Speak Truth to Power: We Need More Roads, Not Light Rail.

The National Surface Transportation Policy and Revenue Study Commission (now that's a mouthful) is holding a hearing tomorrow (April 18) at the University of Minnesota. You can find an agenda here, though there does not seem to be any time for public comment.

The Commission was created by Congress. "The Commission," says its web site, "is working to examine not only the condition and future needs of the nation's surface transportation system, but also short and long-term alternatives to replace or supplement the fuel tax as the principal revenue source to support the Highway Trust Fund over the next 30 years."

The American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials, AASHTO, which snatched up the domain transportation.org, has already released two reports (out of six) for the committee. AASHTO makes some sensible recommendations, but there are some unhelpful nods towards transit. There are also some calls for transit-oriented development (fine if it comes about voluntarily, not if it's pushed by government) and using transportation planning as a backstop to, if not every social ill imaginable, too many for the competency of public planners.

Labels: Transportation

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Like Public Transit? Then Try it for a Day.
Yesterday I was reminded why public transit is not a large part of our transportation mix.

In the early afternoon, I went to pick up a friend at the airport. There were a lot of cars, many more than usual, on the entrance road. As I drove closer to the parking ramps, it was obvious that this was not an ordinary day. There was a queue extending far out from the entrance to the garage.

After trolling at 3 miles an hour, I came up to someone who was handing out information cards, directing me to the other terminal. I thought, “Well, I can give her a call on the cell and say ‘Take a cab, please,’ or I can think of this as an adventure and drive over to the other terminal and take the shuttle back.

I opted for the adventure. It was appalling and yet fascinating.

I had been to the other terminal only once, and wondered how traffic went between the two. There must be some airport-only road, I thought. But I could not find it, and as I followed the signs, I was quickly back out on the interstate. I called my friend. No answer.

So I drove over to the other terminal, found a parking spot, and looked for the promised shuttle bus.

As I walked across the parking ramp, I saw the bus, one level down. “Wait!,” I thought. It did.

The bus was packed, and I was happy to not be carrying any luggage.

Of course, my next sentiment was “Time’s wasting! Let’s go!”

In a few minutes the bus did roll. I stood on the steps near the back door to get a good look at the surroundings. I had never been to this part of the airport, and wondered what was going on. I was especially interested in finding the on-airport road between the two terminals.

Instead, next thing I know we are heading … back to the interstate.

No secret passage way. I was disappointed.

Seated near me was a woman wearing the uniform of a pilot or first officer. She was looking at what appeared to be a schedule. I feared for her passengers, who might be delayed because their pilot was trapped on a bus that was stuck on the highway.

The five minutes that seemed more like 15 passed and we were back at the main terminal. The bus disgorged its passengers, and I looked around for signs of where to go next.

Down the steps I go, thinking that in a hundred yards or so I would see the familiar entrance to the baggage claim area, where cattle call meets flying-bus depot.

Instead, the only logical thing to do was to follow the sign pointing to a tram.

Oh great. This is my multi-modal day. Drive a car. Take a bus. Take a tram. Reverse. Oh well, it was all part of the appalling adventure.

Why is it that train-like vehicles and airports are programmed with the voice of a British woman? Is it to suggest bureaucratic efficiency, the well-oiled wheels of the transportation empire?

The tram ride was two minutes, four at most. I left the tram and looked, seeing way off in the distance the familiar corridor to baggage claim.

I made my way to baggage claim and found my friend. We waited for her luggage to appear. It took about 15 minutes, and in that time, we discussed the security review regime she had been through.

By contrast, two weeks ago I traveled three hundred miles to a conference. I drove. No need to rush to the airport to hurry up and wait in a security line. No need to remove my shoes. No need for someone to rummage through my suitcase.

Eventually my friend’s luggage arrived, and we walked to the tram. “Isn’t big city living great,” I mused. “All these connections.”

We rode the tram till its destination, and then found the bus to get back to the other terminal. My friend’s suitcase must have weighed 55 pounds. She struggled to get it up to the stairs of the bus; I gave her some last-second help.

We stood in the aisle, and I held the bag against my legs, lest it become a bowling ball knocking someone over.

Once off the bus, we looked around for an elevator to the second level of the parking garage. One sign said “Employee elevator.” There was no way I was carrying a 55-pound bag 50 feet up four staircases. After some wandering around we came across a public elevator, took it to the second floor, found the car, and drove off.

Total time: 2 hours. Time that I could have spent had I arranged to meet my friend at the curb? An hour. The extra hour? Tuition in the school of life.

FUN WITH LIGHT RAIL
Later that day I drove my car to the latest and greatest hope of urban planners, the light rail station. I use it to go downtown once a week to tutor English-language learners. I could drive, but have thought that it would be more convenient to not have to drive and find a parking spot, especially during baseball season. But this day I was beginning to wonder if that was such a smart idea.

On days with a lot of rail traffic (that is, baseball games), there’s an attendant at the station. He means to be helpful, but he gets in the way. I don’t need anyone to tell me to push this button and get my ticket in that slot, and he just slows me down by demanding that I answer some questions and let him guide me through the purchase process that I’ve got down cold.

I just missed one train, and had to wait for the next. Oh yes, here’s a problem of using public transit: you have to stand and wait. Outside. In the cold. And wind. And rain.

The train came, I boarded, and then encountered other, shall we say, features of public transit.

A woman in the seat behind me was sniffling. I tried to not notice. A guy across the aisle was talking to someone, in a voice that resonated, about how he hated every holiday except Halloween. (Great. Shall I expect a spell?)

I tried to ignore Mr. Halloween, but couldn’t. So I walked down the car, and sat next to a seat that a guy had just given up in anticipation of the next exit. The cigarette smoke from someone’s clothing hung in the air. Meanwhile, two women were yakking away.

Great. Disease-carrying passengers, loud louts, and cigarette smoke. I love how public transportation brings us all together, don’t you?

Once I left the train, I still had to walk 8 blocks to reach my destination. Oh yes, that’s another limitation of public transit: it often doesn’t offer door-to-door service.

Contrast all this with automobiles: leave when you want. Listen to the music you want (or don’t). Steep in your own airborne germs. Go door-to-door. Aside from that initial shock of entering the vehicle cold, stay toasty warm the whole time.

All this suggests that I hate public transit. Not necessarily. For a while I lived in the Chicago area, and used it a lot. A monthly pass was much less than paying for a commuter parking lot, and the volume of cars on the road would have made each trip unnerving. But I still walked an hour each day, between train station and home and office.

Transit works relatively well in Chicago. More so in New York. But even then, it represents a minority of all trips in the metropolitan area. How many people would like to live in a region as densely populated as these two?

Transit systems can be reasonably clean and appealing, but only at enormous costs that far outstrip comparable expenses of a road system. (Think of the Washington DC/Virginia/Maryland metro, giant earmark to the capital region from the nation’s taxpayers.)

As my little adventures showed, there’s a lot left to be desired with transit. I suspect that many people support it for someone else—let’s get those other people off the road.

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Is TOD DOA?
Transit-oriented development is one of those things that just sounds like it makes a lot of sense: take cars off the road, revitalize blighted or depressed areas, eliminate congestion (at least for some people) and provide some “quaint” as well. But the Independence Institute has its doubts.

Here’s Kathleen Calogne on "The Truth about Transit Oriented Development."

RTD [the regional transit authority in Denver] is preparing to spend billions of dollars of taxpayers' money building rail transit. The problem it faces now is how to get people onto trains when most people live miles from rail lines. Its solution: Jam people into high-density housing around each rail transit station. RTD calls this "transit oriented development," or TOD.

Berkeley, California TOD proponent Dena Belzer claims rail transit in other cities has spurred billions of dollars worth of developments. She adds that many people are eager to live in high-density, mixed-use developments where they can walk downstairs to a coffee shop or grocery store instead of having to get in a car and drive.
First of all, the billions of dollars of development supposedly inspired by rail transit is simply a lie. To make this claim, rail supporters have included every downtown skyscraper and taxpayer-subsidized sports stadium that happened to be built near any rail line. They have even counted downtown parking garages: if rail transit works so well, why the need for new garages downtown?

Second, while some people prefer to live in a beehive of activity, they are definitely the minority. A poll conducted by National Family Opinion found that 82 percent of Americans say they aspire to live in a single-family home in the suburbs, and only 18 percent want to live in cities close to work, shopping and transit. Certainly, people do not move to Colorado's wide-open spaces so they can live in Brooklyn-style neighborhoods.

Unfortunately for TOD enthusiasts like Belzer, the real-world experience with transit-oriented development in Portland, the San Francisco Bay Area and other cities is that TODs only work when they are subsidized and designed around the automobile, not transit.

When Portland, Oregon built its first light-rail line, it zoned every neighborhood along the line for high-density transit-oriented development. Not a single one was built for ten years and then the city started offering millions of dollars in tax breaks and subsidies. Even with the subsidies, only a few of the TODs are fully occupied, and many have high vacancy rates. Some have absolutely no businesses in the supposedly mixed-use developments. What makes some work and others fail? In a word, parking.

