Search Results for: rail projects

Portland Wises Up

By | | News commentary
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Austin voters apparently approved the cities foolish $7 billion light-rail plan. San Francisco Bay Area voters apparently approved a regressive tax-increase to support high-income riders of the Caltrain commuter train. But Portland voters have apparently rejected a $5 billion transportation measure that was mainly aimed at building the region’s most-expensive light-rail line yet.

Portland’s rejection of light rail is not too surprising as the region has rejected every transit tax measure that’s been on the ballot since 1996 because voters have learned that light rail costs too much and does too little. Too bad Austin couldn’t have learned from Portland’s experience.

Portland voters also appear to have returned centrist Ted Wheeler to the mayor’s office even though polls showed he was running well behind leftist challenger Sarah Iannarone. Wheeler had earned the ire of Black Lives Matter protesters when he didn’t try to stop police from stopping property destruction in downtown Portland. Iannarone, meanwhile, openly supported antifa violence and wore clothing celebrating Chairman Mao. Continue reading →

Texas Central Project May Be Dead

By | | Transportation
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After promising that their Dallas-Houston high-speed rail project would be built solely with private funds, Texas Central backers are sending out feelers about getting a federal guaranteed loan to build it. A letter from the company chairman to Texas state senator Robert Nichols says the project “hit a snag” due to the coronavirus, but “monies we hope to receive from President Trump’s infrastructure stimulus” could make it “construction ready this year.”

The fact that President Trump doesn’t have any infrastructure stimulus money is just a minor detail. Company officials cited possible loans through the Railroad Rehabilitation & Improvement Financing (RRIF) or the Transportation Infrastructure Finance and Innovation Act (TIFIA) programs. However, neither of these loan programs are large enough for the kind of project contemplated by Texas Central.

Texas Central was originally supposed to cost $10 billion. Then it was going to cost $20 billion. But the letter to Nichols now admits that the project may cost $30 billion. Continue reading →

BLM: Following the Money

By | | Policy brief
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Before Black Lives Mattered, the acronym BLM usually referred to the Bureau of Land Management, an agency in the Department of the Interior that manages more than 10 percent of the nation’s land as well as mineral resources located under another 19 percent of the nation. After the creation of the national forests, national parks, national monuments, and fish & wildlife refuges, the BLM was formed in 1946 to manage the remaining federal lands.

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

The BLM manages areas that were never claimed as a railroad land grant, under the Homestead Act, or under some other law, leading people to sometimes call them “the lands that no one wanted.” In some cases that is true, but in other cases someone might have wanted the lands but laws such as the Homestead Act restricted the number of acres that a settler could claim for themselves. Continue reading →

High-Capacity Transit Deceptions

By | | Policy brief
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Transit advocates routinely make deceptive claims about the advantages of transit over cars or rail transit over buses. Often those claims deal with the capacity of different modes of transportation to move people. This policy brief will scrutinize some of these claims.

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

Deception #1: Buses vs. Cars

Transit advocates often use a particular photo set that purports to show the “space required to transport 60 people by car, bicycle, and bus.” The photo on the right shows a conventional 40-foot bus, which has about 40 seats in it and room for about 20 people standing. Next to the bus are the 60 passengers. Continue reading →

New Transit Lines Won’t Relieve Congestion

By | | Policy brief
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Voters in Austin and Portland will be asked to increase local taxes to pay for rail transit this November. Less than 8 percent of Portland-area workers and just 2.3 percent of Austin workers take transit to work, so why do transit agencies think that a majority of voters would support spending billions of tax dollars on rail transit?

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

The answer to this question is provided by a famous article in the Onion that claimed a survey by the American Public Transportation Association had found that “98 percent of Americans support the use of mass transit by others.” Congestion in many American urban areas has grown significantly and the Onion article quotes a commuter as saying, “It’s about time somebody did something to get some of these other cars off the road.” Continue reading →

NYC Transit Is Not Vital to the Nation

By | | Transportation
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According to “experts,” saving New York City’s transit is “vital to the U.S. economy,” reports an article in Business Insider. These “experts” include the usual gang of transit advocates, including the chair of New York City’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA), an urban planning professor at New York University, and the Manhattan Institute’s Nicole Gelinas, all of whom fervently believe that New York financial workers are, if not the masters of the universe, still critical to making the earth successfully rotate around the sun.

