funding it. Of course, reason usually has nothing to do with these rail proposals, so naturally some people want to do it anyway.

Importing Boston’s Failures to Honolulu

By | | Transportation, Urban areas
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One of the intriguing things about rail transit is how much more the CEOs of rail transit agencies get paid than those of bus-only agencies. Yet that high pay comes with a high risk of failure and disgrace, as it is much more difficult to build and run rail lines than to simply manage bus service.

Case in point: Dan Grabauskas, CEO of Honolulu’s “rapid transit authority” and the highest-paid city official in Honolulu. What did Grabauskas do to merit this position?

It turns out that his main qualification is having helped run the Boston rail system into its present deteriorated condition. In 2009, Grabauskas resigned from that position in disgrace. Some claim he was forced out by a Democratic governor for the sin of being appointed by the previous Republican governor, yet there is no doubt that Boston’s rail lines were in terrible shape, with frequent delays, at least two recent crashes (including one blamed on rusty signal wires that killed a train operator), and miserable customer service.

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Back in the Air Again

By | | Housekeeping, Regional planning
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The Antiplanner will be in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho today speaking at a conference that seeks to find a balance between property rights and clean water. Golf courses, waterfront homes, and other developments along Lake Coeur d’Alene spill nitrogen, phosphorous, and other nutrients into the lake, leading to algal blooms that can cause serious problems.

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To prevent this, some propose that the county regulate or limit new development. But the Antiplanner argues that any regulations should apply equally to existing developments. Instead of regulation, I propose a system of tradable pollution rights, in which every waterfront property owner starts out with a right to a tiny amount of pollution. Those who don’t pollute could sell to those who do, and those who pollute in excess of their rights would be severely fined.

The Jones Act: Another Form of Economic Repression

By | | Transportation
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As a transportation expert, the Antiplanner was invited to join a radio show about the effects of the Jones Act on Hawaii. I’m not an expert on the Jones Act but was able to do some quick research.

The Jones Act gives Matson, which has regular service between the San Francisco Bay Area and Hawaii, and Horizon an oligopoly in shipping to and from Hawaii. Wikipedia photo by Aykleinman.

For those who don’t know, the Jones Act, officially known as the Merchant Marine Act of 1920, requires that any waterborne shipments between two U.S. ports must be done on ships built in the United States and at least 75 percent owned and crewed by U.S. citizens. The law’s goal of protecting the U.S. merchant marine fleet has largely failed: when the act was passed, the United States had thousands of large cargo vessels plying the seas; today it has less than 200.

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Living in the Fourth-Most Economically Repressive State

By | | Regional planning
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According to the index of economic freedom, only California (of course), New Jersey, and New York are more repressive than Hawaii. Much of Hawaii’s (and California’s) repression comes from the land-use regulation, which makes building a home or starting or expanding a business very expensive.

The Antiplanner has told this story before, but briefly, most of Hawaii’s land is controlled by a few corporations and families. For the first half of the 20th century, these landowners argued that they could not sell their land for homes or other uses because it was too valuable as farms. They sometimes leased land to people who built houses on it, but people could lose their right to use the land at any time.

In 1954, the Democrats took control of the state legislature promising land reform, such as by taking land from the large landowners by eminent domain and selling to more people or at least forcing the landowners to sell land to leaseholders. Instead of keeping that promise, when they took office, the Democrats joined with the large landowners so that anyone who wanted to develop land had to make key members of the legislature one of their partners.

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Back in the Air Again

By | | Housekeeping
3 Comments

The Antiplanner is suffering a week-long visit to Hawaii (or perhaps Hawaii is suffering a visit from the Antiplanner. Posts may be thin depending on whether I can find time in One does not get hardness just by taking this medicine, you should have an empty stomach and don’t take heavy meals which respitecaresa.org buy online viagra contains fats. But to treat such sexual viagra cheap look at here disorder in men, they can all list a basket of symptoms. Controlling levitra price diabetes and ED has become possible with certain medication. The drug comes in viagra australia cost different dosages 25mg,50mg,100mg,130mg,150mg & some companies also it in 200mg per tablet. my busy schedule of two speaking engagements and lots of cycling; also on whether I can find free wifi at the low-cost hotels I am staying at.

Densifying Houston

By | | Housing
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Houston doesn’t have zoning, which means that it doesn’t say how land can be used. As far as the city is concerned, you can buy land anywhere in the city and use it for commercial, retail, industrial, multi-family, or single-family residential. (About half of all residential areas in Houston have protective covenants limiting uses.)

This is a city that needs more affordable “workforce housing”? This three-bedroom, 2-1/2 bath, 2,140-square-foot house on a 7,500-square-foot lot is currently for sale in Houston for $60,000.

Though it doesn’t regulate how you use your land, Houston does have some basic development codes such as minimum lot sizes, set back requirements, and height limits that vary from neighborhood to neighborhood. Now, in an effort to compete for newcomers against its suburbs, Houston is considering the first changes to its development code in 14 years.

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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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Only $379 Million Per Mile

By | | Transportation
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Yesterday, the Phoenix airport proudly opened its “Sky Train,” a 1.7-mile automated rail line connecting the terminal to the nearest low-capacity rail station. This is only the first step: a 0.7-mile extension will open in 2015 and a 2.5-mile extension is supposed to open in 2020.

Click image for a larger view. Flickr photo by Nick Bastian.

Total project cost is $1.58 billion, up from a 2003 cost projection of $700 million (about $900 million in today’s dollars). Assuming no more cost increases, that’s about a 75 percent overrun.

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