TODs are only marketable if they have plenty of parking for both businesses and residents. In other words, they are really automobile-oriented high-density developments, not transit-oriented at all. In fact, surveys of people living in Porland's TOD's show most drive to work.

Denver and its suburbs are already handing out subsidies to TODs near existing and proposed rail lines. The subsidy of choice in Colorado is known as "tax-increment financing" or TIF.

TIF uses most or all of the property taxes on a new development, and sometimes part of the sales taxes on retail sales, to cover much of the cost of building the development. That means that schools, police, fire protection and other services used by those developments must be paid for out of someone else's property taxes -- like yours. Typically, cities sell bonds, spend the money on the development and use future property taxes to repay the bonds.

To understand how much TIF subsidizes these developments, imagine being able to use your property taxes over the next 15 to 30 years for home improvements or to pay off your mortgage. This is enough to persuade developers to build high-density housing even though they know the vast majority of Coloradans prefer to live in single-family homes.

No politician would ask you to vote for higher taxes to subsidize people who shop at Whole Foods. Instead, they divert property taxes from city services to subsidize these lifestyles, and when schools run short of money, they ask you to raise taxes to keep them open. Portland has diverted so many property taxes from schools to transit-oriented TIF that its mayor recently proposed a city income tax to make up the shortfall.

Rail advocates purport that we must have expensive and heavily subsidized rail transit to attract transit riders. Then they say we need subsidized TODs to get more people to live along rail lines to get a few people out of cars. What we end up with is more congestion, higher taxes and declining urban services.

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Force People into Mass Transit.
I've thought that people who accuse mass transit advocates of favoring automobile congestion were off the mark.

But I came across that thought just today, from a newspaper editorial writer.

Here's an excerpt from the editorial blog ["Plato's Cave"] of the Salt Lake City Tribune:

Speaking of beasts (see below), I had long had my own version of how the starvation theory of politics should be applied in Utah.

Stop building highways.

Instead of widening I-15 -- again -- or building Legacy Parkway or the Mountain View Corridor, at a financial cost of billions and an environmental and social cost impossible to calculate, the Utah Department of Transportation should stop being such an enabler and just stop building or widening highways.

When people figure out that they ought to work where they live, live where they work and demand expanded public transit -- because the commute has just become unbearable -- they'll make much wise use of our limited land and budget.

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The Captain and the Professor on Gas Tax Holidays.
Some lawmakers think that government ought to suspend gasoline taxes.

While a former colleague of mine once said that he would support "any tax cut, any time," suspending the tax on gasoline is a political ploy worthy of "I feel your pain."

Thanks. Now can we actually do something to increase the supply of gas? Make sure that the money we are being taxed actually goes into proven technologies (roads) rather than gimmicks (light rail and other forms of public transit)?

Rather than go any further on the topic of why a "gas tax holiday" is a silly idea, I'll leave it up to The Captain and The Professor.

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Rail is an Inferior Means of Mass Transit.

If you're going to have mass transit, you might as well be smart about it.

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Randal O'Toole: "Pennsylvania's Great Rail Disasters Continue."

Dozens of cities around the country, including Pennsylvania cities like Philadelphia, Pittsburgh and Harrisburg, are building, planning, or considering new or expanded rail systems. But is rail really the best solution for regions looking to provide commuters with an attractive mix of transportation alternatives?

In a word, no. It turns out that transit agencies that rely on buses are more likely to see transit ridership grow as fast or faster than automobile driving than those agencies that build expensive rail lines—and rail’s lack of success should be a lesson for rail aficionados both inside and outside government.

Over the past two decades, transit ridership has declined in nearly two out of three regions with rail transit—including Philadelphia and Pittsburgh. By comparison, numerous regions that rely on bus transit have seen huge increases in transit ridership at a relatively low cost. Austin, Las Vegas, and Raleigh, for example, have all seen transit ridership grow much faster than driving.

The cost of starting a rail transit line can be 50 to 100 times greater than the cost of starting comparable bus service. Rail also costs more to operate. In fact, rail’s high costs present a triple threat to regions and transit riders.

First, rail transit tends to suffer huge cost overruns, partly because rail proponents often low-ball costs to get their projects approved. According to a study published in the Journal of the American Planning Association, U.S. rail transit overruns average 41 percent, while highway project overruns average only 8 percent.

Cost overruns threaten transit riders when they force transit agencies to increase bus fares and reduce bus service. Los Angeles started building rail transit in 1985 and experienced huge overruns. Ten years later, it had lost nearly 20 percent of its transit riders, and the NAACP sued the region’s transit agency for cutting bus service to low-income minority neighborhoods in order to pay for rail construction to white, middle-class neighborhoods.

Recessions present a second threat to transit agencies that have gone heavily into debt to pay for rail construction, something they don’t need to do to buy buses. If a recession reduces the tax revenues that support a bus agency by 10 percent, the agency might have to cut bus service by 10 percent. San Jose suffered a financial crisis in the recent recession and lost a third of its transit riders in the last three years.

The third threat to transit systems comes when it is time to rebuild the rail lines. Rails, roadbeds, railcars, power facilities, stations, elevators, and other equipment all must be rebuilt or replaced every twenty to thirty years. Washington DC’s expensive subway system is facing an imminent financial crisis because the agency needs nearly as much money to rebuild the system over the next decade as it originally spent to build it, yet it has no funds to do so.

Of the twenty-three urban areas with rail transit, fourteen of them experienced declining transit ridership over the past two decades. In most cases, the reasons for the decline can be traced to one or more of these three financial problems.

Six other regions with rail transit have seen ridership grow, but it hasn’t kept up with the growth in automobile driving. Moreover, in Portland, Dallas, and Salt Lake City, bus ridership was growing faster before rail construction began than transit ridership has grown since the rail lines opened.

Rail advocates claim rail transit will reduce congestion and air pollution and save energy. Yet it can’t do any of these things if the high-cost rail construction reduces transit ridership, or if it slows ridership growth below the level attained when a region uses only buses.

Rail supporters also argue that rail transit promotes economic development and increases property values. Yet a study published by the Federal Transit Administration found that “urban rail transit investments rarely ‘create’ new growth.” Any increase in property values near the rail line, said the study, was balanced by decreases somewhere else in the region.

The idea of gliding to work in a high-speed train is very seductive. But as the humor newspaper The Onion points out, most Americans want other people to ride transit so they can drive on uncongested roads. [Emphasis added.] Most rail transit lines average only about 20 to 25 miles per hour, and since they are so expensive to build they don’t go where most people want to go anyway.

Rail transit fattens the wallets of rail contractors who can make campaign contributions to powerful elected officials. But if transit agencies truly want to improve mass transit in their regions, they should rely on fast, flexible, and low-cost buses.

[Courtesy of the Commonwealth Foundation.]

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McDonalds Is Your Kind of Place.
Government is called on to perform all sorts of services, some vital, and some, well, less than that.

Because of an unresolved budget dispute, Minnesota government shut down. Or at least, part of it did. Among the services and offices closed: highway rest areas.

One man told a newspaper, ""So far, the shutdown's not affecting us. But I'm concerned about all the elderly people who will be traveling this weekend and can't use the rest stops. What are they supposed to do, go in the woods?"

As it turns out, it's not even true that all rest areas will be closed. Some will remain open despite the "shutdown crisis." (The linked web page, which doubtless will be updated as soon as the shutdown is over, provides information about rest areas that will remain open.)

As for other facilities, there's always the many McDonalds and other businesses that line the roads. Stop in to do your business, buy a cup of coffee, and get back on the road. You deserve a break today, right? The business gets some small change, and the functions of a rest area are served, at minimal taxpayer cost.

If enough people learn to make a few adaptations, maybe this shutdown business will lead to a rethinking of the expansive state.

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Is "Let's all Suffer" a Good Way of Planning Roads?
Toll roads, though useful for creating and maintaining roads, is opposed for reasons both good and goofy. Here's the goofy.

Tolls for Thee," a commentary (not found online) in the May 2005 issue of The Rake casts a critical eye on the possibility of toll lanes recently opened in the western region of the St. Paul-Minneapolis metropolitan region.

Thanks to a recent policy innovation, a seldom-used HOV (high occupancy vehicle) lane is now HOT (high occupancy OR toll). With a MNPass, commuters can use a dedicated lane of I-394 in one of two ways: be in a carpool, or pay a fee based on a transponder.

Adding the toll option shifts cars to a seldom-used lane. The ability to get in the fast lane by paying a toll obviously benefits people who fork over the fee. (Otherwise they would drive in the "free" lane). And when some people leave the "free" lanes, that frees up some space for everyone else. Finally, it makes the cost of using the road more transparent than the gas tax, which is rolled into the price at the pump.

Sounds like a win-win-win situation, doesn't it?

