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Infrastructure Bill Deferred

By | | News commentary, Transportation
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Rather than pass the Senate-approved $1.2-trillion infrastructure bill, the House of Representatives decided to punt, instead extending existing surface transportation programs until December 3. At issue was not the infrastructure bill, which most people thought would pass, but the $3.5-trillion social-spending bill, which seemed much less likely to pass.

Progressives in the House demanded that both bill be voted on at the same time, effectively holding the infrastructure bill hostage in order to promote passage of the social-spending bill.

While the infrastructure bill is dubious enough, it has the advantage that roughly half the spending in the bill is one-time only, while the other half is merely an extension of spending that is already happening. The social-spending bill, however, proposes to create several major new entitlement programs, such as free child care, medicare expansion, and housing programs. The $3.5-trillion cost is only the estimated cost for the first ten years of the programs, but like Obamacare and other entitlements, they are likely to go on for many years beyond that. Continue reading →

Environmentalists Sue to Save Ferret

By | | Fish & wildlife, Follow up
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Three environmental groups filed a lawsuit yesterday challenging the Fish & Wildlife Service for its failure to recover the black-footed ferret, an animal the agency once called “the most endangered mammal in North America.” The three groups — WildEarth Guardians, Western Watersheds Project, and Rocky Mountain Wild — argue that the agency has not taken the steps needed to save the ferret in Wyoming.

Black-footed ferrets peer out of a burrow that was probably dug by prairie dogs. The ferrets rely on prairie dogs for both food and shelter. Fish & Wildlife Service photo by Kimberly Fraser.

As I noted in a recent policy brief (and as described in much more detail in this 1996 report), the ferret relies on prairie dogs for both food and shelter, but ranchers have convinced both the federal and state governments to poison prairie dogs by the tens of thousands. For the first decade after the Endangered Species Act was passed, the leading poisoner of prairie dogs was the Fish & Wildlife Service itself, whose aggressive anti-prairie dog campaigns had already eliminated the animal from 95 to 98 percent of its historic range. Continue reading →

One Boondoggle Down, Hundreds to Go

By | | Transportation
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New York Governor Kathy Hochul has killed the LaGuardia AirTrain, a ridiculously expensive people mover that had been supported by her predecessor, Andrew Cuomo. “I don’t feel obligated to accept what I have inherited,” Hochul said, noting that there were lower-cost alternatives that had been ignored by Cuomo and rejected by the Port Authority.

This bridge has become a symbol of Portland, but it really should be read as a symbol of the Portland light-rail mafia‘s willingness to spend $1.5 billion on a new light-rail line that added no net new riders to the region’s transit system, which carried fewer riders the year after it opened than the year before. Photo by Steve Morgan.

Of course, those lower-cost alternatives are still going to cost a lot of money, and spending that money is problematic in an age when many people are no longer comfortable in crowded conditions. As noted here earlier this month, New York City offices have some of the highest vacancy rates in decades, and even offices that are still under lease may be nearly empty as the number of people entering those offices is down by more than 70 percent. Downtown groups have released similarly dire reports for Seattle and Washington, DC, among other cities. Continue reading →

EVs Not Cheap to Fuel

By | | Transportation
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Electric vehicles cost more to buy than gasoline-powered vehicles, but they supposedly make up for at least part of that cost by lower fuel costs. The Department of Energy estimates that (as of March 20) gasoline cost an average of $2.85 per gallon while the electricity required to produce the same amount of power cost only $1.16 per egallon.

Photo by Mr. Satterly.

Not so fast, says a consulting firm called the Anderson Economic Group, which points out there are other costs that have to be considered with an EV that are built in to the price of gasoline. These include:

  • The cost of buying and installing charging devices;
  • High registration fees charged by many states to make up for the lack of fuel taxes collected from owners of EVs;
  • The time spent refueling; and
  • The miles of driving to charging stations, which are less numerous than petroleum fuel stations.

