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Northern Virginia Transportation Conference

By | | Transportation
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Presentations from the American Dream Coalition conference I spoke at yesterday:

John McClain (George Mason University): Northern Virginia’s Economy & Trends (2.9 MB)

Alan Pisarski (author of Commuting in America: Commuting Patterns Today & Tomorrow (4.8 MB)

Sam Staley (Reason Foundation): Mobility First (5.7 MB)

Tom Rubin (American Dream Coalition): Rail Performance in the U.S. (12.1 MB)

Gabriel Roth (Independent Institute): Faster by Bus (324 KB)

Corey Stewart (Chair, Prince William County Board of Supervisors): Transportation in Prince William County (1.2 MB)
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Alisdair Cain (National Bus Rapid Transit Institute): Mobility with BRT (22.6 MB)

John Palatiello (America Moving Forward): Public-Private Partnerships Really Work (2.9 MB)

Chris Walker: Transforming the Dulles Region (7.0 MB)

Randal O’Toole (Cato Institute): Transportation, Energy, & the Environment (7.4 MB)

Wendell Cox (Demographia): The Costs of Smart Growth (29.7 MB)

Unfortunately, the day before the conference, the FTA succumbed to pressure from the Virginia Congressional delegation and reversed its position on Dulles rail.

FAIL: Capitol Visitor Center Opens This Week

By | | News commentary
41 Comments

With great fanfare appropriate to its great cost overruns, members of Congress opened a new visitor center at the foot of the nation’s capitol building. “What was conceived in the 1990s as a sensible $71 million celebration of democracy,” opined Washington Post writer Dana Milbank, “turned into a half-billion-dollar [actually, $621 million, more than $1,000 per square foot] shrine to legislative excess,” including an $85 million TV studio for senators.

Artist’s rendering of the Capitol Visitor Center.

Which, of course, makes it a great example of how representative democracy actually works.

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Trillions Are the New Billions

By | | Meltdown
4 Comments

Numerous news stories report that the cost of the “bailouts” so far has “reached” $8.5 trillion. Some more cautious stories say they “could” reach $8.5 trillion. ABC News Chris Cuomo says reassuringly that we might get about half back in loan repayments.

The source of this $8.5 trillion is apparently Bloomberg, and their scorecard is here. First, the totals don’t add to $8.5 trillion, only $8.35 trillion. But that’s quibbling. A closer look reveals a far greater portion of the claimed $8.5 trillion isn’t real.

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Bubbles, Panics, and Recessions

By | | Book reviews, Meltdown
49 Comments

In the past thirty years, the world economy has suffered several major bubbles. First came the Japanese stock market and property bubbles that peaked in 1989. Scandanavia suffered real estate and stock bubbles at about the same time. These were soon followed by stock market and real estate bubbles that peaked in southeast Asia in about 1997. High-tech and telecommunications bubbles (which some count as two different bubbles) peaked in 2001. Finally, we have the current housing bubble that peaked in 2006.

Are these bubbles more frequent than in the past? Are all of these bubbles somehow related? Why is real estate connected with most of these bubbles? What tools do central bankers and other government agencies have to prevent or minimize the bubbles?

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Supermarkets: Too Much Diversity?

By | | Entrepreneurs
31 Comments

The big news in Sisters, the nearest town to the Antiplanner’s exurban home, is the grand opening of a new 43,500-square-foot Ray’s supermarket. The new store is more than 50 percent larger than the one it replaces and new features include a “wine cellar” with 2,200 different kinds of wine; an olive bar; and a bulk-food section with hundreds of different grains, flours, and spices.

These things may not seem impressive to people living in big cities, but Sisters’ population is only about 1,500 people. As one customer gushed, “you feel like you’re walking into a Safeway,” but then you remember, “This is Sisters.”

The new store probably carries at least 30,000 different products — known in the retail industry as stock-keeping units or SKUs. Yet this is only in the middle of the full range of food store offerings in this country.

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Back in the Air Again

By | | Housekeeping
23 Comments

The Antiplanner is flying back to Washington today to go to various meetings. Most notably, on Thursday, December 4, I will speak at a conference about transportation. If you are in the area, I hope you can attend.

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Happy Thanksgiving

By | | Housekeeping, Useful Data
27 Comments

As a Thanksgiving gift to all my faithful allies and loyal opponents, the Antiplanner has summarized the recently posted National Transit Data for 2007 into one file. The original data are contained in about 21 different files, many of which are hard to read because you have to cross-reference to other files.

The 1.6 MB spreadsheet I’ve posted is in three parts. The first 1438 rows include data for every mode (light rail, bus, etc.) offered by every transit agency in the country (or at least every one that reports to the FTA). The data are also sorted into “DO,” meaning directly operated by the transit agency, and “PT,” meaning contracted out to private companies.

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Use Your iPhone to Carpool

By | | Transportation
14 Comments

Take a look at the video describing a new iPhone application people can use to arrange carpools. One tech writer calls it “hitchhiking 2.0.”

Will it work? The number of people interested in carpooling is small, the number of those who have iPhones is smaller (though it also works on other smart phones), and the number who happen to be going in the same direction as others who have smart phones much smaller.
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If gas were still $4 a gallon creeping up to $5 or more, it might work. At less than $2 a gallon, it’s a lot more iffy. Still, it’s better than spending billions on rail transit that also only works for a few people. Perhaps more important, the iPhone system also works for transit and vanpool operators.

When the Facts Change, RTD Ignores Them

By | | Transportation, Urban areas
18 Comments

“When the facts change,” John Maynard Keynes once said, “I change my mind. What do you do?”

If you are a government agency like Denver’s Regional Transit District (RTD), you simply ignore the new facts. That’s because your plans are based on a delicate political compromise, not on a realistic assessment of those facts.

The latest facts show that one of RTD’s proposed FasTracks rail lines will cost almost 60% more and will carry only 55% as many riders than projected in 2004. As a result, the cost-per-rider on that line has ballooned to more than $60, nearly four times the 2004 estimate and more than six times the cost of bus-rapid transit. Yet RTD still wants to build the line.

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GPS Tolling without Invading Your Privacy

By | | Transportation
49 Comments

While gasoline taxes have built most of the nation’s highway network, most experts agree they are on their way out. First of all, they don’t account for the cost of the roads each user drives on. Second, alternative fuels will make them obsolete.

Many of the Antiplanner’s faithful allies, such as John Charles of the Cascade Policy Institute, believe that gas taxes should be replaced by GPS devices that charge people based on where and when they drive. But other people have privacy concerns. Do we really want Big Brother to know everywhere we go?

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