That depends on whether you value actually making it easier to get around, or whether you have an equality-of-misery way of thinking. The folks at The Rake seem to have the latter.

"While it's nice to see that car-poolers will still be able to use the lanes unharrassed, the idea that you can substitute money for socially agreeable behavior is repugnant to us."

Do we have to hold hands and sing folk songs, too?

Please. Being in a carpool is not a virtue. It's simply a matter of convenience and preference, much like whether a person takes a toll road, or a "free" local road. (I was in a car pool for five years, commuting 25 miles one way from one small town to another. Our motivation was not to be "socially agreeable," but to save ourselves a few bucks in wear-and-tear on the cars and gasoline.)

Discussions of politics and law sometimes lead to the slogan "You can't impose morality." The editorialists at The Rake go out of their way to do exactly that.

We think the punishment of sitting in traffic fits the venal sin of insisting on driving your own automobile alone, every day.

I've never been one to keep a list of venal (or even mortal) sins, but imagine what one can add to the list: having your own house or even condo (why not live in dormitories, to save "open space?"); having your own cookware (perhaps we should all save all that precious aluminum wasted on family-owned pots and pans, and all eat institutional food?), and well, how about abolish private ownership of ... just about everything, including books and magazines? (All that paper currently being wasted on Harry Potter novels? Queue up for your copy at the library.)

The Rake does skirt across the proper way of thinking about the issue--personal choices are made as a result of considering many different costs--but for some reason never get the right answer.

The high price of gas is already putting a pinch on drivers, and in a rational world, it should lead to more car-pooling, more public transit, and more long-term solutions in which we all participate.


That's assuming a lot of things there. Public transit, by its nature as rule-bound, public-union dominated bureaucracy, will impose significant non-financial costs on people, including significant time-wasting. Car-pooling's advantages must be considered against its disadvantages of inflexible schedules, the trouble of finding compatible riding companions, and so forth.

So while the costs of personal auto ownership and use has increased in nominal (though not necessarily income-adjusted) terms, they haven't risen enough to persuade large numbers of people to abandon the "venal sin" of solo driving.


In our bizarre, delusional state, we seem to believe that social and civic responsibility is optional, that morality is a commodity that can be traded in the open marketplace.

Following the dictates of public scolds is morality?

Who says that old-style liberalism is dead?

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Some Reason in Road Planning.
The Reason Public Policy Institute has some new work on road planning. A recent newsletter from them is reproduced below:
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Few are far between these days are states, counties, or cities that have not fallen way behind on building needed transportation infrastructure. With each passing month the need gets greater, and now a vast range of state and local governments are looking at public-private partnerships as a means to fund and build needed roads.

Reason has recently released a number of items to help state and local officials grapple with transportation problems:

First, the recent $1.83 billion lease of the Chicago Skyway has government officials across the country examining the potential benefits of selling or leasing their own toll roads and bridges. While privatizing existing toll facilities is a viable option that can often yield large financial profits, a Reason study released this week warns the "devil is the details" and offers a comprehensive guide to help policymakers determine if privatization is the right step and to ensure that the long-term lease agreement is advantageous to motorists. You can find the full study – Should States Sell Their Toll Roads? - at www.rppi.org/ps334.pdf.

Our latest issue of Surface Transportation Innovations (http://www.rppi.org/surfacetransportation23.html) includes a number of valuable articles:

--How Much Can Tolls Pay For? examines the extent to which new market-priced congestion-relief lanes can be paid for out of toll revenues.

--The Continued Decline of Car-Pooling discusses Census data showing that car-pooling has continued to decline, reaching a new low of 10.4 percent in 2003, down from 11.2 percent in 2000, and what that implies for transportation planning and projects.

--How Much of Congestion Is Due to Incidents? looks at new research into how much of urban congestion is caused by accidents, breakdowns, etc. vs. plain old too much traffic. The answer is shocking.

You can read the testimony of my colleague George Passantino before the CA state senate on how the state can tackle major new road projects in partnership with the private sector at http://www.rppi.org/testimony_california_transportation_ppp.shtml.

Finally, you can listen to Reason's Bob Poole talk about transportation needs, congestion, and toll roads on NPR's Talk of the Nation at http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4629059.

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Economics: $100 to Park Your Car? What a Deal!
A principle of basic economics is that a good or service is as cheap (or dear) as what a willing buyer will pay. But that principle is often lost in a sea of populism.

Dean Barnett writes for the Weekly Standard that some Boston Red Sox fans have paid $100 for a parking spot close to Fenway Park. While the mayor thinks that's outrageous, Barnett says "parking around Fenway is a display of free market capitalism at its finest."

It's all about an individual's tradeoff between cash and convenience: not surprisingly, the most expensive lots are the ones closest to the park. Take a mass transit line, by contrast, and your parking fee is $0.

Of course, it's easy for politicians such as Thomas P. Menino to strike a populist pose by clamor for price controls. One can only be thankful they don't succeed more often than they do.

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Housing Availability and Ease of Mobility in Fly-Over Land.
What are the two biggest headaches of metropolitan life? Aside from lousy schools, high housing costs and lots of traffic qualify.

Writing for the Oklahoma Council of Public Affairs, Wendell Cox finds Oklahoma Poised for Growth.

The essay is an interesting review of how transportation and land use policies affect both housing costs and drive times.

Among the data that stand out:

• Two-thirds of the variation in cost of living across large metropolitan areas can be explained by housing prices;
  
• Cities that ration land (Denver, Portland, San Francisco) through smart-growth policies have higher than average housing costs;
  
• In metropolitan areas with 1 million or more people, those with land rationing policies score 50 percent higher on a housing cost index than metropolitan areas that do not;
  
• Cities that have been the most aggressive in implementing land-rationing policies (smart growth) have seen their traffic congestion increase the most; and
  
• The economic growth of an urban area is linked to how easily it is to travel from one side of the region to another (this makes sense when you consider that it increases the use of comparative advantage among workers).

Cox concludes that Oklahoma has a bright future both for what it does (spend money on roads) and what it doesn't (implement "smart growth" policies).

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Transportation: Toll Roads Coming to You?
Toll roads may be coming to North Carolina and Minnesota.

Among the proposals in North Carolina: a $10 fee for everyone taking I-95 (the Boston-to-Miami corridor) through the state, and roads in the Research Triangle Park area.

While you would think this idea would bring a populist backlash, it hasn't. Says one Transportation department official: "Local support for these things has been incredible. In five public meetings, we've only had one person say anything negative at all."

Perhaps the issue is flying--or driving--under the radar. Or perhaps dissatisfaction with the status quo is causing the public to reconsider its opposition to tolls.

A survey conducted late last year in Minnesota showed support for tolls on a highway that connects downtown Minneapolis with its western suburbs.

I-394, currently has an HOV (carpool) lane; starting sometime in May, the road will have a HOT (high occupancy vehicle OR toll) lane.

While it's easy to denounce tolls as double taxation -- "Hey, we already paid for that road," a quick reality check reminds us that road maintenance costs money, too.

Obviously there are ways that states can improve their methods of building and maintaining roads, and it would be a pity if tolls served as a cushion to prevent necessary innovations in project management and policy changes (such as repealing "prevailing wage" laws that inflate labor costs.)

But tolls can be useful in financing and traffic management. (The Reason Public Policy Institute offers a lot of resources on the subject, by the way.) For information specifically about tolls (from an enthusiastic supporter of congestion pricing), check out TollRoads News.)

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A Cartoon Paints a Thousand-Word Essay.
Reviewing some of the entries over at the Detroit News weblog (where I serve as a contributor), I was reminded of the value of an editorial cartoon.

In the case of the News blog, the cartoons are provided by John Cox and Allen Forkum. They've got some good cartoons. My favorite is "The Generation Graft," which defines, in a cartoon of five people, the Social Security system.

Sprawl or Bust, meanwhile, ponders what would have happened if Americans were wringing about sprawl about 200 years ago.

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A Review of Ballot Measures
While everyone's talking about the presidential contest, a number of ballot measures in the states have the potential to bring good (and inflict harm) for years go come. The National Taxpayers Union offers a review of some of the measures decided this week.

Term Limits: Measures to weaken them were rejected in Arkansas and Montana.

Let the other guy pay: proposals to tax tobacco users, high-earners, and out-of-town tourists succeeded in several states. Oklahoma approved a tax on the gullible (i.e., a state lottery.)

I will pay for choo-choos: increased taxes for light-rail boondoggles passed in Colorado and Arizona. On the other hand, Florida voters pulled the plug on a $25 billion bullet train project. Missouri voters approved a measure to make sure that motor fuel tax revenues actually go to roads, and not transit systems.

Don't take me out to the ballgame: Kansas City (MO and KS) area voters rejected plans to increases taxes for sports stadiums. St. Louis county (MO) voters voted in favor of a measure requiring voter approval before any tax money is spent on sports stadiums. But voters Arlington (home of the perennial also-ran Texas Rangers baseball team) voted for a tax increase to buy a stadium for the lovable losers extremely wealthy sports team owners and men who play games for a living.

