New Geography

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  • For High-Speed Rail It Looks Like the End of the Line

    With its vote on September 21, the Senate Appropriations Committee ended the rail boosters’ hopes of getting a meaningful appropriation for high-speed rail in the new (FY 2012) fiscal year. It probably also dealt a decisive death blow to President Obama’s loopy goal of "giving 80 percent of Americans access to high-speed rail."

    By including only a token $100 million for high-speed rail as a "placeholder" in their FY 2012 budget recommendations (a sum that is likely to be further cut in the House-Senate negotiations on the FY 2012 appropriations), Senate appropriators have done more than merely declare a temporary slowdown in the high-speed rail program. They have effectively given a vote of "no confidence" to President Obama’s signature infrastructure initiative. Along with their House counterparts who had denied the program any new money, the Senate lawmakers have sent a bipartisan signal that Congress has no appetite for pouring more money into a venture that many lawmakers have come to view as a poster child for wasteful government spending.

    Their posture is understandable. After committing $8 billion in stimulus money and an additional $2.5 billion in regular appropriations, the Administration has little to show for in terms of concrete results or accomplishments. Aside from an ongoing project to upgrade track between Chicago and St. Louis (a $1.1 billion venture that promises to offer a mere 48 minute reduction in travel time between those two cities), no significant construction has begun on any of the authorized rail projects.

    In the meantime, the Department of Transportation has rushed to distribute the balance of the authorized HSR dollars, lest Congress decides to rescind any funds that remain unobligated. Continuing its practice of scattering money far and wide rather than focusing it on one or two worthwhile projects, the Federal Railroad Administration approved in September over $480 million worth of planning, engineering and construction grants "to improve high-speed and intercity passenger rail service" in 11 states. The beneficiaries are New York, Texas, New England (Maine, Vermont, Rhode Island, Connecticut), North Carolina, Virginia, Washington State, Oregon and Pennsylvania. The awards range from $149 million to New York State to as little as $13 million to the state of Oregon, and they average under $40 million per individual grant. It remains to be seen how quickly the recipient states will put these funds to work—and what kind of service improvements these grants will bring about.

    From an examination of the grant announcements it becomes clear that none of the grants will help to bring true "high-speed" rail service to America. At best, they will permit modest incremental improvements in speed and frequency of existing Amtrak services by helping to upgrade railway tracks of Class One railroads on which Amtrak runs its trains. The U.S. Department of Transportation (DOT) has implicitly acknowledged to have revised its program objective.  It has dropped its earlier rhetoric that high-speed rail "is just around the corner" (Secretary LaHood’s words) or that "80 percent of Americans will have access to high-speed rail" (repeated assertions by LaHood and DOT press releases).  

    Instead, the DOT (through its Federal Railroad Administration) is trying to lower the expectations by stating that "the true potential of high-speed rail will not be achieved or realized overnight." (FRA’s "vision statement") It’s a welcome sign that the Department has abandoned its quixotic goal of revolutionizing rail travel overnight. It may also signal the Administration’s realization that it cannot unilaterally force its vision upon a fiscally conservative Congress, a largely indifferent public and a skeptical, risk-averse investment community. If high-speed rail is eventually to find its place in America, it will be because market conditions will create a favorable climate for its development and acceptance – not because Washington in its wisdom has decided that the country needs it – and needs it now!    

    California’s Bullet Train beset by mounting political and financial problems

    Meanwhile, the one true U.S. high-speed rail project – California’s LA-to-San Francisco bullet train – is beset by mounting political and financial problems.  Nearly three years after the passage of the enabling Proposition 1A and less than a year before construction is scheduled to start on the first line segment in the Central Valley, construction costs have doubled the 2008 estimate. There is no evident source of where the additional funds to complete Phase One (LA-SF) system will come from since the prospect of both further federal money and private risk capital is remote. As one recent report put it, the project is being pursued "in the confident hope of a miracle."

