RTD, Denver’s rail transit lobby group, claims that a poll shows that most voters support a sales tax hike to pay for its boondoggle FasTracks rail plan. Voters previously agreed to a 0.4 percent sales tax increase in 2004, but now RTD says they will have to double it to get the rails built on time.
The actual survey results reveal that this was a “push poll,” meaning the interviewer asked leading questions to get people to support the project.
Here’s a little-known fact: Denver light-rail trains are the emptiest in the nation. Denver light-rail cars seat 70 and have room for at least that many standing, yet they carried an average of less than 14 people in revenue service in 2007. In the rest of the nation, the average was 24.
If only RTD, Denver’s transit agency, had managed to find some 14-passenger buses (which retail for about $50,000 each). It could have saved taxpayers the $1.2 billion or so that it spent building light rail.
This fact is among many revealed in a new report published by the Independence Institute of Golden, Colorado, which has long been critical of RTD’s dreams of rail empire. The report shows that RTD has repeatedly and continually lied to voters about the high costs and minimal benefits from building more rail lines in Denver.
Here’s a little-known fact: Around 80 percent of the revenues collected by federal land agencies in 2007 came from about 0.1 percent of the lands they manage. The other 99.9 percent is just a black hole sucking in tax dollars.
This fact is revealed in a new report on federal land management that offers a way to improve resource management and save taxpayers at least $7 billion per year. The report proposes to turn federal land agencies into fiduciary trusts and fund them exclusively out of a portion of the receipts they collect in user fees.
After a mere 14 years of planning, Portland’s “westside express” commuter-rail line is about to start operating. As the Antiplanner previously noted, however, this 14.7-mile line really doesn’t go anywhere that anyone wants to go, so TriMet predicts a whopping 2,600 riders a day (i.e., 1,300 round trips). It may end up being more, but the numbers will be insignificant either way.
Flickr photo by Hardlinejoe.
TriMet plans to run 32 round trips a day, which means each trip will carry an average of 40 passengers. For that, they have railcars with 80 seats, and they are ready to run them in pairs. Too bad TriMet couldn’t have found a bus or two capable of carrying 40 passengers.
The big news this week in Portland, the City That Doesn’t Work, is that Portland’s new mayor, Sam Adams (the first openly gay mayor of a big American city), really did have an affair with an intern when he was on the city council. He now claims that the intern came onto him and he was noble enough to at least wait until the intern turned 18. Nothing wrong with that, is there?
For those of you just tuning in, allegations of this affair were raised by one of Adams’ opponents in the mayoral campaign. Adams lied about the affair, smeared the other candidate (who is also gay), and forced him to drop out.
Yesterday was memorable for many reasons. Obviously, having the nation’s first non-white president gives hope and inspiration to many people for whom the American dream had previously only been a slogan.
Never before in American history — maybe all of history — have almost two million people — come together to listen to a speech. (I love the headline: “Inauguration Crowd Estimated At Up To 2 Million; No Arrests Reported Yet.”)
Never before has Washington Metrorail carried more than a million passenger trips in one day. If it carried that many everyday, it still would not have been worth the cost. Of course, they had to close the escalators at some of the popular stations because their trains can’t move people out as fast as the escalators can move them in. Trains that can move more people than an eight-lane freeway are somehow swamped by an escalator?
All eyes are on Washington today, but many will remember the crash landing of US Airways 1549 in the Hudson River last week. The number one hero of that flight, Captain Chesley Sullenberger, has been invited to attend today’s inauguration.
But there were many other heroes that day, most notably the crews and boats of NY Waterway ferries. Videos of the rescue operations show ferryboat after ferryboat pulling up to the floating airliner and throwing out life preservers to passengers. A total of 14 boats from the NY Waterway fleet assisted in the operation. Curiously, the captain of the first boat on the scene is named Vince Lombardi.
Janis Krums, a passenger on board a NY Waterway ferry, snapped this photo of US Airways 1549 with her iPhone as the boat approached the plane to rescue passengers, then distributed it via Twitter. (Click for a larger view.)
Back in 2002, Metro — Portland’s regional planning czar — made several additions to the region’s urban-growth boundary. The biggest addition was 18,600 acres — supposedly enough to house 50,000 people — on the east side known as Damascus. Portland’s housing market was booming, and some people predicted a huge land-rush that would lead to windfall gains for Damascus property owners.
Now, more than six years later, nothing has happened and it looks like nothing will happen. Metro blames it on the high cost of infrastructure. The reality is that Metro planners so gummed up the process that no one could develop their property.
The House Appropriations Committee released its proposed economic stimulus package yesterday, which has supposedly been endorsed by President-elect Obama. Much of it is not within my area of expertise, but the parts that are seem very unlikely to promote any economic stimulus.
If spending money is all that is needed to revitalize the economy, then all the government needs to do is dig holes and fill them up. Unfortunately, too much of this stimulus package does little more than that.
I am not convinced that increased federal spending will help at all, but I am convinced that it won’t help unless that spending goes for things that are truly needed. Projects that are not needed or used will not produce any “multiplier effects,” which means the stimulus will be small and short-lived. Projects that are heavily used will produce multiplier effects that not only make the stimulus more effective, they make it last longer.
The best sign of such multipliers is whether people are willing to pay for projects out of user fees. In such cases, the feds might be able to jump-start projects, but the best way would be to offer loans to be repaid out of those user fees, not grants. This will also minimize the long-term effects of deficit spending, which in the long run could dampen any benefits from the initial stimulus.
Alarming headlines last week read, “ Obese Americans now outweigh the merely overweight.” The story cites a report from the National Center for Health Statistics.
As near as I can tell, the actual report being cited says that changes in obesity rates are “not statistically significant.” In other words, the survey results are not accurate enough to say that obesity rates have actually increased. That is a lot less alarming.
