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How Do You Define “Feasible”?

By | | Transportation
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States and regions all over the country are developing plans for high-speed or conventional-speed intercity passenger trains. One of the first steps in writing such plans is the “feasibility study.” But the people writing these studies have a curious definition of “feasible.”


Click image to download this business plan. Click here to download technical memoranda behind the plan.

Louisiana Governor John Edwards doesn’t even understand the definition of “light rail.” He asked Secretary of Transportation Anthony Foxx yesterday for federal funding for light rail between New Orleans and Baton Rouge. Or maybe he asked for money for commuter rail; it’s hard to know from the media reports. But Edwards is on the record saying he will do everything he can “to make sure that as soon as possible we can pursue light rail” between the two cities, which are about 80 miles apart on Interstate 10.

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Travels with the Antiplanner: New Orleans

By | | Travels, Urban areas
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Last week was the Antiplanner’s first visit to New Orleans since Katrina. What I remember from my previous visit in 2002 was a thriving area centered around the French Quarter filled with overweight tourists eating fatty foods at overpriced restaurants. (I remember weighing myself as soon as I got home to see how many pounds I would have to shed through hard cycling.)

Yet all but the most brain-dead tourists could catch glimpses of another city: run-down buildings, poor people — mostly black — many of whom may have considered themselves lucky to have menial jobs in the tourist hotels and restaurants. At the time, the city was building a new Canal Street Streetcar line for the tourists even as it was cutting back on bus service to the low-income neighborhoods: bus vehicle miles dropped by 12 percent between 1999 and 2003, while streetcar service grew by 40 percent. The 3 million new streetcar riders hardly made up for the lost 6 million bus trips, especially since the streetcar riders were “choice” riders while the bus riders were transit-dependent.

Thousands of homesites in the Lower Ninth Ward remain vacant today.

Katrina transformed the region’s demographics. In 2000, New Orleans had 485,000 people and the urban area had just over 1 million. In 2008, says the Census Bureau, the city had only 312,000 and the urban area less than 800,000. Most of the departed are poor blacks, many of whom found refuge from the flooding in Houston and decided to stay in a city that had better schools and less corruption.

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