    The systems’ first stage – a $10-14 billion 160-mile line segment in the Central Valley from Bakersfield to Merced – has run into determined opposition from local residents and farming interests during the ongoing environmental impact review. The possibility of lengthy court challenges could delay construction, thus increasing costs, eroding political support and putting federal money at risk.

    At the policy level, the project has been subject recently to several analyses. First came a critical report by California legislature’s fiscal watchdog, the non-partisan Legislative Analyst’s Office (LAO). It questioned the Rail Authority’s cost estimates and its decision to build the first segment in a sparsely populated region where travel demand is not expected to be sufficient to cover operating expenses. The LAO concluded that if the total cost of building the Phase One system were to grow as much as the revised Authority estimate for the Central Valley segment (an increase of 57%), the whole system would cost not $43 billion as originally estimated, but $67 billion. Concern about escalating costs and overly optimistic ridership forecasts were echoed by an independent Peer Review Group and numerous newspaper editorials. Even some of the state former legislative supporters, such as state Senators Joe Simitian, Alan Lowenthal and Mark DeSaulnier, have begun to express reservations and urge the Authority to rethink its direction. (See, "California’s Bullet Train – On the Road to Bankruptcy," InnoBriefs, May 31, 2011).

    A more recent challenge to the project’s financial credibility came from a team of respected independent experts, Alain Enthoven, William Grindley and William Warren, who cooperate with a citizen watchdog group, the Community Coalition on High Speed Rail. The team has concluded that without further federal aid (which almost certainly can no longer be counted upon) the project stands no chance of meeting its legislative requirements and the conditions of the enabling bond initiative (Proposition 1A). Nor is reliance on private financial participation a credible option.  In the authors’ judgment, private risk capital hasn’t to date and will not come in the future without revenue guarantees (aka public subsidy).

    The authors conclude: "With highly questionable prospects for federal grants or private ‘at risk’ construction funds, but the certainty that costs will continue to increase, the logic for continuing the largest project in California’s history is highly questionable."  (Alain Enthoven, William Grindley and William Warren, The Financial Risks of California’s Proposed High-Speed Rail Project, September 14, 2011, www.cc-hsr.org ). (Note: The report’s financial analyses and conclusions have been reviewed in detail and verified by high ranking California State officials, according to reliable sources.)

    But politically the most damaging blow to the project has come from a just released opinion survey. According to this poll, nearly two-thirds of California’s likely voters (62.4%) would stop the bullet train project from proceeding further. Virtually the same number said they are unlikely to ever travel on the train between Los Angeles and San Francisco, thus casting doubt on the Authority’s optimistic ridership forecasts. What is more, the project came in dead last (at 11%) in a list of voters’ spending priorities, according to the Irvine-based Probolsky Research polling outfit (as reported in The Sacramento Bee, September 29, 2011). With declining public support as evidenced by this poll, and with the State coming to a point where it will have to prioritize future public spending, enthusiasm for the project among politicians in Sacramento could evaporate.

    Given the possibility of the California bullet train’s demise, the attention and hopes of high-speed train advocates probably will (and should) turn to the Northeast Corridor – the nation’s most likely travel corridor where high-speed rail can eventually succeed and prosper.

    Ken Orski has worked professionally in the field of transportation for over 30 years.

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    Note: the NewsBriefs can also be accessed at www.infrastructureUSA.org
    A listing of all recent NewsBriefs can be found at www.innobriefs.com

  • Los Angeles Downtown Stadium Cloaked in ‘Green’ Snake Oil

    AEG’s downtown stadium in Los Angeles isn’t just a playground for really big guys or just another site for really rich guys to consume conspicuously in luxury boxes. If you believe the chorus of hype, Farmers Field also grows good jobs, solves the city’s debt crisis, transforms downtown Los Angeles into a nicer version of Manhattan, and builds strong bodies eight ways. It may even cure cancer.

    But the downtown stadium – if it’s built – isn’t going to be particularly “green” in ways that matter.

