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The Auto Bailout Failure

By | | Meltdown
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A new paper from the Buckeye Institute affirms what the Antiplanner has said about the Obama administration’s “bailout” of the auto industry: it did more harm than good. “The auto bailout transferred over $25 billion in taxpayer dollars to the United Autoworkers labor union,” says the paper, “while actually hindering the kind of ‘fresh start’ that is necessary for the industry’s future success and that normal bankruptcy procedures, without political meddling, provide.”

“When a public policy produces worse results than doing nothing, it properly should be described as a failure,” the paper adds. “The Obama Administration auto bailout is such a failure.”

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By “injecting politics into the reorganization process,” the paper concludes, the administration actually hindered the industry’s recovery. The lesson is not that a Bush or Romney would have done any better, but that future administration’s should keep their hands off of floundering industry’s and let the bankruptcy process and rule of law sort things out.

Private Transit in Detroit

By | | Transportation
8 Comments

The Detroit Bus Company, a private operator, is offering $5 door-to-door service in inner Detroit. So far, the service only operated from 6:00 pm to 2:00 am on Fridays and Saturday nights, but if this is successful, it will no doubt expand.

Service area for Detroit Bus’ door-to-door operation.
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Within a certain operating area, the company will pick you up at your door in a biodiesel-fueled bus and take you where you want to go. Outside this operating area, the company has some specific stops it will make.

“It’s time this city had a transit system to be proud of,” says the company. The Antiplanner agrees and sends best wishes to this new venture.

Fighting the Hackers

By | | Housekeeping
35 Comments

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Will They Ever Learn?

By | | Transportation
15 Comments

Arizona Shuttle offers 19 buses a day between Tucson and Phoenix. Greyhound offers at least eight. But that’s not good enough for some people, so the state is spending $6.3 million studying the idea of running passenger trains between the two cities.

The state’s first guess is that the start-up cost would be a mere $1 billion. Phoenix and Tucson are about the same distance from one another as San Diego and Los Angeles, where Amtrak runs something like 11 trains per day. Of course, those trains run just 35 percent full despite the fact that they serve urban areas whose combined populations are four times greater than Phoenix and Tucson.

To make the case for rail, the state is spreading scare stories about how bad congestion will be in 2050. Of course, trains won’t do anything about that congestion, since so few people will ride them. Given that most cars on the road in 2050 are likely to be driving themselves, congestion will probably be a lot less than today even if the region’s population doubles, as planners forecast.
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Private Buses or Public Boondoggles

By | | Transportation
6 Comments

A team of graphics artists has attempted to map the private buses that carry workers from San Francisco to Silicon Valley, reports the Wall Street Journal. At least six employers–Apple, ebay, Electronic Arts, Facebook, Google, and Yahoo–offer such services, but they are very secretive about where they go and how many people they carry.

Click image for a larger view.

The artists who developed the map estimate that these private buses carry about a third as many people as CalTrains commuter trains between San Francisco and San Jose. CalTrains cost taxpayers more than $110 million a year, but Silicon Valley firms obviously don’t believe they adequately serve their employees, probably because the rails don’t go near their campuses. Google alone has more than 100 buses in its fleet, about as many as serve the entire fixed-route system in the city of Stockton.

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“Just One-Seventh of Capacity”

By | | News commentary, Transportation
25 Comments

The San Francisco Chronicle is aghast that new 140-seat ferry boats between South San Francisco and Oakland/Alameda are filling an average of just 20 of their seats (scroll down to “On the line”). The service, which cost $42 million to start up, was expensive enough at projected ridership rates, but actual ridership so far is just a third of those projections. Even before such low ridership was known, the paper opined that the ferry service may not be “prudent.”

It’s too bad Bay Area papers don’t put their analytical skills to work on other transit systems. If the ferries are just one-seventh (14.3 percent) full, how full are other transit lines?

According to the 2010 National Transit Database (summary Excel file here), San Jose’s light-rail line is pathetic at 11.1 percent (one-ninth full). San Francisco Muni’s light rail is not much better at 11.6 percent. By comparison, the BART system is doing relatively well, operating at a healthy (?) 15.3 percent of capacity.

