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Obama’s 2012 Transportation Budget

By | | News commentary, Transportation
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“The Obama administration’s embrace of high-speed rail . . . ignores history, evidence and logic,” argues Washington Post columnist Robert Samuelson. “The case against it is overwhelming. The case in favor rests on fashionable platitudes. High-speed rail,” he concludes, “is not an ‘investment in the future’; it’s mostly a waste of money.”

Yet Obama’s 2012 budget proposal, released yesterday, proposes to increase annual spending on high-speed rail by $8 billion. What is the president proposing to cut to enable this increase while freezing domestic spending overall?

The answer: housing. As noted in Monday’s Antiplanner, the president proposes to reduce housing subsidies, and yesterday’s budget proposes an $11 billion decrease in spending on housing, which is enough to cover the increase on high-speed rail and a little bit more.

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Another Smart-Growth Plot?

By | | News commentary
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“Under Obama’s proposal, fewer to own homes,” reported the Antiplanner’s local paper. The paper was reprinting an article from the New York Times, whose original headline was the slightly less inflammatory, “Administration calls for cutting aid to homebuyers.”

Is this another smart-growth plot to restrict homeownership only to the wealthy? Or is it a rational response to the recent financial crisis? The article is based on a report from the Department of Housing and Urban Development on reforming the home finance market.

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New Forest Planning Rules

By | | Public lands
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A curious article in the New York Times says the Forest Service has a “new plan to manage the national forest system.” This new plan, says the Times, is 97 pages long (actually only 94) and has environmentalists upset because it no longer requires the agency to protect minimum viable populations of wildlife.

In reality, there is no new plan, but merely new rules for writing forest plans. As the Antiplanner has noted before, forest planning is a huge drag on the Forest Service that consumes enormous resources and produces nothing of value.

Since the law requires some form of planning, last year faithful Antiplanner ally Andy Stahl proposed “Keep It Simple Stupid” planning that met the absolute minimum requirements of the law but imposed no other obligations on the agency. Stahl pointed out that the only real requirement in the law was that forests should list the timber sales they plan, so he suggested that that’s all that the rules should require.

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High-Speed Train Wreck

By | | Follow up, News commentary, Transportation
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Secretary of Immobility Ray LaHood says the administration’s high-speed rail fantasy won’t be derailed. But remember, this is the guy who said “there is no stopping” high-speed rail in Wisconsin a few months before the November election–and then he killed Wisconsin’s project himself when the “wrong party’s” candidate won the governorship.

Wikipedia commons photo of the world’s deadliest high-speed train accident by Nils Fretwurst.

Republicans remain skeptical and say they want to cancel the program. Even middle-of-the-road transportation commentator Ken Orski, who once wrote enthusiastically about high-speed rail and who is no antiplanner, argues (in a free email newsletter that he doesn’t post on line) that the administration’s plan is “a $53 billion high-speed rail program to nowhere.”

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High-Speed Pork

By | | News commentary, Transportation
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President Obama proposes to spend $53 billion on high-speed rail over the next six years, or nearly $9 billion a year. No one knows where this money will come from, especially in view of Obama’s proposed spending freeze. Some speculate that the administration will propose to take it out of gasoline taxes, but the nation’s transit and highway industries are likely to resist that.

Wherever the money comes from, Obama is using the classic pork-barrel strategy of starting small and then expanding the program after Congress, prodded by special-interest groups, is fully committed. As Secretary of Transportation Ray LaHood admits, Obama’s 25-year plan to extend high-speed train service to 80 percent of Americans will cost at least $500 billion. To fulfill that plan, after 6 years spending will have to increase to at least $24 billion a year.

Whatever happened to the spending freeze?
Flickr photo by SignalPAD.

Naturally, some people love the plan. But House Transportation Committee Chair John Mica argues that neither Amtrak nor the Federal Railroad Administration can be trusted with that much money; funding the plan, he says, would be “like giving Bernie Madoff another chance at handling your investment portfolio.”
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Are Earmarks Dead?

By | | News commentary
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Congressional leaders have promised a two-year moratorium on earmarks. Some in Congress are even trying to get the money back for orphaned earmarks, i.e., earmarks that have not yet been spent. There are usually lots of orphaned transportation projects because the states are not really interested in doing earmarks that override their own priorities.

It remains to be seen how serious Congress is about this. The hexennial surface transportation reauthorization should take place in the next two years, and it is hard to believe Congress will resist putting earmarks into it. While no earmarks were included in transportation reauthorization bills before 1982, the number grew rapidly after then, reaching more than 7,000 in the 2005 bill.

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Will Congress simply agree to whatever the FTA says are the best projects? Or will it override the FTA recommendations? We’ll know in a few months how serious Congress is about the no-earmarks rule.

Have an Opinion? You’re Violating the Law!

By | | News commentary
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A group of neighbors asked state highway officials to install traffic signals on a road near their Raleigh, North Carolina suburb. They buttressed their request with an eight-page analysis of the highway complete with maps and traffic projections.


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The state was so impressed that it agreed to install the traffic signals, right? Wrong. Instead, the state’s chief traffic engineer accused the neighbors of “practicing engineering without a license” and asked the state engineering board to investigate and possibly fine the local residents.

None of the neighbors purported to be engineers; none of them earned any money contributing to the report. But, said the state traffic engineer, the report “appears to be engineering-level work,” and obviously, no one should be allowed to do “engineering-level work” unless they are a state-certified engineer. Even the director of the state engineering licensing board agreed that the neighbors were violating the law if their “engineering-quality work” led to anyone being misled about the need for traffic lights.

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Congestion Coalition Wins in Virginia

By | | Transportation
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The urban mobility discussed here yesterday found that the Washington DC urban area has the fourth-worst congestion in the nation, costing more than $4 billion a year. That congestion will continue to get worse thanks to the efforts of anti-highway groups who appear to have successfully stopped the construction of high-occupancy/toll (HOT) lanes along I-395.

HOT lane opponents convinced Arlington County to oppose the new lanes, arguing that they would increase air pollution. In fact, by relieving congestion, they would reduce air pollution.

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Urban Congestion Report

By | | Transportation
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The Texas Transportation Institute recently published its latest urban mobility report, rating the amount of congestion in each of more than 100 urbanized areas. The report also estimates total congestion costs in 439 urbanized areas.

The Antiplanner has taken previous reports with a grain of salt because congestion estimates were based on formulas rather than on actual measurements of traffic delays. This report, for the first time, incorporates information from actual traffic speeds. The authors say they have backtracked this new methodology to the year 2000, but data before then (which go back to 1982) rely on the old methods. There does not appear to be a significant discontinuity between 1999 and 2000, which suggests either that the old methodology wasn’t too bad or the new data don’t play a huge role in the calculations.

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Ending Urban Redevelopment

By | | City planning, Follow up, News commentary
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Despite pressure from cities, Jerry Brown stands firm in his proposal to end redevelopment agencies, a plan he says will immediately save the state $1.7 billion a year, and more than double that after 2012.


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Meanwhile, the Idaho Freedom Foundation publishes a report proposing to eliminate urban renewal in that state. Urban-renewal agencies in Idaho collect more than $50 million in property taxes that could otherwise go to schools and other agencies. The big savings will be in stopping the growth in urban-renewal districts, which Idaho cities are creating at the rate of five per year.