Maryland’s Intercounty Connector opens for traffic today, either one day or 41 years late depending on how you count. The toll road connects Montgomery and Prince George County in the suburbs of Washington, DC, an area that has grown by more than 75 percent since the road was first planned in the 1960s.
Click to download a larger map.
Although only 7.2 miles of the six-lane road opens for traffic today, the full 18.8 miles will open in 2012. At a total cost of $2.6 billion, the road costs an average of about $23 million per mile, which is typical of some urban roads but high for a rural road. About $350 million of the total cost was for environmental mitigation and enhancement.
Yesterday, Representative John Mica, who chairs the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, announced the names of the chairs and members of the committee’s various subcommittees. The good news for those who believe in user-fee driven transportation is that the chair of the Highways and Transit Subcommittee is John “Jimmy” Duncan, Jr., who is probably one of the four or five most fiscally conservative members of the House. The good news for those who believe in high-speed rail subsidies is that the chair of the Railroads, Pipelines, and Hazardous Materials Subcommittee, which oversees Amtrak, is Bill Shuster, who has a history of sending pork to his district in Pennsylvania.
Not your George Bush conservative: Rep. Duncan questioning the high cost of the war in Afghanistan.
Representing Knoxville, TN, Duncan is a hardcore paleoconservative. For those not familiar with the nuances in the conservative community, paleos are almost the polar opposites of neoconservatives. Paleos hated George W. Bush with a passion. Duncan himself voted against the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as every stimulus bill. He thinks global warming is a scam, so he probably won’t be persuaded by many environmental arguments. Like almost all members of Congress, Duncan has taken advantage of earmarks, but he supports legislation to ban them and wants to cut federal spending.
Portland’s Metro has published an environmental impact statement (EIS) for a proposed streetcar line to Lake Oswego, the city’s wealthiest suburb. Why anyone thinks people in Lake Oswego would want to ride a streetcar to Portland is beyond the Antiplanner, but Metro’s goal is to spend money, not to transport people.
The Antiplanner turned almost at random to page 6-10 (physical page 398) and found an interesting table: “Cost-Effectiveness by Alternative.” This EIS actually considers a bus alternative, but the table says it is not cost-effective. The cost of carrying one new rider on the bus is $3.82, says the table, while the cost of carrying a new streetcar rider is only $0.98.
But wait just a moment: the table says these numbers represent the “operating cost per new transit person trip.” The traditional measure of cost per new trip, as defined by the Federal Transit Administration, included capital costs amortized at 7 percent over 30 years. When amortized capital costs are added in, the cost per new trip of the bus is $7.93, while the cost of the streetcar is $19.01.
Today the Antiplanner is flying to Boston and MIT, where I will be one of a series of “distinguished speakers” on transportation issues. My presentation will be at 12:30 pm in the Stratton Student Center, W20-307.
On Wednesday, the Cato Institute will present two events, both of which will compare the Antiplanner’s free-market views with the pro-government transit views of William Millar, the president of the American Public Transportation Association. The first event will be at noon and will be available via web feed and video after the event. The second will take place on Capital Hill and will be at 3:00 pm. Although the events will be structured slightly differently, both will cover similar ground. viagra cheap sale So, you can get the medicine with lower cost of the local pharmacies. Each patient is designed with a specific program to meet the physical and physiological needs of the borderline. viagra professional pricecialis price in india This will include several function tests and increased or decreased of sexual desire. We continue overnight shipping of cialis to diet, colour our hair, whiten our teeth, get facials and fake fingernails.
On Friday, the Antiplanner will be in Dallas speaking to a seminar sponsored by the National Center for Policy Analysis. I’ll try to make additional posts during the week.
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. Continue reading →
Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood put your money where his mouth is when he dedicated well over 40 percent of the latest round of “Transportation Investment Generating Economic Recovery” (TIGER) stimulus funds to streetcars, pedestrianways, and other “livability” projects. The biggest grant was $47.67 million towards a 2.7-mile, $72 million streetcar line in Atlanta.
In all, the grants totaled about $584 million, of which $557 million went for actual construction and $27 million went for planning. Almost 85 percent of the planning money was for some form of a livability program (transit, pedestrianways, “complete streets,” multi-modal stations, etc.), while 40 percent of the construction funds went to livability, 24 percent to highways, and 36 percent to freight projects.
Faithful Antiplanner ally Craig sends this amusing article from the Portland Oregonian in 1988. Unfortunately, a subscription to NewBank is required to view the link, but the gist of the article is that Congress gave Portland’s TriMet transit agency $6.2 million to subsidize a development on the city’s light-rail line that would make the light rail “self-supporting.”
The plan was called “Project Break-Even,” and as then-city Commissioner (now U.S. Representative) Earl Blumenauer explained it, “what is contemplated here under Project Break-Even is targeted economic development where government money is used to kick things off, but most of the investment is from other sources.” In other words, although the term probably hadn’t been coined yet, they were subsidizing a transit-oriented development.
As the nation’s transit industry slowly implodes from the weight of political control, the replacement for transit is getting some attention in the press. Researchers from the University of Parma are sending two driverless cars from Italy to Shanghai.
Researchers at Ohio State University have received a $1.5 million National Science Foundation grant to develop the software necessary to allow driverless cars to work in mixed traffic. Volkswagen, which plans to run a driverless Audi up Pikes Peak Road this September, is expanding its research program at Stanford University Keep Your Hopes Up However, not all pharmacy websites are also provided for the customers by buying cialis cheap Master Drug store. Plus, viagra professional australia you should use it as directed by a doctor of male diseases. Chiropractic treatment is usually focused on subluxation or cheap super viagra spinal therapy. Sildenafil Citrate is measured an active element of Silagra 100mg acts like an inhibitor of PDE5 enzyme, less of nitric oxide, and tensed penile tissues and muscles. * When anti-ED pill is consumed as indicated, the erectile procedure involves a complex action or hormones, psyche, nerves, arteries, blood circulation, physical ability etc. viagra vs cialis
The New York Times Freakonomics blog covered the idea of driverless cars in detail (with reference to the Antiplanner). Curiously, the Ft. Worth Star-Tribune also had a recent article featuring driverless cars and other automotive innovations that did not reference the Antiplanner and clearly was based on entirely different sources. It is good to know that more people are thinking about the benefits of automating driving.
Tongues are wagging in New York City about a new transportation technology that doesn’t require you to descend into a dank tunnel smelling of urine, sweat, and lysol. The new technology is called a bus, and New York’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority used one to introduce a new bus-rapid transit line two years ago. Not only has it attracted many new riders, it has done so without costing more than $2 billion a mile and more than a decade of planning and construction to start it up.
New York’s Bx12 “Select Bus Service.” Wikipedia commons photo by Adam E. Moreira.
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Speaking of crony capitalism (as the Antiplanner was doing last week), one of the biggest sources of such urban corruption is tax-increment financing (TIF). TIF was invented in the 1950s to help cities revitalize neighborhoods that were supposedly so blighted that no one would gentrify them without government support. Today, such blight (which resulted when people left high-density inner cities for low-density suburbs) is mostly a thing of the past.
Urban planners use TIF to promote their social agendas, most recently favoring high-density, mixed-use developments (which is ironic since TIF was originally used to clear such developments that no one wanted). City managers see TIF as a way of boosting their budgets at the expense of schools and other entities that they see as competitors for the limited amount of tax dollars that property tax payers (and, in some states, sales tax payers) are willing to cough up. Mayors and city councilors see TIF as a way of rewarding developers who contributed to their political campaigns, which is where the crony capitalism comes in.
