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The Railroaded Not Taken

By | | Transportation
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Reeling from a scandal in which ministry employees allegedly embezzled at least $28.5 million, China has dismantled the Ministry of Railways and replaced it with a state-owned company. Managers of the new China Railway Co. had hoped that they would be given the Ministry’s assets but not its debt. However, the government says they will have to deal with its debt as well–all $428 billion of it (2.66 trillion yuan).

China’s high-speed fail.

Restructuring will not save China from that debt, which either taxpayers or creditors will have to cover–it certainly won’t be repaid out of rail fares. The debt is roughly $73 million for each of the 5,840 miles of high-speed rail lines built by the Ministry. This suggests that China got off cheap considering that California is planning to spend close to $300 million per mile for its high-speed rail, while Amtrak wants to spend $345 million per mile ($151 billion divided by 438 miles) building a new Boston-to-Washington high-speed rail line.

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Forest Planning & Transit Planning

By | | Public lands, Transportation
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In 1985, the Hoosier Environmental Council hired the Antiplanner to review the Hoosier National Forest plan, which called for clearcutting most of the southern Indiana federal forest. My review uncovered a document admitting that planners had fabricated data to justify money-losing timber sales. Looking at the plan that was then in effect, I discovered that the forest had attempted to meet legal requirements for public involvement by having the forest’s own soils scientist and biologist review the plan.

Wildflowers in the Hoosier National Forest. Forest Service photo.

Since this proved that the existing plan was illegal, and the proposed new plan was not credible, the Forest Service responded to my visit by shutting down the Hoosier Forest’s timber program for more than a decade. Even after that time, it cut very little timber compared to what it had been cutting before 1985.

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Creative But Not Productive

By | | Transportation
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One of the claims made by Indianapolis transit advocates was that improved transit would help the region “compete for jobs and talent.” They cited a study by a group called CEOs for Cities that found that “Young adults with a four-year degree are 94% more likely to live in close-in urban neighborhoods than their counterparts with less education.”

This is the old Richard Florida idea that cities should strive to attract the “creative class” of well-educated people that want to live in lively cities with walkable, transit-intensive neighborhoods. Ninety-four percent sounds like a big number, but let’s put this into context.

The CEOs for Cities study defined “close in” as neighborhoods near downtowns housing an average of less than 5 percent of urban area populations. “Young adults” includes people in the 25- to 34-year-old age class. The 2010 Census found that about 31.5 percent of this age class has a four-year degree or better. If this group is 94 percent more likely to live close in than their cohorts without a four-year degree, then less than 7.5 percent of young, well-educated adults live “close in.” This is less than 2.5 percent more than might be expected if the population was evenly distributed by education class.

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Indianapolis Presentation

By | | Regional planning, Transportation
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Indygo, Indianapolis’ transit agency, offers one of the lowest levels of transit service of any urban area of its size in the Midwest–only Omaha’s is lower. The proposed Indy Connect plan calls for changing this by making a $1.3 billion capital investment and more than tripling Indygo’s operating from about $50 million to $175 million a year. A key feature of the plan is to have communities outside of Marion County–which is the current limit of Indygo’s services–join in a regional transit district.

Proponents say the plan will make Indianapolis more competitive, relieve congestion, and reduce air pollution. Yesterday, I gave a presentation arguing that the plan wouldn’t accomplish any of those goals. Instead, I urged the region and state to save money by contracting out existing transit services; legalizing private transit operations; and encouraging cities outside Marion County to start their own cross-county transit service, which would probably offer better service at a lower cost than a regional transit district could provide.
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My presentation can be downloaded as a 16-MB PDF. Feel free to use this shows or any of the shows downloadable by clicking on the new “presentations” link above.

Living a Fantasy Means Not Counting Costs

By | | Transportation
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Slate writer Jeremy Stahl wants everyone to know that he has a fantasy of riding high-speed trains that pay for themselves (at least their operating costs) and cut greenhouse gas emissions, and he doesn’t understand why other people don’t support that fantasy. He specifically mentions the Antiplanner, who he dismisses for being “conservative.”

Slate lists Stahl as its “social media editor,” and he probably does a great job at that. But he apparently isn’t a numbers guy. You don’t have to be “conservative” or totally innumerate to know that the real world, and not the fantasy he wants to live in, has a limited amount of money and resources. Making decisions about how to effectively spend those resources requires more than just fantasizing how you would like things to be.

