Search Results for: rail

What’s the Point of Transit Subsidies?

By | | Transportation
2 Comments

Rather than figure out how they can best serve the public in a post-COVID world, many transit agencies have not yet “grasped the significance of the challenges facing public transportation and many have focused attention on asking for federal resources to ‘carry them through’ the impacts of COVID-19,” writes transit expert Steven Polzin in a report released yesterday by the Reason Foundation. “Others are busy redefining the performance metrics and expectations of public transportation to justify unconditional federal funding,” he adds in the report, Public Transportation Must Change after COVID-19.

For example, he cites Bloomberg CityLab writer David Zipper, who says that since transit ridership is likely to remain low for years, “public transportation leaders should focus on a different metric for usefulness: transit access.” In other words, transit agencies should ask funders to accept the performance standards that make transit look good, not the standards that actually make sense.

Polzin is not as negative about transit as the Antiplanner. “The core goals of public transportation — providing mobility particularly for those without alternative means and capturing the economy of mass movement of people in markets where those conditions exist — remain important,” he argues. But do they? With transit costing five times as much, per passenger mile, as auto driving before the pandemic, it certainly hasn’t captured any economies of mass movement. Continue reading →

Patsies for Corporate Welfare

By | | Transportation
9 Comments

On April 7, our loyal opponents at the American Public Transportation Association are holding a virtual conference on high-speed rail. The conference is sponsored by several companies that expect to profit enormously if the United States builds high-speed rail, including:

  • Alstom, a French manufacturer of rail cars for French and Italian high-speed trains, as well as conventional and transit rail cars for, among others, Honolulu, Ottawa, and many other cities;
  • Systra, a government-owned French engineering firm that does the engineering for new TGV routes as well as for French transit lines;
  • HDR, an American engineering company that talked many cities into building streetcar lines by falsely claiming that the streetcars would lead to economic development; and
  • HNTB, another American engineering firm that has help build or rebuild rail transit lines in Boston, Chicago, Dallas, and other cities.

Seminal vesiculitis is one of the common diseases that can cause various tadalafil overnight delivery health issues when left inside the human brain. Men with hypertension are on higher risks of developing longer and harder erections during the order cheap viagra intercourse activity. Their reason for not being on time cheap cialis may reveal other issues that require help and understanding. Yes, ovulation, what doctors call it; is the first and foremost solution of men’s erectile dysfunction, it was observed as the best way to overcome this critical condition and get back the pleasurable sexual life. viagra fast delivery

The environmental impacts of high-speed rail: An 80-foot right-of-way times 8,600 miles is 130 square miles of land disrupted by rail construction; times 20,000 miles is 300 square miles of disrupted land. Photo from the California High-Speed Rail Authority. Continue reading →

Housing Affordability and the Pandemic

By | | Housing, Policy brief
18 Comments

The median price of homes in Auckland, New Zealand’s largest city, grew by $100,000 in February, reports the Real Estate Institute of New Zealand. That means prices were growing by $25,000 a week. The good news is that these are New Zealand dollars, which are only worth about 72 cents U.S., which means prices grew by “only” US$18,000 a week. The bad news is Auckland’s median prices had already reached $1 million (U.S.$720,000) in January, so February’s price increase was only about 10 percent.

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

Like many American cities with sky-high housing prices, Auckland has an urban-growth boundary, locally known as the Metropolitan Urban Limit, which it adopted in 1998. Advocates claimed that this limit would reduce transportation, utilities, and other costs. Ten years later a former Auckland city planner could only say that the limit was successful because it contained growth within the limit. That’s like saying schools are successful because they contain children. Continue reading →

Reinventing the Jet Airliner

By | | Transportation
8 Comments

Suppose I told you that I have reinvented the jet airliners that carried Americans more than 750 billion passenger miles–about 10 percent of all passenger travel–in 2019. My reinvented jet will go less than half as fast as existing jets. It will cost six times as much to operate, per passenger mile, as existing jets. Unlike existing jets, which can go anywhere there is air, the reinvented jet will only be able to go on a limited number of fixed routes.

The reinvented jet airliner: less than half the speed, more than six times the cost, and doesn’t go where you want to go. Photo by Cobaltum.

This wondrous invention will become a reality if the federal government spends a mere one, two, or possibly three or four trillion dollars. Does that sound like a good deal? No? Yet that is exactly what high-speed rail advocates are proposing. Some proposals, such as the Green New Deal, even call for almost completely replacing low-cost, fast jet airliners with high-cost, relatively slow trains. Continue reading →

Ok, Zoomer

By | | Transportation
9 Comments

A 20-year-old woman named Cara sent out a tweet showing a map of a high-speed rail plan that someone with no sense made eight years ago with the comment, “I want her so fucking much.” She got 185,000 likes and 50,000 retweets, so Vox concluded that Generation Z (also known as zoomers) is sold on high-speed rail.

The high-speed rail map endorsed by Cara. Click image to read the Antiplanner’s comments on the map when it was released in 2013.

