New Geography

Author: Randal OToole

  • Protecting Cities in Fire-Prone Regions

    If you live in a fire-prone area, which includes most of California, it is not a good idea to allow ivy and other plants to cover the sides of your building, as this winery and this church did near Santa Rosa. Both were lost to last week’s wildfires.

    Similarly, if you are a legislator in a fire-prone state, it is not a good idea to outlaw fire-resistant developments. As now-retired Forest Service researcher Jack Cohen relates in the above video, one requirement for making your home fire-safe is to have no large flammable structures within 100 feet of the home. That pretty much means people should build on one-acre or larger lots.

    But in California, the nation’s most fire-prone state, urban planners’ mania for density has led the legislature to effectively outlaw such low-density development. Santa Rosa’s Coffey Park neighborhood consisted of conventionally sized suburban homes on 50-by-100-foot lots–small for a modern suburb–resulting in many houses being only a few feet apart from one another. If one house caught fire during a dry spell, the intense radiant heat would be sure to set off the next home. As a result, the neighborhood is now a smoking ruin.

    As the Antiplanner noted a decade ago, California developers have built shelter-in-place neighborhoods that are so fire-resistant that it is safer for residents to stay in their homes than to evacuate. Wildfires have swept by these neighborhoods and not harmed a single home.

    Sadly, this technique has been criticized by even the California Department of Forestry, which argues that making homes fire-safe will just encourage people to live in fire-prone areas (meaning almost all of California). They suggested that people build their homes closer together to make them “easier to protect.” That didn’t work very well in Santa Rosa.

    If California had allowed urban areas to grow in the modern way, with density at the center and increasingly low densities at the edges, then a ring of low-density, shelter-in-place neighborhoods around Santa Rosa and other cities could have provided a fire break protecting the denser developments. But this is practically forbidden in California. So, we will get more disasters like the one in Santa Rosa and the 1991 Oakland Hills firestorm.

    This piece first appeared on The Antiplanner.

    Randal O’Toole is a senior fellow with the Cato Institute specializing in land use and transportation policy. He has written several books demonstrating the futility of government planning. Prior to working for Cato, he taught environmental economics at Yale, UC Berkeley, and Utah State University.

    Photo: Homes burned by a wildfire are seen, Oct. 11, 2017, in Santa Rosa, California via VOA News.

  • Ending Economic Apartheid

    Thanks to its greenbelt and slow-growth policies, Boulder, Colorado is the nation’s most-expensive and least-affordable housing market of any city not in a coastal state. As a result, as noted in an op-ed in The Hill, the number of black residents in Boulder declined by 30 percent between 2010 and 2016, leaving less than 1.6 percent of the city with African-American ancestry.

    Closer to my home, the Bend Bulletin argues that the state of Oregon “works against affordable housing by, among other things. . . artificially increas[ing] the price of land through its urban growth boundary system.” Although cities are required to maintain an inventory of developable land within their growth boundaries, the paper notes that permission to expand their boundaries takes years.

    The Oregon legislature effectively admitted that this is a problem last year when it passed a law allowing two cities to develop land on up to 50 acres of land outside of their growth boundaries. But can anyone seriously believe that adding 100 acres of new housing will make housing more affordable in Oregon?

    To make matters worse, the law is to be administered by the state Land Conservation and Development Commission, the same commission that wrote the rules requiring urban-growth boundaries in the first place. Even if 100 acres were enough, they certainly won’t be timely. Applications to be one of the pilot cities are due November 1, more than a year after the law is passed. Considering this is actually only a preapplication, it could take another year to get final approval. Once approved, the pilot cities will probably take a year or more to implement their plans. Those plans will no doubt be appealed by 1000 Friends of Oregon or some other group. So it may be several years in all before ground is broken for the first new home under this law.

    This is the wrong way of dealing with land use in general and housing affordability in particular. Oregon needs to abandon urban-growth boundaries and Boulder needs to abandon its greenbelt and its limit on construction permits. These policies violate people’s property rights and freedom of movement. In the end, it will probably take a court ruling, not a legislative action, to strike them down.

