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TriMet Makes More Friends

By | | News commentary, Transportation
16 Comments

One peculiar thing about almost every light-rail line in the country is that fares are on the honors system. There are no turnstiles, no drivers who demand fares upon boarding (the drivers are in a separate compartment from the passengers), and no fare collectors.

Instead, there are ticket boxes at stations and an occasional fare inspector who issues expensive tickets ($175 in Portland) to people who aren’t carrying proof of payment. If the potential for abuse by freeloading passengers is great, the potential for alienating fare-paying customers is almost as serious, particularly since the fare rules aren’t always clear and the ticket boxes at the stations don’t always work.

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Naturally, the attorney who was banned from riding the trains is suing. We can only hope that the court will determine that, not only do people have free-speech rights, they have the right to claim they have free-speech rights without fear of being kicked off the trains. In the meantime, I advise the attorney to telecommute or start riding a bicycle to work.

Playing the Numbers Game

By | | Regional planning, Transportation, Urban areas
21 Comments

Planners for Metro, Portland’s regional planning agency, are playing an interesting game. They did a travel survey in 1994, when gas prices were low and the economy was booming. Then they did another survey in 2011, when gas prices were high and the economy was in recession. They found that Portland travelers in 2011 are more likely to bicycle or ride transit and less likely to drive. Naturally, they credit their land-use policies with the change.

The Oregonian is rightly skeptical of the “spin” Metro planners are putting on the numbers. There are several reasons justifying such skepticism.

First, the sample size was small–4,800 people for a region of well over a million people. Second, the numbers do not tally well with the results of the Census Bureau’s American Community survey. The Metro survey found that 81 percent of Portland-area commuters rode in cars and 11 percent took transit to work in 2011. The Census Bureau, however, found that more than 84 percent drove and only 8 percent took transit in 2008. Since the census data are based on a larger sample–more than 25,000 households in Oregon, of which about a third are from the Portland area–it is probably more reliable.

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Streetcar Woes

By | | News commentary, Transportation, Urban areas
41 Comments

Portland opened its new east side streetcar line a couple of weeks ago, but the real story is in the Lake Oswego plant that is supposed to be making streetcars to run on the new line. In 2011, the company, United Streetcar, announced that its first streetcars would be several months late and it would only be able to build five streetcars for the price of six–and the company’s president was brazen enough to say, “You’re not getting less. I actually think you’re getting more.”

The company’s streetcars are essentially copies of the first streetcars the city bought from a company in the Czech Republic. The price of the Czech streetcars was $1.9 million apiece (only about six times more than a bus that has more seats). The cost of United Streetcar’s first streetcar? $7 million. If Portland is lucky, it will eventually get five for an average of a little more than $4 million each–but hey, they’re made in the USA (a requirement for federal funding).

Strangely, the city didn’t complain about getting short-changed one streetcar, and it’s response to the delay was to spend more money hiring a company, LTK Engineering Services, to monitor the company making the streetcars, paying it $1.35 million to date. So far, only one of the five streetcars is out on the streets (or, fairly frequently, in the repair shop). To prod United Streetcar into finishing the other four, which are several months behind schedule, the city is about to hand over another $386,000 to LTK.
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How does LTK spend that money? It has eight engineers watching over the shoulders of the workers at United Streetcar, for each of whom it bills the city a mere $162 an hour. Don’t worry, says the city; there are plenty of “contingency funds” in the project’s $148.3 million budget to cover this cost.

Who says streetcars aren’t cost-effective? They are pretty cost-effective for LTK, not to mention United Streetcar.

Clackistanis Threaten Portland Light Rail

By | | News commentary, Transportation, Urban areas
19 Comments

In all the times it has been on the ballot, Clackamas County has never voted for Portland light rail. But Portland planners were determined to run a light-rail line into the urban heart of the county, so they persuaded the county commission to give them $20 million of the $1.5 billion cost of the 7.7-mile rail line.

Residents, who had previously recalled several city commissioners from office over light rail, didn’t take this sitting down. Instead, a group that calls itself “Clackistanis” put a measure on the ballot directing the county commission to spend no county resources on light rail without voter approval. The commission responded by scheduling a $19 million bond sale to take place a few days before the vote.

Rail opponents filed a lawsuit attempting to stop the measure. The county responded by canceling the bond sale just a day before the Oregon Supreme Court issued a restraining order against the sale.

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Still Corrupt After All These Years

By | | Transportation
45 Comments

The Oregonian reports that construction of the Sellwood Bridge was rife with “graft, kickbacks and corruption”–or at least it was when the bridge was first planned 87 years ago. As comments to the article point out, not much has changed.

Today, the region is planning an expensive replacement bridge that is twice as wide as the existing one–but will have no more lanes of traffic. Instead, the additonal width is supposed to be for bicycles and pedestrians. The huge cost of that additional width, of course, is borne mainly by people who get around by automobile. Just down river, the region is building an even more expensive bridge that will solely be for light rail, bicycles, and pedestrians. Total passenger traffic on this bridge will probably be a fraction of one lane of the Sellwood Bridge.

