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Creative Financing Bites Muni

By | | Transportation
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San Francisco Muni may have to pay $68 million to banks and insurers as a result of some “creative financing” done 8 and 9 years ago. As previously described in the Antiplanner, in the early 2000s the Federal Transit Administration encouraged transit agencies to sell their equipment to banks and then lease it back. The banks would get the tax advantages of depreciating the equipment (which, as government agencies, the transit agencies wouldn’t get), and the banks and agencies would split that advantage.

As the Antiplanner noted before, this meant that, for each $100 million worth of capital purchases, transit agencies would get about $3 million more, but the cost to taxpayers would be about $6 million (because the banks would get the other $3 million). The problem today is that the transit agencies also insured the lease payments and the funds were tied to the insurer’s credit ratings. IF and when those ratings fall, the transit agencies are on the hook to repay the entire amount to the banks.
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The good news is that the IRS ruled such tax shelters illegal in 2004. The bad news is at least 30 transit agencies are in the same boat as Muni and may be scrambling for funds to cover their bets. This so-called creative financing was nothing but a dirty little scam that the FTA and local transit agencies played on unwilling taxpayers–just one more reason to privatize transit.

Reviving California High-Speed Rail

By | | News commentary, Transportation
8 Comments

The California High Speed Rail Authority has reason to be thankful this week as the U.S. Department of Transportation gave it another $900 million, keeping hopes alive for the state’s rail program. That means the feds have given the state a total of about $4.5 billion which, when matched with state bonds (which can only be sold when matched by other money) brings the authority’s total funds to $9 billion.

That’s less than 10 percent of what it will cost to build the San Francisco-to-Anaheim line. The authority plans to start building in the Fresno area next year; if it fails to start by September 30, it loses the federal dollars.

Some members of Congress from California want to take back the rail grants. But it is more likely that the only way to stop the authority from spending billions building a train to nowhere is for the legislature to deny its approval of bond sales.

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Happy Thanksgiving

By | | Housekeeping
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Here in central Oregon, Smokey got a taste of his first powder snow a few days ago. Though it has mostly melted at our elevation, there is plenty at Santiam Pass a few miles away.


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The Antiplanner and his companions wish all readers of this site, faithful allies and loyal opponents both, a wonderful and safe holiday.

New Concept: Compare Benefits with Costs

By | | Regional planning, Transportation
4 Comments

The San Francisco Bay Area Metropolitan Transportation Commission (MTC) is considering the possibility of using benefit-cost analyses to decide how to spend federal and state taxpayer dollars. This “new” technology dates back to 1848, so you can see why regional planners might be just discovering it now.

As presented in the San Jose Mercury-News, benefit-cost analysis sounds very objective and scientific. The problem, however, is that most of the “benefits” in the analysis, including such things as “Road fatalities and injuries, emissions reductions, the cost of owning and operating a car and even the health effects of physical inactivity,” are almost completely speculative. How do you put a price on those things? How do you measure the effect of building a BART line vs. building a HOT lane on physical inactivity? The answers to these questions will be as political as any other decision, meaning the benefit-cost analysis will be just as politicized as whatever previously passed for analysis at the MTC.

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Reauthorization or Gridlock in 2012?

By | | News commentary, Transportation
1 Comment

Speaker of the House John Boehner announced last week that House Republicans will soon introduce a surface transportation reauthorization bill called the American Energy and Infrastructure Jobs Act. The good news is that the plan (now available only in outline form) would eliminate New Starts and other slush funds that encourage cities to waste money. The bad news is that the plan would create a new slush fund that will encourage states to waste money on highways and bridges.

As Antiplanner readers know, Congress was scheduled to reauthorize surface transportation–meaning spending of gas taxes and other federal highway user fees–in 2009. But recently Congress has been gridlocked between Tea Party Republicans, who oppose new taxes and wasteful spending, and Senate Democrats, who want to increase spending to “create jobs” but don’t know where the money would come from.

