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These Are a Few of My Favorite Trains

By | | Housekeeping
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Merry Christmas or whatever holiday you celebrate this time of year. If you like railroads, my Christmas present to you is some photos of my favorite trains.

One of the little ironies of the transportation debates is that many rail skeptics, such as the Reason Foundation’s Robert Poole, Wendell Cox, and myself, are actually rail nuts in our private lives, so today’s post will document the Antiplanner’s long-time obsession with passenger trains. Unless otherwise noted, all photos were taken by the Antiplanner. Click on any photo for a larger view.

Of the literally thousands of pre-digital photos I have taken of trains, this is my favorite. The SP&S 700, the nation’s second-most powerful operating steam locomotive, is rounding a corner near Hope, Idaho, on its way home from Billings, Montana in 2002.

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Broken Machines, Nervous Transit Cops, and Indecent Exposure

By | | Transportation
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That’s what you would have seen if you had taken a recent official tour of Portland’s light-rail line given by TriMet for the Milwaukie city council.

TriMet wants to build a light-rail line to Milwaukie, a Portland suburb, but the council is aware that residents strongly oppose it. They have voted against light rail the last couple of times it was on the ballot and they once voted to recall their mayor and most of their city council when those officials were promoting rail and transit-oriented development.

Now the crime issue has come up, giving opponents a new argument for killing the project. So TriMet offered to take the city council on this tour to show how wonderful it would be to have light rail in their community.

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There’s Something Fishy in Salt Lake City

By | | News commentary, Transportation
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The Utah Transit Authority (UTA) made the stunning announcement Wednesday that it has been overestimating its light-rail ridership by 20 to 30 percent. It recently installed infrared scanners that accurately recorded every passenger who boarded a train and found its previous numbers were way too high.

Don’t worry, rail fans. Utah won’t let little things like lying and cheating stand in the way of building more rail lines at the expense of new roads. When officials discovered that planners had made a “calculation error” to bias their analysis in favor of more trains, they decided to build more rail lines anyway.

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Do Planners Really Want Public Involvement?

By | | Transportation
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It is late and I am tired and I don’t have time or ideas for a lengthy post, so I am just going to vent over one of my pet peeves: how planners say they want public involvement and then through obstacles in the way of members of the public who want to get involved.

Today the plan I am concerned with is for the “central corridor,” a proposed light-rail line from Minneapolis to St. Paul. The Twin Cities Metropolitan Council published a draft environmental impact statement (EIS) for this proposal last year.

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HOT Lanes Yes, Cordon Charges No

By | | Transportation
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Denver converted some high-occupancy vehicle lanes to high-occupancy toll (HOT) lanes in 2006. A new review from the Institute of Transportation Engineers finds that they have been highly successful.

On the other hand, the congestion charge being used in London isn’t doing much to relieve congestion. In fact, according to one report, congestion “is spiraling out of control.”

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Missouri Law Should Be a Model for the Nation

By | | Regional planning
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How do we fix planning and zoning laws that make housing unaffordable and give planners the opportunity to impose their utopian ideas on unwilling neighborhoods? One answer has been offered by Robert Nelson, a University of Maryland professor of public policy. In various articles and books, Nelson has proposed that states allow neighborhoods to opt out of zoning and write their own zoning codes in the form of protective covenants.

Houston already has a system like this, albeit without zoning. Anyone who lives in a neighborhood that doesn’t already have protective covenants can petition their neighbors and, if a majority agree, create a homeowners association and write such covenants. Nelson has essentially proposed to allow this in all cities, and to slowly replace zoning with such covenants.

But what about rural areas? Should people be allowed to opt out of rural zoning? Since the Antiplanner is not too fond of such rural zoning, clearly my answer would be “yes.” And a law recently passed in Missouri effectively allows this to take place.

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Did Urban Planners Cause the Next Recession?

By | | News commentary
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The New York Times asks six economists, “Are we in a recession?” Of course, they don’t agree: one says, “the American economy is slipping into its second post-bubble recession in seven years.” Another says, “as to the factual question of whether we are in a recession given the data in hand, the unambiguous answer is no.” A third says, “Nobody knows.”

If we are entering a recession, most agree that the housing crisis is the cause. And the evidence is overwhelming that the housing crisis was caused by urban planning.

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Light Rail Follies #5: An Objective Panel

By | | Transportation
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The Honolulu city council wants to build a rail line. Yet many people in Honolulu think this would be a waste of money, and they are pushing for high-occupancy toll lanes, that can be used by autos and bus-rapid transit, instead. So, to cover its you-know-what, the city council plans to create an “objective panel” of five advisers who will review the alternatives and select the final plan.

Who will be on the panel? A list of people being considered includes a vice president of Bechtel, a former vice president of Siemens, a former Parsons Brinckerhoff planner, and numerous employees or former employees of various transit agencies, nearly all of which run some form of rail transit.

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Light Rail Follies #4: Dallas Builds On Time, Under Budget

By | | Transportation
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Dallas Area Rapid Transit (DART) says that a light-rail line that was supposed to cost $988 million will actually cost $1.88 billion. The first phase of the “orange” line to Irving, Texas, was supposed to be completed in 2011, but due to “unforeseen” increases in costs, DART will delay that by at least a year. Eventually, the line is supposed to reach DFW Airport, but that depends on whether DART can scrape up enough money to pay for it.

Click on map to view or download a larger version PDF (308KB).

DART blames those evil Indians and Chinese, who are not only taking our jobs and decorating our children’s toys with lead paint, they are consuming the steel and concrete we need by building highways. Don’t they know the age of the automobile is over and they should be building light rail instead? In any case, DART claims its experts could not have predicted this and so shouldn’t be blamed. Of course, that is exactly why transit agencies shouldn’t plan rail construction projects — they can’t predict the real costs and so almost always end up over budget.

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Light Rail Follies #3: Seattle Jumps on the Streetcar Bandwagon

By | | News commentary, Transportation
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Not content with building the most expensive light-rail line in the world, Seattle has to keep up with its Northwest neighbor, Portland, by opening a streetcar line — the unfortunately named South Lake Union Trolley (SLUT). Although this line is only opening today, they are already talking about building more.

Testing the SLUT.Flickr photo by Choconancy.

Streetcars are so insipid that their advocates barely even claim that they have anything to do with transportation. Instead, they are supposed to stimulate economic development — though the only evidence of that is from Portland, which just happened to offer hundreds of millions of dollars of subsidies to developers along its streetcar line. Especially when you consider that many of those subsidies went to the construction of parking garages, can anyone really think that the streetcar had anything to do with the developments?

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