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Flash! Amtrak Food Services Loses Money

By | | News commentary, Transportation
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House Transportation Committee Chair John Mica says that Amtrak is losing $84 million a year on its food services. A recent report from the Amtrak inspector general says that at least part of the loss is due to thefts from Amtrak food-service personnel.

Florida Representative Sandy Adams–who, due to redistricting, is facing Mica in this year’s election–says that Mica’s criticism of Amtrak’s losses is “an election-year stunt.” Adams, who is supposed to be a Republican, is critical of Mica’s solution, which is to turn over food service to private companies. Why “put taxpayers on the hook to continue a subsidy to the companies who win the concession bid”? asks Adams.

Of course, the answer is that private companies are more efficient, less likely to have onerous pension and health care liabilities, and will probably have better methods of making sure employees don’t steal from them. Any Republican should know this answer, but Adams’ response to Mica is no doubt an election-year stunt.

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Rail Propaganda Is Not a Civil Right

By | | News commentary
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Honolulu’s transit agency signed millions of dollars worth of contracts to Parsons Brinckerhoff and other consultants to spread propaganda in favor of its $5 billion rail project, which is a major issue in tomorrow’s Saturday’s mayoral election. When a member of Honolulu’s city council proposed to require the transit agency to terminate these contracts and limit its public relations programs to just one staff member (instead of the current ten), the agency responded saying that it was required by the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to issue the propaganda.

This and other federal laws, says the transit agency, “require recipients of federal transit funding to engage in an active, inclusive, and extensive public participation and involvement process in the planning, implementation, operation, and improvement of public transit projects.” This would be believable if the agency ever actually listened to any member of the public who is not enthusiastically in favor of its vision of an ugly elevated rail line through Honolulu. While the agency has jumped through the hoops of seeking comments on environmental impact statements and other documents, it has totally ignored any the substance of those comments (such as a request that the agency compare rail with a wide range of alternatives).
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Propaganda is not public involvement, and transit agencies that conduct advertising or other campaigns to gain support for their projects (as opposed to simply getting new riders) are deceiving the public and wasting their money.

Here and There

By | | News commentary, Transportation
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Atlanta wisely voted down a transportation tax. Some thought it spent too much on highways; some too much on transit. But wherever the money would be spent, why should transportation be paid for out of taxes when users will (and should) pay for it?

Meanwhile, the race for mayor of Honolulu is heating up with pro-rail groups spending $1 million against former Governor Ben Cayetano, who has vowed to kill the city’s $5 billion rail project. Cayetano nevertheless appears certain to get a plurality of votes in next Tuesday’s election, but probably not enough to avoid a runoff election in November.
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Meanwhile, the Antiplanner has started a new blog dedicated to the Silver Age of passenger trains, which the Antiplanner defines as lasting from 1934, when the first streamliners appeared, to 1971, when Amtrak took over. As a fan of those trains, the Antiplanner has collected hundreds of pieces of rail memorabilia, which I’ve scanned and will post at the rate of at least one per day over the next year or so with only occasional political commentary. Regardless of how you feel about transportation policy, if you love trains, you’ll enjoy this new blog.

Champions of Pork

By | | News commentary, Transportation
48 Comments

For the White House to declare someone a “champion of change,” they apparently have to be a champion of pork. The first person listed helped plan the California high-speed rail system, whose projected costs have more than doubled in since voters approved it in 2008. The original cost projections, made in the late 1990s, were only $15 billion, but the state’s High-Speed Rail Authority has managed to push those costs up to more than $100 billion.

The second champion of change is the CEO of a company that is making electric buses. Each bus is supposed to save transit agencies $100,000 a year in fuel costs (though they don’t say how much the electricity costs). Sounds good, except that three buses and two charging stations cost $5.6 million, which is more than $1.8 million a bus. Since an ordinary bus costs about $300,000, that means it will take more than 15 years to recover the extra cost. Guess the expected lifespan of a bus (hint: it is three years less than 15).

Not only that, “without government funding for research and development, Proterra wouldn’t be in its current position” to make these buses, according to the champion of change. So the buses required subsidies to develop, they require subsidies to buy, and the Antiplanner won’t be surprised if they require subsidies to operate.

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“You’ll Be Given Cushy Jobs”

By | | News commentary, Transportation
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Mame Reiley, a professional political activist who supports liberal Democratic causes in Virginia, recently resigned from the board of directors of the Washington Metropolitan Airport Authority (WMAA), the entity that is extending Metrorail to the Dulles Airport. Immediately upon resigning, the authority hired her as an “advisor” and will pay her $180,000 a year.