This banyan tree still stands in the Horniman Circle Park, buying cialis online frankkrauseautomotive.com Mumbai. Many scientists have come up with some of the benefits of sex that make pfizer viagra discount lives better. discount bulk viagra All hypnotherapy has the same aim. Thus, the muscle ache of tension-type headache is present for more than 15 days a generic viagra online month or two. Meanwhile, Portland has developed urban renewal to perfection. The city buys land for fair-market value, then removes obsolete structures and installs streets, water, sewer, and other infrastructure–all costs that developers would ordinarily have to pay themselves. Then the city sells the land at below-market prices to favored developers on the condition that they build high-density, mixed-use developments. In return, the favored developers make large political contributions and gush over the city’s transportation policies. Not quite the same as graft, kickbacks, and corruption, but close.

The good news is people are revolting against the system. Clackamas County residents calling themselves “clackastanis” are challenging urban renewal and light rail. Even inner-city residents are protesting new high-density developments that the city is planning without parking. Until the city and TriMet go bankrupt, however, these efforts probably won’t be enough to stop the Portland rail juggernaut.

More Evidence That Portland Is Nuts

By | | Transportation, Urban areas
20 Comments

TriMet, Portland’s transit agency, has made the largest cuts in its history, including reductions in bus service, fare increases, and elimination of free rail rides in downtown Portland (the free bus rides were eliminated last year). Meanwhile, it is using nearly $10 million of money supposedly dedicated to the Milwaukie light-rail line to remodel its offices.

Portland’s mayor and alleged pedophile Sam Adams considers TriMet’s subsidized passes for “youths” to be one of his “favorite program,” so he has proposed to fund it by charging TriMet $2 million for using city property for its bus shelters and benches. What an innovative financial tool!

Apparently, all that broke government entities need to do is requisition funds from other broke government entities. TriMet can build its next light-rail line by charging the state rent for taking cars off the road. The state can fund its k-12 educational programs by charging the universities for the future college students it is providing. The federal government can eliminate the national debt by charging water districts for the clean water that runs off of federal lands. Pretty soon everyone can own money to everyone else and we can all pretend that they cancel out (ignoring, of course, the original investors who will lose their shirts, but they’re probably part of the 1 percent so they deserve it).

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Streetcar Dreams

By | | News commentary, Urban areas
9 Comments

A few weeks ago, the Antiplanner questioned a streetcar project in Atlanta. Now comes a response from none other than Portland Mayor Sam Adams, who says Portland’s streetcar once had detractors “were afraid that it would be too expensive and people wouldn’t ride it. We don’t hear that so much these days.”

As Bojack says, “Maybe he would if he knew how to listen.” Or how to read: the big-government loving Governing magazine recently published an article detailing how Portland is running out of money to pay for its streetcar and light-rail dreams.

Meanwhile, the former city commissioner who dreamed up the Portland streetcar, then took a job for an engineering firm selling streetcars to other cities, is running for mayor of Portland. He writes an article defending the “things that are great about Portland” including “smart growth, transit, urban renewal, bicycles, [and] myself.” I guess Portlanders should vote for him if he is one of the city’s great things.
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Letting the Infrastructure Crumble

By | | Transportation, Urban areas
37 Comments

Portland can spend hundreds of millions on streetcars and billions on light rail. But it is letting its most-valuable asset–the city’s $5 billion road system–fall apart, says an expose featured in yesterday’s Oregonian. The city’s transportation department, says the article, has enough money to hire eight new employees to oversee streetcars, build more than a dozen miles of new bike paths, and co-sponsor a Rail-volution conference in Los Angeles. But it doesn’t have enough many to repave any badly deteriorating street until 2017 at the earliest.

Even when the federal government was handing out stimulus funds in 2009, Portland decided not to put any of the funds into its streets. None of its projects, the city claims, were “shovel-ready” (as if the high-speed rail projects that did get funded were in any sense shovel-ready).

It is hard to see this as anything but malign neglect. Smart-growth advocates (such as Todd Litman, who the Antiplanner debated last week) insist they aren’t anti-automobile. But they are for spending all your transportation dollars on alternatives to the automobile even as your bridges and streets fall apart.

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Why Congress Should End New Starts

By | | Transportation, Urban areas
27 Comments

The House Republican transportation bill ends gas tax subsidies of transit and requires that any new rail projects receiving “New Starts” grants meet strict financial tests and not simply be awarded on the basis of some vague concept such as “livability.” In response, Secretary of Livability Ray LaHood says it is vital to keep funding transit out of gas taxes. As an example, he cites the Portland-to-Milwaukie light-rail line, which he says is “an integral part of rebuilding the nation’s economy.”

Really? This 7.3-mile line line is expected to cost $1.5 billion and carry just 9,300 new riders (that is, people who weren’t previously riding the bus) each weekday. Since most people ride round trip, that 4,650 round-trip riders a day. The high cost is enough money to buy each of those new round-trip riders a new Toyota Prius every year for the 30-year life of the project.

This will be the most expensive, and one of the least-used, light-rail lines in Portland. The light-rail will be slower than many of the buses in the corridor–buses that will be cancelled when the rail line opens.

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Remember When “Transit” Meant “Transportation”?

By | | News commentary, Transportation
31 Comments

Portland’s TriMet transit agency is spending more than $370,000 to install solar panels on a downtown building. This will initially save the agency less than $3,700 a year, and even if the savings increase over time, when interest is counted there will be something close to a 100-year payback period.

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TriMet is doing this because it had the money left over after building a light-rail line to Clackamas, Oregon. It’s not like it could have returned the money to the taxpayers, or at least spent it on improved bus service or something that has an actual transportation benefit. In Portland, image is far more important than reality.