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Columbia River Bridge Faces Opposition

By | | Transportation
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The revived plan to replace the I-5 bridge over the Columbia River between Portland and Vancouver has been hammered by two liberal transportation experts in Portland. New Urbanist Joe Cortright calls it “vastly oversized and over-priced.” David Bragdon, former president of Metro, one of the agencies that wrote the original plan, documented years of falsehoods perpetrated by planners and called the proposal the “most expensive, stupid something” that could be done in the corridor.

As I noted recently, the plan called for a 12-lane bridge to serve a six-lane freeway. It also included a bridge for light rail even though voters in both Portland and Vancouver had rejected funding for this light-rail extension. Piling stupidity on stupidity, the plan called for a bridge that couldn’t open for ship traffic, and because light-rail trains couldn’t go up a steep enough grade to allow such traffic, planners proposed to buy out several existing shipping companies rather than leave light rail out of the plan.

Predictably, Cortright complains about the 12 lanes without ever mentioning the light-rail boondoggle. Bragdon only mentions light rail to suggest that the Washington Department of Transportation planned to stab Oregon in the back by deleting light rail from the project after it was approved. The reality is that both the 12 lanes and the light rail were insane and planners were crazy to propose a project whose 12 lanes would alienate the New Urbanists and whose light rail would alienate fiscal conservatives. Continue reading →

The Columbia River Crossing Rises Again

By | | Transportation
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After being declared dead seven years ago, the proposal to replace the bridge over the Columbia River between Portland and Vancouver has been revived. Proponents of a new bridge have a web site that must be designed for Generation Z, as I find it pretty incomprehensible.

The original Pacific Highway bridge, now known as the Interstate Bridge, had two lanes of traffic including room for trolley cars.

Part of the existing structure opened as a two-lane bridge in 1917, and its capacity was doubled by building a duplicate bridge in 1958. Later the bridges were re-striped for three lanes to match the Interstate 5 freeway lanes north and south of the river. Continue reading →

The Law of Large Proportions Saves Energy

By | | Policy brief, Transportation
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Americans drove more miles in 2019 than the previous year but used less energy to do so, according to data released by the Department of Energy last week. This isn’t a new trend: American energy consumption for highway passenger vehicles has declined 12 percent since 2007 despite the fact that we are driving 7 percent more miles.

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

The data were published in edition 39 of the Transportation Energy Data Book, which has information all modes of transportation, often going back to 1970. The data in the book show that not only is our energy consumption for transportation declining, the carbon footprint of motor vehicles is also falling, which helped the United States reduce total greenhouse gas emissions by 13 percent since 2005. The book also has information about petroleum production around the world, auto ownership for many other countries, toxic air pollution, and other energy- and transportation-related topics. Continue reading →

Transit 2020: Subsidies Up, Ridership Down

By | | Policy brief, Transportation
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The transit industry carried 37.5 percent as many riders in December 2020 as it had in December 2019, according to data released last week by the Federal Transit Administration. This is a slight increase over the 36.9 percent carried in November. For the year as a whole, it ended up carrying 46.1 percent as many riders as it had transported in 2019.

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

The industry had begun the year carrying about 6 to 7 percent more riders than the first two months of 2019, suggesting that it might have been about to turn around the decline that it had experienced over the previous five years. The pandemic foiled this recovery, and the industry avoided total disaster only by the American Public Transportation Association and transit agencies convincing Congress to give transit $25 billion in April and $12 billion in December, with more on the way. This has taught the transit industry a perverse lesson: it doesn’t have to actually carry many passengers to continue to receive subsidies. Continue reading →

Transit Subsidies of $108 Per Ride

By | | Transportation
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Yesterday, the Antiplanner predicted that at some point people would realize that transit is a waste. That point may have already been reached in Portland, which has voted down new taxes for transit the last four times they have been on the ballot. Moreover, on Monday a Portland television station reported that TriMet, Portland’s transit agency, is spending $108 to subsidize each and every ride on the Westside Express Service (WES).

The report quotes the Cascade Policy Institute‘s John Charles as saying, “They should just admit it was a mistake.” Even a representative of the Association of Oregon Rail and Transit Advocates agrees that “it’s too expensive.” Continue reading →

Vote No, They’ll Build It Anyway

By | | Transportation
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In 1998, Portland-area voters rejected plans to build a new light-rail line. So TriMet, the region’s transit agency, built it anyway.

