Search Results for: rail projects

Our Over-Promiser in Chief

By | | Transportation
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“The Interstate Highway System transformed the way we traveled, lived, worked, and developed,” said President Biden in his March 31 speech introducing his American Jobs Plan. “Imagine what we can do, what’s within our reach, when we modernize those highways,” he continued. “You and your family could travel coast to coast without a single tank of gas onboard a high-speed train.”

The late Senator Arlen Specter shares a ride on an Amtrak train with then-Vice President Joe Biden in 2009.

When I read this, I had to wonder: is Biden’s speechwriter a total ignoramus when it comes to transportation? Or did Biden depart from the speech and allow his mind to drift to a total non-sequitur? I wondered this because, in case you weren’t aware, high-speed trains will not go on even modernized interstate highways. Although many people talk about building rail lines in the median strips of interstate highways, that’s just a fantasy: trains cannot handle the grades and high-speed trains cannot handle the curves found on interstate freeways. Not to mention the fact that there is no money for high-speed trains in Biden’s infrastructure plan anyway. Continue reading →

February Transit Ridership Down 66.2 Percent

By | | Transportation, Useful Data
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Light is visible at the end of the pandemic tunnel: millions of people are being vaccinated each day and many are going back to work. But that light isn’t shining on transit agencies, as ridership in February, 2021 was only 33.8 percent of the same month in 2020, according to data released Tuesday by the Federal Transit Administration. This is down from 34.3 percent in January.

Measured as a percent of 2020, Amtrak data show that rail passenger miles picked up slightly in February and airline passenger numbers from the Transportation Security Administration also increased, but transit ridership fell. Driving data won’t be out for another week or so.

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Miami Affordable Housing Vice

By | | Housing, Policy brief
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By Elijah Gullett

Note: As a follow-up to my report on low-income housing tax credits in Seattle, I asked Elijah Gullett, who is a student in public policy at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, to look at affordable housing programs in Miami. This is his report.

Click image to download a five-page PDF of this policy brief.

In 2007, journalist Debbie Cenziper won the Pulitzer prize for her Miami Herald investigative series, House of Lies. Cenziper revealed how Oscar Rivero, a Miami developer, ripped off taxpayers by promising the construction of affordable housing units and inflating construction costs for his own profit. In 2016, Lloyd Boggio and Matthew Greer, former CEOs of Carlisle Development Group, were found guilty of defrauding the government for affordable housing construction. Despite Carlisle being praised for their work in constructing “high-quality” low-income housing in Miami, they stole tens of millions of taxpayer dollars by inflating construction costs and making backroom deals with contractors. Even more recently, Pinnacle Housing Group and Related Group have been investigated for padding construction costs to steal money from government programs. 

Continue reading →

What’s the Point of Transit Subsidies?

By | | Transportation
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Rather than figure out how they can best serve the public in a post-COVID world, many transit agencies have not yet “grasped the significance of the challenges facing public transportation and many have focused attention on asking for federal resources to ‘carry them through’ the impacts of COVID-19,” writes transit expert Steven Polzin in a report released yesterday by the Reason Foundation. “Others are busy redefining the performance metrics and expectations of public transportation to justify unconditional federal funding,” he adds in the report, Public Transportation Must Change after COVID-19.

For example, he cites Bloomberg CityLab writer David Zipper, who says that since transit ridership is likely to remain low for years, “public transportation leaders should focus on a different metric for usefulness: transit access.” In other words, transit agencies should ask funders to accept the performance standards that make transit look good, not the standards that actually make sense.

Polzin is not as negative about transit as the Antiplanner. “The core goals of public transportation — providing mobility particularly for those without alternative means and capturing the economy of mass movement of people in markets where those conditions exist — remain important,” he argues. But do they? With transit costing five times as much, per passenger mile, as auto driving before the pandemic, it certainly hasn’t captured any economies of mass movement. Continue reading →

Housing Affordability and the Pandemic

By | | Housing, Policy brief
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The median price of homes in Auckland, New Zealand’s largest city, grew by $100,000 in February, reports the Real Estate Institute of New Zealand. That means prices were growing by $25,000 a week. The good news is that these are New Zealand dollars, which are only worth about 72 cents U.S., which means prices grew by “only” US$18,000 a week. The bad news is Auckland’s median prices had already reached $1 million (U.S.$720,000) in January, so February’s price increase was only about 10 percent.

Click image to download a four-page PDF of this policy brief.

