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Milwaukee Presentation

By | | Transportation
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Last year, the Milwaukee city council approved a $64 million streetcar plan on a 10-to-5 vote. But there’s a snag in the plan. Building the streetcar will also require $30 to $50 million to move underground utilities. Men are inclined to have sexual issues by the age of 50 and complete ineptitude is seen in every sixth man by the age of 80, nearly 80% of all men suffer from BPH symptoms. uk generic viagra The bridge designing engineer was sildenafil overnight David McDonnold. If you buy 40 pills you will be spending $199.20 US dollars instead of $217.13 and will be saving $21.60 viagra pills in india US dollars. It helps to prevent aging process in men and generic viagra from canada is the lack of person’s psychological sexual capability. The city was hoping to force utility companies to pay the costs, but the state public utilities commission may not agree. This just proves once again how easy it is to spend other people’s money.

The Antiplanner’s presentation about the folly of streetcars is available in either PowerPoint or PDF format. People are free to borrow from it if they find it useful.

Back in the Air Again

By | | Housekeeping, Transportation
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Today the Antiplanner is in Milwaukee to try to help persuade the city not to build a streetcar line. It is notable that many of the places that want streetcars–Cincinnati, Kansas City, Milwaukee, Orange County, to name a few–originally had light-rail plans that never happened. It is almost as if streetcars are seen as a consolation prize for failing to sucker the locals into funding light rail.

Yet cities were right not to build light rail, and streetcars would be an even bigger waste of money. The least-expensive streetcar lines being planned today are more expensive than the first light-rail lines. Both San Diego’s and Portland’s first light-rail lines cost less than $15 million per route mile, and even after adjusting for inflation that’s less than $30 million per mile today. Yet most streetcar lines being planned today are expected to cost $30 million or more per track mile, which is $60 million per route mile.

The problem with light rail is that it is expensive, low-capacity transit that doesn’t go very fast–most light-rail schedules average only about 20 to 22 mph. Streetcars are worse, having much lower capacities and speeds of only about 6 to 10 mph.

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Brookings Buys into Amtrak Accounting Tricks

By | | Transportation
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“Combined, Amtrak’s short-distance corridors generated a positive operating balance in 2011,” says the Brookings Institution’s new report on Amtrak. This suggests that the United States should “invest” more in such short-distance routes.

The problem with this is that just one short-distance route, the Boston-to-Washington Northeast Corridor, dominates all the other routes. That one route carries as many passenger miles of travel as all the 27 other short-distance routes put together. Of those 27 routes, only three–the Carolinian and trains from Washington to Lynchburg and Washington to Newport News, Virginia–had a “positive operating balance,” to use Brookings’ term, in 2012. But all of those routes actually start in either New York or Boston, so really they are Northeast Corridor trains too.

In using the term “positive operating balance,” Brookings–with the help of Amtrak’s non-standard accounting methods–is being highly misleading. First, both Brookings and Amtrak count state subsidies as “revenues,” so Brookings doesn’t count a train’s operating loss that is offset by such subsidies against that train’s “operating balance.” Since only short-distance trains receive state subsidies, this leads to a strange recommendation from Brookings that Congress should encourage state subsidies of long-distance trains, as if that would make the subsidies go away. As someone told USA Today, “A subsidy is a subsidy whether it’s coming from federal, state or local taxpayers.”

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Brookings Butchers Amtrak Data

By | | Transportation
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Intercity passenger trains are experiencing a “renaissance” with Amtrak ridership growing “faster than other major travel modes,” says a new report from the Brookings Institution. Unfortunately, the authors of the report are guilty of selectively using data to make their case.

“Amtrak ridership grew by 55 percent since 1997,” says the report. Why 1997? Fifteen years is a strange time period to use unless there were no data before then; but annual passenger travel data go back many decades before 1997 so that’s no excuse. As it happens, in 1997 Amtrak was nearing bottom: gas prices were low and few people felt the need to resort to government-subsidized travel. Ridership actually bottomed out in 1996 at 5.1 billion passenger miles, but grew to just 5.2 billion in 1997. This makes the growth since 1997 look especially impressive.

Another problem with Brookings data is that it is based on trips rather than passenger miles. A journey of 1,000 miles potentially accesses four times as many destinations as a journey of 500 miles, so measurements based on passenger miles are a much better indication of value than measurements based on trips.

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Portland’s Latest Planning Failures

By | | Housing, Regional planning
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Recently the Antiplanner recounted some of the consequences of Portland’s race to become the nation’s best-planned city: failing schools; crumbling streets; lack of funding for building maintenance; and declining transit service. Now we have more information on the street situation plus one more example of mismanagement.