Boehner proposes to resolve this by increasing production of oil & gas on federal lands, including Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, and dedicating the revenues from such production to highways and bridges. Boehner’s plan continues to include no more earmarks; ending or consolidating nearly 70 transportation funds such as New Starts; removing requirements that gas taxes be spent on non-highway projects; and streamlining transportation planning.

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The Technology That Changed Small Business

By | | Book reviews, Entrepreneurs
29 Comments

The Antiplanner hasn’t finished reading Marc Levinson’s The Great A&P and the Struggle for Small Business in America, but the story he tells is essentially the same as that told by former A&P executive William Walsh in The Rise & Decline of the Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Company, a book the Antiplanner discussed nearly three years ago. Despite the similarities, the two writers have very different slants, one essentially pro-capitalist and one subtly anti-capitalist.

To Walsh, A&P is a classic American success story. Founded by George Hartford as a tea shop in Manhattan in 1859, the company was grown by his children, George and John, to more than 16,000 stores that dominated the grocery trade in much of the United States. The average store was small by today’s standards, selling only 400 to 500 different products. When the first supermarkets were developed in the 1930s, the Hartfords jumped on the bandwagon and quickly replaced their shops with a smaller number of much larger stores. Like WalMart today, A&P in the 1930s through the 1950s was considered an unstoppable juggernaut.

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Technology-Neutral Energy Savings

By | | Transportation
23 Comments

The EPA estimates the Toyota Prius gets 50 miles per gallon. But, judging from other cars that are made in both hybrid and regular versions, much of that high efficiency is not due to the hybrid engine. The Toyota Camry hybrid, for example, gets 39 mph on the highway, while the non-hybrid version gets 35 mph–not a big difference. In town, due to regenerative braking, the hybrid performs much better: 43 vs. 25.

Despite the minimal advantages of hybrids, particularly on the highway, many people want to give hybrids all sorts of legal preferences, such as free use of HOT lanes even if the hybrid has only one occupant.

Now a new report written by former Secretary of Transportation Norman Mineta argues that government energy policy should be “technology neutral.” As New York Times writer Jim Motavalli points out, it is anything but neutral today, favoring electrics, plug-in hybrids, and hybrids over hydrogen, pure gasoline or pure Diesel vehicles.

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Even the Washington Post Opposes California High-Speed Rail

By | | Transportation
12 Comments

Once a supporter, now the Washington Post‘s editorial page says, “Somebody, please, stop this train.”

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Brown’s Folly

By | | News commentary, Transportation
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Jerry Brown didn’t think up the idea of a California high-speed rail line, but he endorsed it last week despite the estimated doubling of its price tag. Brown has recommended that the legislature release funds so construction can begin in 2012.

“Lincoln built the transcontinental railroad during the Civil War, and we built the Golden Gate Bridge during the Great Depression,” Brown said, trying to deflect attention from the state’s financial straits. Bad examples. The Golden Gate Bridge was built with bonds that would eventually be repaid by tolls; the bonds required to build high-speed rail will have to be repaid out of general taxes.

Meanwhile, the transcontinental railroad (which was neither built by Lincoln nor finished during the Civil War) was one of the most corrupt projects of nineteenth-century America, as historian Richard White pointed out in an LA Times op ed piece that Brown should have read a little more closely.

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Everybody Wants a Streetcar

By | | News commentary, Transportation
29 Comments

The streetcar craze is just insane. Los Angeles wants one; so does San Antonio. It was bad enough when cities all over the country were building light rail, an expensive, obsolete form of transportation that at least has the virtue of providing slightly better service than the local buses it usually replaced. But streetcars have no redeeming transportation value at all; they are hardly faster than walking, they are far more expensive than buses; and (because, for safety reasons, they cannot operate as close together) their capacity is much lower than a bus line.

Yet at the rate things are going, in a few years more cities will have streetcars than light rail. Cincinnati is further along than most other cities; Sacramento is talking about one; Tucson is building one; and Atlanta apparently hasn’t wasted enough money on its flop of a heavy-rail line, so it is talking about streetcars. Even normally sensible Kansas City is talking about streetcars.

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