The Antiplanner » Home Page

Baltimore’s Red Line Low-Capacity Rail Project

By | | Transportation
3 Comments

Last week, the Antiplanner looked at Maryland’s Purple Line low-capacity rail (formerly known as light rail) project and showed that it both increased congestion and wasted money. Today, I’ll take a quick look at Baltimore’s Red Line low-capacity rail project, which is also being planned by the Maryland Department of Transportation (MDOT).

Some think MDOT wants to build the Red Line mainly for political parity: since it is planning the Purple Line in the DC metro area, it has to have a companion project in the Baltimore area. There may be some validity to this rumor as the Red Line is an even greater turkey than the Purple line.

Continue reading →

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.”

Continue reading →

Will Obama Cause Another Bubble?

By | | Housing
8 Comments

“The Obama administration is engaged in a broad push to make more home loans available to people with weaker credit,” says the Washington Post, and some people fear that will lead to another housing bubble. In fact, there are going to be more housing bubbles; the Obama administration is contributing to them; but not through policies promoting subprime lending.

Neither subprime lending nor other federal policies caused the housing crisis that led to the 2008 financial crisis. Too few people understand this because they still view U.S. housing as a single market. But unlike labor or food or cars, housing is not something that you can easily pick up and move to somewhere that may place a higher value on it. Oil can be easily and fairly cheaply transported, so there is a world oil market; but housing markets are strictly local.

Nearly eight years ago, Alan Greenspan famously said the United States was not suffering from a housing bubble. He has take a lot of heat for that, but he was right. His exact words were, “Although a ‘bubble’ in home prices for the nation as a whole does not appear likely, there do appear to be, at a minimum, signs of froth in some local markets where home prices seem to have risen to unsustainable levels.”

Continue reading →

Regional Transit for Indy?

By | | Transportation
6 Comments

The Antiplanner was invited back to Indianapolis yesterday to testify to the Senate Tax and Fiscal Policy Committee on a proposal to create a regional transit agency for Indianapolis. Currently, the transit agency is limited to serving Marion County, but Indianapolis suburbs extend well beyond that county’s limits.

While this seems like a no-brainer, it is not. Proponents of regional transit have made it clear that they want to build a light-rail line that will cost well over a billion dollars and either bus-rapid transit on dedicated lanes or light-rail lines in other parts of the region. Even if that weren’t the case, the regional transit idea is just another case of “bigger is better,” when in fact allowing smaller transit agencies to cross county lines if that is where their patrons want to go could be far more efficient.

If they are not, you will viagra canada know, and move on. Women, who are consuming anti depressants, mood stabilizers and birth control pills, they have also given complaints including https://pdxcommercial.com/property/1105-portland-avenue-gladstone/1105-portland-ave-brochure/ viagra effects women dry vagina, low sex drive, lack of libido and inability to have one. There are viagra online in india many men who are suffering from this problem. For instance, buy generic viagra if you are diabetic, controlling your sugar levels effectively. The Antiplanner argued that the regional transit plan is likely to make Indianapolis more congested, at a higher cost, yet won’t help transit riders, particularly low-income riders who lack access to cars. While it probably had nothing to do with anything I said, as soon as I was done with my testimony, the committee unanimously voted to send the proposal to an interim study committee, effectively deferring it for another year.

You can download my testimony in PDF (2.8 MB) or Word format.

The Purple Money Eater

By | | Transportation
2 Comments

The Antiplanner is particularly interested in the cost effectiveness of transit projects, and Maryland’s Purple Line is a prime example of an agency selecting just about the least cost-effective alternative. According to the DEIS, the cost of attracting one new rider to the “TSM” alternative is about $9; the low- and medium-cost BRT alternatives are about $14; the high-cost BRT is about $20; and the light-rail alternatives range between $22 and $24. The preferred alternative is the second-most expensive and, at $23 per new rider, the second-least cost-effective.

Put another way, the preferred alternative attracts about 134 percent more riders than TSM, but to get those riders the annualized cost is more than six times greater. Relative to the TSM alternative, the cost of getting one more transit rider on the preferred alternative is almost $34. At this rate, someone who makes a daily round-trip each work day under the preferred alternative who wouldn’t have under TSM would cost taxpayers nearly $16,000 a year.

Continue reading →

Purple Congestion Eater–or Congestion Maker?

By | | Transportation
11 Comments

Residents of Montgomery County, Maryland, are skeptical of a proposed light-rail line known as the “purple line” (to distinguish it from the DC area’s Red, Orange, Blue, Yellow, and Green heavy-rail lines). AAppropriately so: The Antiplanner has reviewed the draft environmental impact statement (DEIS) and found it to be biased and misleading.

Click on image to download entire, 37-MB DEIS. Click on the link in the above paragraph to go to the DEIS web page where you can download selected chapters.

