Coyote Blog

Every traveller to London loves the tube.  There is no better way to get around this great city than with a multi-day Underground pass.

But as a tourist, I have always tended to ride the underground during the day, or late at night after a show.  For the first time, for a couple of days in a row, I have had to brave the tube and Victoria Station at around 6PM.

As a result of this experience, I have a message for “smart growth” urban density-seeking urban planners: please don’t do this to me.  Never have I been so uncomfortable, so claustraphobic, and so ready to go Postal than I was in those tremendous moving crowds.  It is a system designed to move a maximum amount of people efficiently, but it does so by forcing human beings to conform to the requirements of the system, rather than the other way around.

Unfortunately, it is exactly this dehumanizing vision that so enraptures modern planners.   It is their mindset that people must adjust to their plans, not the other way around.   It is ironic that most of these people, who would claim to be children of the sixties devoted to individualism, are in fact the architects of the ultimate Tayloristic forced conformity.   I understand that such transit solutions may be necessary in a city as high of a population density as London, but please don’t force that kind of density on the rest of us.   If you enjoy it, power to you, you are welcome to live in such an environment.  But leave the rest of us alone who want a car and 2.2 acres.

In particular, the whole notion of “congestion” really struck me.  City planners always talk about fighting congestion, but they always mean traffic on roads (though ironically much of what they do actually increases congestion on roads).  But what about pure human to human congestion?  I would far rather be stuck on a freeway in my air conditioned car listening to the radio than packed in a moving mass of humanity in Victoria Station, packed into a platform waiting for a train, and then packed for half an hour standing in a train straining not to topple over on the person next to me.

The Thin Green Line has been running a series of articles complaining about price increases and service cuts at the local MTA.  I will leave aside for today the critique I have been putting in the comment section of that blog, which is that if you really care about transit service for the working poor, then you never should have started down the light rail path in the first place.  Light rail is an expensive yuppie toy that inevitably, through its high costs and continuing capital requirements, starves money from the bus services that the working poor actually depend on.

But anyway, I thought it was endemic of a certain type of political outlook that the author could write this with a totally straight face:

Also problematic is that the MTA did not hit drivers and riders equally [with proposed fee and fair increases].

Wow!  You mean a price increase for a service does not hit users and non-users of that service equally?  On what planet does one have to live on to believe that they should?

The (flawed) theory of government stimulus plans is that in certain economic under-capacity situations, government spending can have a multiplier effect.

The Anti-planner shows that, as far as government spending on mass-transit is concerned, $9,150 of taxpayer subsides per rider generate about $6,100 in average savings per rider.  Every dollar of public transit spending destroys about 30 cents of value, which I guess makes it the anti-stimulus.

Update:  Yeah, I know, transit supposedly eliminates all those externalities.  But most rail transit plans typically reduce congestion by fractions of a percent, even by their builder’s estimates, while energy savings is wildly over-estimated.

Via the AZ Republic:

Fritz Henderson, president and chief operating officer of GM, said that choosing the bankruptcy route would further erode consumer confidence in the automaker and “we want them to be confident in their ability to buy our cars and trucks.”

In order to save the value of their executive stock portfolios, which are a large part of their compensation, auto executives are promoting the line now that consumers will for some reason stop buying GM cars if the company is operating under Chapter 11 protection.

The auto-makers real strategy is to get some kind of money, almost any amount will do, from the government ASAP.  It really doesn’t matter how much, because with their cash burn rate almost any amount Congress gives them right now will not last much more than 6 months, and certainly will not be enough to reach recovery (their requests go up by a few billion each time they appear in front of Congress).  Automakers are facing potentially several years of recession, and any real restructuring would take 5 years or more (and even that is doubtful since the industry has had 30 years of notice on these issues and have not done anything).  But if they get some cash, then there will be a psychological pull for Congress to put in more.  They will say — well, you’ve already put in $5 billion.  If you don’t put in another X billion, that first 5 will have been wasted  (few people understand that “sunk costs are sunk” and Congress is no exception).  This is how expensive transit projects are funded.

The position that customers will stop buying the product due to some loss of confidence in chapter 11 doesn’t hold up.  Most every airline traveler has flown on an airline operating under chapter 11 in the last 10 years or so, and if I can have enough confidence that an aircraft is being adequately maintained in bankruptcy, I can probably muster the courage to buy a car.  I presume the issue here is downstream warranty support.  But this is about the last thing that would ever be slashed in a chapter 11.   For God sakes, airlines have never even substantially disavowed frequent flier miles in a bankruptcy, surely a much more obvious target than warranty repairs.

I would argue that it is uncertainty that is driving any loss of confidence  (in fact, sales have plummeted already, ahead of any chapter 11).  A chapter 11 filing would actually increase certainty, as those running the receivership could quickly communicate principles to be followed in the bankruptcy, such as protection of warranties. Right now, people have a perception that in a bankruptcy, GM would go *poof*.  Once it actually files a chapter 11, the media and executives would switch modes from fanning panic to actually explaining how receivership works.

In fact, if there is any fear on the issue of long-term warranty support, it is being created by executives like Henderson who are fanning the flames of fear in a brinkmanship game to try to avoid chapter 11.  If he were really worried about this loss of confidence, he and other auto executives would be out there assuring people that their cars and servicing and dealers will also survive a chapter 11 filing.  But he is not.  This is totally disingenuous.

More on why GM should be allowed to fail here and here.

Incredibly, it looks like Proposition 1A in California is going to pass.  This act authorizes a $9 billion dollar bond issue to start a high-speed rail passenger line from the Bay Area to the LA Area. 

Why do I say "start."  Because even the line's supporters put the minimum cost at $40 billion, so the taxpayers have authorized 22% of the line.  And this is by supporters numbers.  By my numbers they have likely authorized less than 10% of the line. 