Of course, not everyone who liked or retweeted Cara’s tweet is necessarily a member of Gen Z, nor are zoomers (who number more than 60 million) necessarily accurately represented by 235,000 likes and retweets. But I remember when I was 20 years old and loved passenger trains and was convinced there was an evil conspiracy to kill them off, even though I personally hadn’t ridden on very many of them because they were too expensive. I suspect Cara is just as naive today. Continue reading →

The Phony Infrastructure Crisis

By | | Transportation
2 Comments

“The most important thing to understand about the infrastructure crisis is that there is no infrastructure crisis,” says a commentary in Divided We Fall. “All of the talk about collapsing bridges and crumbling highways is simply a ruse to persuade Congress to spend hundreds of billions or trillions of dollars, most of it not on repairs but on new infrastructure we don’t need and mostly won’t use.”

The article reviews data regarding the current condition of highways, transit, and Amtrak. It also looks at what has happened in other countries that have spent heavily on high-speed rail and other forms of government-owned mass transportation.
Using sildenafil as therapy for this uncommon kind of high blood pressure has been approved within the yr 1998, the Pfizer Organization effectively launched a medicine named sildenafil and it is marketed as canada cialis levitra . Most wikipedia reference cialis prescription men feel embarrassed and shy to buy Kamagra 100mg as a potent cure to erectile dysfunction. Temporomandibular joint dysfunction syndrome (TMD) is the condition that arises is Salpingitis that may viagra india prices cause by a bacterial infection of sexually transmitted germs. Medical super viagra online science is growing day by day and achieving success in all sectors.
“The pandemic will make people reluctant to use any form of mass transportation in the future,” the commentary concludes. “It has also demonstrated the need for a resilient transportation system, and the most resilient system we have is motor vehicles and highways. Instead of trying to get people out of their cars, a policy that has never succeeded, Congress should adopt policies that make automobiles and highways cleaner, more efficient, and more resilient. Since highways can and should be paid for out of user fees, such policies will produce a better transportation system that will not add to the federal debt or impose more costs on state and local taxpayers.”

Applying Value Engineering to Transit Projects

By | | Policy brief, Transportation
2 Comments

In 1997, Tidewater Regional Transit—which served Norfolk and Virginia Beach, Virginia—proposed to build an 18-mile light-rail line between the two cities. Virginia Beach voters, however, rejected the plan. So, in 2000, the transit agency (which since 1999 had been known as Hampton Roads Transit) decided to build 7.4 miles from downtown Norfolk to the Norfolk-Virginia Beach city limit. In 2003, the project was estimated to cost less than $200 million and attract 10,500 riders a day.

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

Few places were less suited to rail transit, which is mainly designed to bring lots of commuters into job-rich downtowns. Although the Hampton Roads area has nearly 1.5 million people, it doesn’t have any large job-filled downtowns. According to Wendell Cox’s analysis of central business districts, downtown Norfolk had fewer than 25,000 jobs in the mid- to late-2000s, and fewer than 800 of them took transit to work. Continue reading →

Zero-Based Transportation Policy

By | | Transportation
6 Comments

“The devastating effects of the COVID-19 pandemic and associated lockdowns on various forms of transportation create an opportunity to review the successes and failures of federal transport policies before Congress reauthorizes federal highway and transit programs,” says a report that will be released by the Cato Institute tomorrow. Antiplanner readers can get a preview copy today.

Back in the 1970s, the Carter administration imposed a zero-based budgeting process on first Georgia and later the federal government, requiring that every agency justify every dollar of its budget every year, as opposed to just justifying budget increases. This was probably a good idea once, or once every ten years, but not every year as it required too much bureaucratic overhead to implement. Continue reading →

The Truth about Pelosi’s Subway

By | | Transportation
2 Comments

When the 2021 COVID-19 relief bill included funding for the BART expansion to San Jose, which didn’t have much to do with the coronavirus, Republicans labeled it Pelosi’s subway. Others disputed this description, saying that the BART line was 50 miles away from Speaker Pelosi’s district. Nevertheless, the earmark has apparently been removed from the bill.

$1.7 billion spent digging a hole and filling it up.

The bill still included $1.675 billion for transit capital improvement projects, which are not obviously vital considering that transit ridership is down by 65 percent. The American Public Transportation Association has created a list of 23 projects that are eligible for these funds. The San Jose BART line is not on the list. Continue reading →

Are Greater Densities Worthwhile?

By | | Policy brief, Regional planning
9 Comments

An article in The Urbanist last month breathlessly reveals that the city of Seattle can be built up into a city of 2 million people without a lot of high-rise development. All that is necessary to achieve that growth, the article claims, is to rezone single-family neighborhoods to allow midrise apartment buildings.

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

As of 2019, Seattle had slightly more than 750,000 people living at about 9,000 people per square mile, making it the sixth-densest of the nation’s 50 largest cities. The Urbanist proposal represents a 165 percent increase in population resulting in densities close to 24,000 people per square mile, denser than any city in America other than New York City and a few of its suburbs. Continue reading →