The DEIS considers seven alternatives to doing nothing: one called “transportation system management” (TSM), which is basically improving bus service without significant new infrastructure; low-, medium-, and high-cost bus-rapid transit; and low-, medium-, and high-cost light rail. (Planners call these “low-, medium-, and high-investment alternatives, but it is only an investment if you get a return.) For a route of about 16 miles, the capital costs range from $5 million per mile for TSM to $92 million per mile for high-investment rail.

Continue reading →

Portland’s Creative Class Gets to Work

By | | News commentary, Urban areas
13 Comments

Thanks to the industriousness of Portland’s creative class of young, well-educated people, Oregon now has the third-highest food stamp rate of any state in the country. As shown in the chart below, Oregon was disgustingly below average in the 1990s, but shot up in 2001, the year the Portland streetcar opened, and has been in the top three since about 2009. Today, it is behind only Louisiana and Mississippi (and, it might be noted, DC), states well known for their hard work and creativity.

It wasn’t easy for Oregon to achieve the status of being number three. Back in the 1990s, most Oregonians on food stamps were rural residents put out of work by the decline in federal land timber sales. But that can only go so far, as there aren’t that many sawmills left that remain to be put out of business. So the creative class got to work, making Oregon one of the first states to distribute food stamps in the form of an debit card so there would be no stigma put on those using it. In fact, the card is called the “Oregon Trail” card, thus identifying food-stamp recipients with the brave pioneers who first settled Oregon 170 years ago.

Continue reading →

More California HSR Follies

By | | Transportation
6 Comments

Quentin Kopp, the man who more than any other single person is probably most responsible for the California high-speed rail project, now says the project is illegal and has filed a declaration in court saying so. In response, the California High-Speed Rail Authority–which was created by a law Kopp wrote and which Kopp later headed–is suing Kopp, California farmers who oppose the project, the Antiplanner, and, well, any other skeptics in an effort to get a court order giving it $8 billion to start construction on the train to nowhere.

Kopp’s argues that the authority has “mangled” the original plan for a 220-mph rail line in order to keep costs down. That original plan, which was supposed to cost $45 billion, is now expected to cost somewhere closer to $117 billion. Since the authority doesn’t have that money, it has adopted instead a $68 billion plan to build a “blended” system that uses some existing tracks and some new tracks. But the trains on this system won’t go from San Francisco to Los Angeles in 4 hours and 40 minutes as the law requires.

Of course, the authority doesn’t have $68 billion either, so the likelihood of this blended plan ever being completed is slim. But it needs a plan of some kind in order to justify spending the $8 billion it does have building a line in California’s relatively thinly populated Central Valley.

Continue reading →

New Boondoggles

By | | Transportation
4 Comments

Back in the early 1980s, San Diego spent an average of $7 million per mile–about $17 million in today’s dollars–building two light-rail lines. In the mid-1980s, Portland spent $15 million a mile–about $28 million in today’s dollars on the eastside light-rail line.

The Antiplanner is convinced that neither of these expenditures was worthwhile. Yet their cost is but a pittance compared to what transit agencies are spending today. For example, the 2013 New Starts projects include 26 different commuter rail, light-rail, and heavy-rail plans.

Of the seventeen light-rail plans, not a single one is expected to cost less than $50 million per mile, and only one is less than $60 million. The average cost of all seventeen is $138 million per mile. Even taking out three very expensive projects–mostly underground–that cost an average of $727 million per mile, the remaining light-rail plans cost $110 per mile.

Continue reading →

Spending Millions on Transit; Getting Thousands in Value

By | | Transportation
5 Comments

A $112 million transit center in Silver Spring, Maryland, is years behind schedule due to serious construction flaws. After detecting the flaws, Montgomery County officials halted construction and hired en engineering firm to look at the center.

That firm’s report found that the pillars supporting the three-level center are inadequate to hold the buses that are supposed to use one of the levels; the concrete covering the steel reinforcement bars is so thin that the center will probably rust out in about 12.5 years, instead of the 50 years for which it was designed; and the center doesn’t meet fire standards.

Really, why does Silver Spring need an expensive, three-level transit center anyway? They could have fit everything they wanted in a ground-level, surface parking lot that would have cost far less than $112 million. This is simply another case of transit going for the high-cost solution to any problem.

If you consider buy viagra buy taking a medication you should always speak to a health professional first for safety and advice. purchase cialis Performance of a meta-analysis of 11 randomized controlled clinical trials on ED and statins. Force Measuring Equipments – ED crane scale, AP dynamometers, Mechanical force gauge, Force control switches cialis generika http://seanamic.com/imes-signs-six-figure-contract-with-abp-humber/ etc. are the supplied by the store. In diabetic patients, muscles around penile artery constrict and block free sildenafil samples the flow of blood. Continue reading →