    According to a report by David Futch in the L.A. Weekly:

    AEG has promised to build a “carbon-neutral” Farmers Field football stadium that will add no extra emissions to the current load in polluted downtown Los Angeles. But there’s no way to accomplish that, according to environmental lawyers, climate researchers and traffic engineers who’ve seen it all before.

    Claiming “carbon neutrality” for a massive construction project that will have a usable life measured in decades is beyond the ability of good science (and common sense), but it sounds good in press briefings. “Most labels are nonsense, dreamed up by marketing departments,” Konstantin Vinnikov, a University of Maryland climatologist and atmospheric scientist, told Futch.

    In defense of green nonsense, the state Legislature has put on Governor Brown’s desk SB 292, a special bill that would permit the city of Los Angeles and AEG to declare Farmers Field a model of environmental sensitivity while shutting out critics of the project, whose ability to force a real review of the stadium’s environmental impact would be severely limited.

    Under SB 292, legal challenges would have to go directly to the state Court of Appeals, where bringing suit is much more expensive.

    In exchange for giving AEG a fast track to judicial review in a favorable setting, the downtown stadium would have to show zero net emissions of new greenhouse gases from automobile trips and achieve a ratio of automobile trips to attendance that is at least ten percent lower than other NFL stadiums.

    Since nearly all NFL stadiums are not in downtowns but at the suburban fringe, where tailgaters gather in massive parking lots, this last criterion is essentially meaningless.

    But AEG has another out. If cutting more automobile trips isn’t “feasible” (a very slippery term), AEG can buy carbon credits to reduce emissions somewhere else – even in another state – rather than cut the stadium’s emissions downtown.

    Certifying that AEG’s trip reduction measures have met the goal of greenhouse gas emissions (to the extent “feasible”) is the responsibility of the city – not the state agencies that currently oversee air quality. In fact, all of the mitigation measures promised by AEG are equally squishy, hedged with qualifiers that permit AEG and the city to quietly waive costly mitigations and allow others to be achieved without measurable improvements. That’s just standard operating procedure at city hall, which explains why state regulators are cut out of the process.

    Santa Monica environmental attorney Doug Carstens reminded Futch, “When developers (like AEG) start shedding mitigation like crazy, then instead of revoking approval, public agencies tend to forgive and forget.”

    SB 292 is almost certain to be signed into law. And it’s so perfect a model of environmental duplicity that other developers demanded and a got a companion bill – SB 900 – that gives every big project in California generally the same benefits. SB 900 is sure to be signed into law, too.

    Farmers Field won’t be environmentally neutral in the context of downtown’s crowded streets and neighborhoods and, say many experts, can’t possibly be “carbon neutral” overall. As one traffic engineer asked, “Do they include the carbon dioxide emitted by all of the additional motor vehicles, buses and trains serving fans going to and from the games? Do they count the carbon dioxide emitted by the power plants supplying the electricity for the billboards?”

    Actually, AEG doesn’t have to count anything, except the profits it intends to make. And the only green that will wrap Farmers Field will shine from its gigantic LED billboards.

    This piece originally appeared at KCET.org.

    D. J. Waldie is a contributing editor at the Los Angeles Times and a contributing writer for Los Angeles magazine. He is the author most recently of California Romantica with Diane Keaton. He blogs for KCET TV at http://www.kcet.org/user/profile/djwaldie.

    Photo by Pete Prodoehl

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  • Obama’s New $50 Billion Infrastructure Stimulus — Old Wine in New Bottles

    President Obama’s new $50 billion infrastructure initiative — part of his $447 billion American Jobs Act (AJA)—offered no surprises. It’s almost an exact replica of his FY 2012 budget request which included a sum of $50 billion for transportation to “jump start” a proposed $556 billion six-year surface transportation reauthorization.

