Search Results for: plan bay area

Cooking the Books

By | | Transportation
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The Salt Lake County Council of Governments recently agreed to spend $2.5 billion on rail transit. But a state auditor found that the analysis used to justify the decision contained some errors that, if corrected, would have indicated the money should be spent on roads instead.

The analysis ranked commuter rail as the second-highest priority transportation investment for the county. But when the errors were corrected, it dropped to 19th out of 34.

“So what?” say city and county leaders. They would have spent the money on rail no matter what the analysis found.

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Block Grants for Efficient Transit

By | | Transportation
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Last month, the Congressional Research Service put out two reports on federal transit funding. These reports offer some intriguing alternatives for transit for the next round of federal transportation reauthorization, which is due in 2009.

Click on image to download.

The first report (above), issued in September, deals a little more with transit history and structure. The almost-identically titled second report (below) came out about two weeks later and deals a little more with transit finance. But the two reports overlap in many ways, including their recommendations.

Click on image to download.

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On the Desirability of Rail Transit

By | | Transportation
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Rail transit is a waste of money, and what little benefit it provides in the form of congestion relief is far exceeded by its cost. That is the Antiplanner’s general opinion, and it is shared by economists Clifford Winston, of the Brookings Institution, and Vikram Maheshri, of UC Berkeley.

The two have written a paper, On the Social Desirability of Urban Rail Transit Systems, that has been circulating around the Internet for awhile (and was previously mentioned by the Antiplanner). Now it is being published in the Journal of Urban Economics.

At $170 million, the cost of building each mile of Seattle’s new light-rail line is enough to construct four miles of a four-lane freeway. If Seattle is lucky, its light rail will carry 30 percent of a single freeway lane; the national average is just 25 percent.
Flickr photo by brewbooks.

Winston and Maheshri examine 25 light- and heavy-rail systems in the U.S. and find that, with the exception of the San Francisco BART system, “every system actually reduces welfare and is unable to become socially desirable even with optimal pricing or physical restructuring of its network” (emphasis in original).

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TODs Don’t Work, Says L.A. Times

By | | News commentary, Transportation
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The Los Angeles Times takes a hard look at transit-oriented developments (TODs) and concludes that they don’t change people’s travel habits. Local officials say TODs will revitalize neighborhoods without adding to congestion, but the Times finds that “there is little research to back up the rosy predictions.”

The paper cites one study that “showed that transit-based development successfully weaned relatively few residents from their cars.” Two reporters from the paper itself spent two months interviewing TOD residents and reached the same conclusion: “only a small fraction of residents shunned their cars during morning rush hour.”

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Welfare to Wealthy Golfers

By | | News commentary
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Bandon, Oregon, my home town, was featured in the New York Times last week as a “hard-luck community” apparently inhabited by a bunch of rubes who foolishly subsidize wealthy executives. The article (also viewable as a video) actually left out some of the juiciest parts of this tale.

#6 at Bandon Dunes Golf Course. Photo by Bandon Dunes Resort.

The story is about Bandon Dunes, a destination golf resort built by a wealthy golf enthusiast named Mike Keiser (who, everybody likes to observe, made his money selling greeting cards printed on recycled paper). Keiser spent tens of millions of dollars of his own money building the course on sheer speculation. When he opened, greens fees started at something like $175 a round (and are now as high as $250). But every hole has an ocean view and the course was quickly rated one of the best in America, so he got more business than originally anticipated.

Keiser did not need any subsidies to build. Full disclosure: I understand Keiser gives money to my new employer, the Cato Institute. After his resort proved successful, however, some local governments decided to promote their empires by subsidizing Bandon Dunes and its wealthy customers.

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Will Seattle Spend $10.8 Billion on 50 Miles of Light Rail?

By | | News commentary, Planning Disasters, Regional planning
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Sound Transit, which is way overbudget in the construction of Seattle’s first light-rail line, now wants voters to approve a measure to build 50 more miles of light rail for the modest cost of $10.8 billion (in 2006 dollars). That’s a mere $216 million per mile, which is about four to five times the average cost of light-rail construction elsewhere.

I suspect this is going to be an uphill battle for the transit agency, if only because the Seattle Times article reporting this story emphasizes a much-higher figure of $23 billion (which includes projected inflation and some finance charges). Newspapers that want to promote light rail usually underplay the cost, but the Times feels burned by the last rail plan, which it supported, and which ended up costing far more than was projected.

Sound Transit, which wants to build 50 more miles of light rail, is also running commuter trains. Ridership proved so far below forecast levels that the agency ended up selling many of the commuter cars it had purchased for the operation.
Flickr photo by MGJeffries.

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Making California Housing Affordable

By | | News commentary, Planning Disasters
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A bill being considered by the California legislature aims to make the state’s housing more affordable. According to this analysis, the bill amends the state’s Planning and Zoning Act by requiring cities and counties to take more steps to keep housing affordable.

The bill is supported by various home building associations as well as some non-profit groups such as the California Council of Churches, St. Vincent DePaul, and the California State Firefighters Association, which worries that firefighters and other public employees can’t afford to live in the cities they serve.

Is California’s housing system broken? This house would cost $150,000 in Houston, $400,000 in Bakersfield, $950,000 in Marin County, and well over $1.2 million in San Jose.

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Let’s Reduce Congestion by Tearing Out Freeways

By | | Transportation
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Those wacky planners are always coming up with crazy ideas. Recently, a planner over at Planetizen proposed that cities should remove urban freeways.

His reasoning was simple. Freeways are ugly. Cars are evil. Freeways induce more driving. So if we get rid of the freeways, people will drive less and everyone will be happier.

Beauty vs. mobility?
Flickr photo by gsgeorge

I can’t argue with the notion that some freeways are ugly, but so are a lot of things and beauty, after all, is in the eye of the beholder. Everything else about this argument is simply wrong.

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The Nation’s Worst-Managed Transit Agency Hires a New CFO

By | | Transportation, Urban areas
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After building more light-rail lines than it can afford to operate, the Santa Clara Valley Transportation Authority (VTA) has made so many service cuts that it has lost a third of its riders. VTA’s chief financial officer resigned after an outside audit (previously discussed here) criticized the agency for building expensive rail projects to politically powerful (but auto-liberated) neighborhoods without ensuring that the agency had the funds to operate the system.

Last June, angry voters turned down a sales-tax increase designed to help the agency get back on its feet and build more rail lines. Now, under pressure to prove they can be fiscally responsible, the board of directors has hired a new “temporary” CFO, paying him $13,600 for 39 weeks of work.

Excuse me, what was that? Not $13,600, you say, but $13,600 per week? For 39 weeks? That’s $530,400. The previous CFO only got $200,000 a year, meaning his weekly wages were less than a third of the new guy’s. No wonder he did such a lousy job — they weren’t paying him enough!

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The Nation’s Worst Transit Agency

By | | Planning Disasters, Transportation, Urban areas
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I’ve previously noted that the Santa Clara Valley Transportation Authority (VTA) may be the nation’s worst-managed transit agency, at least among those serving big cities. Now a new report commissioned by VTA’s own board of directors confirms many of my concerns.

The new report was written by a company called Hay Group. Most consultants fawn all over their clients, but this report is surprisingly frank. Among other things, it accuses VTA of building “capital projects” (i.e., light rail) that benefitted politically powerful neighborhoods without insuring that it had the money to operate those projects. The result is low ridership and high operating costs.

When there is just one car, it is not a train. Flickr photo by LazyTom.

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