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Glaeser Opposes High-Speed Rail

By | | News commentary, Transportation
14 Comments

Edward Glaeser, one of the nation’s leading urban economists, thinks that high-speed rail is a waste, especially when it is planned for areas such as Alabama and Oklahoma. Not only is this inefficent, he notes, “intercity rail travelers are wealthier than car travelers,” so subsidies to high-speed rail are regressive.

“The case for subsidizing urban mass transit, like the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority, is certainly debatable,” says Glaeser, “but it is much stronger than the case for subsidizing rail links between non-coastal cities.” Glaeser dismisses claims that high-speed rail will promote economic growth, saying that “no serious evidence supports such claims.”
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Meanwhile, a Government Accountability Office report on Obama’s high-speed rail plan raises many of the same questions posed by the Antiplanner. Noting that the Federal Railroad Administration has no reliable estimates of costs, ridership, and benefits, the GAO questions whether it is appropriate to spend billions of dollars of stimulus funds on an unknown and untested program.

DeFazio’s Bright Idea

By | | News commentary, Transportation
21 Comments

As the Antiplanner previously noted, House Transportation Committee Chair James Oberstar (D-MN) and Highways and Transit Subcommittee Chair Peter DeFazio (D-OR) want to spend $500 billion on transportation over the next six years — which is about $150 billion more than is available. Fortunately, if you think their plan is a good one, DeFazio has a solution: tax futures trades in oil.

This should easily raise $150 billion, DeFazio says, and “it should be wildly popular. I mean, everybody hates speculators.” That’s the ticket: just tax people everyone hates.

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Intercity Buses: The Forgotten Mode

By | | Transportation, Useful Data
25 Comments

During my last trip to DC, I happened to listen to a debate over a proposal to build a streetcar line in Baltimore. “People won’t ride a bus,” argued one of the streetcar advocates. “To attract tourists, we need to have a streetcar.”

Meanwhile, within a two-block walk of the Cato Institute offices, I could find dozens of buses: charter buses in front of hotels, open-top tour buses filled with tourists, Bolt buses, two-story-high Megabuses, and many more. Most of them filled well over half their seats, except for the city buses which ran nearly empty.

Rail advocates are fond of claiming that Margaret Thatcher said, “A man who, beyond the age of 26, finds himself on a bus can count himself as a failure” — as if support from a fiscal conservative lends credence to their cause. In fact, there is no evidence Thatcher ever said this “or indeed shared the sentiment.”

The truth is that intercity buses are staging a revival, attracting riders of all ages from all walks of life. They are doing so by offering services you can’t get from Amtrak at much lower prices. But because they are unsubsidized, they are ignored by would-be policy makers such as the Surface Transportation Policy Commission. Moreover, accurate data on bus ridership are very hard to come by.

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Sweet Sixteen

By | | Housekeeping
6 Comments

Chip, the Antiplanner’s friend, reaches the ripe old age of 16 today — that’s over 100 years in dog years. Sadly, though it may be hard to tell from these photos (most taken in the last few months), he is showing his age.

Chip looks spry in this photo taken a few days ago.

In past years he has accompanied me on many 15 to 22 mile hikes. But last summer we confined ourselves to 4 to 5 mile walks in search of huckleberries, and I went on longer tramps alone. By now, he is reluctant to even go for a half-mile or so around the neighborhood. Still, we try to include him in as many activities as possible.

Chip was 9 when we took this 21-mile hike through the Mt. Jefferson Wilderness.

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Planned Waste in the Puget Sound

By | | Regional planning, Transportation
40 Comments

The Puget Sound Regional Council (the metropolitan planning organization for the Seattle-Tacoma area) is seeking comments on its draft 2040 transportation plan. The Antiplanner has long been critical of long-range transportation planning, and this plan is, if anything, even more repulsive than previous efforts.

For one thing, even though it is supposed to be a draft environmental impact statement (DEIS), it is written in a patronizing question-and-answer style reminiscent of a children’s book. This sends a clear message that planners think the readers are idiots and need to be guided by the hand or they might want something that is politically incorrect. As it turns out, the data in the document show it is the planners who are the idiots.

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High-Speed Opinions

By | | Follow up, Transportation
13 Comments

Publication of the Antiplanner’s views on high-speed rail in the Denver Post and Iowa City Press-Citizen has naturally produced both positive and negative comments. Most of the negative ones fall into two categories:

1. Ad hominem attacks on the Cato Institute; and

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It may be a testament to the quality of our public schools that the analytical skills of Americans smart enough to use a web browser have reached such depths of sophistication.

Sanity Prevails in Texas

By | | News commentary, Regional planning
20 Comments

After The Onion reported that Texas was building a wall around itself to keep out the job-hungry Americans, the Texas legislature effectively did the same thing by passing a smart-growth bill designed to destroy the Texas economy so that it would no longer have jobs attracting people from the rest of the country. Fortunately, Governor Rick Perry vetoed the bill.

The bill “would promote a one-size-fits-all approach to land use and planning that would not work across a state as large and diverse as Texas,” said Perry. “Local governments can already adopt ‘smart growth’ policies based on the desires of the community without a state-led effort that endorses such planning.”
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Actually, what makes Texas work so well is that counties, for the most part, have no zoning authority. This means if some city such as Austin decides to adopt a smart-growth plan, developers can simply go outside the city limits and build for the market instead of what planners want.

Amtrak Inspector General: Europe’s Trains Lose Billions

By | | Transportation
8 Comments

Rail advocates are often torn between arguing that everyone else subsidizes passenger trains, so we should too; and arguing that passenger trains could make a profit if only we would provide enough initial capital investment. High-speed rail advocates, for example, often claim that high-speed trains in Europe make money. For example, in 2008 The Economist wrote that the French TGV “lifted the [French state] railway to a profit of 695 million euros in 2006.”

Money maker or money loser?

Last year, Amtrak’s Inspector General hired a European consulting firm to examine such claims. The resulting report demolishes any notion that European railroads make money.

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In Defense of Paul Krugman

By | | Regional planning
43 Comments

As an unabashed supporter of Democratic Party policies, Paul Krugman has made some enemies in conservative camps. So the right-wing blogosphere was gleeful to discover a 2002 column in which Krugman actually urged the Federal Reserve Bank to “create a housing bubble to replace the Nasdaq bubble.” As near as I can tell, the first to point this out was someone named Patrick who commented on a Reason blog.

Since then, Mark Thornton at the Ludwig Von Mises Institute has uncovered many other examples of Krugman saying things in 2001-2004 that promoted a Fed-led housing boom. “Krugman did cause the housing bubble,” Thornton concludes.

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Metrorail Tragedy

By | | News commentary, Transportation
44 Comments

It is too soon to know what caused the Washington Metrorail crash that killed at least six seven nine people. The horrific photos show one train car telescoping into another, which is the last thing you want to have happen in a rail accident. Considering the accident took place just after 5 pm, it was lucky there were not more fatalities.

Time has not been kind to the Metrorail system. The Antiplanner remembers when the first lines opened and the trains exploded into the various underground stations and smoothly came to a stop. Today, the trains lurch and shudder, are delayed or cancelled by broken rails and “baffling” smoke in the tunnels, and passengers have to put up with numerous elevator and escalator outages.

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