I wonder if voters knew they were authorizing either a) $40-$100 billion, in effect, rather than $9 billion; or b) a $9 billion white elephant of a rail line that ends up incomplete and going nowhere or c) something that is not really high speed rail and therefore not different from Amtrak service that already exists.  (What are you talking about Coyote, government transit people would never begin a project without full funding and leave an orphaned white elephant in place.)

The state that makes up a huge percentage of the current mortgage and
foreclosure problem seems to not have learned its lesson about
borrowing.

I am generally an optimistic guy, but I wonder if we have gotten to the point where there is a large subset of the population for whom voting is solely for the purposes of boosting self-esteem.  I feel good when I support public transit, so I vote for Prop 1A, despite the fact there is no possible way it will ever deliver any public transit.

Apparently, even before the first train starts carrying passengers (sometime in December), Phoenix’s new light rail system is already forcing bus fares up.  (via a reader)

Before the Valley’s light-rail service ever begins, the cost to ride the train and city buses may be headed up.

The issue of raising the Valley’s regional fare policy has been brewing for several months as transit officials have struggled to cover
rising gas prices and other increased operation costs, said Greg Jordan, Tempe’s transit administrator. Transit and light-rail costs are covered by a half-cent sales tax, which has fallen over the past year.

The real issue is that transit agencies are generally given a fixed pot of money for operating subsidies (in this case the proceeds of a half-cent sales tax) and rail tends to take a hugely disproportionate share of that money, starving out less sexy but more practical and cost-effective bus systems.  Even in the that wet dream of rail planners, Portland:

In fact, 9.8 percent of Portland-area commuters took transit to work before the region build light rail. Today it is just 7.6 percent. In a story repeated in numerous cities that have built rail lines, rail cost overruns forced the city to raise bus fares and reduce bus service. That’s a success?

This is even more likely in Phoenix, where buses make far more financial sense than rail, given our very low densities, lack of a real downtown area, and numerous commuting routes.  In fact, not only is it predictable, but I predicted it:

Rail makes zero sense in a city like Phoenix.  All this will do is create a financial black hole into which we shift all of our bus money, so the city will inevitably end up with a worse transportation system, not a better one.  Cities that build light rail almost always experience a reduction in total transit use (even the great God of planners Portland) for just this reason – budgets are limited, so since rail costs so much more per passenger, other transit is cut back.   But the pictures of the train will look pretty in the visitor’s guide.

The Arizona Republic had another of its cheerleading articles on light rail this morning.  In it was a chart that, contrary to the intent of the article, summarized exactly why Phoenix light rail is doomed.  Below is a chart of the employment density (top chart) and population density (bottom chart) at each stop along the first rail route.  Note that this line goes through what passes for the central business district of Phoenix and the oldest parts of town, so it was chosen to run through the highest density areas – all future extensions will likely have lower numbers.  Unfortunately, they do not reproduce this chart online so here is a scan:

Take the population density chart.  As a benchmark, lets take Boston.  The average density for all of the city of Boston is 12,199 people per square mile.  Phoenix’s light rail line cut through the highest density areas of town has only one stop where density reaches this level, and most stops are less than half this density.  And this is against Boston’s average, not against the density along its rail routes which are likely much higher than the average.

Rail makes zero sense in a city like Phoenix.  All this will do is create a financial black hole into which we shift all of our bus money, so the city will inevitably end up with a worse transportation system, not a better one.  Cities that build light rail almost always experience a reduction in total transit use (even the great God of planners Portland) for just this reason – budgets are limited, so since rail costs so much more per passenger, other transit is cut back.   But the pictures of the train will look pretty in the visitor’s guide.

Postscript: Phoenix’s overall average density is around 2,500 per square mile.  Assuming that the 12,000 in the chart above is one of the densest areas of Phoenix, this gives a ratio of about 5:1 between peak and average density.  This same ratio in Boston would imply peak density areas of 60,000 per square mile.  This may be high, but indicates how much higher route densities on Boston rail should be.  Oh, and by the way, Boston rail is losing a ton of money.

Other city densities here from 1990.  People think of LA as spread out, but LA has a density over three times higher than Phoenix!

Mayor Daley of Chicago has a great idea:  despite already having rail transit service between O’Hare Airport and Downtown, he wants to build a new non-stop express rail line to save travelers about 9 minutes.  After all, if Moscow just did this, it must be a good idea.

OK, this is dumb enough.  But what is really amazing is that Chicago embarked on building a $320 million downtown station for the project without even a plan for the rest of the line — no design, no route, no land acquisition, no appropriation, no cost estimate, nothing.  There are currently tracks running near the station to the airport, but there are no passing sidings on these tracks, making it impossible for express and local trains to share the same track.  The express service idea would either require an extensive rebuilding of the entire current line using signaling and switching technologies that may not (according to Daley himself) even exist, or it requires an entirely new line cut through some of the densest urban environments in the country.  Even this critical decision on basic approach was not made before they started construction on the station, and in fact still has not been made.

Though the article does not mention it, this strikes me as a typical commuter rail strategy — make some kind of toe-in-the-water investment on a less-than-critical-mass part of the system, and then use that as leverage with voters to approve funding so that the original investment will not be orphaned.  Its a kind of blackmail that both makes me sick, and is necessary for these systems as voters would never ever approve the kind of money that would be required to build the whole project  (If this express line requires $320 million just for one station on one end of the line, can you imagine the total cost?  $10 billion? for 9 minutes time savings).

The other day, I posted an update to my light rail bet saying that not only was light rail incredibly expensive for the amount of transportation it provides, it is not even clear that it provides any "green" benefits  (with "green" today meaning only the potential to reduce CO2, since the global warming hysteria has sucked all of the oxygen out of other environmental goals).