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The Affordable-Housing Industrial Complex

By | | Housing, Policy brief
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Since 1932, Congress has passed dozens of laws aimed at making rental housing and homeownership more affordable. Many of these laws created new programs while few of the older programs were abolished. As a result, more than two dozen programs remain active today, including programs targeted for specific groups such as seniors, people with disabilities, Native Americans, veterans, and people with HIV.

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

These programs fall into two broad categories: programs aimed at assisting low-income people to pay for rental housing and programs aimed at assisting middle-income people to become homeowners. Little effort has been made to assess whether the various programs are cost-effective in what they do. As a result, relative to what they produce, some are far more costly than others. Continue reading →

FlixBus Buys Greyhound

By | | Transportation
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In a move that is sure to shake up America’s fluid, intercity-bus market, one of the newest entries into that market, FlixBus, is buying one of the oldest, Greyhound. Greyhound was previously owned by FirstGroup, one of the two main British companies that emerged from Britain’s bus privatization in the 1990s.

The other British company was Stagecoach, which started Megabus, which revolutionized American intercity bus operations in 2006 by offering curbside bus service (saving the cost of bus stations) and internet ticket sales (saving the cost of ticket agents). FirstGroup responded by buying Greyhound in 2007. Continue reading →

Why Have a US Department of Transportation?

By | | News commentary, Transportation
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America’s freight delivery system is melting down and Congressional action on infrastructure is stalled. So what has Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg being doing about these problems?

Nothing, it turns out. For the past two months, he has been on paid leave due to having two new babies at home. The thing is, no one even noticed until Politico pointed it out last week. Now many people, particularly Republicans, are in a tizzy, wondering why Buttigieg should keep his job if he isn’t doing it.

Some are asking a more pertinent question, which is: why do we even have a Department of Transportation? Most of its budget, which was $87.5 billion in 2021 not counting various COVID relief funds, was simply passed through from the Treasury to the states according to formulas set by Congress. That could have been done by the Department of Commerce, which oversaw agencies such as the Bureau of Public Roads before the Department of Transportation was created. Continue reading →

More Rail Follies

By | | Transportation
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Speaking of faulty railcar wheels (which I wrote about in Monday’s post regarding the Hawaii rail debacle), Washington’s Metro has been forced to drastically reduce rail service due to wheel problems that are causing its trains to frequently derail. The National Transportation Safety Board discovered that Metrorail trains have suffered dozens of minor derailments since the 7000-series of cars were put into service in 2015.

A Blue Line train derailed last week, and investigators found that it had actually derailed twice before that same day. Many other trains were delayed as it took two hours to evacuate the 187 passengers on board. In a press conference early this week, National Transportation Safety Board officials said that the derailment could have been “catastrophic” if the wheels had hit the third rail that powers the trains.

As a result, Metro is taking the 7000-series cars out of service for at least a week while it tries to determine what to do about the problem. Since those cars make up 60 percent of the system’s operable fleet, that means reducing service from as frequently as every five minutes to as infrequently as every half hour. Continue reading →

August Driving Dips to 95.6% of 2019 Levels

By | | Transportation, Useful Data
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Americans drove 8.3 percent more miles in August of 2021 than 2020, but 4.4 percent fewer miles than 2019, according to data released yesterday by the Federal Highway Administration. Meanwhile, Amtrak’s monthly performance report for August, which was released last week, shows that the railroad carried 67.0 percent as many passengers as in August 2019, down from 68.2 percent in July.

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The Truth About Western Wildfire

By | | Policy brief, Wildfire
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According to the National Interagency Coordination Center’s latest situation report, nearly 40 major fires are still burning across the United States, but the report notes that more than half “are being managed with a strategy other than full suppression.” Generally, such fires are on federal or state land and the agencies are allowing the fires to burn while taking care that they don’t damage structures or trespass onto private property. In most parts of the country, the 2021 fire season is over.

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

Despite shrill reports, 2021 was an ordinary fire year, burning about 94 percent as many acres as the previous 10-year average. Based on situation report archives, fires have burned well over the average number of acres in northern California, the northern Rockies, and the East, well under the average in Alaska, the central Rockies, the Great Basin, and the South, and about the average in the Pacific Northwest, Southern California, and the Southwest. Continue reading →