Washington Metro doesn’t have enough money to maintain its rail system, and the region doesn’t have enough money to build the Silver line to Dulles Airport, which is already under construction. So what should the region do?
Plan more rail lines, of course! Because, when it comes to rail transit, no amount of money is too much, right? Where is the “fix-it-first” crowd when we need them most?
The North Carolina legislature has forbidden the state’s transportation department from applying for more high-speed rail funds from the federal government. Before the department can apply for any grants that would obligate the state to pay $5 million or more in operating costs–which any high-speed rail project would do–it must receive approval from the state legislature.
In the view of some, this makes North Carolina the fourth state–after Florida, Ohio, and Wisconsin–to reject federal high-speed rail funds. But unlike the other three states, North Carolina isn’t turning back the $496 million in funds it has already received. But that $496 million will not buy much without further grants, which are unlikely to happen now. Many people credit the John Locke Foundation, which published two reports on high-speed rail–one by the Antiplanner and one by Wendell Cox–with persuading the legislature to take this step.
Meanwhile, Democratic governors across the nation “admire the way [Illinois Governor Pat] Quinn grabbed up federal high-speed rail dollars rejected by the Republican governors of Wisconsin and Florida.” Yet the Chicago Tribune, the state’s largest paper, has–belatedly perhaps–come out against the state’s high-speed rail projects as expensive and not really high speed.
As a part of the annual budget package, the California legislature approved a bill that would have required city and county redevelopment agencies to either shut down or start making large payments to local school districts. However, Governor Jerry Brown vetoed the budget package, saying it doesn’t go far enough in closing the state’s budget gap.
Brown called for completely eliminating redevelopment agencies as soon as he took office in January. The agencies are primarily funded by tax-increment financing (TIF), which uses property taxes on new development to subsidize that development. California redevelopment agencies currently collect $5.5 billion in property taxes a year. Because some of that money is dedicated to repaying bonds, eliminating the agencies would immediately save the state $2.5 billion, later increasing to $5.5 billion as the bonds are paid off.
According to Transportation for America–which is largely a shill for the transit and high-speed rail industry–the nation about to face a new crisis: a shortage of mobility “options” for retiring baby boomers. According to a report published by the group on June 14, “By 2015, more than 15.5 million Americans 65 and older will live in communities where public transportation service is poor or non-existent.”
The appropriate answer to that, of course, is “So what?” Most seniors don’t ride transit. Census data show that more than 12.5 percent of all Americans are over 65, yet data from the American Public Transportation Association show that only 6.7 percent of transit trips are taken by senior citizens. The average American rides transit less than 34 times a year; the average senior citizen less than 18 times a year.
Putting that into perspective, the 2009 National Household Travel Survey says Americans over 65 take an average of 1,168 trips per year, nearly all by automobile. Transit serves only 1.5 percent of those trips. This survey of the travel habits of more than 300,000 people also found that senior citizens travel an average of 8,250 miles a year by car. Transit carries seniors an average of less than 100 miles a year, or about 1.1 percent of the total of transit and auto travel.
An earlier series of Antiplanner posts looked at the recent financial crisis and the role the housing market played in that crisis. This has led the Antiplanner to look deeper into the history of housing and home ownership.
The Census Bureau began tallying homeownership rates in the 1890 census; before that, American homeownership rates can only be guessed at by the fact that the vast majority of American lived in rural areas and most–roughly two-thirds in 1890–American farmers owned their farms and, by extension, their homes. Between 1890 and 1940, census data found that about 40 to 45 percent of Americans owned their own homes. Then there was a sudden increase to 62 percent in 1960, after which it slowly crept up to 65 percent.
The Antiplanner has always assumed that the 40 to 45 percent of households that owned their homes represented middle-class (white-collar) families, and the 20 percent growth after 1940 represented working-class (blue-collar) families. But as Margaret Garb shows in City of American Dreams, reality is a bit more complicated.
The Texas Transportation Institute estimates that commuters wasted $115 billion sitting in traffic in 2009–up from just $24 billion in 1982. But Smart Growth America is still promoting its idiotic “fix-it first” policy.
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The truth is, of course, that Smart Growth America is just anti-roads and is using fix-it first as a subterfuge to oppose new roads. But if the policy makes sense at all, then no new rail transit lines would be built in America until transit agencies clear up transit’s $77 billion maintenance backlog. Do you suppose Smart Growth America would endorse that policy?
Some people are chortling over a recent Pew survey that finds the share of Americans who think that cars are a “necessity” is the lowest since pollsters started asking the question in 1973. Perhaps, some are suggesting, that’s because young people aren’t driving as much as older Americans, so we shouldn’t invest much more in highways.
Another interpretation of the numbers is that more people think they should tell pollsters that they don’t need cars as much as they used to. The Antiplanner prefers to rely on revealed preferences rather than survey data. Here are a couple of revealed preferences.
Table B25044 of the 2009 American Community Survey indicates that 113 million out of 123 million American households–that’s 91.1 percent–have at least one vehicle available. Despite the recession, this is up from 105 out of 126 million households (89.7 percent) in the 2000 census (see table H44, summary file 3 or this brief).
This “news” is a couple of months old, but Caixin Weekly, a Chinese business magazine, has published an extremely critical article about that country’s high-speed rail program. This report probably inspired similar but shorter articles in the Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, and other publications.
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One theory is that China will continue to waste money on things like high-speed rail in order to persuade the U.S. to bankrupt itself trying to keep up. If the U.S. doesn’t fall for it–and it appears it has not–then China will have to stop building or end up contributing to its own bankruptcy. That’s not so hard to believe considering that Japanese National Railways piled up a $300 billion debt (in today’s dollars) in 1987, which the government was forced to assume and which contributed to that nation’s economic doldrums since 1990.
According to census data, about 4 percent of American workers–5.9 million–live in households that have no automobiles. Conventional wisdom suggests that these are people who are either too poor to own a vehicle, and we should pity them; or people who for environmental or other reasons have learned to live without a vehicle, and we should admire them.
There may be a third category, however. As demographer Wendell Cox recently discovered, table B08141 from the Census Bureau’s 2009 American Community Survey shows how people get to work by how many vehicles they have in their household. It turns out that nearly 1.2 million people who have no vehicles nevertheless drive to work in a single-occupancy vehicle. That represents 20 percent of workers with no vehicles. Another 730,000, or more than 12 percent of people with no vehicles, carpool to work.
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The Antiplanner visited Austin over the weekend to pick up Smokey, an 8-week-old Belgian Tervuren puppy. Smokey is actually a nephew (several generations removed) to Chip.
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As most dog owners know, puppies have two speeds: off and frenetic. Postings are likely to be light this week as I’ll be doing my regular job during the off periods between Smokey’s frenetic periods.