Let's repeal the laws of economics: Voters in Florida and Nevada approved a higher minimum wage rate, ensuring higher unemployment for the least productive workers.

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Autos: The New Axles of Evil.
A certain segement of the environmental movement, along with some urban planners and community activists, don't like cars or highways. (Says one noted author: "I believe in no more highways.") They don't want you to like cars, either, preferring instead that you take light rail, subways, or the bus, and live in densely-populated townhouse developments.

There are, of course, several innovations that could improve highway travel--computer-controlled cars that could triple road capacity and variable-rate tolling to smooth out traffic congestion to name just two--raise political rather than technical opposition. Why? Call it fear of the "axles of evil."

John Tierney, a staff reporter for the New York Times, doesn't especially enjoy cars. Now, he says "I no longer believe that my tastes should be public policy." Why? he was convinced by critics of "smart growth" and other efforts to restrict or otherwise downplay the role of cars.

Social and environmental problems caused by the car, he says would be made worse by most proposals of the car skeptics.

"The car is not merely a convenience but one of history's greatest forces for good, an invention that liberated the poor from slums and workers from company towns, challenged communism, powered the civil rights movement and freed women to work outside the home."

Other items of note from the article:

• Given a choice between equally-priced homes, 83 percent of Americans choose the suburbs.


• A super-high gas tax won't stop population shifts to the suburbs. At least this has been the case in Europe: "Even with $5-per-gallon gasoline, the number of cars per capita in Europe has been growing faster than in America in recent decades, while the percentage of commuters using mass transit has been falling. As the suburbs expand, Europe's cities have been losing people, too. Paris is a great place to visit, but in the past half-century it has lost one-quarter of its population."


• Traffic congestion has become worst in cities (New York, Chicago) that have population densities approaching those favored by "smart growth" planners.


• More people work in the 'burbs than in the center city--and commute from suburb to suburb. (Yet much transit is oriented in the suburb-to-city route).


• The alleged increase in commuting times is vastly oversold: "The length of the average commute, now about 25 minutes, rose just 40 seconds in the 1980's and about 2 minutes in the 1990's."


• Are we "paving over paradise" for parking lots? Not quite. "The major change in land use in recent decades has been the gain of 70 million acres of wilderness -- more than all the land currently occupied by cities, suburbs and exurbs."


• Is transit the cure? Not quite. Only percent of all urban commuters outside New York use transit--which takes twice as long on a per-trip basis than cars. Looking to transit is expensive and ineffective: "even if Congress miraculously tripled the annual subsidy for transit, the average driver's commute would be reduced by a grand total of 22 seconds."


• Which form of transportation is most heavily subsidized? Transit, which costs four times as much as trips by auto. Transit riders pay only one quarter of the cost. By contrast, drivers pay 19 out of every 20 cents for roads. Even if the loosest definition of the costs of automobile use are used, trips by car still cost only half as compared with transit.


• Is building new roads only a sucker's game, as posited by the theory of "induced demand?" No. "A new freeway does indeed attract new drivers, but that doesn't mean it's not worth building. Besides benefiting those drivers (no small thing), it eases the strain on the road network."


• Are toll roads or toll lanes only for the rich? "[E]ven drivers who won't pay the toll have come to appreciate the lanes because they divert traffic from the regular highway. And while affluent drivers are more likely to pay the bill, surveys have found people of all incomes using the lanes." And say that only "the affluent" pay the tolls, you've got to like that if gouging the rich is your thing. Everyone else gets to use (at no extra charge) roads that now have fewer cars on them.


• The "smart growth plus transit" approach lies in a blame-the-victim mentality. "After decades of working on technological fixes like beam-control roads, [traffic engineers have] turned to basic economics instead. They now see traffic jams as the equivalent of bread lines in the Soviet Union, a consequence of an unimaginative monopoly run by politicians loath to charge the market price for a valuable commodity. To be fair to the Soviet politicians, though, at least they didn't blame the public for the problem that they created. They didn't promote a smart-diet program urging people to eat less bread."


• The campaign against the car, and suburbs, has a social-class feel to it: "Intellectuals' distaste for the car and suburbia, and their fondness for rail travel and cities, are an odd inverse of the old aristocratic attitudes. The suburbs were quite fashionable when only the upper classes could afford to live there. Nineteenth-century social workers dreamed of sending crowded urbanites out to healthy green spaces. But when middle-class workers made it out there, they were mocked first for their ''little boxes made of ticky-tacky'' and later for their McMansions. Land Rovers and sports cars were chic when they were driven to country estates, but they became antisocial gas-guzzlers once they appeared in subdivisions."

I've not written much about transit--after all, there are so many other interesting areas of public policy, such as K-12 education, health care financing, and taxes, among other things. But this Times article pretty much covers the major points of the transit / housing / smart-growth debate that I have seen.

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Is Anything Beyond the Scope of Government?
At a time when government agencies are having a difficult time getting everything done that they should (by mission statement, at least) do, they keep trying to do more.

The Texas Department of Transportation wants to set up free wi-fi Internet access at 96 rest areas. People wanting a wired connection will have to pay their own freight. Perhaps these wired folks will cover the costs of the the entire operation, wired and wireless. But that's not clear from what I can tell.

A department spokesman said "We think this will be a huge win-win for Texas’ travelers. Knowing free Internet service is available at our rest areas will get drivers to make regular stops. Since fatigue is a factor in 1.5 percent of all crashes, anything we can do to get people to pull off the road and take a break is going to make our highways safer."

When you consider what's available on the Internet, next thing you know we will hear complaints that some people are using their free access to download porn, up to and including its most vile forms. Or perhaps someone will set up a spamming operation. Or any number of other illegal or unsavory actions sometimes taken online.

Blogger Richard Wiggins offers a few more questions:
-- What if those truckers stay up all night in chat rooms instead of resting?
-- What if um, professional services folks use the Internet to meet clients?
-- What if those without an ISP set up camp and never leave?

Iowa, meanwhile, will let a vendor test the use of wi-fi at 3 (and as many as 40) of its rest areas. The vendor's got the right idea: "We don't want people saying, "Hey, that's kind of cool, but why are my taxes being used for this?" Indeed. The vendor, I Spot Network, hopes to turn a profit by selling advertising on the connections.

Apparently Maryland is taking the trendy approach, a state officials saying "If they can go online while they travel it's a convenience for them and it ties in with Maryland's strategy of being a leader in technology." At least they plan to recoup the cost of buying a connection--though it raises the question of why state government is taking over something that is placed and financed by private vendors every day.

Truckstop.Net is an example of how the Internet can be delivered along roadways without government action.

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Infatuation with Transit Stalls Road Projects
Trapped in traffic? See a road that could be widened, but isn't? Perhaps the fault lies with insufficient tax revenues to fund the project. Or maybe it's just the result of misguided efforts that hold road projects hostage to ineffective public transit.

In Michigan, the Detroit News editorial board laments obstacles to widening Interstate 75 in Oakland County, the most widely-travelled road in the state.

"The Oakland stretch of I-75 is jammed with 200,000 commuters a day, bustle spawned by the county’s successful economy including 116,000 new jobs in the 1990s alone."

Regional planners are on record of supporting the addition of more lanes. So why has the project stalled? Calls to spend $2 billion on a bus system--and that's the cheapest transit option.

Meanwhile, Interstate 35 in Minnesota is split between the two Twin Cities. Both are crowded, but the western trunk, called I-35W, is perhaps the most clogged. The logical path is to expand that road, but the state can't. Why? The City of Minneapolis, through which the road travels, insists that money first be spent on more bus service. The Taxpayers League of Minnesota isn't impressed by the state law that gives the city veto power over a project that affects thousands of state residents

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A CRASH Course in Light Rail.
Houston has had a 7.5-mile long light rail system for less than a year -- and it has racked up 50 train/car crashes in that time.

The light rail authority blames drivers, but has also changed some lighting along the route, as suggested by the the Texas Transportation Institute.

The safest route would involve grade separation--elevating the tracks.
The authority blames some of the crashes on suburban congressmen who fought against additional money; the authority built the system at grade level to save money. That, of course, brings up the question of how much safety would have been purchased for the additional money required to build an elevated system. I don't know the answer, and would welcome any pointers on readers who can find a place to calculate the cost-per-accident avoided.

Based on current trends, the route is expected to carry 1 percent of local traffic by the end of 2004.

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When Public Transportation is Dirty, Poorly Managed.
Two items on public transportation this morning, both courtesy of the Buckeye Institute.

First, the Central Ohio Transit Authority (COTA), which services Columbus and its suburbs, has eliminated 30 percent of bus time on the road since 2001. During the same time, its expenses have been 30 percent higher than its peers. With this dismal record, it's going to ask voters (again) for more money.

Imagine, oh, McDonalds saying "Yes, we've had some problems with our service and management. Here's what we're going to do for you. We will cut our hours, reduce the number of items on the menu, and increase the prices."