New York is “the only place where you have an abundance of face-to-face contact,” says Gelinas, which is supposedly is why its economic productivity was so high. Because Manhattan is so compact, “you can have many, many meetings every day with your potential vendors, your customers, your competitors,” something that supposedly isn’t possible in the suburbs.

I skeptical that maximizing the number of boring meetings per day somehow makes people more productive. Besides, what good are face-to-face meetings when everyone is wearing a mask? If they need to, people can have more meetings per day over Zoom, Skype, or FaceTime without masks and without having to travel from one meeting to the next. Continue reading →

Giving Transit a Pass

By | | Transportation
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Everyone knows that transit is so morally superior to driving that we aren’t supposed to ask about how much it costs. Pay no attention to the fact that the next light-rail line Portland wants to build will cost nearly $3 billion; planners don’t mention the cost in their presentation of the proposal.

Nor are we supposed to ask whether anyone is actually riding transit. When Portland’s last light-rail line, which cost $1.5 billion, opened a few years ago, transit ridership declined. But that’s no reason to question the next line.

Now we have some new questions are we aren’t supposed to ask. A bill signed by California Governor Gavin Newsom on Monday has exempted transit projects from detailed environmental review, meaning we no longer get to find out that the rail project that’s supposed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions will actually increase them. Not surprisingly, the bill was written by state Senator Scott Wiener, who also wants to force single-family neighborhoods to accept high-density transit-oriented developments in their midst. Continue reading →

DC Metro Should Just Shut Down

By | | Transportation, Urban areas
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With transit ridership off by 84 percent in July, what better time than now to simply stop running the expensive and failed DC Metro rail system? Apparently hardly anyone really depends on it, as driving was back to at least 80 percent of its pre-pandemic levels in July.

Based on a budget update provided to the Metro board, the Washington Metropolitan Area Transportation Authority (WMATA) may have to shut down, as it expects to run out of money around next January. WMATA says it needs at least $212 million to operate through June, 2021 (the end of its fiscal year), plus more, of course, for the following year.

To deal with this, WMATA is proposing to reduce rail and bus frequencies, cut back late-night service, cancel 39 bus routes, and defer some capital improvement projects to a later date. But even these cuts won’t completely close the gap between shrinking revenues and costs. Moreover, due to the need for public hearings and other requirements, WMATA won’t even be able to implement any changes until December, so it will continue to hemorrhage money for few riders for several more months. Continue reading →

Transit and the Mania for Density

By | | Policy brief
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When I was in high school—this would be about 1969—my social studies teacher asked the class to imagine we could design the city of Portland from scratch. What would it look like? I did a few calculations and realized that, if people were packed into higher densities, most of the city could be left as parks and open space. My vision called for a grid of high-rise clusters with a mixture of retail shops and apartments, accompanied by some single-family homes. Each cluster would be surrounded by forests and parks and connected with the others by rail transit so no one would have to drive. Industrial areas would be located in their own clusters.

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

It never occurred to me to ask whether people wanted to live in high rises, whether the cost of building housing in high rises would be more than the cost of single-family homes, or whether people would still need cars because they might want to go somewhere not reachable by train. In essence, I had designed the Ideal Communist City as described in a book by that name that was first published in English in 1971. That book was influenced by Swiss architect Le Corbusier’s Radiant City, which he proposed in the 1930s. Planning historian Peter Hall called Corbusier “the Rasputin of urban planning” for his authoritarian views and the ways in which he beguiled and misled generations of urban planners. Continue reading →

Rapid Bus: Finding the Right Model

By | | Policy brief
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In 2005, Kansas City opened its Main Street bus-rapid transit line, one of the first of its kind in the nation. The buses were “branded’ with distinctive paint jobs and, like light rail, stopped less frequently than regular buses, increasing their average speeds. They also ran four times per hour instead of the twice-per-hour schedules of many local buses.

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

Sharing lanes with other traffic, the buses didn’t have a dedicated right of way, didn’t require people to pay before they board, didn’t have priority at traffic signals, and didn’t use other advanced technologies. Despite this, the increased frequencies and speeds generated a 50 percent increase in ridership on the route. Continue reading →