The Antiplanner has more information, this time from the transportation planners in Denver.  Normally, transportation planners grossly exaggerate the benefits of their proposed systems, so it is interesting that even they so no net CO2 savings from their proposed rail lines:

The Antiplanner’s review
of rail transit and greenhouse gases found that Denver’s light-rail
lines produce more greenhouse gases per passenger mile than a typical
SUV. The Gold Line DEIS agrees, admitting that the rail alternative
will result in a regional CO2 increase of 0.034% (see page 3.7-10).

By the way, the Denver system does not do so great on the financial part either:

Now, RTD says the line will cost more than $600 million, which is a
lot for a mere 11 route miles. Moreover, RTD has changed the proposed
technology to something it calls “electric multiple-unit commuter
rail,” which sounds something like the Chicago Electroliners or some of
the Philadelphia commuter trains.

For this high price, the DEIS reports incredibly trivial benefits.
The proposed rail line is projected to take 0.0085 percent of cars off
the road. Of course, that’s for the region as a whole, but in the
corridor it will take a whopping 0.227 percent of cars off the road. A
handful of buses could do as well.

While that might seem terrible, it actually outdistances our guys here in Phoenix, who are projecting that the next 3.2 mile line here will cost $306 million.  While the Denver line is projected to cost $10,300 per foot, the Phoenix line will cost at least $18,000 per foot.

I generally have a bet I make for new light (and heavy) commuter rail systems.  I bet that for the amount the system cost to build, every single daily rider could have instead been given a Prius to drive for the same money; and, with the operating losses and/or subsidy the system requires each year, every one of those Prius drivers could be given enough gas to make their daily commute.  And still have money left over.  I have tested this bet for the systems in Los Angeles and Albuquerque.

Well, it turns out I left something out.  Many people are interested in commuter rail because it is perceived to be greener, which nowadays generally means narrowly that it uses less energy and thus produces less CO2.  But in fact, it may not.  Blogger John Moore sent me a link to this article by Brad Templeton analyzing energy usage in various transportation modes.  While a full train can be fairly efficient (just as a full SUV could be if 7 passengers were in it), cars and trains and busses are seldom full.  When you look at their average load factors, trains are seldom better than cars:

In fact, a car at its average load factor (1.57 pax) has about the same energy use as busses or light rail per passenger mile.  The analysis is difficult to do well, but even with errors, its clear that rail projects do not dominate over car travel in terms of energy use  (One must be careful to differentiate rail project construction decisions from individual choice of mode decisions — an individual at the margin shifting from car to train saves a lot of energy;  a city choosing to invest in a large new rail system to entice drivers off the road does not).

In fact, relevent to my bet, Mr. Templeton says this:

My first conclusion is that we would get more efficient by pushing
small, fuel efficient vehicles instead of pushing transit, and at
a lower cost.

He explains his results, which are counter-intuitive to many

A full bus or trainload of people is more efficient than private cars,
sometimes quite a bit more so.   But transit systems never consist
of nothing but full vehicles.   They run most of their day with light
loads.  The above calculations came from figures citing the
average city bus holding 9 passengers, and the average train (light
or heavy) holds 22.   If that seems low, remember that every packed
train at rush hour tends to mean a near empty train returning down
the track.

Transit vehicles also tend to stop and start a lot, which eats
a lot of energy, even with regenerative braking.   And most
transit vehicles are just plain heavy, and not very aerodynamic.
Indeed, you’ll see tables in the DoE reports that show that over the past 30 years,
private cars have gotten 30% more efficient, while buses have
gotten 60% less efficient and trains about 25% worse.   The
market and government regulations have driven efforts to make cars
more efficient, while transit vehicles have actually worsened.

In order to get people to ride transit, you must offer frequent
service, all day long.  They want to know they have the freedom to leave at
different times.  But that means emptier vehicles outside of
rush hour.   You’ve all seen those huge empty vehicles go by, you just
haven’t thought of how anti-green they were.    It would be better
if off-hours transit was done by much smaller vehicles, but that
implies too much capital cost — no transit agency will buy enough
equipment for peak times and then buy a second set of equipment for
light demand periods.

A lot of his data can be checked at the US Department of Energy data book here.  In particular, you can see the key numbers in table 2.12.  After perusing this data for a bit, I had a few other reactions:

• Commercial air travel gets a bad rap.  On a passenger mile basis, it is really not worse than driving and only about 20% worse than Amtrack  (and probably the same as Amtrak or better if you leave out the Northeast Corridor). (table 2.14)
• Busses have really gotten way more inefficient over the years, at the same time cars have become substantially more efficient.  While the government criticizes its citizens for not practicing enough energy conservation, in fact its citizens have been buying more and more fuel efficient vehicles while the government has been buying less efficient vehicles.  (table 2.13)
• While passenger cars have increased substantially in efficiency, over the road trucks have seen no progress, and have actually gotten less efficient over the last 10 years (table 2-18)

Make sure to read the whole article.  I think the author is pretty fair at achnowleging where the uncertainties are in the analysis.  He also has comparisons of mass transit energy numbers between cities.  A few individual cities seem to beat even the most efficient cars — most, including places like New York, do not.

Postscript:  I don’t think numbers for New York include taxis.  If they did, New York would likely look terrible.  From an energy standpoint, taxis are a horrible transportation option, perhaps the worst possible.  It would be interesting to know how many New Yorkers who look down on SUV’s routinely get around town using taxis.

On several occasions I have have lamented the declining standard of activism:

Activist:  A person who believes so strongly that a
problem needs to be remedied that she dedicates substantial time to …
getting other people to fix the problem.   It used to be that activists
sought voluntary help for their pet problem, and thus retained some
semblance of honor.  However, our self-styled elite became frustrated
at some point in the past that despite their Ivy League masters degrees
in sociology, other people did not seem to respect their ideas nor were
they particularly interested in the activist’s pet issues.  So
activists sought out the double shortcut of spending their time not
solving the problem themselves, and not convincing other people to
help, but convincing the government it should compel others to fix the
supposed problem.  This fascism of good intentions usually consists of
government taking money from the populace to throw at the activist’s
issue, but can also take the form of government-compelled labor and/or
government limitations on choice.