    This piece first appeared on The Antiplanner.

    Randal O’Toole is a senior fellow with the Cato Institute specializing in land use and transportation policy. He has written several books demonstrating the futility of government planning. Prior to working for Cato, he taught environmental economics at Yale, UC Berkeley, and Utah State University.

    Photo: Eddyl [CC BY-SA 3.0], via Wikimedia Commons

  • Bringing Soviet Planning to New York City

    New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio wants to bring the same policies that worked so well in the Soviet Union, and more recently in Venezuela, to New York City. “If I had my druthers, the city government would determine every single plot of land, how development would proceed,” he says. “And there would be very stringent requirements around income levels and rents.”

    As shown in the urban planning classic, The Ideal Communist City, soviet planners also believed they were smart enough to know how every single plot of land in their cities should be used. The cities built on their planning principles were appallingly ugly and unlivable. They were environmentally sustainable only so long as communism kept people too poor to afford cars and larger homes.

    If de Blasio believes in this planning system so much, why doesn’t he implement it in New York City? The biggest obstacle, he says, is “the way our legal system is structured to favor private property.” He blames housing affordability problems on greedy developers who only build for millionaires.

    The reality is that, under the control of private property owners, New York City housing was quite affordable in 1969. It was only when planners began to interfere with private property rights that housing prices spiraled out of control.

    In 1969, New York City median family incomes were $,9692 and median home prices were $25,700, for a value-to-income ratio of 2.7. This was affordable because, at 5 percent interest, someone could devote 25 percent of their income to a mortgage that is 2.7 times their income and pay off the loan in 15 years. Housing was even more affordable in the suburbs, as value-to-income ratios in the New York metropolitan area were 2.6.

    By comparison, value-to-income ratios in 2015 were 8.8 for the city and 5.1 for the metropolitan area. Even at today’s 3 percent interest rates, someone buying a home that is 8.8 times their income could devote a third of their income to the mortgage and not be able to pay it off in 40 years.

    What happened since 1969 to make housing so much less affordable? Contrary to de Blasio, one thing that didn’t happen is that developers got greedier. While there is no accurate measure, I am sure that people were just as greedy in 1969 as they are today. The human desire to accumulate wealth hasn’t changed in thousands of years, which is one reason why the kind of socialism that de Blasio favors never works.

    Instead, one thing that happened was rent control. New York state first imposed rent control in 1950, but the law exempted rental housing built after 1947, and other housing was gradually deregulated through 1969. But in 1969, New York passed a new law that applied rent control to all housing, thus discouraging anyone from building new rental housing.

    Another thing that happened was the city’s historic preservation ordinance, which was passed in 1965 and which has gradually restricted more and more of the city from redevelopment. More recently, New York City responded to unaffordable housing by passing an inclusionary zoning ordinance which provides affordable housing for a tiny number of people at the expense of making it less affordable for everyone else.

    New Jersey and Connecticut did their part by passing statewide growth management laws, thus restricting people’s ability to escape New York City’s high housing prices by moving to the suburbs. Connecticut first passed its law in 1974 and New Jersey in 1986.

    All of these actions are examples of the kind of government control that de Blasio supports, and all of them contributed to the high housing costs that de Blasio objects to. The next time he wants to find a greedy person to blame for unaffordable housing, he should look in a mirror.

    This piece first appeared on The Antiplanner.

    Randal O’Toole is a senior fellow with the Cato Institute specializing in land use and transportation policy. He has written several books demonstrating the futility of government planning. Prior to working for Cato, he taught environmental economics at Yale, UC Berkeley, and Utah State University.