The second transportation item has to do with the affects of mass transit on air quality. Usually mass transit is sold as a means of reducing congestion (never mind that it is almost always not terribly effective), but there's always the air quality issue as a back-up plan. Except that doesn't work out very well, either.

"A study by Dallas' transit agency ... concluded a proposed new light-rail line would reduce regional carbon monoxide emissions by less than one one-hundredth of a percent.

The proposed light-rail line would, however, hurt regional air quality by increasing nitrogen oxide emissions by 42 tons, nearly one-tenth of a percent."

In other words, the light rail system would make a net polluter.

Meanwhile, synconizing traffic signals is a much more effective way of reducing pollution, at a lower cost.

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Why the Lure of Private Rail?
What's so attractive about light rail, especially considering its relative ineffectiveness in dealing with traffic congestion?

The Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis asks (and answers) the question. "One economic reason is that the benefits of light rail are highly concentrated, while the costs are widely dispersed."

To paraphrase your Momma's words, the squeaky wheels get their light rail cars.

On the other hand, the costs of light rail are small enough on a per-person basis ($6 in St. Louis), that it's hard for folks to get worked up about it. Says the Fed, once again, "Even if these benefits are exaggerated and the taxpayer realizes the cost-ineffectiveness of light rail, it is probably not worth the $6 for that person to spend significant time lobbying against light rail."

Thanks to Out of Control for the tip. The group blog is a blogroll item for anyone interested in government performance and effectiveness.

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Minneapolis Light Rail Causes Traffic Problems
Sold as a way to alleviate traffic congestion, Minnesota's $715 million light rail system is instead causing traffic tie-ups.

Traffic light synchronization for the Hiawatha line is required, since the line uses surface streets. According to reports in the St. Paul Pioneer-Press (registration required), some automobile drivers are experiencing longer commutes as a result of having to wait for the two-car train.

Another complaint: riders are parking on neighborhood streets near the line, making life difficult for local residents. So far, the project has only one-fourth of the park-and-ride lots normally found for such systems.

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Transit Costs Soar-Again
Minnesota's foray into the train business is becoming expensive--double the projected cost.

In 1998, the expected cost for the Hiawatha Line was about $400 million; now the final bill will be over $715 million for the 12-mile line.

"Construction of the region's first light rail line is paid for by a mix of federal, state, county and local contributions," went a report in the St. Paul Pioneer Press (registration required).
Contributions, you say? Oh sure, I understand the logic--the reporter is trying to describe the mix of the funding stream. But remember those funds come from taxpayers (and not thin air), a point that's hard to emphasize too much. Is the money from those taxpayers being spent wisely? Not when you consider the relative cost-ineffectiveness of rail systems compared with roads, or even a bus system.

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Privatized Rest Areas.
The Mackinac Center for Public Policy is calling on the State of Michigan to contract out the operation of or sell outright its 83 rest areas.

The state spends nearly $7 million per year in upkeep and operational expenses, costs that could be borne by private companies that had a franchise to sell food or other goods and services in the rest areas. The State of Ohio, for example, received over $12 million in 2002 from rest areas on the Ohio Turnpike. (Toll roads are free of the state and federal prohibitions on commercial activity on government-owned land near highways.)

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Air Quality: It's Getting Better
With traffic congestion a regular topic of complaint in metropolitan areas, it's easy to assume that air quality is getting worse. Wrong.

PIRG (the group started by Ralph Nader) is wrong about many things, including the desirability of automobiles. Their latest report calls on governments to "curtail the growth of vehicle travel," citing pollution concerns.

Joel Schwartz dissects PIRG's report here. My favorite parts: "even with a tripling of driving [since 1970], technological improvements in vehicle emissions control reduced total emissions by 70 percent.... PIRG's fanciful claims not withstanding, technology will continue to win the battle against air pollution without the need to restrict people's travel choices."

Schwartz also takes on PIRG's advocacy of mass transit: "Rather than pursue the "public interest," PIRG seeks to override Americans' preferences."

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Mass Transit Doesn't Move Me
The Illinois Department of Transportation says that the next stage of transportation improvements in the far western suburbs of Chicago is three to five years away. It expects the area (US 59 to I-39) to double in population by 2030. One of the most sensible steps is one of the mostly hotly contested (by a minority of anti-auto activists): building a new road between I-88 and I-80. (Take a look at a map and you'll see a space just crying out for a road, especially given the population growth in the region.)

Of course, some will want more money on mass transit. But, as the Daily Herald notes, "though the Chicago area has the second highest usage of public transportation in the nation, over 90 percent of traffic is passenger vehicles."

Meanwhile, bus drivers in metropolitan Minnesota are on strike, and have been for over a week. (It's the usual culprit: disputes over pay, including health insurance plans.) The Taxpayers League of Minnesota has run a brief fact sheet/commentary on mass transit during the strike. Some examples:

Low income individuals, for whom transit is often seen as a vital service, make less than 5 percent of their trips by transit.

Mass transit wastes energy. Per-passenger mile, autos are 16 percent more efficient.

How about "social costs" of pollution, noise, and so forth? Cars win again, with a cost of 7 cents per passenger mile. A bus costs 40 cents a mile, and light rail--what captures the most imagination of transit advocates--costs up to $1.09 a mile.

American cities have nowhere near the population density required to make transit cost-effective.

Labels: Health care, Transportation

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Thieves among Airport Screeners
Writing in the suburban Chicago paper, the Daily Herald, Chuck Goudie recounts his tale of woe. He suspects that government workers in the TSA (Transportation Security Agency) pilfered his checked luggage, robbing him of an expensive short-range radio, a cellphone charger, and a cigarette lighter, which was empty.

We won't know conclusively, of course, but the response of a TSA representative brings to mind the response of "How much more would we hear of this if it happened with a private company in charge?" Since 9/11, the official response which has involved the greatest number of personnel has been the war in Iraq. The mass firing of contract screeners and the creation of the TSA has been the second largest response. While the war has rid the world of a, well, world-class tyrant, the beneficial effects of a new bureaucracy are less than certain.

Here are the relevant excerpts from Goudie's essay:

When TSA agents open your suitcase and dig through your socks and underwear, they are supposed to leave behind a piece of paper that states, "We were here." ...

On the day that my items were removed, there was no note left behind as required by the regulations. ...

[A TSA representative] said that because no TSA note was left behind, it was obvious that a TSA inspector never opened my bag. ...

TSA later fired 1,200 federal screeners after background checks revealed they had lied on their applications or had criminal histories including felonies. ....

I could file an airline claim to receive a maximum of $2,500 for stolen luggage. But all the airlines exclude things such as electronics, cash, jewelry and anything else attractive to unscrupulous employees.

Meanwhile, the Reason Public Policy Institute has offered several worthy proposals on how to increase aviation security.

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How To Deal With Traffic Congestion? Buy a Good Stereo
Anthony Downs, writing for the Brookings Institution, says that "Peak-hour traffic congestion is an inherent result of the way modern societies operate." To make things worse, people will use autos more and transit less as income increases.

He dismisses peak-time pricing, saying that most Americans would reject them because they "favor wealthier or subsidized drivers." That's not entirely true--toll lanes are used by all economic groups, and even all-Lexus lanes would take cars out of lanes used by everyone else, a win-win situation.

Expanding roadways to accommodate all peak traffic, on the other hand, is "prohibitively expensive." As for mass transit, it represents only 17 percent of all commuters, even in the most densely populated regions. Tripling transit capacity isn't cost-effective, either. It would reduce morning commuting trips by 8 percent--not nothing, of course, but not much. Finally, "living with congestion" is, Downs says, "the sole viable option."

"For the time being," he laments, "the only relief for traffic-plagued commuters is a comfortable, air-conditioned vehicle with a well-equipped stereo system, a hands-free telephone, and a daily commute with someone they like."

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The Lure of Light Rail
As a skier, I noticed this article in Stateline about the difficulties that Denver-area residents face while trying to get to their state's fine ski resorts. The drive has become like rush hour. The solution, according to some is more transit, especially monorail.

(Sorry, but this reminds me of Marge versus the Monorail, a classic episode of The Simpsons. As the official web site for the show summarizes the episode, "Mr. Burns is forced to pay a $3 million fine for illegally dumping toxic waste under trees in the park. At a town meeting where Springfield's citizens discuss how to best use the new funds, Lyle Lanley, a charismatic traveling salesman convinces them to build a completely useless monorail. Marge is the only one in town who disapproves of the project and when the monorail is complete disaster, her reservations are proved correct.")

Meanwhile, ski area owners are responding to the problem with private-sector solutions. "Some ski areas are coming up with ways to cope with bad traffic: overnight hotel accommodations cheap enough to keep metro-area skiers from commuting home after a day on the slopes, and flex-time skiing with a half-day lift ticket that can be used any four hours of the day."