It seems that there is a surprisingly large coalition ready to take this to its logical extreme:  A group called Service Nation is set to spend a ton of money lobbying the government to create a program to force every young person into servitude by 2020.

Not satisfied with taking 20-40% of our income to spend as they see fit, the government hopes also to be able to order around the labor of millions of young adults.   I feel like I am reading some bizarre historical re-enactment of the Soviet or Chinese youth programs.  This whole program, which I am tentatively going to label "happy face fascism," makes me so sick I can’t even address it further tonight.  More later.

PS:  This is, not coincidentally, exactly the idea Obama has been pushing (here and here).  I say not coincidentally, because this is how one skirts stupid campaign finance laws – you get your supporters to take your top campaign planks and run with them as "independent" efforts that are not subject to campaign finance restrictions.

PPS: Just to head off an argument that came up last time in the comments, I have been a consistent opponent of the military draft as well.

Update:  I know the allusion is over-used, but we are in 1984-land when people keep using the term "voluntary universal national service" as do the leaders of this effort.  By universal, they mean that everyone has to do it.  So they are calling for "national service that everyone is required by law to perform but is voluntary." I do not think that word means what you think it means.

The solution is to develop a system of voluntary universal national
service for our country and for the world. To call upon all young
adults to take at least one year to learn the hard and rugged skills of
practicing idealism.

Yes, lets teach them the "hard and rugged skills" of being forced to do labor that no one is willing to pay for voluntarily, so must be performed by slaves instead.

Another thought:  TJIC made a relevant observation to this the other day:

I’m seeing more and more grudging praise for the efficiency of the Chinese dictatorship these days.

It tends to go something like this:

Sure, sure, they’re horrible, and democracy is better, but if they
decide that they need to put in { more mass transit | a factory | a new
canal | an Olympic village }, they just tell everyone in the village
“move!”, and the job gets done.

I get the same impression.  Service Nation is the end result of such thinking.

Clarification:  Service Nation denies they support mandatory service, and have removed the word "universal" from their site.  However, it should be noted that many of the prominent supporters and board members of Service Nation have individually advocated for mandatory service.  Also, no denial that they are seeking to create a new, massive government beauracracy.

A few weeks ago, Kevin Drum had a post on shale oil development, quoting from a speech by Congressman Ken Salazar.  It is hard to really excerpt the piece well, but my take on their argument against shale oil leasing is:

• Shale oil technology is unproven
• The government is leasing the shale oil rights too cheap
• There is already plenty of shale oil land for development, so new leases won’t increase development
• This is just being done by the Bush Administration to enrich the oil companies
• The administration is rushing so fast that Congress has not had the chance to put a regulatory regime in place

In many ways, the arguments are surprisingly similar to those against new offshore and Alaskan oil leasing.  Through it all, there is this sort of cognitive dissonance where half the arguments are that the oil won’t be developed, and the other half seem to be based on an assumption that a lot of oil will be developed.  For example, how can the leases be "a fire sale" if shale oil technology is unproven and development is not likely to occur?  I would say that if these assumptions were true, then any money the government gets for a worthless lease is found money. 

Similarly, how are oil companies going to enrich themselves by paying for leases if the technology is not going to work and no development is going to occur?  This same bizarre argument became Nancy Pelosi’s talking point on offshore oil leasing, by saying that oil companies were somehow already cheating us by not drilling in leases they already have.  Only the most twisted of logic could somehow come to the conclusion that oil companies were enriching themselves by paying for leases were they found no developable oil.

From the standpoint of Democratic Party goals, there is absolutely nothing bad that happens if the government leases land for oil shale or oil drilling and oil companies are unable to develop these leases  (there is some small danger of royalty loss if leases are not developed when they could be economically, but most private royalty agreements are written with sunset periods giving the lease-holder a fixed amount of time to develop the lease or lose it — I don’t know how the government does it).  The net result of "no drilling" or "oil shale technology turns out not to work" is that the government gets money for nothing. 

Here is the problem that smart Democrats like Drum face, and the reason behind this confusing logic:  They have adopted environmental goals, particularly the drastic reduction of CO2 in relatively short time frames, that they KNOW, like they know the sun rises in the east, will require fuel and energy prices substantially higher than they are today.  They know these goals require substantially increased pain and lifestyle dislocation from consumers who are already fed up with fuel-cost-related pain.  This is not because the Democrats are necessarily cruel, but because they are making the [faulty] assumption that the pain and dislocation some day from CO2-driven global warming outweighs the pain from higher priced, scarcer energy.

So, knowing that their policy goal is to have less oil at higher prices, and knowing that the average consumer would castrate them for espousing such a goal, smart Democrats like Drum find themselves twisted into pretzels when they oppose oil development.  They end up opposing oil development projects because in their hearts they want less oil around at higher prices, but (at least until their guy gets elected in November) they justify it with this bizarre logic that they oppose the plan because it would not get us oil fast enough.  The same folks who have criticized capitalism for years for being too short-term focused are now opposing plans that don’t have a payoff for a decade or so.

At the end of the day, most Democrats do not want more oil developed, and they know that much higher prices will be necessary to meet their climate goals.  It sure would be refreshing to hear someone just say this. As I wrote at Climate Skeptic, the honest Democrat would say:

Yeah, I know that $4 gas is painful.  But do you know what?  Gas
prices are going to have to go a LOT higher for us to achieve the CO2
abatement targets I am proposing, so suck it up.  Just to give you a
sense of scale, the Europeans pay nearly twice as much as we do for
gas, and even at those levels, they are orders of magnitude short of
the CO2 abatement I have committed us to achieve.  Since late 2006, gas
prices in this country have doubled, and demand has fallen by perhaps
5%.  That will probably improve over time as people buy new cars and
change behaviors, but it may well require gasoline prices north of $20
a gallon before we meet the CO2 goal I have adopted.  So get ready.