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More on the European Transport Myth

By | | Transportation
20 Comments

While many people believe that European travel modes are quite different from those of the United States, a close look at the data reveals two main points. First, Europeans travel a lot less than Americans: including flying, the average American travels about 85 percent more miles per year than the average Western European. Second, the percentage shares of various forms of travel are about the same except that Europeans travel a little more by rail and a little less by auto.

But what about trends? Is Europe becoming more like the U.S., with increasing overall mobility, rail’s share declining, and auto’s share increasing? Or have Europe’s high-speed rail programs and urban transit policies led to a resurgence of rail travel?

We can answer these questions based on three sources of data. First, in 2004 the European Union published a report titled Key Facts and Figures About the European Union and included transportation data, broken down by air, rail, bus, trams & metros, and autos, in part 3. The numbers were mode shares for 1980 and 2000.

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European Housing Disasters

By | | Housing
23 Comments

Land-use planning has made British housing so expensive that more than half of all homeowners expect to have to downsize the next time they move while only 22 percent expect to upsize. Home prices in Britain and other European countries with lots of land-use regulation tend to bubble as much as prices in California and other states with strict land-use rules.

This Swedish apartment building slated for demolition due to planners’ overbuild of multi-family housing looks a lot like many so-called transit-oriented developments recently built in Portland. Photo is from the Swedish “abandoned places web site.

Meanwhile, Swedish planners so overbuilt multifamily housing that, since 1995, they’ve had to demolish 20,000 units, and many more wait to be torn down. The apartments were built as part of what planners called the “million programme,” in which a million dwellings were to be built in the 1950s and 1960s. About 110,000 of these units were built in three- to eight-story apartment buildings during the 1950s and 1960s. They were so uniform and boring that, in 1971, people took to the streets to revolt against government policy and demanded the right to build and live in single-family homes. As a result, where before 1970 three out of four dwellings built in Sweden were multifamily, after 1970 three out of four were single family. Here are some photos of apartments waiting for demolition.

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Renationalization or True Privatization?

By | | Transportation
9 Comments

United Kingdom’s Department for Transportation is in trouble over a plan to transfer the franchise to run passenger trains over the London-Glasgow West Coast route from Virgin Trains (which is 49 percent owned by Stagecoach) to rival First Group. After fifteen years, Virgin Trains’ franchise is set to expire in December, and when the government put a new franchise up for bid, First Group had the low bid (meaning it asked for the least subsidies).

A Virgin Train. Photo by Andrew Butcher.

Virgin argued that having the low bid should not be the only factor in selecting a winner, and hired Europa Partners to evaluate the bidding process. The consultant’s report (a full version of which doesn’t seem to be available on line) argued that selecting the low bidder carried a high risk that the operator would go bankrupt, thus disrupting rail service.

The government awarded the contract to First Group anyway, leading Virgin to sue. Thanks in part to a timely appeal from Virgin’s Richard Branson to Prime Minister David Cameron, the government withdrew its award the night before it was supposed to defend it in court, saying that it had found irregularities in the bidding process, just as Europa had indicated. Now the government may be on the hook for millions of pounds to First Group, which says the reversal injured it and that its share value fell by 240 million pounds after the government withdrew the contract.

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Congress Still Perplexed by Wildfire

By | | Public lands, Wildfire
14 Comments

“U.S. runs out of funds to battle wildfires,” misstates a Washington Post headline. “In the worst wildfire season on record, the U.S. Department of Agriculture Forest Service ran out of money to pay for firefighters, fire trucks and aircraft that dump retardant on monstrous flames,” continues the article, making two more errors.


Smoke from the Pole Creek Fire billows above Black Butte Ranch, near Sisters, Oregon, on September 9, 2012.

First, 2012 is hardly the worst wildfire season on record. We only have to go back to 2006 to find a year that had burned more acres, as of October 5, than 2012. Before 2006, several years in the 1930s and 1950s vastly exceeded 2012’s number: an average of nearly 40 millions acres a year burned in the 1930s.

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