Labels: Transportation

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In Search of Quaint Cities
How would you like to be able to ride a bike or walk to everywhere you need for work, shopping, and so forth? OK, so neither one sounds very good during this midwestern deep freeze. Yet at other times, it sounds pretty handy: no traffic jams, businesses where you know the owners, and so forth. Such is the dream of "neotraditional" urban planners. You may not have heard of it, but it's the pursuit of "quaint," and it may be coming to a town near you.

The tool: more restrictive zoning. Randal O'Toole argues a point you won't find in many places this day: that's just calling for more of what got us in trouble.

"Some planners recognize that zoning is the true cause of urban "blight." Says Randall Arendt, a planning professor at the University of Massachusetts, zoning is why America looks the way it does. The law is the major problem with the development pattern."

O'Toole heads up the Thoreau Institute, which has a lot of data and provocative ideas on land use, urban planning, and transportation.

Labels: Transportation

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Toll Roads Proposed for Minnesota
Toll roads are under discussion for Minnesota, and none too soon. Twin Cities traffic is the second worst in the country, if you figure out where congestion is increasing the most.

The pay-as-you-go concept gets qualified support from the Texas Transportation Institute. Bill Stockton, the associate director of the Texas Transportation Institute, says "They're not a panacea; everyone wants a silver bullet to solve transportation problems. This allows you to make better use of the facilities you have instead of surrendering to gridlock."

Stockton adds, "I'm a traffic engineer, and I can tell you you'll never be able to build all the capacity you could possibly need." Well, of course, since there's something of a disconnect between road usage and the price that a person pays to be on the road. True, fuel taxes do roughly correspond with the number of miles traveled. But there's nothing to concentrate the mind on the actual cost of roads like having to hand over some change to a toll booth attendant, dropping coins in a collection basket, or hearing the "beep" of a transponder as the car passes a traffic monitor. Plus, fuel taxes don't allow for congestion pricing, or charging higher rates during the busiest times of day.

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Minnesota Makes Small Move Towards Toll Roads
According to a report by Minnesota Public Radio (link is likely to decay soon), "Gov. Tim Pawlenty says his administration is moving forward with plans to build toll lanes in the metro area."

Sounds like a plan. With state taxes already among the highest in the country, there's little room for raising taxes to pay for road expansion. Unfortunately, there is often little room for new lanes themselves.

Labels: Transportation

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Lost Inventory
A writer to the Detroit Free Press asks about the distances used on road signs ("33 miles to Pontiac: does that mean to the city limits, or to the center of the city?"). Columnist Matt Helms says "the Michigan Department of Transportation didn't immediately have available a list of signs to check out and see exactly which spot in Pontiac was used for the 33-miles sign."

This is not the most pressing policy issue, by any means, but it points out what may be a management problem. Shouldn't the Department of Transportation know where all of its signs are? With bar coding placed on every item in a supermarket, and the growth of radio ID tags and GPS technology, it would seem that the state ought to know where its property is "immediately."

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Slippery Slopes
The Ironwood Daily Globe, in the Lake Superior snowbelt area, reports that Wisconsin has cut the hours its road-clearing crews will operate. The result could be a "long, accident-filled winter."

I may be guilty of special pleading--I would, after all, like to do some driving in Wisconsin this season. But shouldn't clearing the roads be one of the primary responsibilities of the government? Granted, it may not be exempt from some cost-cutting measures, but with the state poised to take on any number of other projects--including a $3 million "Hmong cultural center"--there are still yet other ways to balance the budget.

(Governor Doyle vetoed the appropriation for the Hmong center, but apparently he objected only to the procedure used to bring about the funding, not actually having state taxpayers pick up the tab.)

Labels: Transportation

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The Road Tolls for Thee
The Detroit Free Press' transportation beat writer says that the goal of having 90 percent of Michigan's roads in "good condition" by 2007 won't be met. Matthew Helms agrees with Governor Granholm that the state should therefore not expand its road network. It sounds plausible--don't expand until you maintain what you have. But it is rooted in a false choice. Michigan should expand its road system and upgrade its current one. And it can, if it uses tolling to construct some of the new roads.

Labels: Transportation

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Do SUVs Destroy Roads?
Chicago, like many Chicago cities, has its own vehicle tax. Mayor Richard Daley wants the city to charge SUV owners another $90 on the premise that their vehicles do more damage to the roads. A professor of civil engineering tells the Sun-Times that the argument is full of potholes: "You'd have to weigh what a truck weighs -- at least double the weight of an SUV" for the argument to be valid.

Labels: Transportation

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Working Poor Need Autos, Not Bicycles
Unless you happen to live in a very small geographic area--Manhattan, say--you must have a car to fully participate in American life and work. So who's standing in the way of the working poor getting access to better jobs? Some advocates of mass transit.

Wendell Cox and Ronald Utt observe that 20 percent of federal transportation dollars are spent on mass transit, which serves only 2 percent of travelers. Further, transit's share of urban travel has plunged to that level from 7 percent in 1960.

As it turns out, roughly 2 of every 3 transit riders are from low-income households. Given the choice between the flexibility of having a car and the inflexibility of depending on transit, most people opt for the car--if they can afford it.

Some scholars advocate giving the poor money for automobiles. (The Buckeye Institute found that it would be cheaper to lease new cars for transit riders than it would be to build a rail system.) Federal rules were changed a few years ago to make it easier for the poor to have a car.

The Surface Transportation Policy Project doesn't like this, though, and wants to make sure that federal policy discourages the working poor from achieving one of the badges of economic self-sufficiency, automobile ownership. It favors funding bicycles and transit.

Bicycles? Fine for recreation. But as a public policy, it's So 19th century.

Labels: Transportation

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Minnesota to Advocate "Zipper" to Cut Down on Merge Rage
The Pioneer-Press points out one of the frustrations of highway driving today: "It's maddening when you're sitting in a long line of cars merging to a single lane on the highway and someone zips along in the open lane and cuts in near the front of the line."

The Minnesota Department of Transportation will be advocating a "zipper" technique for dealing with the problem.

Electronic signs will tell motorists when to queue up early, old-style (one lane), and when to occupy two lanes up until the point where the second lane disappears.

A Department of Transportation official says "If traffic is heavy, the system will instruct motorists to use both lanes and take turns once they've reached the defined merge point just before the lane closure."

It's good to see the state trying to address a minor though common problem. Now if state residents would only learn how to yield and merge properly. My driving around the area confirms the news account that "Minnesota drivers are not good at yielding the right of way in general, and the state led the nation in 2001 with 15 percent of its accidents caused by failure to yield."

Labels: Transportation

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When is a Road not a Road?
Matt Helms, transportation columnist for the Detroit Free Press, takes on this question from a reader: this highway was just rebuilt, and it looks like there are three lanes, but there are really only two. Why?

The answer: federal environmental policy. Right now, that space is just an extra-wide shoulder. It would take too much trouble to pass the environmental policy tests. But should the policy governing roads change, the state will just have to make a few changes, and ... you've got a new lane.

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Toll Takers Brought to You by Walgreens
Continuing in the theme of corporate involvement, the Chicago Tribune (registration required) reports that the Illinois State Toll Highway Authority is looking into having Walgreens and other retail stores distribute electronic toll collection devices (known in the state as I-PASS).

Currently, 40 percent of motorists use I-PASS; the toll authority would like that to increase to 75 percent. And they're on to something. Not only does it save in personnel costs (fewer toll takers at booths), but more importantly, it reduces bottlenecks at tollboths, traffic jams that, more than the actual cost of tolls, give tollroads a bad name.

The I-PASS device acts more or less like a debit card, linked to a stored bank of money; motorists add value to it by check or credit card, and a small amount is deducted each time the car to which it is attached passes a toll "gate" (sometimes a literal gate, sometimes not). Making the transponder available in retail settings--currently, a motorist must call, write, or go online to get one--should increase usage rates.

Labels: Transportation

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Chicago-Milwaukee Rail?
Milwaukee-area officials have agreed to spend $91.5 million in federal funds to study ways to extend Metra service from Kenosha to Milwaukee. (For information on Chicagoland's passenger rail system, click here.) Mass transit usually doesn't live up to its promise. Population density in America is seldom high enough to justify its cost. For a review of mass transit in general, see The Public Purpose.

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Speed Limits to Rise on Illinois Tollway?
Officials at the Illinois State Toll Highway Authority are thinking about raising the 55-mph speed limit, at least in some areas. A spokesman says "We're looking at doing anything we can do to improve customer service."

Well, good for them. While metro Chicago highways have their stop-and-go times, often cars travel in excess of the stated speed limit. The motorist who sticks with 55 is more likely than not going to be a traffic hazard.

With the limited enforcement of the current speed limit, it makes sense to bring the stated limit more into conformity with the speed at which most people actually drive. The 85 percentile rule, I think it's called. People are in general smart enough to know what's an appropriate speed, and artificially low speed limits only furthers a cynical view of law.