    Photo: Kevin Case from Bronx, NY, USA (Bill de Blasio) [CC BY 2.0], via Wikimedia Commons

  • Commuting Data for 2016

    Last week, the Census Bureau posted 2016 data from the American Community Survey, including population, income, housing, employment, and commuting data among many other categories. The survey is based on data from more than 3.5 million households. Today, the Antiplanner will look at commuting data: how people got to work in 2016 compared with previous years.

    To save you time, I’ve downloaded and posted 2016’s table B08301, “Means of Transportation to Work,” for the nation, states, counties, cities, and urbanized areas. I’ve also posted similar tables for 2006, 2010, and 2015.

    In columns Z through AE, I’ve calculated the shares of commuters (excluding people who work at home) who traveled to work by driving alone, carpooling, transit, rail transit, bicycling, and walking. (These won’t quite add up to 100 percent as are other categories such as taxi and motorcycle.) Only some cities, counties, and urban areas are included because others were too small for the sample size to be valid. Since the places that are included may vary from year to year, the rows of the various spreadsheets do not line up below the state level.

    The data show that, nationwide, transit’s share of travel grew from 5.03 percent in 2006 to 5.49 percent in 2015. This growth was at the expense of carpooling, as driving alone’s share also grew. In 2016, however, transit’s share fell to 5.36 percent while both driving alone and carpooling grew.

    Among major urban areas, transit’s share of commuting grew from 2015 to 2016 in Pittsburgh, Salt Lake City, Seattle, and–amazingly–San Jose. But it declined in far more regions: Austin, Boston, Charlotte, Dallas-Ft. Worth, Honolulu, Houston, Los Angeles, Orlando, Philadelphia, Phoenix, Portland, Sacramento, San Francisco-Oakland, and Washington DC. It was flat (changed by 0.05 percent or less) in Atlanta, Chicago, Denver, Miami, Minneapolis-St. Paul, and New York.

    Outside of Seattle, these numbers are not encouraging for those who think rail transit is good for transit riders. Although transit’s share also grew in the Salt Lake urban area, it declined in Ogden and Provo-Orem, which are connected with Salt Lake City by an expensive commuter train that is doing little to boost transit ridership. The growth in San Jose was in spite of the region’s rail transit system: although the bus share grew, rail’s share of commuting declined.

    Transit’s share grew in both Raleigh and Durham. If those cities want to keep transit healthy, they shouldn’t disrupt whatever is working now by building an expensive light-rail line. I’ll be presenting more 2016 data in future posts.

    This piece first appeared on The Antiplanner.

    Randal O’Toole is a senior fellow with the Cato Institute specializing in land use and transportation policy. He has written several books demonstrating the futility of government planning. Prior to working for Cato, he taught environmental economics at Yale, UC Berkeley, and Utah State University.

    Photo: [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

  • Why Rail Transit Doesn’t Work in Atlanta

    One of the more interesting presentations at the 2017 American Dream conference was by Alain Bertaud, a French demographer currently working at New York University. He has compared urban areas all over the world to see how transportation has influenced the layout of those areas.

    He started by comparing Atlanta with Barcelona, Spain. Although both have about the same number of people, Barcelona occupies about 63 square miles while Atlanta covers 1,650 square miles. Barcelona has about 62 miles of rail lines, while Atlanta had about 46 when Bertaud was making his comparison (it’s up to 52 today). In order for Atlanta’s rail system to provide the same level of service to its residents as Barcelona’s, the region would need to build another 2,350 miles of rail lines. At current construction prices, that would cost at least $700 billion.

    The above charts show population densities within 30 kilometers of urban centers, with the first kilometer on the left and the 30th kilometer on the right. The European cities, including Paris, Warsaw, and Barcelona, shown in the first column, are very dense in the center with densities falling to nothing after 22 miles from the center. Asian cities in the second column–Beijing, Jakarta, and Bangkok–are similar. But American cities in the third column–Atlanta, Los Angeles, and New York–look very different. Densities do taper off but the centers, even of New York, are nowhere near as dense as in Europe and Asia.