Portland’s city auditor has released two new reports showing that the city’s priorities are screwed up. A January report found that, even though the city’s transportation budget has been growing, spending on street maintenance, traffic signals, and structural maintenance” has been declining. A more recent report specifically criticized the city for neglecting its streets, saying nearly half need “significant rehabilitation or reconstruction” to put them in acceptable condition. “Despite knowing the inevitable and costly consequences of failing to maintain streets,” the city “limited street maintenance work in recent years, choosing instead to focus on other priorities.”

This is underscored by the city’s own report card showing that maintenance of pavement, traffic signals, bridges, and street signs fail to meet the city’s own standards.

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Not in the Antiplanner’s Library

By | | Book reviews
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“We are too fat, we are too much in debt, and we save too little for the future,” says philosopher Sarah Conly on the opening page of this book. Based on this, she strongly supports the idea that government should use coercion to prevent people from harming themselves.

The Antiplanner hasn’t read and is not going to buy the book, and only partly because the list price is an outrageous $95. More important, while it might provide some insights into how nanny-state supporters think, this is one book I don’t need to read to know that it is wrong.

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Coordinating Traffic Signals

By | | Transportation
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Last week, Los Angeles became the first major city in American to coordinate all its traffic signals. The city spent $410 million coordinating signals at 4,000 intersections, or about $100,000 per intersection.

The $410 million cost is less than the cost of one mile of L.A.’s proposed Westside Subway Extension and about the same as the cost of two miles of Portland’s latest light-rail line. Yet the signal coordination will do far more to relieve congestion, save energy, and reduce air pollution than both of these rail projects put together–more, in all probability, than all rail transit projects in the United States.

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Virginia Takes Two Steps Backwards

By | | Transportation
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When Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell proposed to pay for transportation by replacing the gas tax with a sales tax, many pundits predicted it would never happen. They were only half right. Last Friday, the Virginia Senate passed a bill, already approved by the Assembly, that replaced the retail gas tax with a sales tax plus a wholesale gas tax that is almost as much as the retail tax.

The wholesale gas tax is 3.5 percent, which means that it adjusts with changing oil prices. At current gas prices, it amounts to about 14 cents a gallon, slightly less than the 17.5 cent per gallon retail tax that is being eliminated. When added to the increased sales tax that is dedicated to transportation, the result will be a significant increase in transportation funding.

It is not likely, however, to result in any significant improvements for travelers. Instead, as the Wall Street Journal notes, it is a scam that mainly benefits “unions, real estate developers and the transit lobby.”

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Proposed Anaheim Streetcar

By | | Transportation
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Anaheim is another city planning a streetcar line, in this case from the Amtrak/Metrolink station (and planned high-speed rail station) to Disneyland. Disney is reportedly enthused about the project, since otherwise it might have to provide its own buses. The consultants planning the streetcar have also no doubt convinced Disney that the streetcar is “high-capacity transit,” a term that is naturally used numerous times in the city’s alternatives analysis.

Click to download the table of contents to the alternatives analysis for the Anaheim Slow Connection.

Maybe it is due to my poor Googling skills, but I haven’t actually been able to find a page on the city of Anaheim’s web site linking to the alternatives analysis. However, I have found individual chapters of the analysis, including the executive summary, chapter 3: transportation analysis, and chapter 7: comparison of alternatives. If you want to download any of the other chapters, read the table of contents and then copy and paste http://www.anaheim.net/images/articles/4947/ChapterX.pdf into your browser, substituting the number of the chapter you want for the X.

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Skyriding to the Top of the Stupidity Pile

By | | Transportation
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Streetcars apparently aren’t stupid enough for Michael McDaniel and Jared Ficklin of Frog Design in Austin, Texas. They’ve come up with an even stupider idea: moving people around on urban networks of ski lifts. Each ski lift would consist of scores of small cars suspended from wires, and each car would carry six to twelve people.

The 152-car, 2.1-mile gondola system in Rio de Janeiro cost $74 million, goes about 8 mph, and is expected to carry up to 30,000 people per day. Flickr photo by minplanpac

They estimate that a base system could cost as little as $3 million per mile. If you insist on weighty luxuries such as air conditioning and heat, the cost rises to $12 million. They admit that in urban areas the costs are more likely to be around $24 million per mile, but say that is still less expensive than streetcars or light rail. That’s like saying french fries are healthy because they aren’t as heart-attack-inducing as eating pure lard.

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