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HSR as Wasteful in U.K. as in U.S.

By | | Transportation
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Rail advocates argue that high-speed rail makes the most sense in 300- to 600-mile corridors, so some think that the United States is too big for it to work. Conversely, English columnist Simon Jenkins argues that Britain is too small for high-speed rail to make sense: what the country needs, he says, is more reliable trains, not faster ones. “In rail terms, England is one huge metropolis in which the chief constraint on time is not technology but the number of stops.”

Jenkins writes with authority (and a bit of sour grapes), as he was on the board of British Rail in the 1980s before it was privatized and also on the board of London Transport. He thinks the “pseudo-privatization” of rail services has made it less reliable and more bureaucratic than ever (against which it has to be pointed out that Britain is the only European country where public transit is gaining market share).

But his arguments against high-speed rail are right on: it is a “gargantuan project” that “will cost a lifetime of money” and mainly “serve a few rich travelers.” Nor is it “particularly green.” Instead of investing billions in building brand new tracks, the money should be spent on making the existing tracks work better.

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Gee, Krugman’s Graphs Look Like the Antiplanner’s

By | | News commentary, Planning Disasters
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Comparing housing prices in Los Angeles with those in Atlanta using a graph very similar to those used by the Antiplanner, Paul Krugman remakes the point that the United States did not have one housing bubble: it had many. And, he adds, the bubbles were caused by land-use regulation, while places that did not have government constraints on land did not have bubbles.

The Economist makes the point, previously made by the Antiplanner (on p. 115 of Best-Laid Plans, that volatile housing prices reduces mobility and increases unemployment rates. When home prices drop and homebuyers find themselves “underwater,” some won’t leave even for better jobs elsewhere because they can’t afford to lose the house.
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Unfortunately, most of the people who commented on the Economist article conclude that this means people are better off renting than buying. This may be true if you live in a region infested by smart-growth planners. But in relatively free housing markets, buying remains better for most of those who can afford the down payment — not because of the economic return you get from buying but because homeowners enjoy a higher quality of life.

The News Report from Hell

By | | News commentary
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This is not really about antiplanning, but as a rail fan I am offended by this story about Amtrak weather delays. Far be it from the Antiplanner to defend Amtrak, but the NBC News reporter who wrote it just has his facts wrong.

He says the California Zephyr arrived in Chicago “almost 24 hours late” after a journey of “nearly five days” from Sacramento. “Almost 24 hours” turns out to be 19 hours, but the train normally takes less than 50 hours to go from Sacramento to Chicago, so how could the trip have taken five days?

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FasTracks Update: Costs Down, Still Can’t Afford It

By | | News commentary, Transportation
17 Comments

If there is one thing Denver’s Regional Transit District (RTD) has become famous for, it is making economic forecasts that are proven wrong a year later. Back in 2004, it projected that it could build 119 miles of rail lines for $4.7 billion. By 2007, the cost was up to $6.2 billion, then $7.9 billion. In 2008, it had declined to $7.0 billion (which everyone but the Antiplanner published as $6.9 billion — but it was really $6.952, which rounds up to $7.0).

The latest projection estimates that, thanks to the recession, the cost will be only $6.5 billion (details here). But the other side of the projection — revenues to pay for it — are even more dismal, with revenues now projected to be $2.5 billion less than originally expected.

In fact, the latest projections indicate that, even if RTD manages to build all of the new rail lines, it won’t have enough money to run them. Of course, RTD and the rail nuts who support it just see this as all the more reason why Denver-area voters should agree to another tax increase. Let’s hope they wise up this time.

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Transportation Apartheid or Victim-Industrial Complex?

By | | News commentary, Transportation
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A lawsuit in a federal court charges that Chicago’s Regional Transportation Authority (RTA), which distributes funds to three different transit agencies, has systematically discriminated against minorities when it allowed the Chicago Transit Authority (CTA) buses and trains (which are mostly used by blacks and Latinos) to decline while it kept up on and expanded suburban Metra commuter trains (which are mostly used by whites). This case is similar to a suit in Los Angeles that was settled when the transit agency agreed to restore bus service to minority neighborhoods, and an on-going suit in the San Francisco Bay Area (third item down).

Many Chicago elevated lines are poorly maintained.
Flickr photo by Ateller Teee.

Civil rights attorney Robert Bullard calls transportation policies that favor white suburbanites over inner-city minorities “transportation apartheid.” But a conservative blogger suggests that the Chicago lawsuit may be just “a racist shakedown perpetrated by the Victim Industrial Complex.” Which is correct?

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Airport Insecurity

By | | News commentary, Transportation
27 Comments

Someone walked the wrong way through a gate at Newark Airport and the Transportation Security Administration shut terminal C down for six hours. Someone put honey in their checked luggage at Bakersfield Airport and TSA shut the airport down for several hours. A dog barked when he sniffed an airline-owned suitcase and TSA evacuated the Minneapolis airport. Meanwhile, a kid in St. Louis loses his Christmas present because it looks a little like plastic explosive.

All of these are overreactions to the “Christmas bomber.” As many have pointed out, no one has any idea whether these increased security measures make sense — and many others doubt that they do.

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California: The Future Does Not Work

By | | News commentary, Planning Disasters
15 Comments

Californian William Voegeli compares his home state with the Antiplanner’s favorite state (at least politically), Texas. Being homes to the first- and second-largest populations in the country, both are “populous Sunbelt states with large metropolitan areas, diverse economies, and borders with Mexico producing comparable demographic mixes.”

But there are two sharp differences between them. California spends well over $10,000 per capita each year (and Voegeli argues that it is ineffectively spent), while Texas spends barely two-thirds that much. The second difference, argues Voegeli, is a function of the first: Texas is growing rapidly while California’s growth has stagnated. Companies are moving out of California, while in one recent period, Texas gained more jobs than the other 49 states combined.

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High-Speed Rail: Planning Disaster of the Teens?

By | | Planning Disasters, Transportation
27 Comments

In a recent post, the Antiplanner pointed out that the United States is in competition with China, or more accurately, the Western model of democratic capitalism is in competition with the Eastern model of authoritarian capitalism. Now, China has announced the opening of the world’s fastest high-speed train service, capable of reaching speeds of 245 mph.

Fast for a train.
Flickr photo by Datemarker.

Naturally, this has treehuggers saying China will leave United States “in the dust” and the rest of the world behind as well. But let’s get real: in the United States, we use a technology known as jet airplanes that move people twice as fast as China’s high-speed trains.

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Happy New Year

By | | Housekeeping
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The Antiplanner’s Year in Review

By | | Housekeeping
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In the past, I’ve called myself a forester, an economist, and a policy analyst. But sometimes it seems I am really mainly a writer. If that is my primary occupation, then 2009 was a great year.

At the beginning of the year, I wrote Gridlock, an 82,000-word book that is just now being published. Once that was done, I wrote three policy papers for Cato: How Urban Planners Caused the Housing Bubble (11,000 words), The Myth of the Compact City: Why Compact Development Is Not the Way to Reduce Carbon Dioxide Emission (11,000 words), and Getting What You Paid For; Paying for What You Get: Proposals for the Next Transportation Reauthorization (9,000 words). I also wrote two Cato briefing papers: one on high-speed rail (4,000 words) and one on transportation reauthorization (6,000 words).

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