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Meeting with a Regional Planner

By | | Regional planning
11 Comments

An Aussie who calls himself the Unconventional Economist, also known as Leith van Onselen, created and posted this little cartoon about dealing with regional planners. He based much of it on a script by another blogger named Ross Elliot.

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The Unconventional Economist, by the way, has written an impressive series of articles on housing bubbles and policies in various countries, including Canada, China, Germany (one country that didn’t have a bubble), the Netherlands, New Zealand, Sweden, and the United Kingdom. He has also written about U.S. housing markets, including California, Phoenix, and Texas, and of course plenty of posts about Australia. The Antiplanner agrees with almost everything he says, which means many readers of this blog will not.

Max Crashes

By | | Transportation, Urban areas
7 Comments

Vancouver voters apparently bought claims that C-Tran needed a tax increase to maintain bus service. Meanwhile, TriMet is so eager to reach Vancouver that it crashed a light-rail train into the buffers at the end of the line that could eventually cross the Columbia.

Few knew about the accident until someone sent the security camera video to a bus driver who posted it on his blog. When the Oregonian asked TriMet about it, “the agency said the video didn’t exist and denied knowing about the incident,” then suspended the driver for “invading privacy laws.” Isn’t security camera footage taken by a public agency public information? In any case, no one was hurt as there were only “a couple of people” on board. That’s why they need so-called “high-capacity transit”?

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Another Lying Transit Agency

By | | News commentary, Transportation
15 Comments

Tomorrow, Vancouver Washington voters will be asked to raise sales taxes in order to “preserve existing bus service.” Without the sales tax increase, says C-Tran, the transit agency, “C-TRAN would need to implement a system-wide service reduction of about 35 percent by early to mid 2013.”

It turns out that is a lie. An accountant named Tiffany Couch has scrutinized C-Tran’s budget and projected costs and revenues and concluded that existing taxes are sufficient to maintain bus service for many years.

So why does C-Tran say that service will decline without the tax increase? The answer, says Couch, is that C-Tran has already decided it wants to build a light-rail line connecting with Portland’s light rail. Without the tax increase, C-Tran will have to cut bus service in order to pay for the light rail.

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The Cost of Auto Accidents

By | | News commentary, Transportation
12 Comments

Auto fatalities dropped in 2010 below 33,000, less than in any year since 1949. But AAA has just published an alarming report arguing that the cost of auto crashes is $300 billion a year. Since Americans spend only about $900 billion per year (select table 2.5.5 and add lines 54, 57, and 116) buying, operating, and maintaing cars, this makes accidents appear to be a significant portion of the cost of driving.

AAA’s worthwhile goal is to promote auto safety, but the report also feeds anti-auto arguments about the hidden costs of driving. Since auto critics also misuse AAA’s estimates of the cost of driving, it is worth reviewing this new report.

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Free Bus to Atlanta

By | | News commentary, Transportation
9 Comments

Megabus, which serves the Midwest and Northeast, is starting service in the South and to celebrate it is giving away 10,000 tickets to or from Atlanta and eleven other cities. Even if you don’t get a free ticket, when the Antiplanner checked there were still seats on many routes for $1 to $3.

Megabus’ new service connects Atlanta to Birmingham, Charlotte, Chattanooga, Gainesville, Jacksonville, Knoxville, Memphis, Mobile, Montgomery, Nashville, and Orlando. Buses to Knoxville, Mobile, Nashville, and Orlando stop once; the rest are non-stop.

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High-Speed Fail, v. 2.0

By | | News commentary, Transportation
20 Comments

Ninety-eight point five billions dollars. That’s the new cost of California’s high-speed rail line from Los Angeles to San Francisco, according to a business plan released yesterday by the California High-Speed Rail Authority.

At least, that’s the cost reported (a half day in advance of the plan’s release) by the Los Angeles Times. The reason why the cost has more than doubled from previous estimates is that the Authority is now proposing to not finish the line until 2033 (vs. 2019 in the previous plan–see p. 52), and the added years of inflation make the cost higher in “year-of-expenditure” (YOE) dollars. When adjusted for inflation to today’s dollars, the cost is “only” $65 billion.

