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Saving the Suburbs?

By | | News commentary
58 Comments

Sunset magazine editor and New York Times blogger Allison Arieff asks, “what are we going to do with all the homes and communities we are left with” when everyone moves out of the suburbs and back to the cities? (Click here for part 2.)

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California Thieves Steal Money Transit Stole from Highways

By | | News commentary, Transportation
38 Comments

As in most states, California originally created gasoline taxes to pay for highways. But the ever-hungry transit lobby effectively stole some of that money by convincing the state legislature to divert some gas taxes and most Diesel taxes to transit.

Of course, no amount of money is ever enough for the passenger rail lobby, so they conceived the idea of the state selling nearly $10 billion of bonds — with no particular source of revenue to repay those bonds — to fund high-speed rail and rail transit improvements in cities on the high-speed rail route. Of course, this was sold to voters as being essentially cost-free — because measures that require a tax increase must get approval from two thirds of voters instead of just half.

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Europe vs. the U.S.

By | | Transportation, Useful Data
28 Comments

Here are some numbers to think about. The European numbers are from Panorama of Transport, published by the European Union. The U.S. numbers are from the National Transit Database and National Transportation Statistics.

As of 2004, page 23 of Panorama says that 137 cities in the EU-25 had light rail or streetcars (trams), compared with just 27 in the U.S. (including vintage trolleys). Thirty EU-25 cities had what the Europeans call “metros,” including what we would call subways, elevateds, and commuter rail, compared with 14 in the U.S.

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The All-Weather Transport

By | | News commentary, Transportation
36 Comments

London had a big snowstorm. Good thing they have the world’s best rail transit system so people can still get around.

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Flickr photo by aburt.

Self-Steering Buses

By | | Follow up, Transportation
11 Comments

While doing research on driverless highways, I ran across this video of a self-steering bus in Adelaide.

The bus line is called the “O-bahn” with O standing for omnibus (which was abbreviated to bus about a century ago) and bahn being German for road. Interestingly, it relies on a mechanical device to keep the bus on the track. As shown below, a small wheel projects from each side of the bus. When the wheel hits the concrete curb on the side of the roadway, it turns the bus wheel slightly. The driver controls the speed and steers the bus when it leaves the bahn.

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Dude, Where’s My Driverless Car?

By | | Transportation
22 Comments

Futurists have predicted driverless cars at least since 1940. A consortium including General Motors, CalTrans, and the University of California successfully demonstrated driverless cars on an urban freeway more than a decade ago. Yet here we are, in 2009, with nary a driverless car on the open road.

A successful 1998 driverless car demonstration placed magnets in San Diego freeway lanes. By sensing the magnets and other cars, the eight cars shown were able to drive together or individually pass one another without any problems. Some states have installed road magnets to guide snow plows on short segments of mountain roads, and UC Berkeley put magnets in one street for a driverless bus, but research in this mode has nearly stopped.

Driverless cars offer huge potential benefits over driver-operated cars. Congestion would become a thing of the past because roadway capacities would at least quadruple. Highways would be much safer and traffic could safely move at higher speeds in many places. Driverless cars would save energy, initially because they would be programmed to minimize fuel consumption and later because cars could be lighter weight because accidents would be so rare.

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Push-Polling for Rail Transit

By | | News commentary, Transportation
27 Comments

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.

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16 Strategic Misrepresentations

By | | Transportation, Urban areas
28 Comments

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.

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Trusting Smokey

By | | Public lands
5 Comments

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.

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More Portland Follies

By | | News commentary, Transportation
102 Comments

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.

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