Postscript:  By the way, oil companies have been trying to develop shale oil since the 1970s.  Their plans went on hold for several decades, with sustained lower oil prices, but the call by the industry to the government for a clarified regulatory regime has been there for thirty years.  The brief allusion in Salazar’s speech to water availability is a valid one.  I saw some studies at Exxon 20+ years ago for their Labarge development that saw water availability as the #1 issue in making shale oil work.

PPS:  I mention above that the pain of fuel prices not only hits the wallet, but hits in term of painful lifestyle changes.  One of the things the media crows about as "good news" is the switch to mass transit from driving by a number of people due to higher oil prices.  This is kind of funny, since I would venture to guess that about zero of those people who actually switched and gave up their car for the bus consider it good news from their own personal life-perspective.  Further, most of the reduction in driving has been the elimination of trips altogether, and not via a switch to mass transit.  Yes, transit trips are up, but on a small base.  95%+ of reduced driving trips are just an elimination of the trip.  Which is another form of lifestyle pain, as presumably there was some good reason to make the trip before.

Update: Updated on Canadian Oil Sands production here.  Funny quote:

Fourth, and potentially most important, the U.S. “green” lobby is
pushing legislation that could limit purchases of oil sands products by
U.S. government agencies based on its GHG footprint.  It would be well
beyond stupid for Congress to prohibit our buying oil from Canada while
we increase buying it from countries that threaten our security.  But
just because something is stupid certainly does not mean Congress may
not do it.

The Anti-Planner links an absolutely scathing article in the Miami Herald on the absolute disaster they have made of their mass transit system.  This is a great summary:

Miami is just one more example of the points the Antiplanner keeps making about rail transit:

1. Transit agencies might run excellent bus systems. But when they
start building rail, they quickly get in over their heads by optimistic
forecasts, unforeseen costs, and the sheer humongous expense of
building dedicated transit lines.

2. Though all rail systems require periodic expensive maintenance,
few transit agencies set aside any money for this because it is easier
to spend the money now and let future managers worry about the future.

3. Though the rail systems are usually built to serve downtown
white-collar workers, in the end it is the transit-dependent people who
rely on buses who pay the cost.

4. There is only one thing rails can do that buses can’t do better,
faster, and more flexibly, and that is spend a lot of your money.

I would like to observe one other thing at work in the Miami example that looks to be exactly what we are facing here in Phoenix in the next election.  Miami offered up a transit tax referendum for something like $800 million.  They promised a mix of highway improvements and rail.  In several cases, including the upcoming referendum in Phoenix, I have tried to warn people that the people who put these referendums together are rail-ophiles.  They have learned, however, that rail alone won’t sell a bond issue or tax, so they throw in a bunch of highway improvement promises, which people really will pay for, as window dressing.  Often, however, these improvements never get done, as they are empty promises to sell the tax.  We see exactly this in Miami:

But five years and more than $800 million later, the county has spent more
than half the new money on routine Transit operations and maintenance while adding 1,000
jobs to the payroll.

   There were initial achievements. The county added 11 million miles of bus service, gave
free rides to seniors, and briefly experimented with 24-hour rail. It spent $40 million on
hundreds of tiny public-works projects….

   For example, here is the cost estimate that was attached to the 44 road projects that
county commissioners asked for: $0. The projects have since been estimated to cost
$428.2 million.

   Nor was any money earmarked for an unspecified number of flyover intersections on the
list of promised improvements. Such projects, which involve raising an existing road to
pass over another, cost as much as $18 million apiece today. None have been built.

So this tax was sold in part as a highway improvement tax, but $0 was actually budgeted.  The highway piece was a lie to sell the tax.  Beware Phoenicians.

I had occasion to think about the term "public service" at about 6AM this Sunday morning.  As I was driving my son to a way-too-early baseball game, I flipped around the FM dial trying to find some music.  There was none.  All I could find were a number of really dull programs on arcane topics presumably on the air to fulfill the radio broadcaster’s "public service" requirements of the FCC regulatory regime.  Since almost no one gets excited about this programming except for the leftish public policy types that inhabit regulatory positions, the radio stations broadcast all this garbage on Sunday mornings when no one is listening anyway.  Ironically, in the name of "public service," stations must broadcast material no one in the public actually wants to listen to.

Which leads me to coyote’s definition of corporate public service:  Make a product or service for which people, without use of force or fraud, are willing to pay the listed price.

Any freaking moron can (or at least should be able to) offer a product or service that people will be willing to use for free.  Is this a public service?  Well, maybe.  If you are out there helping to feed homeless people, power to you.  But is it really a public service that the Miami transit system offers free rides that it can only pay for with deficit spending?  Or $1.50 bus rides that cost taxpayers $30 each to provide?  And this is not to mention the free services, like public service radio broadcasts, that many people would be willing to pay not to receive. 

That’s why I say that any moron can give stuff away.   But find me the person who can create enough value that people are willing to pay enough for his product to cover all the material, labor, and capital inputs it took to create it, with surplus left over for both buyer and seller, and that is the person performing a real public service.

And let me listen to some freaking classic rock on Sunday mornings.

The Anti-planner observes:

Over the past 25 years, the population of the Pittsburgh urban area
has remained fixed at about 1.8 million people. Driving, however, has
increased by almost 50 percent.

During this period, Pittsburgh has spent hundreds of millions of
dollars upgrading light-rail lines, building exclusive busways, and —
in the latest project — building a $435 million transit tunnel under the Allegheny River. Despite (or because of) this investment, transit ridership has dropped by more than 25 percent.