    Moreover, Atlanta’s population growth in the 1990s was mostly in the outlying areas. Only 2 percent of new Atlanta residents located within a half mile of a rail station and only 13 percent located within a half mile of a bus stop, while 85 percent located more than half mile from either.

    New job locations are even worse for transit, with jobs in four of the first five miles from the center actually declining. Only 1 percent of new jobs located within a half mile of a rail station, and 22 percent within a half mile of a bus stop, meaning 77 percent were not reached by transit. (The original chart said 32 percent, but that made the total add up to 110 percent. Dr. Bertaud updated and corrected the chart to read 22 percent.)

    Even as American urban planners, particularly on the West Coast, try to make our cities more like European ones, European and Asian cities are becoming more like American ones. In Seoul, for example, most population growth was in the bands between 20 and 40 kilometers from the center, while most job growth was in the bands between 9 and 35 kilometers from the center.

    The same is true for European cities. While the second chart shown above makes it appear that Paris and other cities are monocentric, in fact they have large numbers of suburban jobs. As Bertaud noted, “Even in metropolitan area like Paris, with an elaborate transit system, the majority of trips are made by cars from suburb to suburb.” Transit ridership in many European cities is flat or declining, while driving is rapidly growing.

    When new technologies like automobiles change the shape of cities, there is no going back. Cities can build rail lines, subsidize dense housing projects, and try to discourage driving, but driving will continue to grow even as transit ridership stagnates, at best, and per capita ridership falls.

    This piece first appeared on The Antiplanner.

    Randal O’Toole is a senior fellow with the Cato Institute specializing in land use and transportation policy. He has written several books demonstrating the futility of government planning. Prior to working for Cato, he taught environmental economics at Yale, UC Berkeley, and Utah State University.

    Photo by Nicolas Henderson, via Flickr, using CC License.

  • A Reporter Rode Denver’s Airport Light Rail–And You Won’t Believe What Happened Next

    Here’s a heartwarming story of a man who rode Denver’s airport light rail once, and it worked for him, so now he wants everyone in his Virginia city to pay higher taxes to build light rail to the local airport in case he might want to ride it again someday. How thoughtful and touching.

    Of course, there are a few problems with his story. First, what he rode wasn’t light rail, which averages about 20 miles per hour; instead, he rode a commuter train that averages 38 miles per hour. So if he manages to persuade people in Virginia to build light rail to his local airport, he will get something far inferior to what he rode in Denver.

    Second, the writer is guilty of survivorship bias, which is an assumption that because something worked for him, it will work for everyone else. But the Denver airport train doesn’t work for everyone else, partly because it is unreliable and partly because transit is slow for anyone who isn’t near an airport line station.

    In fact, it works for very few people. There are just 144 daily round trips between downtown Denver and the airport. Of course, people can get on the train in places other than downtown Denver, but the majority of people in the Denver area who want to go to the airport would have to first go downtown, presumably on a bus or another rail line.

    Unfortunately, the Virginia writer never bothered to ask what share of air travelers take the train and Denver’s Regional Transit District hasn’t released that information. But we know that, in 2016, an average of 104,000 air travelers a day went to or from Denver International Airport. RTD says that an average of 10,256 people get on or off the train at the airport station each weekday, which is slightly less than 10 percent of air travelers. Based on the experience in other cities, a significant number of those are from the more than 30,000 airport employees. So the train probably carries between 5 and 10 percent of air travelers.

    Third, the writer has no perspective on the huge cost of rail, especially since he only had to pay a tiny fraction of the cost of his ride. From downtown to the airport, Supershuttle costs $25 and Uber costs about $35. The airport train is $9, which sounds like a good deal. But Supershuttle and Uber drivers both pay gas taxes that covered virtually all of the costs of I-70 and the other highways to the airport, while train riders paid none of the $1.1 billion construction cost and only a fraction of the operating cost of the airport train.