Since she supposedly resigned from the board for health reasons, the Antiplanner has to wonder if she is really worth $180,000 a year. Is this her reward for helping plan the WMAA’s political campaigns to finance the insanely expensive rail line? Or does the authority expect to tap into her expertise as it negotiates the final pieces of funding for the project?
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In any case, expensive projects such as airports and rail lines attract political attention because of their potential to provide cushy jobs for their political supporters. The Washington Examiner identifies four other authority board members who received contracts ranging from $42,000 to nearly $1 million from the authority. While most would call this a conflict of interest, to some it is merely politics as usual.

Because $117 Billion Wasn’t Expensive Enough

By | | News commentary, Transportation
17 Comments

In 2010, Amtrak proposed to spend $117 billion to upgrade its Boston-to-Washington high-speed rail corridor. This idea was so unrealistically expensive that the Antiplanner called it “gold-plated high-speed rail.”

Apparently, Amtrak wants platinum plating instead, as its 2012 update to the proposal has raised the cost to $151 billion. This includes some additional bells and whistles, including a $7 billion revamp of Washington, DC’s Union Station (see Amtrak’s report for complete details).

Amtrak either hasn’t heard or doesn’t care that high-speed rail is dead (except for a train to nowhere in California) or that the federal government is about out of money. Instead, says Amtrak CEO Joseph Boardman, it wants to be “ready” in case someone accidentally drops $150 billion or so in its path.

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RTD Fools the Wall Street Journal

By | | News commentary, Transportation
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“Denver rethinks the modern commuter,” heralds the Wall Street Journal. The article goes on to say that, instead of building parking lots at its rail stations, Denver is encouraging developers to build high-density, mixed-use developments. Somehow, this is supposed to be news.

Let’s think this through. First of all, no one is “rethinking the modern commuter.” The Census Bureau reports that transit carried less than 5 percent of Denver-area commuters in 2010, while more than 85 percent drove. Instead, what RTD, Denver’s transit agency, is rethinking is the role of public transit.

The old-style public transit system used cheap, flexible buses whose routes could be altered overnight to take people from where they were to where they wanted to go. When Denver first built rail, it substituted expensive but glamorous trains for inexpensive buses, but still allowed people to go from where they were–provided they were willing to drive to a park-and-ride station–to where they wanted to go–provided they wanted to go downtown.

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More Tales of Rail Failure

By | | Transportation
7 Comments

The ink is barely dry on California legislation to start building high-speed rail, and now they reveal a $2.5 billion hidden cost that wasn’t included in previous estimates, that being the cost of tunneling the final mile into San Francisco. It shouldn’t really matter, as they don’t have the money to build the last 130 to 150 miles of rail from the Central Valley to San Francisco anyway.

On top of that, California residents are discovering that their high-speed rail authority has been keeping controversial aspects of the planned route as secret as possible, at least until it is too late for people to do anything about it. For example, the plan calls for running the track 75 feet above the city of Alhambra, which is likely to be a major eyesore.

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Brookings Discovers Driverless Cars

By | | Transportation
35 Comments

Brookings Institution economist Clifford Winston points out in the Wall Street Journal that driverless cars will render high-speed rail and urban real transit even more obsolete than they already are. The Antiplanner, of course, brought driverless cars to the attention of WSJ readers two years ago.

Winston’s major point is that, rather than build high-speed rail, we should concentrate on rebuilding and redesigning our highway system to prepare for the increased driving that this new technology will inevitably bring about. He proposes, for example, to create more highways dedicated to cars rather than open to both cars and trucks. Such roads could be built with thinner pavement and narrower lanes. This might make sense, though the benefits of having multiple kinds of vehicles sharing the costs of the same infrastructure seem very high.
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Some states simply refuse to consider the effects this new technology will have on travel habits. Oregon, for example, has proposed a 2050 strategic transportation plan that counts on getting people out of their cars and onto transit, leaving the highways for trucks. This simply is not going to happen, but never underestimate the ability of Oregon planners to substitute their own fantasies for reality.

Land-Use Regulation & Income Inequality

By | | Housing
17 Comments

Harvard economists have proven one of the major theses of American Nightmare, which is that land-use regulation is a major cause of growing income inequality in the United States. By restricting labor mobility, the economists say, such regulation has played a “central role” in income disparities.

When measured on a state-by-state basis, American income inequality declined at a steady rate of 1.8 percent per year from 1880 to 1980. The slowing and reversal of this long-term trend after 1980 is startling. Not by coincidence, the states with the strongest land-use regulations–those on the Pacific Coast and in New England–began such regulation in the 1970s and 1980s.

Forty to 75 percent of the decline in inequality before 1980, the Harvard economists say, was due to migration of workers from low-income states to high-income states. The freedom to easily move faded after 1980 as many of the highest-income states used land-use regulation to make housing unaffordable to low-income workers. Average incomes in those states grew, leading them to congratulate themselves for attracting high-paid workers when what they were really doing is driving out low- and (in California, at least) middle-income workers.

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