Although the numbers vary slightly from place to place, Pittsburgh’s
story is pretty typical of transit everywhere. Sure, some cities have
seen ridership gains, but subsidies to transit are huge and transit
does not make a notable (meaning 5 percent or more) contribution to
personal mobility in any urban area except New York (where it is 10
percent).

He has a good summary of what’s wrong and what might work instead.  I appreciated this observation in particular:

Why do we put up with this? The answer, of course, is that transit is
pork. “For most transit agencies in the United States, if they were to
write a mission statement that is reflective of what they do, they
would indicate that they exist for the purpose of serving their
employees and vendors,” not transit riders, notes Cox.

Most all local governments have extensive programs in place for government inspection of elevators because, you know, private businesses can’t be trusted to operate safe equipment.  But it turns out the least safe elevators are operated by the government itself:

New York City Transit
has spent close to $1 billion to install more than 200 new elevators
and escalators in the subway system since the early 1990s, and it plans
to spend almost that much again for dozens more machines through the
end of the next decade. It is an investment of historic dimensions,
aimed at better serving millions of riders and opening more of the
subway to the disabled.

These are the results:

¶One of every six elevators and
escalators in the subway system was out of service for more than a
month last year, according to the transit agency’s data.

¶The
169 escalators in the subway averaged 68 breakdowns or repair calls
each last year, with the worst machines logging more than double that
number. And some of the least reliable escalators in the system are
also some of the newest, accumulating thousands of hours out of service
for what officials described as a litany of mechanical flaws.

¶Two-thirds of the subway elevators — many of which travel all of 15
feet — had at least one breakdown last year in which passengers were
trapped inside.

The whole thing is pretty depressing.  But perhaps just as depressing is the fact that the NY Times, in a quite lengthy article, never once questions why the government is in the elevator maintenance business at all.  You see, the New York City Transit system hires all of its own maintenance people, presumably because, though the article never mentions it, the public employees union insists that these functions remain in house.  OK, here is a quiz:  How many private elevator owners in New York City have their own staff repair elevators?  My guess is the answer is close to zero.  Everyone uses third party elevator equipment repair companies or operate under long-term service contracts with the manufacturer.  Why?  Well, lets see what problems NY Transit faces:

“They don’t have enough competent people with the proper training,”
said Michele O’Toole, the president of J. Martin Associates, which the
transit agency hired in 2006 to evaluate its elevator operations. “It
all reflects back to qualifications, training, capabilities.”…

Elevators and escalators are spread out over a far-flung system,
requiring more mechanics and slowing responses to breakdowns. There has
been little standardization of parts, so mechanics must cope with a
bewildering hodgepodge of machinery. And the machines, which operate 24
hours a day, are subject to all sorts of abuse: Elevators become
makeshift bathrooms, and escalator steps are pounded by heavily loaded
hand trucks.

Guess what?  These are all classic reasons for outsourcing.  Manhattan elevator maintenance companies are set up to handle a far-flung elevator inventory, and can more efficiently stock parts, buy special equipment, and provide specialized training than can any individual operator.   Shared external capacity can also be sized and used much more efficiently to deal with random failures — the more elevators in a region one maintains, the better staff can be utilized across a stochastic system.

But of course, the NY Times is never going to go against any public employee union, so it takes the line that this is a good governance issue, rather than a structural issue where an individual elevator owner is always going to be less efficient than outsourcing to a large regional third party company.  It compares NY Transit to other public transit agencies, but not to other private owners of elevators.  My guess is Donald Trump owns more elevators than NY Transit – how does he handle elevator maintenance?

By the way, the article says that there are 167 elevators and 169 escalators in the system.  They also say there are 200 full-time maintenance people.  So, on average, one person spends 60% of their year on a single elevator or escalator.  Think about the elevators and escalators you ride every day.  Can you imagine someone working on it for 1200 hours a year?

And what is this in the quotes above about slow responses to breakdowns in the far-flung empire?  With 200 people for 336 devices, they could practically assign an individual repair person to each one.   I can see him now, with his toolbox, sitting on a folding chair in the back of the elevator with a box of Krispy Kremes, waiting to spring into action at the moment of failure.

Our governor is pushing for a one percentage point increase in the state sales tax as well as increased developer impact fees to fund a series of transportation projects.  Like most modern transportation bills, they are sold as a way to improve state road and highway capacity (something most people support), but it turns out that these projects are but window-dressing. Much of the money in the proposed bill goes to a series of dubious mass transit projects, including the oft-discussed mythical passenger rail line between Tucson and Phoenix.  None of these projects make sense in spread out, low density cities like Phoenix or Tucson that have no real city core, which is why they face a lot of opposition.

Well, our governor has cut a deal to try to get more support for her pet projects, and boy does it look ugly:

Some Republican
state lawmakers on Monday blasted a "backroom deal" between Gov. Janet
Napolitano and a Valley home-builders group that would exempt
residential developers from sharing a portion of the costs of a major
transportation initiative in exchange for a $100,000 contribution to
boost the signature-gathering campaign.

Under the agreement, the Home Builders Association of Central Arizona
agreed to withdraw their opposition to a state trust-land initiative
backed by Napolitano. In return, developer impact fees would no longer
be part of the transportation initiative’s approach to raising money.

Kevin Drum and Alex Knapp write that there appears to be $20-$50 billion in federal energy subsidies each year going to the oil industry, and that this should be a target for elimination before any windfall profits tax.  I wrote in the comments:

I agree 100%.  Let’s cut all the subsidies.

However, before you get too excited, my guess is that most of the
money marked as "oil company subsidies" really in fact goes to non-oil
projects like alternative energy. In the same way that a huge portion
of federal "highway" funds don’t go to highways but to silly
politically correct failing transit projects, my guess is that,
similarly, "oil industry" subsidies go for a lot of silly alternative
energy projects.

