Search Results for: rail

How San Jose Held Up Google for $200 Million

By | | City planning, Policy brief
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Last month, the San Jose city council approved a plan for Google to practically double the size of downtown San Jose. The plan allows Google to build up to 7.3 million square feet of office space, 4,000 to 5,900 housing units, 1,100 hotel/extended stay units, and half a million square feet of retail or cultural space on 80 acres of land located just west of downtown. The site is immediately adjacent to the San Jose train station, which serves commuter trains, light rail, and Amtrak.

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

According to city planning documents, this is exactly the kind of development San Jose was looking for in this area, one which (according to a staff presentation) would “create a vibrant, welcoming, and accessible urban destination consisting of a mix of land uses and that are well-integrated with the intermodal transit station.” Yet in order to get the project approved, Google had to put up $200 million for various special interest groups who were protesting the plan. This may actually have the perverse effect of discouraging future development in the city. Continue reading →

Infrastructure Arithmetic

By | | Transportation
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The White House and Senate Republicans have compromised on a $1.2 trillion infrastructure bill. Meanwhile, President Biden and Republican leaders have agreed to a $579 billion infrastructure bill.

Since $579 billion is less than half of $1.2 trillion, both of these statements can’t be true — and yet they are. The difference is that the $1.2 trillion includes “baseline spending,” or the amount that would have been spent on infrastructure even if no bill were passed. The actual infrastructure bill would only include $579 billion of new spending. That’s quite a concession on the part of the White House, which had originally proposed $2.3 trillion in new spending, or nearly four times as much as the bipartisan agreement. On the other hand, $579 billion is exactly $579 billion more than Republicans had proposed to spend before Biden released his original proposal on March 31.

At the same time, the so-called baseline appears to represent the amount that would be spent on surface transportation by the bill proposed by House Democrats, or about $78 billion a year. This is a large increase from the amount that has been spent in the past few years, which has been about $55 billion a year. In order to get the total above $1 trillion, allowing the president to save some face, the $78 billion a year is extended for eight years, even though the House bill would authorize only five years of spending. Continue reading →

Japan Maglev Controversy

By | | Transportation
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Plans to build a maglev line between Tokyo and Nagoya may be threatened by local opposition. The proposed route would go through the Shizuoka prefecture, where people fear that a long South Alps Tunnel required for the train will affect their water supplies.

This famous scene of the Shinkansen in front of Mount Fuji is in Shizuoka prefecture. Photo by MaedaAkihiko.

Leading the opposition is Shizuoka Governor Heita Kawakatsu, who won re-election this week in a campaign where the rail line was a major issue. Kawakatsu represents a minority party while his opponent was endorsed by the Liberal Democratic party, which has been the majority party in Japan for many years. Continue reading →

Jane Jacobs and the Mid-Rise Mania

By | | Housing, Policy brief, Regional planning
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The next time you travel through a city, see if you can find many four-, five-, or six-story buildings. Chances are, nearly all of the buildings you see will be either low rise (three stories or less) or high-rise (seven stories or more). If you do find any mid-rise, four- to six-story buildings, chances are they were either built before 1910, after 1990, or built by the government.

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

Before 1890, most people traveled around cities on foot. Only the wealthy could afford a horse and carriage or to live in the suburbs and enter the city on a steam-powered commuter train. Many cities had horsecars—rail cars pulled by horses—but they were no faster than walking and too expensive for most working-class people to use on a daily basis. Continue reading →

TransitCenter Says Transit Is Racist

By | | Transportation
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The pro-transit TransitCenter has discovered something that the Antiplanner has been saying for years: transit policies are effectively racist. Many urban areas have “two-tiered transit systems,” says the TransitCenter’s Mary Buchanan, where an expensive form of transit, such as light or heavy rail, whisks high-income people, who are often white, to work while a cheaper, slower form of transit, such as local buses, trundles low-income people, who are often minorities, to their jobs.

Black households have significantly lower auto ownership rates than whites. Source: American Community Survey table B25044. When broken down by race, the Census Bureau only has five-year data for 2011-2015; some auto ownership rates have probably improved since then. Census Bureau data also don’t breakdown Hispanic vs. non-Hispanic ownership rates; most Hispanics are included with whites.

