Search Results for: peak transit

FTA Wants Your Comments

By | | Follow up, News commentary, Transportation
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Last January, Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood announced that he was replacing rules that required that federal transit grants had to be “cost effective” with rules promoting “livability.” Yesterday, the Federal Transit Administration asked for your comments on this proposal.

The FTA doesn’t have new rules yet; it just wants to know what you think of the idea. Considering that the head of the FTA has revealed that he is skeptical of expensive rail projects, especially when cities can’t afford to maintain and operate the systems they have, they might genuinely be interested in some new ideas. After all, how livable can a city be where lots of people have given up their cars for transit only to find that the transit agency has stopped running for lack of funds?

Speaking of costly transit, the Tennessee Center for Policy Research has just published a new paper on the cost of transit in that state. The paper also shows how Tennessee transit systems use more energy and emit more greenhouse gases, per passenger mile, than cars or even SUVs. The only really efficient transit system, the paper shows, is vanpooling, which is the closest thing most transit agencies have to actual automobiles.

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Why We Can’t Go Back

By | | Transportation
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Last week, the Antiplanner attended a meeting about high-speed rail sponsored by the National Conference of State Legislators. One of the speakers represented Amtrak, and though she spoke for about 10 or 15 minutes, her entire presentation could be boiled down into one statement: “What Amtrak needs is money, money, and more money.” (Yes, she actually said that.)

This reminded me of a statement made by a representative of the New York City Transit authority last fall at a Federal Transit Administration conference about the deteriorating condition of older rail transit systems. Even though New York’s rail system is in much better shapes than the ones in Boston, Chicago, or Philadelphia, the official admitted (in the last slide) that “there will never be enough money” to bring New York’s rail lines up to a state of good repair.

Rail transit and high-speed rail have bottomless appetites for tax dollars, partly because they are politically driven rather than being funded out of user fees. But there is an even more critical difference between modern passenger rail and past transportation innovations.

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Back in the Air Again

By | | Housekeeping
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The Antiplanner is flying to DC today to give presentations in four cities over the next six days. First, on Friday, I’ll join Ron Utt of the Heritage Foundation in a briefing on rail transit and transportation reauthorization in Rayburn House Office Building room B-339. Lunch will be provided.

On Monday from 9 to 11, the Antiplanner will join several other speakers on transportation issues at the Holiday Inn in Concord, New Hampshire. This event is sponsored by the Josiah Bartlett Center for Public Policy.

On Tuesday at 4:30 the Antiplanner will speak about Gridlock at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut. This event is sponsored by the Yankee Institute for Public Policy.
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On Wednesday at 6 pm, the Antiplanner will join James Howard Kunstler to discuss the question, “Who should control urban growth?” This presumably lively program will take place in room 001 of the Solomon Center at Brown University.

If you are in Washington, DC or New England, I hope to see you at one of these events.

Social Security, CalTrains, Going Broke

By | | News commentary
15 Comments

It is hard to imagine that anyone inside the DC beltway is not feeling a rising sense of panic over the news that Social Security is out of money. As the New York Times graphic shows, Social Security revenues were expected to exceed receipts through 2016, but in fact are expected to be less than receipts from 2010 on.

The year 2016 is comfortably far enough away that elected officials whose terms are no longer than six years don’t bother worrying about it. But if social security is out of money now, then the entire federal edifice — much of which has been funded by borrowing from the social security surplus — is on the brink of collapse.

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Yglesias Is Baffled

By | | Follow up, Regional planning
69 Comments

Matthew Yglesias is baffled by reality. At least, he finds the Antiplanner’s post about how zoning codes actually work, as opposed to how Yglesias imagines they work, to be “baffling and bafflingly long.”

He boils his case down to three simple statements:

  1. Throughout America there are many regulations that restrict the density of the built environment.
  2. Were it not for these restrictions, people would build more densely.
  3. Were the built environment more densely built, the metro areas would be less sprawling.

Reality is never so simple. As you can see, it all depends on statement 1: are there regulations throughout America that restrict density? As evidence that there are, Yglesias cited the Maricopa County Zoning Code, which he claimed allows development no denser than duplexes. Apparently, he didn’t read (or was baffled by) chapter 7, which allows housing at 43 units per acre, or chapter 10, which allows anyone with 160 acres to build as dense as they want.

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Wisconsin’s High-Cost, Low-Speed Rail

By | | Transportation
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Wisconsin was the fourth-highest (after California, Florida, and Illinois) recipient of federal high-speed rail money, receiving $823 million to initiate Milwaukee-to-Madison service. The state’s application proposes to use this money to operate six trains a day between the two cities as a continuation of service from Chicago to Milwaukee.