Labels: Transportation

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Michigan Governor Vetoes Mackinac Bridge Proposal
Michigan's governor, Jennifer Granholm, vetoed a series of bills that would have folded the bridge's costs--currently paid for by user fees (tolls)--into the general transportation budget for the state. Thorugh the Detroit Free Press headline said that New Funds for Mackinac Bridge fixes rejected, Granholm did the right thing. Transportation planners ought to make greater use of tolls and new tolling technology; as the only road over a four mile span of Great Lakes waters, the "Mighty Mac" bridge is an obvious case for tolls.

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NYC and Flyover Country Residents Are Different, After All
Remember that famous cartoon (from New Yorker, I think), the map of the U.S., in which 9/10 of the land in sight is taken up by New York City and the Jersey shore? It highlights, among other things, how different New York is from the rest of the country.

The Washington Post (newspaper of, uhm, another unusual city) reports on the car culture (or lack thereof) in New York. Only one in four New Yorkers, it turns out, has a drivers license. "New Yorkers plan work and play around their inability to drive," the paper says. Of course, it's not hard to get around in a car when there are so many people, and
"alternate side of the street parking, rapacious meter maids, $100 parking tickets, exorbitant insurance rates, incomprehensible and contradictory highway signs and the fact that no car in New York ever stays in its lane."

Perhaps this goes some way towards explaining how the residents of Gotham don't always see things the same way that people elsewhere do: in regards to transportation, at least, they live more like residents of Paris, France, than Paris, Michigan. Think of how the auto fits into the broader American culture: hundreds of thousands watching NASCAR events in person (while millions watch on TV); getting a drivers license as a rite of passage of adolescence; "making out" in the car; long family vacations on the road, driving through states that seem to never end, such as Nebraska, Kansas, or Georgia; hauling sheetrock in the station wagon or pickup truck; country music songs about trucks, with whimsical lyrics such as "I met all my wives in traffic jams / You know there's something women like about a Pickup Man," and two institutions almost gone even from flyover country, the drive-in theater and drive-in restaurant. (On the other hand, there are drive-up bank tellers, drive-through restaurants, and even drive-through purveyors of fancy coffee.)

New York is the only area in the country in which transit is anything more than a minor part of the transportation mix. That's due not only to its culture--something policy makers, in general, try to change all the time--but because of its population density. Most Americans outside of New York don't want the population density of New York, and they're not going to want its transportation system, either.

Labels: Transportation

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Wisconsin to Study Electronic Tolling to Rebuild Highways
The state of Wisconsin figures that it will take $6.2 billion to reconstruct Milwaukee-area highways. The Department of Transportation says it is considering using electronic tolling. The Wisconsin Policy Research Institute, by the way, makes the case for electronic tolling and user fees to pay for highways. Here's their report, in PDF format.

Labels: Transportation

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Be Thankful for Inaction
"Sprawl" is the latest non-problem to be addressed by government planners. The Detroit Free Press reports on a "blue ribbon panel" with this photo caption: Strong voices on both sides of the debate may lead to political inaction.

Good.

Some policies affecting zoning and land use ought to be changed. But it's more likely they will be changed for the worse than for the better, so inaction is preferable to action.

But anyway, among the recommendations of the report:

Lower property tax rates for agricultural use, to "save farmland."
Make the distribution of state money for roads and sewers conditional on "regional growth plans."
By government rule (zoning), make people live on smaller plots of land.
More funding for mass transit [the dream continues, even in the state built by auto factories.]

The Mackinac Center, by the way, calls this "social engineering." Looks like that is still in demand, though.

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Toll Road Cheats in Chicago. Will Wisconsin use electronic tolling?
An audit conducted by the Illinois State Toll Highway Authority finds that 0.3 percent of all tolls due at manned tollbooths go unpaid (how is this possible? workers giving friends a wave-through?). But 10 percent of all tolls due at unmanned toobooths (some without as much as a gate) go unpaid--a 33-to-1 ratio. In the I-Pass lanes, which use electronic tolling, 6 percent of cars are toll cheaters--probably because the drivers don't have the transponder, and appreciate the ability to blow through at 50 mph.

Through an aggressive enforcement campaign involving video cameras and mailing out tickets to violators, the toll authority has reduced violations from 4.2 percent last year to 3.2 percent for the first 6 months of this year.

One oddity from the report: At at least one toll collection area, people paid more than they were supposed to. Why? One theory is that it's simply quicker. At the Joliet Road plaza, the fee is 15 cents (two or three coincs), but many motorists throw in a quarter (one coin).

A toll of 15 cents? People, if you're going to have a toll system that requires cars to make a stop, set the toll high enough to make a stop worthwhile--40 or 50 cents. On the other hand, if you're going to have small payments, electronic tolling is the way to go.

Meanwhile, the Journal-Sentinel reports on a proposal to pay for road projects in Milwaukee with electronic tolling. But don't count on it. The state is already sitting on $91 million in federal funds--uncharacteristically unspent after 12 years. The Wisconsin Policy Research Institute, by the way, argued in favor of using tolls in this 2002 report (pdf format).

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Electronic Tolling to Increase on Chicago Roadways
The Illinois Toll Highway Authority has announced that it's going to add 22 electronic tolling ("I-Pass") lanes to the Chicago metro roadway system. It's about time. Tolls make sense--people who use the roads the most pay for them the most--but the heavy reliance on manned tollbooths do not. They take up way too much time, and personnel costs.

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Megaprojects, Cost Overruns, and Political Games
Cost overruns are a given when dealing with large public works projects. The Chicago-area based Daily Herald has a lengthy story today about the subject, and a study that says Chicago officials are underestimating the true cost of expanding O'Hare International Airport. If true, O'Hare expansion would follow in this tradition:

The Big Dig, a road project underneath Boston Harbor, quadrupled in cost, to $15 billion.

The new Denver International Airport, which doubled in cost from the six years from voter approval to startup.

Other projects in Chicago that have had significant overruns, including the renovation of Soldier Field.

In his book, "Megaprojects and Risk," Bent Flyvbjerg studied multibillion-dollar construction projects worldwide and found about nine out of 10 went over budget, with many running 40 percent over original estimates

A consulting firm hired by suburbs that oppose O'Hare expansion says that the cost of the project will be $16 billion; the city of Chicago says the true cost will be closer to $6 billion. The differences come from the way that the suburbs and the city label different projects. The suburbs count some projects as part of the expansion (and thus, presumably, optional), while the city says the same projects would have to be done with or without the expansion going forward. These include

$3.8 billion for the "World Gateway Program" to expand current terminals and add two more.

$2.1 billion for an ongoing capital improvements programs.

$2.7 billion for additional operating costs that would be required during the expansion process.

Finally, the Illinois Department of Transportation estimates that road projects, including laying in an access from the west (I've lived in the western suburbs, and think this would be a great idea) will cost another $2.3 billion. The city says this shouldn't be part of the expansion numbers either, since that's a state responsibility. But clearly, the utility of those projects depends heavily on whether or not O'Hare is expanded.

The Herald digs out an academic who give us the obvious (but necessary to hear, again) truth: big projects get out of control. Alan Altshuler, a professor in the Kennedy School of Government, says that when (as is usually the case) they face uncertainty, project boosters pick the most optimistic figure. "There are such powerful political incentives to underestimate costs when you're trying to sell projects, that people just come in low."

The suburbs have a bias towards inflating the numbers; the city has a bias towards lowballing the estimate. I'm inclined to go with the suburb's numbers.

Does O'Hare needed to be expanded? Probably. But Illinoisians--and airline passengers generally--ought to know what they're getting into ahead of time.

By the way, the Reason Public Policy Institute reports on a proposal to turn the operation of Atlanta Hartfield Airport over to a private contractor.

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Road Screw-Up Costly
The Virginia Department of Transportation (VDOT) has a reputation for poor management, and its reputation is not getting any better.

VDOT has been widening I-64 in the Hampton Roads area, and motorists who had hoped for traffic relief are going to have to wait longer. Department officials are figuring out how to deal with 2.5 miles of new road (not yet in service) that does not meet safety standards. The roadway is improperly graded, meaning that water could pool on the road, causing cars to hydroplane.

Inspectors first noted the problem in December, but VDOT's top leader, Philip Shucet, did not hear about this until June. Shucet is not in danger of losing his job. The $85 million project is already over budget; this could add another $5 million to the costs.

Keep this in mind next time you hear someone argue that privatization shouldn't be tried because private companies can't be trusted to manage public projects.

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Will Michigan Chase Transit Follies?
An official state panel will soon be floating the idea that Michigan spend up to $1 billion to buy land on urban fringes to preserve "open space" and counteract "suburban sprawl." The panel, headed up by two leaders of the more-government-is-better school of thought (former governor William Milliken, a Republican, and former attorney general Frank Kelly, a Democrat), will probably also offer the been-there-failed-at-that approach of transit-oriented development. A far better approach, one favored by the Senate Majority Leader, would address crime and lousy schools, two factors that encourage people to move out of cities.

For a market-oriented view of a way to deal with sprawl, read this report from the Michigan-based Mackinac Center for Public Policy.