I personally don’t care where it goes. I am all for eliminating all
of this subsidy mess, equally, whether it’s for oil exploration or
energy-from-donkey-poop or for CEO salary enhancement. But recognize
before you make this the liberal rallying cry, much of this subsidy
money may well be going to liberal pet projects.

Anyone have any better idea where this money goes that they are referring to?

Richard Conniff in the NYT:

But we need language to remind us that this is our government, and that
we thrive because of the schools and transit systems and 10,000 other
services that exist only because we have joined together. Instead of
denouncing taxes, politicians would do better to appeal to the
patriotic corners of our hearts that warm to phrases like “we the
people.” “Taxation” is a throwback to the time when kings picked our
pockets. “Paying my dues,” a phrase popularized in the jazz music
world, is language by which we can stand together as Americans.

I am confused as to what the substantial difference is between 1 king picking our pockets and 535 kings picking our pockets.   Just because I get the annual opportunity to cast a meaningless vote between the Coke and Pepsi party does not change my view of government. 

To my mind, this is the #1 incorrect perception people have about the American Revolution.  So many people, like this author, seem to think it was about voting and democracy.  Bleh.  The Revolution was about the relationship between human beings and government.  Voting was merely one tool among many the founders adopted to try to protect man from government.  Unfortunately, this intellectual battle is being lost. 

JFK was the president that first made it clear that those of us who love freedom have been losing this battle.  In his famous quote "ask not what your country can do for you – ask what you can do for your country,"  JFK defined the heads-statists-win-tails-freedom-loses choice that people like Mr. Conniff continue to try to present us with.   These collectivists define our relation to government as either the recipient of unearned loot or milch cow to the whims of the voters.  Neither part of JFK’s challenge represents a relation between man and government a freedom-loving person should accept.

More on why voting is not what makes our country great here.

The Anti-Planner has an absolutely fabulous article about a Wisconsin passenger rail proposal, but in fact what the article really is about is how government decisions get made.

According to RTA’s latest newsletter,
the KRM would cost about $200 million to start up and would require a
$6.3 million annual operating subsidy. For that it would carry about
1.7 million trips per year, which translates to 6,700 per weekday.

In other words, RTA wants to spend $200 million to take 3,350 people
to and from work each day. The Milwaukee-Racine-Kenosha urbanized areas
have about 750,000 commuters, so RTA’s proposal would take less than
half a percent of them to work. But they would all have to pay for it
in the form of some local taxes plus a diversion of a share of federal
and state gasoline taxes to fund the rail line.

By the way, though this post isn’t meant to be entirely about rail itself, let’s use Coyote’s test on this rail proposal.  As a reminder, here is Coyote’s test:

Take the total capital charge and compare it to the cost of buying every projected rider at $22,000 Prius.  Then, take the operating subsidy (which is always higher than projected) and see how it compares to the average gas consumption in a year of said Prius’s.  If the projected capital charge and subsidy could have bought every rider a car and all the gas they need to drive it, then the rail line is not only an average run-of-the-mill government boondoggle, but a total and complete ripoff.

And, the KRM… FAILS.  And fails miserably.  The $200 million charge would have bought every rider TWO Prius’s and still have some money left over, and the operating subsidy, sure to be larger in reality, would buy each rider about 627 gallons of gas a year, which at 30mpg would get them 19,000 miles per year.  But don’t worry, KRM, every single new rail system to which I have applied the test has failed (Phoenix, Houston, LA, Albuquerque).

But lets continue:

The planned commuter line would run 14 round trips per day, which
means each train would have about 240 people on board. That’s about
five bus loads. So why not just buy five buses for each planned
trainset and move people by bus instead?

The newsletter explains that RTA considered a bus alternative, but
it would attract only a third as many people as the rail line. It would
also cost only an eighth as much to start up, so I always wonder why
don’t they just invest three-eighths as much in buses and carry as many
people as the rail line.

But then I noticed that the rail line was projected to have seven
stops between Milwaukee and Kenosha, while the bus line would stop 27
times. As a result, the bus would take almost twice as long as the
train. No wonder it attracted so few people!

The train would average just 38 miles per hour and RTA admits that
it would not go significantly faster than motor vehicles, so there is
no reason why buses could not be run on schedules similar to the train.
So why didn’t they consider an alternative in which buses stopped only
seven times?

It turns out they did. The report
from the consultant hired by RTA included a bus-rapid transit
alternative that stopped fewer times than the regular bus alternative.
It included some exclusive busways, so it cost a lot more than the
regular bus alternative, but it would cost only half as much as the
train. Moreover, it was projected to carry as many riders as the train.

Naturally, RTA told the consultant to drop this alternative from further consideration.

The Anti-Planner shoots back what to me looks like a really good proposal:

The consultant had also estimated that the bus-rapid transit
alternative would disrupt traffic more than the trains. But if the
busways (which would move no more than about 5 buses per hour) were
opened to low-occupancy vehicles that pay a toll, they would actually
relieve congestion. Plus, the tolls would pay for most if not all of
the new lanes, and by varying the toll, the lanes would never get
congested so the buses could meet their schedules. This would result in
transportation improvements for both auto drivers and transit riders,
and at a very low cost to taxpayers

It seems that one of those cycles the US always castigates itself about is a perception that the Europeans have a better rail system than we do and that we should somehow emulate their system.  Which is why we still have federal subsidies of a half-assed Amtrak system and high-speed rail proposals are circulated breathlessly from time to time. 

By the way, I have been a consultant to French railroad SNCF and I gaurantee we do not want to emulate the European rail system.  First and foremost, the railroads are huge employment boondoggles.  I remember that the SNCF when I was there had something like 100,000 freight cars but 125,000 freight car maintenance people.  I suggested the railroad could assign one individual full time to his own car and still lay off 20% of the work force. 

The main reason we don’t have inter-city passenger rail is a simple one that anyone spending 5 minutes with the numbers can understand — there are distance break points where air travel is more economic than rail, and most US inter-city transit falls into the larger distance ranges.