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Republicans Caving on Reauthorization

By | | News commentary, Transportation
13 Comments

It would seem like Republicans hold all the cards in the debate over transportation reauthorization. It seems most likely that they will gain seats in both House and Senate next fall if not capture the Senate majority.

House Republicans have said they want to spend no more money than is flowing into the Highway Trust Fund, less than $40 billion a year. Senate Democrats say they want to keep spending at current levels, which is closer to $55 billion a year, for two years, then start the debate all over again. To make this work, says transportation observer Ken Orski, the Senate plan would completely drain the $19 billion in the Highway Trust Fund and then find another $12 billion somewhere.

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It is time for the Tea Parties to take some action. I hope that Republicans who support the Democratic plan will face some opposition in their next primary elections.

LaHood Looks Forward to “Wonderful Opportunities”

By | | News commentary, Transportation
11 Comments

Secretary of Immobility Ray LaHood announced recently that he plans to step down from his post at the end of President Obama’s first term and that he is looking forward to some “wonderful opportunities” in the private sector. This naturally raises the question of what kind of opportunities await a bumbling has-been who betrayed his party’s principles in order to unconditionally support a president of the opposite party.

For example, the former Republican congressman from Illinois recently charged that Republicans in Congress today oppose Obama’s transportation policies because they “don’t want Obama to be successful.” Since Obama’s policies call for spending hundreds of billions of dollars the nation doesn’t have on transportation projects the nation doesn’t need, it is more likely that fiscal conservatives don’t think those policies can be successful at accomplishing anything other than wasting money on a grander scale than any other domestic project in history.

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The office of Secretary of Transportation has somehow become a “throwaway” position that recent administrations have used to make their cabinets appear more diverse. Bush kept a Democrat, Norman Mineta, in the office while Obama appointed a Republican, LaHood. We’ll see what the next administration does. As someone commented on the Washington Post web site, after Obama’s first term, “The other members of the cabinet will be leaving as well.” Maybe, if Republicans can find a credible alternative.

Getting Priorities Straight

By | | News commentary, Transportation
14 Comments

Facing a $12 million to $17 million budget shortfall next year, Portland’s TriMet transit agency is cutting bus service for lack of funds. But it has enough funds to spend $250,000 on a giant sculpture of a deer with a baby face.

The agency has already cut bus service by 13 percent and light-rail service by 10 percent in the last two years. Yet it is spending at least $3 million on “art” as part of its $200-million-per-mile light-rail line to Milwaukie, one of the most wasteful rail projects ever. As a matter of policy, TriMet spends 1.5 percent of its capital expenditures on art, even though it is not required to do so.
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After all, the most important thing is to keep Portland weird, not to actually provide transportation to people who need it. In furtherance of that goal, TriMet recently hired a multicultural manager and a transit equity manager, no doubt paying both more than $100,000 a year.

TriMet asked the public for ideas to help it close its budget gap. Most of the ideas involved taxing someone else such as auto drivers or out-of-town visitors. How about ending capital-intensive projects and focusing on providing efficient transit service on routes and schedules that fill up the buses so that losses are minimized? I bet they never thought of that one.

RIP Bill Niskanen

By | | News commentary
6 Comments

The Antiplanner was saddened to hear that William Niskanen, who for more than two decades chaired the board of the Cato Institute, died yesterday morning after suffering a stroke Tuesday night. Niskanen was a tenured professor of economics at the University of California at Berkeley in 1975 when he took a job as chief economist with the Ford Motor Company. He was fired from that job five years later when Ford wanted to lobby for restrictions on auto imports and he told them, “a common commitment to refrain from seeking special favors [from the government] serves the same economic function as a common commitment to refrain from stealing.”

After a short stint teaching at UCLA, President Reagan named Niskanen to his Council of Economic Advisors, and Niskanen eventually chaired that council. His obituary doesn’t say so, but I am pretty sure he was dismissed by Reagan in 1985 for disagreeing with some of the deficit spending that Reagan was incurring.

Niskanen’s habit of putting principle over self-interest made him a perfect fit for the Cato Institute, which–for those who don’t know–is sort of the Earth First! of free-market groups. Where Earth First!’s motto is “No compromise in defense of Mother Earth,” Cato’s motto could be “No compromise in defense of personal and economic liberty.” Cato was only six years old in 1985 and it counted itself fortunate to be able to attract a scholar of Niskanen’s caliber.

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