Like many American cities with sky-high housing prices, Auckland has an urban-growth boundary, locally known as the Metropolitan Urban Limit, which it adopted in 1998. Advocates claimed that this limit would reduce transportation, utilities, and other costs. Ten years later a former Auckland city planner could only say that the limit was successful because it contained growth within the limit. That’s like saying schools are successful because they contain children. Continue reading →

The Truth about Pelosi’s Subway

By | | Transportation
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When the 2021 COVID-19 relief bill included funding for the BART expansion to San Jose, which didn’t have much to do with the coronavirus, Republicans labeled it Pelosi’s subway. Others disputed this description, saying that the BART line was 50 miles away from Speaker Pelosi’s district. Nevertheless, the earmark has apparently been removed from the bill.

$1.7 billion spent digging a hole and filling it up.

The bill still included $1.675 billion for transit capital improvement projects, which are not obviously vital considering that transit ridership is down by 65 percent. The American Public Transportation Association has created a list of 23 projects that are eligible for these funds. The San Jose BART line is not on the list. Continue reading →

The Dark Side of Japan’s Bullet Trains

By | | Policy brief, Transportation
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In 1964, the Japanese National Railways (JNR) was on a roll. The state-owned but largely unsubsidized company had just finished seven years of uninterrupted profits. Moreover, in 1964 it opened the Shinkansen (meaning new main line) between Tokyo and Osaka in time for the Summer Olympics. This exposed an international audience to the latest in Japanese technology in the form of the fastest trains in the world with top speeds of 130 miles per hour and average speeds as high as 86 miles per hour. These quickly became the envy of other countries, leading even the United States Congress to pass a law promoting high-speed trains in 1965.

Click image to download a four-page PDF of this policy brief.

Today, salarymen and tourists ride shinkansen the full length of Japan’s main island of Honshu as well as on the outer islands of Hokkaido and Kyushu. However, there is a dark side to the shinkansen. Like Darth Vader, who started out as a nice little boy who loved speed but whose life was corrupted by a power-hungry politician, the shinkansen was warped by politicians and ended up doing more harm than good to Japan’s economy. Continue reading →

Time to Rethink Amtrak Subsidies

By | | Transportation
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Amtrak will celebrate the 50th anniversary of the start of its operations in May. There’s not much to celebrate, however, as an audited financial statement recently posted on the company’s web site reveals that it lost $1.7 billion in 2020, up from $0.9 billion in 2019. Even that is deceptive, however, as the auditors bought into Amtrak’s claim that subsidies from the states are “revenues” and don’t distinguish such subsidies from ticket sales and food and beverage income.

Amtrak’s unaudited year-end results indicate that the company received $342 million from the states in fiscal year 2020 (which ended September 30). If these are counted as subsidies from the states, rather than passenger revenues, then the real losses were almost $2.3 billion in 2020, up from $1.1 billion in 2019.

Actually, the audited statement reveals in notes on page 10, most of that $342 million didn’t come from the states but was funded by Congress “to support the Company’s state partners in making their State Supported route subsidy payments due to Amtrak.” This means even the auditors admit that it is a subsidy, but they don’t disclose even in the notes that this subsidy was included in the revenues in the statement of operations on page 5. Continue reading →

Forum on State Transportation Issues

By | | Housekeeping
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State transportation issues during and after the pandemic will be the topic of an on-line forum next Wednesday, February 17. The Antiplanner will join several other experts, including Robert Poole, Baruch Feigenbaum, Marc Scribner, Wendell Cox, and Mariya Frost, to discuss highway, transit, and similar issues from noon to 1:30 pm Pacific Time (3:00 pm to 4:30 pm Eastern Time).

The forum is aimed at state policy think tanks, legislative staff, and other people who deal with state transportation issues agencies, budgets, and policies. Presentations will be based on Transportation and COVID-19, a group of articles published in December. More information and event registration are available from the Washington Policy Center.

Speaking of seminars, University of Oxford Professor Bent Flyvbjerg, noted expert on megaprojects, is holding an on-line class on Reference Class Forecasting. The projected cost of constructing the typical light-rail line rises by 40 to 50 percent between the initial cost estimate and project approval. The actual cost of constructing it rises another 40 to 50 percent between project approval and project completion. Continue reading →

Transit 2020: Subsidies Up, Ridership Down

By | | Policy brief, Transportation
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The transit industry carried 37.5 percent as many riders in December 2020 as it had in December 2019, according to data released last week by the Federal Transit Administration. This is a slight increase over the 36.9 percent carried in November. For the year as a whole, it ended up carrying 46.1 percent as many riders as it had transported in 2019.

Click image to download a four-page PDF of this policy brief.

The industry had begun the year carrying about 6 to 7 percent more riders than the first two months of 2019, suggesting that it might have been about to turn around the decline that it had experienced over the previous five years. The pandemic foiled this recovery, and the industry avoided total disaster only by the American Public Transportation Association and transit agencies convincing Congress to give transit $25 billion in April and $12 billion in December, with more on the way. This has taught the transit industry a perverse lesson: it doesn’t have to actually carry many passengers to continue to receive subsidies. Continue reading →