Search Results for: kansas city streetcar

Is Transit Only Transit If It’s Expensive?

By | | News commentary, Transportation, Urban areas
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Wired magazine freaks out because the Tennessee senate supposedly passed a “mind-boggling ban on bus-rapid transit.” AutoblogGreen blames the legislation on the left’s favorite whipping boys, the Koch brothers because it was supported by Americans for Prosperity, a tax-watchdog group that has received funding from the Kochs.


Not only would Nashville’s bus-rapid transit consume up to three lanes of traffic and be given priority at traffic signals, the design of stations in the middle of a major arterial will create hazards for pedestrians.

In fact, the senate did not pass a bill to ban bus-rapid transit; it passed a bill to limit the dedication of existing lanes to buses. There is no reason why buses need their own dedicated lanes, at least in a mid-sized city such as Nashville. Kansas City has shown that bus-rapid transit in shared lanes can work perfectly well and attract as much as a 50 percent increase in riders.

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Back in the Air Again

By | | Housekeeping, Transportation
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Today the Antiplanner is in Milwaukee to try to help persuade the city not to build a streetcar line. It is notable that many of the places that want streetcars–Cincinnati, Kansas City, Milwaukee, Orange County, to name a few–originally had light-rail plans that never happened. It is almost as if streetcars are seen as a consolation prize for failing to sucker the locals into funding light rail.

Yet cities were right not to build light rail, and streetcars would be an even bigger waste of money. The least-expensive streetcar lines being planned today are more expensive than the first light-rail lines. Both San Diego’s and Portland’s first light-rail lines cost less than $15 million per route mile, and even after adjusting for inflation that’s less than $30 million per mile today. Yet most streetcar lines being planned today are expected to cost $30 million or more per track mile, which is $60 million per route mile.

The problem with light rail is that it is expensive, low-capacity transit that doesn’t go very fast–most light-rail schedules average only about 20 to 22 mph. Streetcars are worse, having much lower capacities and speeds of only about 6 to 10 mph.

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Yglesias Is Baffled

By | | Follow up, Regional planning
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Matthew Yglesias is baffled by reality. At least, he finds the Antiplanner’s post about how zoning codes actually work, as opposed to how Yglesias imagines they work, to be “baffling and bafflingly long.”

He boils his case down to three simple statements:

  1. Throughout America there are many regulations that restrict the density of the built environment.
  2. Were it not for these restrictions, people would build more densely.
  3. Were the built environment more densely built, the metro areas would be less sprawling.

Reality is never so simple. As you can see, it all depends on statement 1: are there regulations throughout America that restrict density? As evidence that there are, Yglesias cited the Maricopa County Zoning Code, which he claimed allows development no denser than duplexes. Apparently, he didn’t read (or was baffled by) chapter 7, which allows housing at 43 units per acre, or chapter 10, which allows anyone with 160 acres to build as dense as they want.

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Groceries: How Did We Get Here?

By | | Entrepreneurs
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Last week, the Antiplanner examined the American grocery industry. That post showed that you can find at least ten different classes of grocery stores (if you count Jungle Jim’s as its own class), ranging from about 2,500-square-foot convenience stores to Jim’s 250,000-square-foot behemoth.

If some government agency tried to plan the distribution of groceries to all the households in the country, how would they do it? Would they come up with a system that offered towns as small as 1,500 people access to 30,000 different products in one store? Not likely.

We know that, in the centrally planned Soviet Union, the typical grocery store of the 1980s featured only about a dozen different products on its shelves at any given time. To buy something from one of these stores, customers had to stand in three lines: one to order the product, one to pay for it, and one to pick it up.

Fortunately, no one in America planned our system of grocery distribution. Instead, today’s supermarkets and supercenters are the product of more than a century of grocery evolution. Many of the key ideas found in today’s grocery stores can be traced to individual entrepreneurs, but it is likely that if one entrepreneur had not introduced each idea, someone else would have a year or two later.

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