    The rhetoric may have changed — Obama avoided using the terms “stimulus” and “infrastructure” in presenting his AJA initiative to Congress—but the substance of the two initiatives is remarkably similar. Both proposals would fund an identical mix of programs (highways, transit, Amtrak, high-speed rail, aviation and the TIFIA credit program) and both would establish a National Infrastructure Bank.

    The FY 2012 transportation budget request failed to obtain congressional approval for two reasons: (1) the Administration failed to show how the proposed $50 billion program would be paid for; and (2) there was no convincing evidence that the program would promptly create new jobs. Indeed, all evidence pointed in the opposite direction. The $48 billion in Recovery Act funds for transportation had failed to create the millions of jobs promised by the Administration. The money earmarked for highways had been spent largely on short term roadway maintenance-type contracts and had produced only temporary jobs. Nor was there much to show for in terms of an improved condition or performance of the nation’s transportation system. As for the Infrastructure Bank, it is widely believed that at least one or two years could pass before the Bank would become operational and in a position to begin financing large-scale job-creating infrastructure projects.

    The same reasons that led Congress to ignore the Administration’s FY 2012 transportation budget request will likely cause the lawmakers to reject the new transportation initiative. They are skeptical that a fresh infusion of funds will succeeed where the first stimulus failed. Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results may not be exacly insanity but it does suggest a certain denial to look facts in the face.

    The President said that “everything in this bill will be paid for” and that he will call on the Joint Deficit Committee to come up with additional deficit reductions necessary to pay for the American Jobs Act. But by proposing to end tax breaks for people making more than $200,000 and for oil and gas companies, the White House is setting itself up again for a fight with the Congress which already once before rejected this approach to “revenue enhancement.” It remains to be seen if the independent congressional committee will do Obama’s bidding. With the President’s approval ratings at an all time low, they just might be emboldened to ignore his plea.

    Note: the NewsBriefs can also be accessed at www.infrastructureUSA.org
    A listing of all recent NewsBriefs can be found at www.innobriefs.com

  • Waging a Green Jihad on Suburban Homes

    It seems rarely a month passes without some new assault on the lifestyle and housing choice preferred by the overwhelming majority of Australians: the detached suburban home. Denigrated by a careless media as ”McMansions” or attacked as some archaic form of reckless housing choice which is suddenly “no longer appropriate” (according to some planning or environmental fatwa), the detached home is under a constant assault of falsely laid allegation and intellectual derision.

    The latest of these assaults is the form of a proposed ”green star” rating scheme for ”McMansions” which critics claim cost could cost homeowners thousands of dollars in devalued prices.  While the critics’ suggestions of financial hardship might be taking the possible impacts a bit too far, it is reasonable to challenge this obsession of regulators and green crusaders which view the detached home as some form of modern environmental vandalism.

    The very first (and what should be obvious) fact that escapes our planning cabal’s attention is that houses, or home units, or even office buildings for that matter, don’t use energy. Only the occupants in them and their behaviour consume energy. The dwelling itself can be designed for more efficient energy use by the occupants, for sure, but remember always that it is people who consume power, not buildings.

    That point was brought home, embarrassingly for our rampaging environmental and social crusaders, by no less than the Australian Conservation Foundation in 2007. Their “Consumption Atlas” revealed what came as a surprise to many, but which should have been widely understood from the start: that wealthy people who can afford to live in the expensive home units and townhouses of trendy inner city areas use much more energy, and have bigger carbon footprints per capita than their suburban counterparts.  More than that, it also revealed that inner city areas are “consumption hotspots” and smaller household sizes have greater environmental impacts than larger (chiefly suburban) households.

    The significance of those findings has been studiously ignored by the advocates of environmental engineering who claim that a leading virtue of wholesale change in housing type from detached suburban to high density inner urban  will be good for the environment. The facts, however, show that it ain’t necessarily so. If a large family of five, for example, (mum, dad and three kids) living in a four bedroom house with two cars in the suburbs produce a smaller carbon footprint than the DINKs and yuppies living in their city apartment, why aren’t the media, environmental and planning advocates asking more questions?