    Contrary to the above headline, you probably will believe that the Virginia writer made the same mistake that many Americans make when they ride trains in Europe. They see other people riding them and assume they are seeing a cross-section of the city or country they are visiting. They fail to find out about all the people who aren’t riding the trains and why the trains don’t work for those people. Nor do they ask who is paying for and who really benefits from all the subsidies to passenger rail transportation.

    The reality is that the Denver airport line would have been a huge waste of money and should never have been built even if it hadn’t had an 89 percent cost overrun. With that overrun, Denver is basically bankrupting itself so a few people can take a train to the airport which the city nearly bankrupted itself building.

    This piece first appeared on The Antiplanner.

    Randal O’Toole is a senior fellow with the Cato Institute specializing in land use and transportation policy. He has written several books demonstrating the futility of government planning. Prior to working for Cato, he taught environmental economics at Yale, UC Berkeley, and Utah State University.

    Photo by Jeffrey Beall (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0 or GFDL], via Wikimedia Commons

  • Transit’s Precipitous Decline

    Transit ridership in the first quarter of 2017 was 3.1 percent less than the same quarter in 2016, according the American Public Transportation Association’s latest ridership report. The association released the report without a press release, instead issuing a release complaining about the House Appropriations bill reducing funding for transit.

    The ridership report is devastating news for anyone who believes transit deserves more subsidies. Every heavy-rail system lost riders except the PATH trains between Newark and Manhattan and the Patco line between Camden and Philadelphia. Commuter rail did a little better, mainly because of the opening of Denver’s A line and trend-countering growth of riders on the Long Island Railroad. Most light-rail lines lost riders, though surprisingly many streetcar lines gained riders.

    In most cases where light-rail ridership grew, it did so at the expense of bus ridership. Los Angeles Metro gained 1.66 million light-rail riders but lost 8.73 million bus riders, or more than five for every new light-rail rider. Between the two modes, Phoenix’s Valley Metro lost 23,100 riders; Charlotte 20,200 lost riders; and Dallas Area Rapid Transit lost 193,100 riders. Similarly, Orlando’s commuter trains gained 22,700 riders but buses lost 98,500.

    Houston and Minneapolis-St. Paul lost bus riders but not quite as many as they gained in light-rail riders. Houston gained 192,100 light-rail riders but lost 154,200 bus riders. Minneapolis gained 337,000 light-rail riders but lost 270,000 bus riders. Only Seattle scored a large increase in light-rail riders (thanks to an expensive new line that opened March 16, 2016) without an offsetting decline in bus ridership.

    Many individual transit agencies suffered particularly catastrophic declines. Broward County (Fort Lauderdale), which wants to build a $200 million streetcar line, lost 12.8 percent of its transit riders. San Jose’s VTA, the agency I’ve sometimes called the worst-managed transit agency in the country, lost 11.9 percent. Birminghan lost 9.8 percent; Cleveland lost 7.9 percent; and San Diego lost 6.2 percent. In San Francisco, Muni lost 6.4 percent, BART lost 5.6 percent, SamTrans lost 8.9 percent, AC Transit (Oakland) lost 0.8 percent, and Central and Eastern Contra Costa County lost more than 7.0 percent.

    One factor contributing to the losses might be that 2016 was leap year, so its first quarter had 1.1 percent more days than 2017. But both quarters had exactly the same number of work days (62 or 64 depending on whether you count King’s Birthday and President’s Day as holidays or work days), so leap day counted for less than it might have.

    Many of these losses are just a continuation of trends that began in 2009 or earlier. As the Antiplanner noted last month, several major transit agencies lost 25 to 35 percent of their riders between 2009 and 2016, and most of these continued to lose in 2017. Moreover, none of the factors that led to these declines–low fuel prices, high auto ownership rates, rising costs, increasing competition from ride-hailing services–are going away, and some are only going to get worse.

    Since 1970s, the transit industry has received well over a trillion dollars in subsidies while seeing a 20 percent drop in the average number of rides urban resident take each year. All this should lead Congress and state legislatures to question why taxpayers ought to continue subsidizing this fast declining industry.