The proposal does not call for high-speed (faster than 125 mph) or even moderate-speed (faster than 80 mph) rail. Instead, the top speeds will only be 79 mph until even more money is spent improving signaling to allow for “positive train control” (which insures trains will automatically stop when necessary even if the engineer fails to stop the train).

With three stops between Madison and Milwaukee, the average speed will be just 58 mph. That’s a bit higher than the current Badger Bus, which averages 42 to 52 mph depending on which bus you take. But the rail route is longer than the bus route, which means the train will take longer (1 hour 40 minutes) than the fastest bus (1 hour 30 minutes).

In addition, the bus stops in the middle of the University of Wisconsin campus in Madison, while current plans call for the train to terminate at Dane County Airport on the edge of town, with transit connections to downtown and the university. This gives even the slower (1 hour 50 minute) buses a huge competitive advantage.

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Auto Dependent or Auto Liberated?

By | | Transportation
42 Comments

The Antiplanner’s faithful ally and American Dream Coalition director Ed Braddy argues that transit — at least as we know it — is an unsustainable form of transportation.

Which reminds me that the American Dream Coalition’s next annual conference is Some of the things that can be heard from the recordings are all-natural remedy that can soothe back pains, relaxation methods to eliminate spasms, truth about the effectiveness of pain-killers and viagra price online many more. If left untreated, erectile dysfunction can give rise to physical as well as psychological complications. online viagra sales Though psychological viagra 100 mg factors are concerned in the causation of migraines. Both of them are sildenafil citrate medications, which are easily available from various online stores across the world. purchase levitra is one such drug that has already helped many smokers quit smoking for life. scheduled for June 10-12 in Orlando. The conference will feature lots of exciting speakers plus a tour to see, among other things, the Selmon Expressway, which consists of three lanes built in a six-foot-wide median strip of an existing highway.

The Antiplanner’s Library: The Great Society Subway

By | | Book reviews, Transportation, Urban areas
17 Comments

Most DC visitors and residents consider the Washington Metrorail system to be a great success. Among them is Zachary Schrag, author of The Great Society Subway: A History of the Washington Metro. But, as Schrag clearly documents, by the standards of Metrorail’s original planners, it is a dismal failure.

Back in 1962, planners projected that a 103-mile rail system would cost less than $800 million — or about $4.6 billion in 2009 dollars. Moreover, they expected that fares would cover all of the operating costs and nearly 80 percent of the capital costs (pp. 53-54).

As it turned out, the actual 103-mile system that was completed in 2001 covers all of the basic routes of that original plan, yet cost $17.6 billion in 2009 dollars, close to four times the initial projection. Fares cover only about 60 percent of operating costs and, of course, none of the capital costs.

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Dueling PowerPoint Shows

By | | Regional planning
29 Comments

Last week, the Antiplanner engaged in a cordial debate with Chuck Kooshian of the Center for Clean Air Policy about whether smart growth — compact development combined with transit improvements — is a cost-effective way of reducing greenhouse gas emissions. You can watch the video below and download the slideshows used by Mr. Kooshian and the Antiplanner.

Mr. Kooshian made a good point in his rebuttal. The Antiplanner critiqued a study called Growing Cooler, which assumed that new cars built after 2020 would always average just 35 mpg, when much higher averages were possible and even likely. Mr. Kooshian pointed out that his own study assumed that new cars in 2030 would get 55 mph.
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Still, the Antiplanner pointed out, Mr. Kooshian’s study did not compare the cost-effectiveness of smart growth vs. even more fuel-efficient cars, and one MIT study estimated that building new cars average 69 would be cost-effective by 2030. Beyond this, I’ll let the video and presentations speak for themselves.

The Ultimate Transportation Antiplanning Book

By | | Book reviews, Mission
48 Comments

This is a bit premature, but booksellers such as Amazon and reviewers such as the Globe and Mail have already let the cat out of the bag. So I might as well announce the forthcoming publication of a new book: Gridlock: Why We’re Stuck in Traffic and What to Do About It. This book is to transportation planning what The Best-Laid Plans is to government planning in general.

Regular readers of the Antiplanner will be familiar with some of the arguments in the book: Mobility is valuable, and the personal mobility provided by the automobile is not only convenient and inexpensive, it is available to nearly every family in developed countries. Mass forms of transportation such as intercity trains and urban transit cannot substitute for the automobile, so efforts to restrict automobility can cause grave harm to society.

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