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Federal Highways and Urban Form

By | | Regional planning, Transportation
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Note: This is the first of what may become a series of interblog debates between the Antiplanner and Charles Marohn of the Strong Towns Blog.

Many opponents of low-density suburbs — areas they derisively call “sprawl” — argue that Americans would not have chosen to live in such areas unless they were subsidized or forced to do so. One of the most important such subsidies, they claim, is the Interstate Highway System.

“For more than a generation,” argues former Milwaukee Mayor and current head of the Congress for the New Urbanism John Norquest, “urban sprawl sprung up with federal assistance [such as] excessive road building . . . that interfered with the free market.” He adds that, “urban superhighways should be relegated to the scrap heap of history.”

Would our cities look a lot different if the federal government had not built the urban interstates (which were the first major urban highways built with federal assistance)? I argue that the differences would be minor.

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Clearing Up a Mystery

By | | Transportation, Useful Data
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The 2001 National Household Transportation Survey (NHTS) found that the average motor vehicle contains about 1.6 people (see table 16). But a report from the Department of Energy observes that “intercity trips [have] higher-than-average vehicle occupancy rates” (see appendix C-3, page C-3.4).

How much higher? The answer, curiously, comes from the California High-Speed Rail Authority, which commissioned a study that found the average occupancy of autos in intercity trips is 2.4. Any fuel-efficiency comparisons of autos and intercity rail should use this number, not 1.6.

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Back in the Air Again

By | | Housekeeping, Urban areas
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In a trip sponsored by the Kansas Chapter of Americans for Prosperity, the Antiplanner is speaking tonight at the Bank of America Center in Wichita, a city that is just discovering the wonders and costs of modern urban planning. I’ll be speaking to some groups there Friday as well.

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If you are in the area, you can find more information here. I look forward to seeing you there.

One More Strike Against High-Speed Rail

By | | Transportation
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At last, a new reason why high-speed rail won’t work: bad architecture. According to this Chicago Tribune architecture critic, Chicago’s Union Station once had a beautiful, skylit concourse between the waiting room and trains, but it was replaced by a couple of skyscrapers. Now travelers have to walk through low-ceilinged tunnels that are confusing, apparently because you can’t see the sun. This means high-speed rail is doomed to failure — unless, of course, we spend a few more billions on beautiful new stations.

Actually, I’ve been to Union Station many times and never got confused in the tunnels (there are really only two directions to go). But leave it to an architect (or architecture critic) to say that we can make high-speed rail work by spending more money on building design.
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Chicago used to have six trains stations — Central, Grand Central, LaSalle, Northwestern, Dearborn, and Union — and now it is down to one (though remnants of some of the others still exist). But I suspect that, even if we spend a trillion or so on high-speed rail, that one will still be adequate to handle the traffic.

Obama’s Transportation Budget

By | | News commentary, Transportation
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The White House released its proposed 2011 federal budget today, including the transportation budget. For the most part, this budget is an extension of past budgets, but it includes a few new programs.

First, the budget includes $4 billion for a National Infrastructure Innovation and Finance Fund, also known as an “infrastructure bank.” The Antiplanner has a couple of problems with this idea. First, infrastructure should be paid for out of user fees, not tax dollars. Second, unlike many other transportation funds, which are distributed based on specific formulas, this fund will be an “open bucket.” This will give states incentives to come up with the wackiest, most expensive transportation projects.

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High-Speed Raildoggles

By | | News commentary, Transportation
28 Comments

A day after proposing a spending freeze (that everyone from Glenn Beck to Paul Krugman thinks is stupid), Obama gleefully announced $8 billion in federal grants for high-speed rail. But Obama knows full well that the final cost will be much, much more than $8 billion.

How much more? The Antiplanner once estimated $550 billion in capital costs (not counting cost overruns). BNSF CEO Mark Rose guesses $1 trillion (he must have included cost overruns). Oregon Congressman Peter DeFazio compromises at $700 billion.

