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Solid Gold Light Rail

By | | Transportation
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RTD, Denver’s overpriced transit agency, has published a draft environmental impact statement for the proposed Gold rail transit line, which is supposed to go from Denver northwest to Wheat Ridge. Back in 2000, when RTD did a “major investment study” of this corridor, light rail was expected to cost $281 million. By the time FasTracks was put on the ballot in 2004, the cost had risen to $355 million.

Now, RTD says the line will cost more than $600 million, which is a lot for a mere 11 route miles. Moreover, RTD has changed the proposed technology to something it calls “electric multiple-unit commuter rail,” which sounds something like the Chicago Electroliners or some of the Philadelphia commuter trains.

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Affordable Living for Middle-Income Americans

By | | Urban areas
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Harvard economist Edward Glaeser has joined the Antiplanner’s effort to rehabilitate Houston in the public mind. Writing in the New York Sun, Glaeser notes that the Houston metro area is growing 7 times faster than the New York metro area, mainly because Houston is far more affordable.

“Consider an average American family,” says Glaeser, “with aspirations to a middle-class lifestyle. What kind of life will such people lead in Houston and New York City?” He answers that they will earn perhaps 15 percent less in Houston. But New York housing, even on Staten Island, costs twice as much as in Houston for a lower-quality product. Taxes are also lower in Texas.

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Most Overpriced Zip Codes?

By | | News commentary
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The Antiplanner grew up in the Rose City Park neighborhood of Portland, Oregon, zip code 97213, so it is with some pride that I read that Forbes magazine has declared 97213 to be one of the 10 most overpriced zip codes in the U.S. Forbes considers housing overpriced when the monthly mortgage you would have to pay to buy a house is significantly more than the rent for that house. Since few houses are for sale and for rent at the same time, as a proxy, Forbes divides the median home price by the median annual rent on homes with the same number of bedrooms in a zip code.

Frankly, this is just another effort by Forbes to get you to watch one of their advertisement-laden slide shows. So, to save you the time, here are the magazine’s rankings of the 10 most overpriced zip codes:

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A Model for the Nation: New York MTA’s Fiscal Crisis

By | | Transportation
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How many times have you heard someone say, “If only our city had a transit system like New York City’s. Then lots of people would ride transit!” Everyone seems to take it for granted that New York’s subway system is wonderful. Even the Antiplanner’s faithful ally, Wendell Cox, includes the New York subway among his short list of “urban rail success stories.”

Modern transportation.
Flickr photo by PhillipC.

But there is trouble in Gotham City, and not the kind that can be solved by a batman (unless he is a very, very rich batman). In technical terms, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) “is in deep doo doo.” In financial terms, the MTA needs to find $30 billion to rehabilitate its subways over the next five years — and is somewhere around $17 billion short. That’s about $2,000 per New York City resident. Not even Bruce Wayne would be willing to donate $17 billion to the Gotham subway system — especially when it would probably demand another $17 billion or so just a few years later.

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Is Portland Lying Again?

By | | Transportation
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Yesterday’s post mentioned Portland’s claim that it managed to save 1.75 million gallons of fuel per year by coordinating 135 traffic signals. Bojack is rightly skeptical about this claim, so I decided to track it down.

The claim sounds suspicious to the Antiplanner because San Jose coordinated 223 signals in 2003 and claimed that it saved 471,000 gallons of fuel per year. Your mileage may vary, but it seems hard to believe that coordinating roughly half as many signals in Portland could produce nearly four times the benefits.

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We Still Aren’t Giving Up Our Cars

By | | News commentary, Transportation
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U.S. DOT data show that Americans drove almost 10 billion fewer vehicle miles in May, 2008 than in the same month of 2007. Urban driving declined by 5.8 billion vehicle miles, or about 3.4 percent. For the first five months of 2008, Americans drove 2.5 percent less than the same period in 2007, while urban driving declined by 2.1 percent.

The Wall Street Journal points out that the decline in gas purchases is leading to financial problems for highway agencies dependent on gas taxes. Naturally, transit lobbyists want more money spent on mass transit even though the latest data for transit, for March 2008, show a decline in ridership from March 2007.