In the recent election, Portland-area voters rejected plans to build a new light-rail line. Now TriMet is salivating at the possibility that the next Congress will pass an economic stimulus bill that will allow it to build it anyway, perhaps by requiring only 20 percent local matching funds instead of the current 50 percent.

Portland’s first light-rail line, which opened in 1986, cost about $30 million a mile in today’s dollars to go east from downtown Portland to Gresham, Portland’s largest suburb. The second line, which opened in 1997, cost about $75 million a mile in today’s dollars to go west from downtown Portland to Beaverton and Hillsboro. Continue reading →

High-Capacity Transit Deceptions

By | | Policy brief
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Transit advocates routinely make deceptive claims about the advantages of transit over cars or rail transit over buses. Often those claims deal with the capacity of different modes of transportation to move people. This policy brief will scrutinize some of these claims.

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

Deception #1: Buses vs. Cars

Transit advocates often use a particular photo set that purports to show the “space required to transport 60 people by car, bicycle, and bus.” The photo on the right shows a conventional 40-foot bus, which has about 40 seats in it and room for about 20 people standing. Next to the bus are the 60 passengers. Continue reading →

Rail Supporters Can’t Tell the Truth from Fiction

By | | Transportation, Urban areas
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Portland’s regional planning agency, Metro, has put a measure on this November’s ballot to tax all firms with 25 or more employees in order to pay for the region’s latest light-rail scheme. Fortunately, or unfortunately depending on your point of view, the scheme appears to be foundering on the weight of lies told by Metro and the measure’s supporters.

To start, Metro wanted to call the tax a “business tax” even though it would be actually a 0.75 percent tax on payrolls. In other words, it would be an income tax on employees, but it would be invisible because it wouldn’t show on paystubs as a withholding like most income taxes. Portland’s transit agency, TriMet, has used this kind of a tax to pay for its operations and always called it a “payroll tax.” But Metro wanted to call it a “business tax” on the ballot title because it believed Portlanders would be more likely to support taxes evil businesses than poor downtrodden employees.

When challenged, a judge ordered Metro to take “business tax” out of the title but didn’t order it to use the term “payroll tax.” Despite not getting the ballot title they wanted, opponents have raised hundreds of thousands of dollars to fight the measure. This includes large contributions from major employers including Nike, Daimler Trucks, Comcast, and Tillamook Creamery.

As of September 28, opponents had actually outraised supporters. Contributions to the pro-rail campaign came from rail contractor Stacy & Witbeck, the International Union of Electrical Workers, and engineering consulting firm David Evans & Associates. The Evans firm is the company that got the contract to write the environmental impact statement for building a light-rail bridge over the Columbia River and then spent the money lobbying the Oregon and Washington legislatures to build the bridge. Continue reading →

The Affordable Housing Scam

By | | Policy brief
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The federal government has several programs aimed at making affordable housing available to low-income families, and people have found numerous ways to scam those programs.

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

  • Local politicians may steer federal housing funds to developers who made large campaign contributions to those politicians.
  • Contractors build low-income housing and then bill the federal government for inflated or unrelated costs;
  • Staff at local housing agencies can accept bribes to bump people to the top of waiting lists to move into low-income housing;
  • People can move into low-income housing when their incomes are low (such as right after they graduated from college) and then stay in the housing after their incomes rise to well above the average.

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Giving Transit a Pass

By | | Transportation
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Everyone knows that transit is so morally superior to driving that we aren’t supposed to ask about how much it costs. Pay no attention to the fact that the next light-rail line Portland wants to build will cost nearly $3 billion; planners don’t mention the cost in their presentation of the proposal.

Nor are we supposed to ask whether anyone is actually riding transit. When Portland’s last light-rail line, which cost $1.5 billion, opened a few years ago, transit ridership declined. But that’s no reason to question the next line.

Now we have some new questions are we aren’t supposed to ask. A bill signed by California Governor Gavin Newsom on Monday has exempted transit projects from detailed environmental review, meaning we no longer get to find out that the rail project that’s supposed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions will actually increase them. Not surprisingly, the bill was written by state Senator Scott Wiener, who also wants to force single-family neighborhoods to accept high-density transit-oriented developments in their midst. Continue reading →