Search Results for: peak transit

Thoughts on the Oregon Primary

By | | News commentary
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Another Tuesday, another primary that won’t resolve the Democratic nomination. For the first time since 1972, my home state’s primary is likely to take place before all the decisions are made. While Oregon’s votes won’t be counted for two more weeks, our mail-in ballots are already in hand. To date, the Antiplanner has only skirted the presidential campaign, but since I am about to vote, it seems worthwhile going over my reasoning.

For me, the biggest issue today is the war in Iraq. This war was a mistake in almost every possible way. It reduced our standing in the international community, made no sense at all as a part of the war on terror, ignored the Powell Doctrine of when and how we should go to war, and probably made life worse for most residents of Iraq (though better for the Kurdish minority). Domestically, the war’s high cost has dramatically reduced the value of the dollar, from 1.10 euros in 2002 to 0.64 euros today. You can yak about peak oil and Chinese demands for energy, but it was this devaluation more than anything else that has been responsible for the run up in fuel prices.

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The Magazine of Big Government

By | | News commentary
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“What’s up with groups that argue for less government but see publicly built highways as an expression of the free market?” asks Alex Marshall, a columnist for Governing Magazine, in what is both a cheap and unoriginal shot at some of the Antiplanner’s friends.

Marshall finds it “exceedingly strange that a group of conservative and libertarian-oriented think tanks — groups that argue for less government — have embraced highways and roads as a solution to traffic congestion and a general boon to living,” while they “attack mass-transit spending, particularly on trains.” Among these peculiar people Marshall names Wendell Cox, John Tierney, Bob Poole, and some guy named RandalO’Toole (Marshall doesn’t say whether that is a first or last name).

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Value Pricing, Not Congestion Pricing

By | | News commentary, Transportation
24 Comments

Want to discredit a good idea? Implement a bad idea but name it after the good idea. That is what New York City is doing with its so-called congestion pricing scheme.

If you think density relieves congestion, try driving around Manhattan.
Flickr photo by 708718.

What Mayor Bloomberg proposes is to charge every car that enters south Manhattan between 6 am and 6 pm weekdays. He would then spend the money on mass transit. To be accurate, this should be called a cordon tax — that is, you pay a tax when you pass a line (a cordon).

True congestion pricing differs in several ways. First, with congestion pricing you pay for the use of a road, not for crossing a line. Second, with congestion pricing, the price varies depending on the amount of traffic there is. If it is constant all day long, it will fail to smooth out the peaks and valleys in traffic flows. Third, a congestion fee (as a opposed to a tax) would be spent on things that relieve congestion rather than on subsidies to other people.

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Preserving the American/Australian/New Zealand/Universal Dream

By | | Housekeeping
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As long as I am in Australia, I should plug the Preserving the American Dream conference, which will take place just under eight weeks from now in Houston. We have an incredible line up of around four dozen speakers covering everything from ballot-box zoning to the reconstruction of New Orleans.

 

 

 

   

Flickr photo by (and with the permission of) Sienna Plantation resident Adriana Rapolla.
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Anyone concerned about property rights, growth management, zoning, traffic congestion, or the high cost of rail transit should attend. You will especially want to go on the Friday tour of Houston, where you will see the local light-rail line, controversies over high-rises in neighborhoods of single-family homes, and Sienna Plantation, a beautiful and affordable privately planned community in Houston’s suburbs.

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Back in the Air Again

By | | Housekeeping
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The Antiplanner will be speaking in Golden, Colorado tonight at the Independence Institute. I’ll be presenting an updated version of my analysis of rail transit’s impact on energy consumption and greenhouse gases. I’ll be joined by Jessica Corry, who will talk about eminent domain issues involving transit in the Denver area. The reception begins at 5:30 and our presentations begin at 6 pm.

Tomorrow, the Antiplanner will be in Bismarck, North Dakota, speaking about smart growth on behalf of the North Dakota Policy Center. The session begins at 7 am at the Best Western Doublewood Inn.

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Anyway, if you are in the Denver or Bismarck areas, I hope to see you at one of these events.

A Commuter Train for Milwaukee?

By | | Transportation
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Normally, the Antiplanner does not like to use names like “liars” and “cheaters,” preferring to let the facts speak for themselves. But, time and again, these words turn out to perfectly apply to the people who put together rail transit projects.

Take, for example, the Southeastern Wisconsin Regional Transit Authority, or RTA for short, which covers Kenosha, Racine, and Milwaukee counties. Created in 2005, RTA wants to run a commuter-rail line it calls the KRM, from Kenosha through Racine to Milwaukee. The line would meet an existing commuter-rail line that goes from Kenosha to Chicago, and at least one train a day would run through to and from Chicago to Milwaukee.

According to RTA’s latest newsletter, the KRM would cost about $200 million to start up and would require a $6.3 million annual operating subsidy. For that it would carry about 1.7 million trips per year, which translates to 6,700 per weekday.

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Want to Save Energy? Take a Van

By | | Transportation
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The Federal Transit Administration (FTA) has published “provisional” data for 2006, including transit ridership, passenger miles, operating costs, energy consumption, and similar numbers for almost every transit system and mode of transit in the country. The data tables are not exactly straightforward, so the Antiplanner has compiled a summary showing the most important numbers by agency and mode and totals by urban area. Don’t say I never did anything for you.

Earlier this year, the American Public Transportation Association (APTA), the transit industry’s lobby group, was thrilled to report that 2006 transit ridership exceeded 10 billion trips for the first time in 49 years. As exciting as this sounds, it was only 2.9 percent more than in 2005, even though 2006 fuel prices were a lot higher than in 2005.

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“Choice” as a Rhetorical Device

By | | Follow up
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A couple of weeks ago, I asked what we should call Portland’s transit and real-estate development mafia if not the light-rail mafia. Loyal opponent Dan S suggested the “greater choice mafia.” This, of course, reflects the repeated claim of smart-growth planners that all they are doing is offering people more housing and transportation choices.

Bull. If someone wants to live in high-density housing, they can find it. Most Americans don’t, so there isn’t as much high-density housing as low density. But it is there. Planners want to turn it around — to get more people living in high densities than in low. That’s not offering people a choice — it is taking away America’s preferred type of housing from a large share of American families.

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Understanding the FTA

By | | Transportation
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Today we have a guest post from Tom Rubin.

Dane County, Wisconsin has formed a Transport 2020 task force that is trying to obtain federal funding for a commuter-rail line in Madison. During a recent meeting, a consultant “reviewed the FTA’s recent decision to include “perceived” rail advantages into ridership forecasting and modeling. This allows forecasters to quantify the quality of service for rail travel time, rail headways, and the attractiveness of rail, and include that in the ridership model.”

The problem is, this is not what the FTA actually said.

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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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