What is the appropriate policy response? A month or so ago, the Antiplanner conducted an unscientific survey of readers asking how they were coping with high gas prices. Based on this survey, the Antiplanner concluded that most people were reducing driving slightly by trip chaining and eliminating unnecessary trips, while few were switching to transit or other modes.

Commuting guru Alan Pisarski agrees. “while American lifestyles are sure to undergo a shift” due to high gas prices, he says, “it will not be away from the automobile.” The biggest short-term shift, he says, will be to drive the more fuel-efficient of the multiple cars most families own. The long-term shift will be to buy more fuel-efficient cars in the future.

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Railroad Gets Burned

By | | Wildfire
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The Union Pacific Railroad has agreed to pay the Forest Service $102 million — the largest wildfire settlement in history — for causing a fire in California’s Feather River Canyon. Though railroad employees were almost certainly responsible for the fire, the UP could have used some better lawyers or, better yet, some economists among their expert witnesses.

Normally, if you start a fire that gets out of control, you are responsible for paying suppression costs — in this case, $22 million. But this time, the judge also ordered the railroad to pay the estimated damage to “public scenery and recreation and habitat and wildlife,” which added $80 million to the total. On top of that, the UP may have to cover the Forest Service’s costs of reforesting the burned acres.

At first glance, this sounds just. Except it isn’t clear to me that the fire actually did any damage to scenery, recreation, habitat, or wildlife. On top of that, if the Forest Service is so concerned about such damage, why didn’t it do something to fix the problems as soon as the fire was put out? In fact, it did nearly nothing for years.

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Another Grandiose Plan Flops

By | | Planning Disasters
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Taxpayers in Coos County, Oregon, have suffered from numerous grand plans, mostly promoted by the local port districts. The latest one appears to have reduced air service to the region.

The story began in 2003, when the Coos County Airport District asked voters for higher taxes so it could build a fabulous, $20 million air terminal for the North Bend Airport. North Bend is served by Horizon Airlines, which provides five flights a day in the summer, three in winter. The existing terminal was quite sufficient for this service, but district officials darkly warned that, if voters voted against the new terminal, Horizon might pull out altogether.

The new, $20 million terminal.

They were right: I voted against the terminal, and now Horizon is pulling out. But it wasn’t my fault; instead, Horizon’s decision was the direct result of the district’s wheelings and dealings.

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Urban Renewal: Time to Declare Victory and Go Home

By | | Planning Disasters
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The San Francisco Chronicle reports that an urban renewal project that began in the City’s Fillmore District in 1948 is about to sunset. The City’s web site claims the project “has set the stage for the rebirth of a rich and vibrant street life.”

But the director of the City’s Redevelopment Agency tells the Chronicle a different story. “The agency’s time there has not been a happy story,” he says. The little good that has happened in recent years is not “making up for the damage that was done in the early days.”

San Francisco’s Western Addition, of which the Fillmore District is a part. Some of the apartments in the foreground were no doubt built on the sites of former Victorian homes.
Flickr photo by pbo31.

California passed an urban-renewal law in 1945 giving cities the authority to clear out “blighted” areas. Cities were allowed to determine whether a neighborhood was blighted by, among other things, the percentage of non-white people who lived in the neighborhood. The Fillmore District was 60 percent black, ergo it was blighted.

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Energy Crisis Solved?

By | | Transportation
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“You never know what the future will bring,” says Steve Polzin, of the Florida Center for Urban Transportation Research. “If we are not careful, we could do some things that would make corn ethanol look like a wise investment.”

What things are those, Steve? For his answer, take a look at his July 11 article in the Urban Transportation Monitor. The recent Surface Transportation Policy Commission recommended investing in intercity rail, saying that trains “consume 17 percent less energy per passenger mile than air carriers and 21 percent less than automobiles.”

But, Polzin notes, the recently passed Energy Independence Act requires autos to become 40 percent more efficient in the next 20 years, and the next generation of airplanes is also likely to be at least 17 percent more efficient than the current one. So, Polzin asks, why should we “spend decades and billions for intercity rail”?

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