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Tolls that Bridge Trolls and Yoopers
The Mackinac Bridge connecting Michigan's two peninsulas is a fine piece of engineering, and beauty. (It was the subject of my first "real" term paper; a project for a junior high class in Michigan history.) Unfortunately, it's also due for some major maintenance, including sandblasting off multiple layers of lead paint; completely replacing the railing and the road deck.

The question is how to pay for this upkeep, which amount to about $275 million. The fare, which has been $1.50 per passenger vehicle since 1969, was recently raised to $2.50. Some members of the state legislature are calling for the costs of fixing the bridge--which has been largely self-funded (though the bridge authority still owes the state $65 million from its original financing)--to be rolled into the state transportation budget.

That would be the wrong move. Not only would it rob state roads of badly needed repairs, but it would be a step away from the user-pay principle, which is a better way to build a road system than the sausage-making political process of allocating funds out of a state budget.

(A note to non-Michiganders: "Yooper" is the term for people who live in the Upper Peninsula, or "U.P.", while "Trolls" are those who, naturally enough, live "under the bridge.")

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Turning Air Traffic Controll over to Private Companies
The Chicago-area Daily Herald, "U.S. House and Senate negotiators have agreed on language that would allow about 70 smaller airports nationwide - including DuPage, Palwaukee and Aurora - to hire private air traffic controllers." (DuPage county airport, and perhaps the others as well, is a case of wasteful public spending, but that's another day.) The National Air Traffic Controllers Association (the union of federal employees who do most of the air traffic control work) are, of course, alarmed. Meanwhile, Robert Poole of the Reason Public Policy Institute, observes that other countries have successfully used privatization, and encourages the U.S. to do the same.

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Private Toll Roads May Be Safer
Out of Control, a blog run by some folks with the Reason Public Policy Institute, notes the vast disparity between travel deaths on the roads last year (42,815) and on commercial aircraft (0). One possible way to increase traffic safety is to rely more on toll roads.

Why? Toll operating companies must offer an atractive product--smoothly flowing traffic--or people will go with other alternatives. The company that manages a toll road in California has a team of servicemen who will tow a car, bring gas, or take other steps to keep the traffic moving. Traffic that moves at a consistent speed is safer than traffic that varies a lot.

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Another Reason for Electronic Tolling
In another automotive/road story, today's Daily Herald of suburban Chicago says that the Illinois State Highway Authority has already chased down people 50+ violators: people who have passed through tollway booths (many are unmanned, or even without gates) without paying. Now they're going down the food chain, pursuing people with as few as 5 violations. (The toll authority, presumably, has gotten much better at managing and reviewing its extensive video archive of tollboth transactions.)

There is a due process concern in this. The Herald qauotes one defense attorney as saying "You only have 18 months to file DUI charges, but you can go two years back for a 50-cent toll?"

Overall, though I'm glad that the authority is finally making enforcement stick. The system is based on the principle of user-pays, and, well, everyone who uses it should pay. But anyone who lives in metro Chicago (or those who drive through on a regular basis) ought to be using electronic tolling (the version there is called I-PASS), which goes a long way to eliminating the bottlenecks of tollbooths.

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"It's not a Remedial Program. It's a Revenue-Generating Program."
In an effort to maintain college scholarships for the middle class, Michigan's legislature has passed (and the governor is expected to sign) two measures that should increase the state's take by $65 to $75 million a year. The first lowers the legal standard for drunk driving from 0.10 to 0.08 blood alcohol content (BAC). This comes after lobbying from the neo-prohibitionist group MADD, and ore importantly, threats from the feds to withhold highway money (which the feds collect and then send back to the state) for highway construction. (So much for federalism, again.)

A second measure levies a number of new (or higher) fees for driving licences for those with specified violations. Those with 7 or more points face another $100 fee come renewal time, with another $50 for each point. The fine for driving without a license, or without proof of insurance goes to $150. (Driving 9 miles over the speed limit--which would put you in the slow lane in many of the highways outside Chicago, and, I suspect, in Michigan as well--is punished by 2 points.)

According to the Detroit News,

Lawmakers who championed the bill said their main goal was to cut the toll inflicted by drivers with bad records, who are involved in one of every six traffic deaths in the state.

Michigan's crackdown was patterned on a system launched 20 years ago in New Jersey. But officials there said the system wasn't meant to make the roads safer, and they haven't studied whether it has helped cut down the number of fatal crashes.

"It's not a remedial program," said David Weinstein, a spokesman for New Jersey's Motor Vehicle Commission, which administers the program. "It's a revenue-generating program. It wasn't designed with the idea of making bad drivers good or getting bad drivers off the road, although that is a byproduct in some instances."

I'm no apologist for reckless drivers (they get higher fines under the measure, too, as they should). But here again, we see the growing appetite of government justified in the name of public safety. When it comes to speed (and I'm actually drive on the slower side), it isn't absolute speed that causes a problem, it's mixing 45mph slowpokes with 85mph racers. For some views on motor vehicle laws that are contrary to what you will find at MADD, AAA, and such, check out the National Motorists Association.

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Flower Power Along Illinois Roads
Illinois, like most states, overgrew its government during the 1990s, and paid the price in budget shortfalls when revenues fell flat. So the latest initiative of the new governor is ... planting flowers along interstate roads.

The state already spends $1 million a year on landscaping around roads. Estimates of the new push for flowers run from $1 to $2 million. According to the Chicago Sun-Times, first lady Patti "Blagojevich said her new program will be worth the relatively small cost because it will draw tourist dollars and cut back on mowing."

Perhaps it will save some money on mowing costs, but certainly not the entire amount. As for tourism? "Hey Honey, let's go to Illinois this year for vacation. I hear they have a nice set of petunias at mile marker 89."

UPDATE: Lest Illinois residents think they can save tax money and still have prettied-up roadsides by doing the plantings themselves, they best consider whether they would fare the fate of some people in western Canada, where unionized government workers see voluntary action as a threat to their jobs--and are willing to threaten peaceful citizens to take their own initiative.

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Sprawl, Sprawl, Sprawl, Sprawl
The U.S. Census Bureau is out with a new release on the nation's shifting demographics. If you've read much about demographics, you'll not be surprised to learn that the top five growing cities during the time 2000-2002 were in Arizona and Nevada.

The Bureau also notes that Joliet, Ill., is the 10th-fastest growing incorporated area, growing at a clip of 11.4 percent. This provides the suburban Chicago-based Daily Herald a chance to trot out the bogeyman of "Sprawl" with this headline: "Suburb's Sprawl Gaining Speed."

While the Census Bureau says that the City of Chicago lost population during the last two years, "The fastest-growing areas of the state in 2002 were towns anywhere from 20 to 40 miles from downtown Chicago." It notes that other cities near Joliet, including Romeoville (13.5 percent), Plainfield, and Oswego grew by double-digit figures in the time July 2001 to July 2002.

Why the growth in this areas, which involve over an hour's commute to the Chicago Loop?
- Some people value the opportunity to get some "country living" far from the urban core.

- Cheaper land prices mean, as one house-shopper put it, "you can get something new out here for the price of what's old where we live now" (in a closer-in suburb). A sales rep for a developer, quoted in the article, "barely had time to gasp between phone calls and visitors streaming in to see model homes that range from about $130,000 to $158,000." In the closer-in suburb in which I lived during four years, that kind of money will buy a condo (and perhaps only a one-bedroom one at that), not a house.

Of course, an article about population growth can't ignore the professional fretters. The "village planner" for Plainfield says ""We see growth generally as a good thing as long as it's done as smart growth." Ah smart growth! That nebulous term that is a rallying cry for a motley collection of big city mayors who hate to lose population (and power), anti-auto cranks, environmentalists who prefer to use land for birds rather than people, and romantics wishing to re-create the mythical "community" of early 20th-century living, complete with boulevards, street cars, and large front porches. (Oddly enough, this last group wishes to re-establish a pattern of living that was the "suburban sprawl" of its day.)

The village planner of Plainfield defines "smart growth" as "working with developers to make sure Plainfield, Will County's oldest community, does not lose its identity to development." Hmm. Who defines a "community's identity"--a centralized planner, or the voluntary interactions of its residents? Apparently, the thinking goes, the top down approach is best.

The article also argues that another contributing factor to growth on the metro fringe is that "Interstate highways and suburban rail lines make it easy to commute to work." That depends on what your definition of "easy commute" is. Since my wife wanted to live and work in the 'burbs, not the city, I spent 2 hours and 40 minutes commuting each day. Granted, taking Metra (the regional rail line) was cheaper than driving and parking, and much less nerve-racking.

But as even the Daily Herald article notes, jobs, not just people, are moving to the suburbs. This means that as facilitators of "sprawl," highways (and where they exist, commuter rail lines) are fairly small. The Buckeye Institute, based in Columbus, O (which has itself seen a fair amount of "sprawl"), demolishes the "highways cause sprawl" argument in this study. A brief commentary based on the study is here, and the press release is here.

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