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Back in the Air Again: Indianapolis

By | | Housekeeping, Transportation
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The Antiplanner is going to Indianapolis this week to talk to people about a proposed transit plan. The plan, which was written by the Chamber of Commerce rather than Indy’s transit agency, calls for creating a regional transit district (IndyGo, the city’s transit agency, only covers one county) and running several “rapid transit” lines that are billed mainly as bus-rapid transit but that might use light rail on one route where a rail right-of-way is owned by local governments.

The plan is expected to require more than $1.3 billion in capital investments, and the transit system will then require more than triple the operating subsidies–from $43 million in 2011 to $140 million when the plan is fully implemented. Of course, if they actually build a light-rail line, the total costs are likely to go much higher.

In reading through a PDF version of the plan, I was struck by a one-sentence summary of the basic justification for the plan: “A robust regional transit system is necessary to spur our region’s continued economic growth, to preserve our ability to compete for jobs and talent, and to address growing challenges with congestion and air quality compliance” (page 5).

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Can’t Afford to Pay Bus Drivers, But . . .

By | | Follow up, Transportation, Urban areas
13 Comments

Neil McFarlane, the general manager of Portland’s TriMet transit agency, stunned Portland-area residents recently when he warned that the agency would have to cut service by 70 percent unless unions agreed to reduced benefits in upcoming contract negotiations. When he did so, he piously noted that TriMet’s non-union managers have had a pay freeze for four years.

Turns out that pay freeze was more imaginary than real. In the last year alone, TriMet gave its managers pay increases totaling nearly $1 million. McFarlane alone received a 3 percent raise, which–considering his previous pay was $215,000 a year–means a $6,450 boost to his income.

TriMet’s financial woes are hardly new. Last year, TriMet made the largest service cuts in its history and also decided to start charging fares in what was formerly the downtown Fareless Square. Most of the streetcar line had been in Fareless Square, and as a result actual streetcar fare collections averaged less than 4 cents per reported ride.

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The Fading of the Peak Oil Myth

By | | News commentary
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Remember all the talk about peak oil a few years ago? You don’t hear much about it today. The United States, supposedly almost out of oil, began producing more oil than Saudi Arabia a few months ago.

No one thinks there’s an infinite supply of oil in the world, but the peak-oil proponents were claiming that world oil production was about to peak and then head forever downwards just as China and India were consuming more, leading gasoline prices to inexorably rise to $20, $30, even $100 a gallon. This would force everyone out of their cars and onto mass transit, a prediction that was used to justify all sorts of otherwise ridiculous light-rail lines and land-use regulations.

The Antiplanner scrutinized these ideas eight years ago and concluded that those who held them had no understanding of the laws of supply and demand. For one thing, there are plenty of alternative sources of energy that are economically inefficient today but that could come on line if ever oil prices did rise enough.

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Transit Ridership Falls Since 2008

By | | News commentary, Transportation
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The lies begin right in the headline of the American Public Transportation Association’s annual press release patting the industry on the back for carrying heavily subsidized riders last year. “Record 10.5 Billion Trips Taken On U.S. Public Transportation In 2012,” claims the press release headline.

The text reveals that it wasn’t actually a record at all, but merely the “second-highest ridership since 1957.” When was the first highest? In 2008, meaning the headline would have been more accurate if it had read, “Transit Ridership Falls Since 2008.”

Of course, as a lobby group, APTA is paid to promote the transit industry. Reporters are also paid to see through lobbyists’ lies, but unfortunately most of them simply modestly rewrite the press release while others add their own propaganda.

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Taxing Today to Subsidize Yesterday

By | | News commentary
30 Comments

Here’s a great idea sure to be endorsed by everyone who doesn’t think they get enough junk in their mailbox every day: tax email to subsidize the Postal Service.

I can see it now: A multi-billion-dollar annual slush fund that the president can use to reward his supporters in Congress. Labor agreements that allow mail carriers to retire on full pensions at age 55 after just ten years of work. Whole new lobby groups looking enviously at European postal subsidies and talking about how we need postal subsidies to “reconnect America.”

Whole engineering firms will devote themselves to doing studies of whether cities should accept federal funds to build new post offices. Soon people will point out how new post offices stimulate economic development. “We built one post office in a blighted area,” someone will no doubt say, “and got a billion dollars of new projects.” Others will complain about how unsustainable airmail is and demand a return to railway post offices.

Of course, this is only the beginning. We need to tax word processing software to subsidize typewriters; tax spreadsheets to subsidize slide rules; tax digital cameras to subsidize film manufacturers. Whole industries are disappearing before our eyes. Think of the lost jobs!
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