Anyway, the anti-planner shares a bit of information that is seldom mentioned in the rail discussion that makes the US rail system look a lot more desireable:

Europe has decided to run its rail system primarily for passengers,
while America’s system is run mainly for freight. Europe’s rail system
has about 6 percent of the passenger travel market, while autos have
about 78 percent. Meanwhile, 75 percent of European freight goes by
highway. Here in the U.S., highway’s share of freight travel is only 29
percent, while the auto’s share of passenger travel is about 82
percent. So trains get 4 percent of potential auto users in Europe out
of their cars, but leave almost three times as much freight on the
highway.

In fact, the freight rail system is so efficient that to some extent we’ve obviated the need for the Panama Canal.  Many Asian container ships bound for Europe actually make port in Seattle or Vancouver, offload their containers onto trains which shoot across the country to New York or another eastern port where they are reloaded on ships for the trip to Europe.

By the way, in the same article, don’t miss the hilarious proposal in Minnesota to spend taxpayer money for a high speed rail line from the Twin Cities to … Duluth.  Yeah, that’s the ticket.  New York to Boston barely makes it financially, but St. Paul to Duluth is going to be a winner.

We don’t need more highway funds because right now, as estimated by the Anti-Planner, about 40% of Federal highway funds go to non-highway projects.   In particular:

Over the past fifteen years alone, America has spent well over $100
billion on rail transit construction projects but has little to show
for it. As mobility advocate John Semmens pointed out a few days ago in
a recent Washington Times op ed, transit’s share of urban travel has actually declined since 1995.

Wow, money well spent, huh?  I have written many times on commuter rail follies in Phoenix and other western cities that are utterly unsuited to rail transit.  The most recent news here in Phoenix is that design flaws are appearing, even before the first train is run.

Tom Kirkendall observes that this could have been written about Houston light rail.  I would add that it also could have easily been written about Phoenix light rail, which I have criticized here and here and here.  And heavy rail? Don’t get me started.

Beyond these impressions, Tom Rubin observes that VTA has “the worst
operating statistics fo any American transit operator.” The reason for
this, he says, is that San Jose — being built mostly after World War II
— is one of the most spread-out urban areas in the country. Not only
are people spread out, but jobs are spread out, with no job
concentrations anywhere.

This makes large buses particularly unsuitable for transit because
there is no place where large numbers of people want to go. So what was
VTA’s solution when its bus numbers were low relative to other transit
agencies? Build light rail — in other words, use an expensive
technology that requires even more job concentrations.

Now it has one of the, if not the, poorest-patronized light-rail
systems in America. So what is its solution? Build heavy rail, a
technology that requires even more job concentrations.

This is an interesting factoid from another Anti-Planner post:

The amazing thing to the Antiplanner is that anyone would take this
proposal seriously. The average urban freeway lane costs about $10
million per mile. The average light-rail line costs about $50 million
per mile and carries only a fifth as many people. Seattle’s proposed
lines were going to cost $250 million per mile, making then 125 times
more expensive at moving people than a freeway lane.

Portland is the poster child for light rail "success," but this is an interesting definition of success:

“Many (Portlanders) use their public transportation system,” says
Weyrich. In fact, 9.8 percent of Portland-area commuters took transit
to work before the region build light rail. Today it is just 7.6
percent. In a story repeated in numerous cities that have built rail
lines, rail cost overruns forced the city to raise bus fares and reduce
bus service. That’s a success?

A lot more money for fewer total transit riders.  This is absolutely predictable.  Light rail creates huge investment along one single route.  The assets created are totally inflexible — unlike buses, they can only run one single route.  For most western cities with low density and literally hundreds of different commuting routes this way and that, light rail is silly.  Here are a couple of analysis I did for Albuquerque, LA and Phoenix.  Here is more about Portland.

Growing up in Houston, one of the odder parts of the city, even for a local, is the underground tunnel system downtown.  The system was built, I presume, because you can’t even cross the street in the summer time in 100 degree / 100% humidity weather without sweating through your suit coat.  The tunnel system has become quite extensive, such that you can navigate for miles without ever seeing the light of day.  Casual observers often comment on the lack of pedestrian traffic in downtown Houston, but that is perhaps because they never looked under ground.  Over time, underground shopping malls and restaurants and food courts appeared along the tunnels, bringing even more people under ground.

The tunnels are especially difficult to navigate, because there are no visual clues (e.g. we are heading to that building over there) and no signs.  We used to joke people had been lost down there for decades.

Well, the secret is apparently out, as the NY Times has discovered the Houston tunnels.

Seared by triple-digit heat and drenched by tropical storms, midday
downtown Houston appears eerily deserted, the nation’s fourth-largest
city passing for a ghost town.

On the street, that is.

But
below, there are tunnels at the end of the light — nearly seven
color-coded miles of them connecting 77 buildings — aswarm with
Houstonians lunching, shopping and power-walking in dry, air-chilled
comfort….

“Nothing says north, south, east or west. You have to memorize the
buildings,” said David Gerst, a lawyer who opened a lucrative sandwich
shop — BeWitched — off the East McKinney (green) tunnel network under
Commerce Towers, the former Chamber of Commerce building converted to
condominiums. For access to the 3,000 people who stream by his shop
each lunchtime in what tunnel merchants call the holy hours, Mr. Gerst
pays $2,500 a month rent for 800 square feet, more than what surface
lunch space may command.

This is the best part:

It was not centrally planned; it just grew, inspired by Rockefeller
Center in New York. But it is not connected to a transit network. And,
befitting Texans’ distrust of government, most of it is private; each
segment is controlled by the individual building owner who deigns to
allow the public access during business hours — and then locks the
doors on nights and weekends. Some parts, like those belonging to the
former Enron buildings now leased by Chevron, are closed to outsiders
altogether.