“The thing is unimaginably expensive,” admits DeFazio. But, he adds, $700 billion is “the same amount of money that Congress gave in one day to Wall Street!” In trying to make high-speed rail sound cheap, he is hoping you won’t remember that Congress didn’t give Wall Street anything; it was almost all loans and most, if not all, will be repaid. That won’t happen with high-speed rail.

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The Cable-Car Test

By | | Transportation
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As the Antiplanner noted in an earlier post, transit planners of the 1960s claimed — and may even have believed — that fares collected for new rail transit projects would cover all of their operating costs and most of their capital costs. Such claims are commonly made today for high-speed rail, but most transit advocates admit that transit will never cover its costs and argue that it shouldn’t have to.

Secretary of Transportation Ray LaHood has even thrown out cost-efficiency tests imposed by his predecessor, Mary Peters, that the FTA used for judging whether it should fund a rail transit project. Instead, he wants to judge projects for their impact on livability, whatever that means.

Can your rail line top this?

But there must be some test that a reasonable transit advocate (such as many of the Antiplanner’s readers) would accept for judging whether a rail transit system is successful. For those who don’t believe transit should be profitable, I propose the Cable-Car Test.

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Jobs vs. Jobs

By | | News commentary
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President Obama’s state of the union speech yesterday focused on creating jobs (a word he used at least 25 times). On the same day, Steve Jobs presented Apple’s revolutionary and magical iPad. Which will have a more positive effect on people’s lives?

Let’s look at their track records. When President Bush was inaugurated as president, 130 million Americans had jobs. By the time he left office, it was 134 million, not a big increase, but not a decline either.

The first thing President Obama did was to persuade Congress to pass a $787 billion stimulus package in order to “save jobs.” As of December, only 130.9 million workers still had jobs, 3.4 million less than when Obama took office. You can blame that on Bush, you can blame it on whatever you want, but the fact is that Obama promised to create jobs and instead we lost millions of them. At least some people would argue that one reason the economy hasn’t recovered more quickly is that businesses are unwilling to make investments in an unpredictable political environment.

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How Much Has New Rail Transit Cost?

By | | Transportation
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How much money have American cities spent building “new” rail transit lines? A 2005 paper published by the Brookings Institution attempted to answer this question, but the numbers were only sketchy for some systems such as San Francisco BART and Washington Metrorail. Other systems were left out entirely, as were, of course, any lines built since 2005.

Using a variety of other sources, the Antiplanner estimates that the United States has spent more than $90 billion in 2009 dollars on new rail transit lines opened since 1970. This includes the BART system, which opened in 1972 but was under construction before 1970. This does not include the Cleveland Red Line, the only post-war rail transit line built before 1970 (unless you count the Seattle Monorail, which also isn’t included). It also does not include additions made to Boston, Chicago, and other rail transit systems that existed before 1970, or the Las Vegas monorail, which was built with private funds. Finally, it does not include money spent on lines that have not yet opened, such as the Norfolk light-rail route.

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The Transit Corollary to the Peter Principle

By | | News commentary, Transportation
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A dozen people were killed by Washington Metro trains in 2009. Earlier this month, John Catoe, the head of Washington Metro, graciously agreed to “take the fall” for these accidents by resigning his position as of April 2. The accidents weren’t really his fault; Catoe had been hired three years ago to help the agency deal with safety and reliability issues that were serious then; his crime was failing to fix the problems.

A two-year period of relative stability after he was hired led the American Public Transportation Association to give Catoe its outstanding transit manager award for turning the agency around. Then a series of crashes, deaths to workers, revelations about near-accidents and maintenance failures, and — most recently — the near-deaths of safety inspectors revealed that Catoe’s apparent success was largely an illusion.

Metrorail illustrates the Antiplanner’s corollary to the Peter Principle (“employees tend to rise to their level of incompetence”). The transit version of the Peter Principle is that “successful bus transit agencies rise to their level of incompetence when they build rail lines.”

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