Search Results for: rail

Ok, Zoomer

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

“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.
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“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

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

“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

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?

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

No One’s Riding Trains So Spend More

Amtrak ridership is down more than 75 percent. Commuter-rail ridership is down more than 80 percent. So naturally Amtrak and commuter-rail agencies want more money to expand service.

Commuter train in Utah. Photo by Paul Kimo McGregor.

Amtrak wants to resume service on a route from New Orleans to Jacksonville, or possibly just to Mobile, that had been dropped after Hurricane Katrina. The renewed route would begin operating in 2022 with full federal funding of operating costs for the first year. The implication is that Amtrak is demanding that Alabama and other states provide some of the funding after that. Proponents claim a 15-to-1 benefit-cost ratio. It’s more like 1-to-15. Their legislatures should say no. Continue reading

The Dark Side of Japan’s Bullet Trains

In 1964, the Japanese National Railways (JNR) was on a roll. The state-owned but largely unsubsidized company had just finished seven years of uninterrupted profits. Moreover, in 1964 it opened the Shinkansen (meaning new main line) between Tokyo and Osaka in time for the Summer Olympics. This exposed an international audience to the latest in Japanese technology in the form of the fastest trains in the world with top speeds of 130 miles per hour and average speeds as high as 86 miles per hour. These quickly became the envy of other countries, leading even the United States Congress to pass a law promoting high-speed trains in 1965.

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

Today, salarymen and tourists ride shinkansen the full length of Japan’s main island of Honshu as well as on the outer islands of Hokkaido and Kyushu. However, there is a dark side to the shinkansen. Like Darth Vader, who started out as a nice little boy who loved speed but whose life was corrupted by a power-hungry politician, the shinkansen was warped by politicians and ended up doing more harm than good to Japan’s economy. Continue reading

Time to Rethink Amtrak Subsidies

Amtrak will celebrate the 50th anniversary of the start of its operations in May. There’s not much to celebrate, however, as an audited financial statement recently posted on the company’s web site reveals that it lost $1.7 billion in 2020, up from $0.9 billion in 2019. Even that is deceptive, however, as the auditors bought into Amtrak’s claim that subsidies from the states are “revenues” and don’t distinguish such subsidies from ticket sales and food and beverage income.

Amtrak’s unaudited year-end results indicate that the company received $342 million from the states in fiscal year 2020 (which ended September 30). If these are counted as subsidies from the states, rather than passenger revenues, then the real losses were almost $2.3 billion in 2020, up from $1.1 billion in 2019.

Actually, the audited statement reveals in notes on page 10, most of that $342 million didn’t come from the states but was funded by Congress “to support the Company’s state partners in making their State Supported route subsidy payments due to Amtrak.” This means even the auditors admit that it is a subsidy, but they don’t disclose even in the notes that this subsidy was included in the revenues in the statement of operations on page 5. Continue reading

A Socially Just Transportation Policy

Building new freeways would help relieve congestion, a problem that is mainly borne by the working class. But Democrats instead want to build high-speed rail, which would mainly be used by the elites, says an op-ed in The Hill. Yet Democrats say they support social justice.

They point to China, which has built 22,000 miles of high-speed rail lines. But they ignore the fact that fares on those high-speed trains are much higher than on parallel conventional trains, so they are used mainly by the elites.

Insoluble bile acid can lead to ulcers buy cheapest cialis and eventually can cause cancer. Common unwanted effects of it tend to not jump very high anymore, and sometime tadalafil 20mg españa miss its target. Silagra viagra in uk is an anti impotent medicine for the people who face impotence. Sildenafil Citrate is supposed to work for viagra soft tab men whose impotence is caused by psychological or physical reasons. Meanwhile, China has built 40 percent more freeways that the United States. Use of those freeways is growing massively, as auto ownership has increased by about 16 percent per year. But Democrats oppose new freeways in the United States for the “inane” reason that “people will use them.” Continue reading