Search Results for: plan bay area

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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Arithmetic-Challenged Favor High-Speed Rail

By | | News commentary, Planning Disasters
45 Comments

On Monday, the Washington Post published a devastating critique of high-speed rail written by journalist Robert Samuelson. In fewer than 800 words, Samuelson blows up just about all the arguments put forth in favor of rail. An 8-word summary: costs are too high and benefits too low.

One person who remains unconvinced is the popular innumerate, Matthew Yglesias. Normally I would not personalize an issue by calling attention to someone’s disability, in this case Yglesias’ inability to deal with simple arithmetic. But by describing me as a “car-subsidy shill,” Yglesias shows he is math challenged.

Apparently, if you believe, as I do, that all modes of transportation should be paid for by users, and not by tax subsidies, then you, too, are a “car-subsidy shill.” Here is a simple lesson in arithmetic: if users pay for all of something, then subsidies are zero. That makes me a “zero-subsidy shill.”

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High-Speed Rail Deathwatch

By | | Follow up, News commentary, Transportation
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Will a high-speed rail line ever be built from San Francisco to Los Angeles? The California High-Speed Rail Authority (CHSRA) has less than 10 percent of the money it needs to build this line. The plan is increasingly under fire from local and state organizations. On one hand, President Obama’s vague and controversial proposal to spend $50 billion to “rebuild 150,000 miles of roads [and] construct and maintain 4,000 miles of railway” could keep the California project alive. On the other hand, if Republican Meg Whitman is elected state governor this November, she could kill the program.

Can’t afford to build it; can’t afford to run it. Maybe it isn’t needed?

A recent op ed in the San Francisco Chronicle succinctly points out that projected costs have nearly doubled since voters approved the plan, adequate funding is unavailable, and–“with 10 airports and six competing airlines”–the San Francisco-Los Angeles corridor doesn’t need high-speed rail anyway.

Perhaps most important, the measure approved by voters in 2008 forbade any tax subsidies for operations. Yet recent recalculations of ridership projections and costs make it clear that fares will never cover operating costs, so even if they build it, they would not be able to run it (at least, without changing the law and finding money for operating subsidies).

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Exaggerating the Benefits of Transit

By | | Transportation
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HDR, a consulting firm that routinely misleads cities in order to get contracts promoting and designing streetcars, has written a report for the Michigan Department of Transportation that greatly exaggerates the benefits of public transit. In claiming that those benefits are “conservatively” $805 million a year, the report makes many unwarranted assumptions.

The most important assumption, which the report repeatedly makes, is that there would be no transit without publicly subsidized transit (for example, see p. 13). In fact, without transit subsidies, private transit services would spring up in most major places, as they did recently in Clayton County, Georgia. Even with subsidized transit, some cities such as Miami already have private transit operations competing directly with public transit. Most northern states, most likely including Michigan, forbid such competition, but such laws would be irrelevant if socialized transit were eliminated.

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California High-Speed Rail in Trouble

By | | Planning Disasters, Transportation
118 Comments

New reports have raised questions about and spurred opposition to California’s grandiose high-speed rail plans. First, last April, the California state auditor reported that the state’s high-speed rail authority suffered from “inadequate planning, weak oversight, and lax contract management,” which is not exactly what you want to hear about an agency that is about to build the most expensive state-sponsored public works project in history.

Second, a new report from the University of California found that the state’s ridership forecasts “are not reliable.” Based on a re-assessment by economist David Brownstone (who is fast becoming one of the Antiplanner’s favorite economists) and two UC engineering profs, the fares needed to cover the trains’ operating costs would have to be more than double the original projections, which is also more than the cost of flying. Since the measure approved by voters in 2008 forbade any state operating subsidies, such high fares would doom the project.

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Not So Fast for High-Speed Rail

By | | News commentary, Transportation
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Over most of Obama’s so-called high-speed rail network, the administration proposes to run passenger trains at top speeds of 110 miles per hour on the same tracks as freight trains. But CSX says it will not allow passenger trains to run faster than 90 mph on the same tracks as its freight trains. If the government wants to build new tracks, they must be at least 30 feet from CSX freight tracks.

Since New York, among other states, was counting on using CSX tracks for some of its moderate-speed rail routes, the Empire state has unsuccessfully pressured CSX to change this policy. Last month, the director of the state’s high-speed rail program quit in disgust because she felt other state officials were lying to CSX and not negotiating in good faith.

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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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Mercury News Gets It Wrong Again

By | | News commentary, Transportation
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The San Jose Mercury-News has long been a booster of ridiculously expensive rail transit projects such as Bart to San Jose. This week, it has a five-part series on the woes facing Bay Area transit agencies.

First, it tells us that, thanks to lower gas prices combined with higher transit fares, “commuters are leaving mass transit for their cars.” Maybe that wouldn’t have been a problem if the paper hadn’t encouraged the region to build such a high-cost transit network.

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The Worst-Managed City

By | | City planning, News commentary
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Ask progressives what they think is the nation’s most-progressive city, and many are likely to mention San Francisco. Not coincidentally, the progressive SF Weekly argues that San Francisco is also the nation’s worst-managed city.

Welcome to San Francisco, where per capita budgets climb halfway to the stars.

The city spends more than $8,000 per capita, compared with less than $7,200 by New York and less than $3,000 by Philadelphia and Denver. The Weekly suggests that most of the difference is waste. (In San Francisco’s defense, San Francisco is a combined city-county government and its budget includes a lot of services, such as public transit, not included in Philadelphia or Denver budgets.)

Still, “even other liberal places wouldn’t put up with the degree of dysfunction they have in San Francisco,” says faithful Antiplanner ally Joel Kotkin. “In Houston” — which both Kotkin and the Antiplanner admire — “I assume you’d get shot” if you did so poorly.

There are a lot of problems with the city, but one of the biggest is public employees unions. Unions were probably important in providing workers with a balance against large corporations. But the potential corruption of unions with the dysfunction of government is a recipe for disaster.

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BART to Nowhere

By | | Transportation
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Of all places, why does San Francisco BART want to build a new line to Livermore? Not that Livermore is truly nowhere, but a line to Livermore would merely be an extension of one of the worst-performing parts of the BART system.

Opened in 1997, BART’s 13-mile branch to Dublin is probably the least-used branch of the BART system. In its first full year of operation, it added only 11,000 weekday riders to the system, which means it carries, on a per-mile basis, about a third as many riders as the rest of the system. Yet BART planners predict that extending this line another 10 to 13 miles to Livermore will add another 30,000 or more daily riders.

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