    At the time the ACF report was released, I was running the Residential Development Council, and  can still recall hearing the ACF’s key findings mentioned in some very early radio news bulletins on the ABC.  For some reason, the story quietly petered out but the ACF kindly had a version on-line and once I sent a copy to Demographia’s Wendell Cox, it went on to infamy. Wendell prepared a report analysing its “Housing Form in Australian and its Impact on Greenhouse Gas Emissions” online findings.  

    There have been other reports too, which have either been ignored (where their evidence doesn’t suit the cause) or attacked (if the evidence is clearly getting too close to the truth). If you’re remotely interested in some of the facts (as opposed to the parade of rhetoric in the mainstream media) have a look at the evidence in this study called ”The Relationship Between Housing Density and Built Form Energy Use”’ which you can find online here.  There’s a graph on page six which shows the dwelling operational energy (blue part of the bar) for apartments is roughly three times that of detached homes.  The suggestion that occupants of high density apartments will be less likely to use private transport is yet to be borne out by evidence, with the ACF report admitting that higher incomes allowed inner city residents more opportunity to drive despite the presence of convenient public transport and also (heaven forbid) to fly to places, than households with lower incomes.

    Common sense also comes into play. Consider the basic design of apartment buildings as opposed to the detached house. Cross flow ventilation in apartments is harder to achieve (unless it’s a penthouse occupying an entire floor) than in the detached home with windows on all sides. Then there are the energy uses that the apartment more or less makes essential. There is no room for a solar powered clothes dryer (a washing line) in the backyard. Instead, energy guzzling clothes dryers are practically essential, as are air conditioners, not just for individual apartments but also for common areas throughout the building (foyers and corridors). Lighting in common areas is also almost always permanently on. Lifts to move people up and down also consume energy – taking two people from ground to level 25 in an air conditioned lift produces a lot more carbon than walking up a flight of front stairs into the detached home, after all.

    I’m not proposing that the leftist green agenda which is waging war on the detached home turn the blow torch of blame to the wealthy, nor am I suggesting that there’s anything wrong with apartment and townhouse developments. But what’s wrong with letting market forces play more of a hand without the overt moralising and environmental hand wringing that seems to accompany decisions on urban planning policy? Is it really necessary to malign the detached suburban home, in order to make the alternative more attractive?

    We are talking about middle Australia – and their counterparts in the USA, UK and elsewhere – which is under the barrage of assault for having the temerity to choose a form of dwelling that actually suits them. The fact is that people prefer, in the main, to raise children in houses rather than apartments. They often like to keep pets and have a garden around them. The children tend to like backyards to play in. The cars these families drive aren’t a ”love affair” but a necessity – getting from suburban home to suburban workplace and picking up or dropping off children on the way isn’t very practical with public transport. But you get the strong impression, reading the constant digest of anti-suburban living parading through mainstream media, that mainstream Australians are a reckless bunch of self-interested misfits whose behaviour and choices need to be controlled by people wiser than them.

    And there’s one of the great ironies in all this: those who advocate denying housing choice and enforcing apartments over detached homes, public transport over private, and inner city density over suburban expansion, invariably seem to do the opposite of what they preach.  Next time you come across one of these green jihadists waging war on the suburban home (and the people who live in them), ask them if they live in a house or a unit, how many children they have, ask how many cars (or homes) they own, and ask what their power bill is like.

    In my experience, all too frequently the answer reveals itself as a case of “do as I say, not do as I do,”  which is just plain hypocrisy.

    Ross Elliott has more than 20 years experience in property and public policy. His past roles have included stints in urban economics, national and state roles with the Property Council, and in destination marketing. He has written extensively on a range of public policy issues centering around urban issues, and continues to maintain his recreational interest in public policy through ongoing contributions such as this or via his monthly blog The Pulse.

    Photo by yewenyi.

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