Buchanan and her colleagues evaluated transit in major urban areas such as New York and Chicago and found that low-income people would be much better off owning a car than relying on transit to get to work, which is another thing the Antiplanner has been saying for years. Of course, the TransitCenter sees this as one more reason to increase transit subsidies, while I see it as a reason to encourage more car ownership. Continue reading →

Does Transit Cost-Effectively Help the Poor?

By | | Policy brief, Transportation
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Almost every effort to justify subsidies to urban transit makes similar claims: transit supposedly saves energy, reduces greenhouse gas emissions, promotes economic development, relieves congestion, and helps low-income people. Previous policy briefs have shown that, in all but a handful of urban areas, transit uses more energy and produces more greenhouse gases than the average car; often makes congestion worse; fails to promote economic growth; and hurts the 95 percent of low-income workers who don’t ride transit.

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

But what about the 5 percent of low-income workers who do commute by transit (or, at least, did so before the pandemic)? For some transit advocates, it’s not enough that nearly 80 percent of the costs of transit are subsidized. They argue that, to truly help low-income people, transit should be free. Is transit a cost-effective way of providing mobility needed to thrive in modern cities? Continue reading →

House Dems Propose $547 Transport Bill

By | | Transportation
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Democrats on the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee are proposing to increase transportation spending from $305 billion over the last five years to $547 billion over the next five years. Although this is supposed to be a five-year bill, it will really be a six-year bill spending at least $656 billion, as Congress is never able to pass a major bill during an election year and will simply extend it a sixth year at the then-current rate of spending.

Many megaprojects, such as Boston’s Big Dig and Dulles MetroRail (shown here) are built not because they are needed but because politicians can get the federal government to pay for them with “free” money. The proposed transportation bill will encourage more such megaprojects. Photo by Tom Saunders, Virginia Department of Transportation.

The proposed bill would increase spending on highways by 54 percent, double spending on transit, and triple spending on Amtrak. Although transit and Amtrak together carried 1.0 percent of passenger miles before the pandemic and less than 0.6 percent of passenger miles in the last year, the bill would give them 37 percent of the federal funds. Moreover, while federal funding of roads would be hampered by a “fix-it-first” rule, federal spending on transit would have no such limit even though transit infrastructure is in much worse shape than highway infrastructure. Continue reading →

San Diego’s Insane $163.5 Billion Plan

By | | Policy brief, Regional planning
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If the definition of insanity is doing the same thing and expecting a different result, then San Diego’s latest regional plan  is completely insane. The draft 2021 Regional Plan, which was released on May 28 by the San Diego Association of Governments (SANDAG), includes all of the latest planning fads: active transportation, complete streets, density, rail transit, density, transit-oriented development, microtransit, density, and vision zero. Did I mention density and rail transit?

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

The plan backs up these ideas with dollars, proposing to spend more than $80 billion on transit, $9.8 billion on high-density housing districts, $4.3 billion on bike paths, and $0.0 billion on new roads. In all, the plan proposes to spend $163.5 billion over the next 30 years, more than half of which would go for transit and transit hubs. Some of this is for operating expenses, but transit capital improvements alone would cost $52 billion. Continue reading →

Transit & Amtrak Lag Behind Driving & Flying

By | | Transportation, Useful Data
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Transit carried 40.5 percent as many riders in April, 2021 as in April, 2019, according to data released by the Federal Transit Administration last Friday. This is a slight step backwards from March, in which transit carried 40.8 percent as many people as in March 2019.

As indicated by the dotted line, driving data are not yet available, but a future Antiplanner post will update this chart when they are published.

Amtrak was even worse, carrying 37.2 percent of its 2019 passenger-miles, according to the company’s monthly performance report. This, however, was a bigger improvement over March, when it carried 32.7 percent of 2019 passenger-miles. Continue reading →

A Lot of Blame to Go Around

By | | Transportation
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Three-and-one-half years ago, the first Amtrak train over a new, shorter route between Seattle and Portland crashed and killed three passengers. Now Steven Brown, the engineer who went 80 miles per hour around a 30-mph curve, wants to be reinstated, saying the accident was Amtrak’s fault, not his.

It was Amtrak’s fault because, he admits, he was inexperienced with the route (having made “only” three practice runs and seven to ten observational runs) and had never run that model of locomotive before. Given this lack of experience, he says, Amtrak never should have assigned him the train. Of course, as it was a brand-new route, all of Amtrak’s engineers were equally inexperienced with the terrain, and he was given the job because he had scored 100 percent on a written exam for the route. Continue reading →