    This piece first appeared on The Antiplanner.

    Randal O’Toole is a senior fellow with the Cato Institute specializing in land use and transportation policy. He has written several books demonstrating the futility of government planning. Prior to working for Cato, he taught environmental economics at Yale, UC Berkeley, and Utah State University.

    Photo by METRO96 [CC BY-SA 3.0], via Wikimedia Commons

  • Should Transit Fares Cover Operating Costs?

    Maryland has long had a state law requiring transit systems to collect enough fares to cover at least 35 percent of their operating costs. While it is admirable to set a target, this particular target is disheartening for two reasons.

    First, 35 percent is a pretty low goal. The 2015 National Transit Database lists 48 transit operations that cover between 100 and 200 percent of their costs, including New York ferries, the Hampton Jitney, several other bus lines, and a bunch of van pooling systems. No rail lines cover 100 percent of their operating costs, but BART covers 80 percent, Caltrains covers 72 percent, New York and DC subways cover 64 percent, and New York commuter trains cover 60 percent. On average, commuter bus and commuter rail systems earn half their operating costs. So 35 percent lacks ambition.

    Even worse, most Maryland transit operations don’t come close to meeting the target. Maryland commuter trains cover 45 percent of their costs. But Baltimore’s light rail only covers 17 percent, and its heavy rail covers a pathetic 13 percent. Standard bus service also covers just 13 percent of its costs, though commuter buses come closer to the target, reaching 28 percent.

    Maryland lawmakers have figured out a solution to the second problem, if not the first. They simply passed a bill abolishing the target. Now, transit advocates hope, the state can spend even more money building obsolete transit systems that won’t be able to afford to maintain because they can’t even cover a third of their operating costs.

    Transit is “not profitable,” said one advocate, “but it’s essential for an economically competitive region.” Just how economically competitive has Baltimore been since it sunk billions of dollars into light- and heavy-rail lines that don’t cover even a fifth of their operating costs? Maryland certainly won’t make itself more economically competitive by increasing the tax burden still further so they can build more obsolete transit lines.

    Failing to cover costs isn’t a symptom that you are economically competitive. It is a symptom that you’ve failed to provide things that people need and want. The Antiplanner can understand why people think we need to subsidize food stamps or other aid to low-income people. I can’t understand why people think nothing of throwing huge amounts of money towards marketable operations like transit.

    C. Northcote Parkinson, the author of Parkinson’s Law, said that organizations that set goals low so they would be easy to meet were suffering from a disease he called injelititis. The transit industry has been suffering from this disease since the mid-1960s, when it discovered it could live off the public trough rather than actually have to provide services that people want. Once this disease reached its late stages, he said, the only cure required “a change of name, a change of site, and an entirely different staff.”

    There’s still a chance that Maryland’s governor may veto the bill. Let’s hope he does.

    This piece first appeared on The Antiplanner.

    Randal O’Toole is a senior fellow with the Cato Institute specializing in land use and transportation policy. He has written several books demonstrating the futility of government planning. Prior to working for Cato, he taught environmental economics at Yale, UC Berkeley, and Utah State University.

  • Is Your Transportation Project a Boondoggle?

    Tony Dutzik, writing for the progressive Frontier Group, offers a ten ways of recognizing whether a highway project is a boondoggle. A few of his ideas are valid: a highway widening project aimed simply at creating a continuous four-lane road even when there is no demand for four lanes seems silly. But most of his suggestions are wrong: for example, he thinks that, if environmentalists have delayed a project long enough, that proves it shouldn’t be built, when in fact all it proves is that our current planning process allows people to indefinitely delay projects for little or no reason.

    In response, I’d like to offer my own list of ten ways to determine whether a transportation project is a boondoggle. His list focused on highways, though some of his suggestions (“It is sold as needed for economic development”) are valid for transit. Although my list starts out with transit projects, it eventually applies to all types of transportation projects.

