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FAA Bill Postponed for 17th Time

By | | News commentary, Transportation
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Last week, the House decisively postponed reauthorization of the Federal Aviation Administration, something it has already done 16 times since reauthorization was scheduled to take place in 2007. At stake is the future of America’s airline network, which is beholden to the federal government to maintain and update an antiquated air traffic control system.

Flickr photo by Andrew Morrell Photography.

Air traffic control is fully funded by airline ticket fees and other aircraft users. But the system is run by the federal government, which for more than 20 years has promised to update it with a Next Generation system. In contrast, Canada’sprivatized air traffic control recently won an award from the International Air Transport Association for being the world’s best system. ATC agencies in Iceland and the Netherlands also won awards; these have been “corporatized,” turned into independent, government-owned entities that are not dependent on their governments for funding or reauthorizations.

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2009 Transit Data

By | | Useful Data
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The Federal Transit Administration has published the 2009 National Transit Database, which includes loads of information on every federally subsidized transit system in America. Unfortunately, the data come on about 20 hard-to-read spreadsheets (this version, known as the “data tables,” are easier to read but harder to use for calculations).

So, once again, the Antiplanner has collected the most important data into one spreadsheet. You can also download similar spreadsheets for 2008, 2007, 2006, and 2005.

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High-Speed Rail = Low-Quality Planning

By | | News commentary, Transportation
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High-speed rail advocates are psychotic, says the Boyd Group, an aviation planning firm. Psychotics, notes the company blog, suffer from “confusion, disorganized thought and speech, mania, delusions, and a loss of touch with reality”–all of which describe rail nuts.

“If you really want to see psychosis,” adds the Boyd Group, “log on to the DOT’s website. Instead of providing hard, accurate information, it’s now a shoddy trumpet for politically-correct schemes pushed by the hobby-lobby that’s running the Department.” Displaying the DOT’s 2009 map of proposed high-speed rail lines, the blog says “high-speed rail isn’t infrastructure; it’s political correctness” and the administration’s plan isn’t a “vision,” it’s “corruption.”

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Small May Be Beautiful, but Coercion Is Not

By | | Regional planning
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A new report from Oregon’s Department of Environmental Quality urges the state to give people incentives to live in smaller homes or disincentives to live in larger ones. A Life Cycle Approach to Prioritizing Methods of Preventing Waste from the Residential Construction Sector reviews the energy costs of various styles of homes and comes to the startling conclusion that larger homes require more energy than smaller ones. (How much did it cost to figure that one out?)

The report therefore recommends that the state “place incentives on smaller homes or disincentives on larger homes.” Why? If someone needs a bigger home, and they are willing to pay for it, why should the state care? Despite the coy use of the term “incentives,” what they really mean is coercive measures to arbitrarily make larger homes more expensive to force more people to live in smaller houses.

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LaHood Redistributes High-Speed Rail Funds

By | | News commentary, Transportation
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Rather than fight the plans of governors-elect Kasich and Walker to cancel high-speed trains in Ohio and Wisconsin, Secretary of Immobility Ray LaHood has preempted them by redistributing the $1.2 billion in federal rail grants to those states. Not surprisingly, most of the money is going to to California ($624 million) and Florida ($342 million). Washington state will get $162 million, Illinois $42 million, with smaller amounts to other states.

That brings the total of federal grants to California’s project to $3.2 billion. With state matching funds, it now has about $5.5 billion, or slightly more than 10 percent of what it says it needs to build the proposed San Francisco-Los Angeles line. Of course, the actual cost is likely to be much greater.

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Are Earmarks Necessary?

By | | News commentary, Transportation
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Represenative Michele Bachmann, a Republican from Minnesota, is against earmarks. But not when it comes to transportation. “Advocating for transportation projects for ones district in my mind does not equate to an earmark.”

Georgia Republican Representative Jack Kingston agrees. “How do you handle [transportation] without earmarks, since that’s a heavily earmarked bill?” he says.

I don’t think these people got the message last month. Here are a few pertinent points about transportation earmarks.

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No

By | | Follow up, Transportation
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That’s the answer to the question (raised here in September), “Should transit agencies buy hybrid buses?” At least, it is in the case of The Rapid, the transit agency for Grand Rapids, Michigan.

With the usual fanfare, The Rapid took delivery on five hybrid-electric buses some three years ago. These buses cost $510,000 each, or about a $220,000 premium over a plain Diesel bus of the same size. Agency officials predicted the buses would get 8 to 10 miles per gallon, compared with less than half that for ordinary Diesel buses.

A local transit blog, however, released a document showing that the new buses fell a bit short of this target. In fact, they only get 5.13 miles per gallon, compared with 4.45 for normal buses.

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How Many Lies Are in These Documents?

By | | Transportation, Urban areas
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Portland’s Metro has published an environmental impact statement (EIS) for a proposed streetcar line to Lake Oswego, the city’s wealthiest suburb. Why anyone thinks people in Lake Oswego would want to ride a streetcar to Portland is beyond the Antiplanner, but Metro’s goal is to spend money, not to transport people.

The Antiplanner turned almost at random to page 6-10 (physical page 398) and found an interesting table: “Cost-Effectiveness by Alternative.” This EIS actually considers a bus alternative, but the table says it is not cost-effective. The cost of carrying one new rider on the bus is $3.82, says the table, while the cost of carrying a new streetcar rider is only $0.98.

But wait just a moment: the table says these numbers represent the “operating cost per new transit person trip.” The traditional measure of cost per new trip, as defined by the Federal Transit Administration, included capital costs amortized at 7 percent over 30 years. When amortized capital costs are added in, the cost per new trip of the bus is $7.93, while the cost of the streetcar is $19.01.

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What He Said

By | | News commentary, Transportation
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Economic journalist Robert Samuelson has a brilliant piece about the inadequacy of the deficit-reduction plan from the Bowles-Simpson Fiscal Responsibility and Reform Commission. It’s not enough to merely trim budgets, says Samuelson. We need a “new public philosophy,” one that rejects the idea that people are entitled to federal subsidies for everything from mass transit to social security.

“It’s not in the national interest to subsidize mass transit, because most benefits are enjoyed locally,” Samuelson said in the portion of the article most pertinent to topics raised by this blog: “If the locals want mass transit, they should pay for it.” This is actually not a new philosophy but one that most Americans intuitively understood before the so-called Progressive Era.

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More Overbudget Rail Projects

By | | News commentary, Transportation
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The planned Honolulu rail line is likely to go at least 30 percent over its projected costs, and ridership is likely to be 30 percent less than forecast, according to a new report commissioned and released by Hawaii’s governor. The report cost $350,000, which means it commands more respect than if one of the Antiplanner’s faithful allies had written it for free. (Actually, one of the Antiplanner’s faithful allies, Tom Rubin, did help write the report–but not for free.)

The report says the rail line, which the city projected would cost $5.5 billion, is likely to cost at least $1.7 billion more. While local voters approved a sales tax increase to pay for the line, the report projects that tax will be insufficient to pay for the rail line. Over the next 30 years, “The total capital and operating subsidy paid by local taxpayers” on top of the sales tax “is estimate to range from $9.3 billion . . . to $14.5 billion.”

“Transit system usage and fare revenue are likely to be substantially lower than is project,” adds the report, “since the Plan’s projection would require an unprecedented and unrealistic growth in transit utilization for a city that already has one of the highest transit utilization rates in the country.” Update:The full report is downloadable from a state web site. Continue reading →