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US DOT Funding Propaganda

By | | News commentary
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The Department of Transportation’s twitter page recently posted a tweet showing a hypothetical zoomer promoting the Build Back Better Act. “The new infrastructure law is going to make getting from place to place so much better over the next decade and when combined with the Build Back Better Act it will create millions of new jobs,” says the zoomer.

I’m not sure if there is a federal law forbidding an agency from lobbying the public in favor of a non-partisan bill, but it is generally frowned on. Legal or not, many if not most of the responses from people in the twitter universe were negative. Continue reading →

Thieves Continue to Raid Container Trains

By | | Follow up
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In the San Francisco Bay Area, flash mobs are raiding everything from Home Depots to Louis Vuitton. But in Los Angeles, as I noted here four weeks ago, thieves only have to break into containers on board stalled railroad trains.

NBC-LA news has not only documented that thieves are still breaking into containers on Union Pacific trains, it captured video of them doing it. It also contacted some of the intended recipients of the now-empty boxes to let them know why their packages were late. Continue reading →

Have a Happy and Safe Thanksgiving

By | | Housekeeping
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The Antiplanner wishes you the best this Thanksgiving and hopes any journeys you take will be safe.

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The Antiplanner expects to relax this weekend, so there will be no post on Friday and no policy brief next Tuesday.

The Washington Post Has a Sensible Opinion

By | | Transportation
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The Maryland Department of Transportation is planning to build express toll lanes along Interstate 270 and the capital beltway. These lanes will cost taxpayers nothing because they will be built by a private company that will be allowed to toll them to recover its costs.

Express toll lanes already exist on Virginia’s portion of the Capital Beltway. Photo by FAMartin.

These will be the first dynamically tolled lanes in Maryland, meaning the tolls will vary with demand anywhere from 17¢ to $3.76 per mile. The lanes will be an alternative to the free lanes they will parallel and that are frequently jammed with traffic. Continue reading →

Midwest Rail Plan: A Disaster in the Making

By | | Policy brief, Transportation
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In 2009 and 2010, the Federal Railroad Administration gave the state of Illinois $1.39 billion to improve tracks between Chicago and St. Louis to allow passenger trains to go up to 110 miles per hour, saving one hour of travel time. The agency also gave the state $370 million to buy 88 passenger cars and 21 locomotives to operate more frequent trains in this and other Midwest corridors such as Chicago-Detroit.

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

Pretty much all of that money, along with about $500 million in state funds, has been spent. Yet, more than a decade later, Chicago-St. Louis passenger rains are no faster and no more frequent than they were in 2009. The same happened in other Midwest corridors, including Chicago-Detroit, Chicago-Twin Cities, Chicago-Omaha, and St. Louis-Kansas City, where collectively $1.6 billion was spent yet speeds and frequencies remain the same. So far, of the equipment ordered to serve these corridors, only four passenger cars and one locomotive have been delivered. Continue reading →

How Inflation Will Hurt You

By | | News commentary
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“Inflation is good for you!” proclaims a headline from the Intecept. “Inflation is bad for the 1 percent but helps out almost everyone else,” the article claims.

Inflation in Germany in the early 1920s led to this basket of groceries costing a million marks. Before World War I, one dollar would buy 4 to 5 marks, but by the end of 1923, a dollar was worth more than 5 billion marks.

Inflation “may be a good sign,” agrees New York Times business writer Jeanna Smialek. “Don’t panic” about inflation, says economist Paul Krugman. Continue reading →

Live with Less, Says Former Free-Market Advocate

By | | News commentary
14 Comments

Since I share my home with a couple of dogs, I tend to wear out a pair of shoes each year. I usually notice I need new shoes in the rainy season (which is most of the year in Oregon) when I come home with wet feet. But, according to Allison Schrager of the Manhattan Institute, I should just suck it up and learn to live with less.

Apparently, it’s a bad thing that Americans can buy “whatever they want whenever they want.” Schrager finds it alarming that 40 percent of American households have three or more televisions, “including 30 percent of households earning less than $40,000 a year!” Similarly worrisome, to her, is that 30 percent of Americans have 2 or more refrigerators. Just think of how horrifying it must have been for her to discover that some low-income people probably have both three televisions and two refrigerators!

The Manhattan Institute claims to be a “free-market think tank” that supports “greater economic choice.” But you wouldn’t know it to read Schrager’s article, which states that we need to live more like Europeans, meaning consuming less and living with lower economic growth. This is because, she claims, “An economy based on consumption is not sustainable.” Continue reading →

White House Reveals How It Will Waste Money

By | | Transportation
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The White House has issued a series of updated fact sheets bragging about how much money the infrastructure bill will spend in each state (see table below). The fact sheets are based on formulas in the bill that account for a little more than three-fourths of the “new” spending in the bill, with the other 22 percent coming from grant programs. The “new” spending, in turn, accounts for $550 billion, while the other $650 billion is a reauthorization of existing spending programs.

It’s hard to look at these numbers without getting the impression that most of the money will be wasted. For example, every state gets a minimum of $100 million to expand broadband access to its residents. Residents of the District of Columbia currently have access to 38 different broadband providers, with 11 of them providing service to residences. Yet DC, like the states, will get the $100 million minimum. What’s the point? (For that matter, everyone in the country has access to at least two satellite providers, but the bill pretends that anything short of a land-line provider is inadequate.)

The excuse for the infrastructure bill is that America’s infrastructure is crumbling, and that may be true for city streets and city- and county-owned bridges. But the tens of billions of dollars going for highways will almost all go to the states, whose infrastructure is in good shape and improving every year. Continue reading →

September 2021 Driving 98.2% of September 2019

By | | Transportation, Useful Data
1 Comment

Driving on rural interstates surged in September, according to data released yesterday by the Federal Highway Administration. Americans drove 9.3 percent more miles on rural interstates in September 2021 than September 2020, and 4.7 percent more than in September 2019. Overall driving was 7.9 percent more than September 2020 and 1.8 percent less than September 2019.

Motor vehicles and highways have come closer to recovering from the pandemic than any mode of mass transportation.

Driving reached 100.5 percent of pre-pandemic levels in June, but since then has hovered around 98 percent. There were two more workdays in June 2021 than 2019, which helps explains why driving was so much greater in June 2021. July 2021 had one fewer work day than 2019, August was the same as 2019, and September was one more than in 2019. Continue reading →

Mobility Principles for a Prosperous World

By | | Policy brief, Transportation
3 Comments

Four years ago, Zipcar co-founder Robin Chase wrote, or led the effort to write, ten principles of shared mobility for livable cities. Despite a patina of social justice and green values, these principles were a transparent effort to give her company and companies like hers a huge economic advantage by limiting and eventually forbidding the use of privately owned vehicles in cities.

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

Recently, someone asked me for my response to these principles. While my reply is on page 5 of the PDF, my main response is to offer my own mobility principles. These principles apply to urban and rural areas, to the United States and other countries, and to all forms of transportation. I’ve previously stated most of these principles in various Antiplanner posts, but this one brings them together. Continue reading →