    1. It’s a streetcar. Streetcar technology is 130 years old and has since been replaced by less expensive, more flexible buses. Streetcars being built today are no faster and are far more expensive than the ones built 130 years ago. All new streetcar projects and rehabilitations of existing streetcar lines are boondoggles.

    2. It’s light rail. What we call light rail is a slight improvement on streetcars developed in the 1930s, meaning it is “only” 80 years old. Light-rail lines constructed today are no better, and far more expensive, than ones built in the 1930s. Buses can move more people faster and for far less money. All light-rail lines, new and rehabilitations, are boondoggles.

    3. It’s commuter rail outside of the New York metropolitan area. New York City is the only city in America with jobs and populations so dense that buses can’t substitute for rail. Elsewhere, new commuter rail lines in places such as Dallas-Ft. Worth, Nashville, Orlando, Salt Lake City, South Florida, and elsewhere are so ridiculously expensive and carry so few commuters that in many cases it would have been less expensive to give every daily round-trip commuter a new Toyota Prius every single year for the life of the train. This also includes what the FTA calls “hybrid rail“–Diesel-powered railcars operating on commuter-rail or light-rail schedules. The New York exception doesn’t mean it makes sense to start new commuter trains there, but maintenance and rehabilitation of existing trains may be worthwhile (though see #9 below). All new commuter trains, and rehabilitations of trains outside of New York, are boondoggles.

    4. It’s rapid transit, a.k.a. heavy rail, outside of New York City. Again with the exception of New York (though this time the city, not the metro area), electric-powered rapid transit–which was invented in the early 1890s by the same man who perfected the electric streetcar–has been rendered obsolete by buses. A dedicated busway can move more people at higher speeds and lower costs than the Chicago Transit Authority or Washington Metro. No new rapid-transit lines should be built anywhere–even New York–and as older rapid-transit lines wear out–except in New York (again, see #9 below)–they should be replaced by buses. All new rapid-transit lines, and rehabilitations of rapid transit outside of New York, are boondoggles.

    5. It’s a dedicated busway. I just wrote that dedicated busways can replace rapid transit, but very few places in America need dedicated busways. Instead, build high-occupancy/toll lanes, and as bus traffic increases, raise the tolls to insure the lanes never get congested. At some point, the tolls may get so high that they effectively become dedicated busways, but at that point the buses will be moving far more people than almost any rail line outside of, again, New York City. All dedicated busways are boondoggles.

    6. It’s an intercity passenger train. Conventional speed, higher speed, high speed, it doesn’t matter: intercity passenger trains were rendered obsolete by cars, buses, and planes. Their infrastructure and maintenance costs are much higher than any of the alternatives, and their operating costs will always be higher than at least some of the alternatives. Amtrak claims its Northeast Corridor is profitable, but that’s only by pretending maintenance and depreciation don’t count. Railroads make sense for freight; they no longer make sense for passengers. All intercity passenger trains are boondoggles.

    7. It’s a smart highway. Various electronics companies want the government to spend hundreds of billions of dollars building intelligent transportation systems into roads to prepare the way for self-driving cars. But this is dumb; it is much more cost-effective to put all the smarts in the cars and keep the infrastructure simple, especially since local governments can’t afford to maintain the infrastructure they have now, much less smart infrastructure. Since cars are replaced more often than infrastructure, this also enables more rapid updates in technology. All intelligent highway projects that require vehicle-to-infrastructure communications are boondoggles.

    8. It’s a bike lane project that reduces the number of lanes for automobiles. Many cities are attempting to encourage cycling while simultaneously discouraging driving by converting auto lanes to bike lanes, such as by changing a four-lane street to a two-lane street with a center left-turn lane and two bike lanes. This probably doesn’t increase bicycle safety, but it does increase traffic congestion. It is nearly alway possible to find parallel local streets that can be turned into bicycle boulevards without impeding through or local auto traffic. All bicycle projects that reduce the capacity of arterial or collector streets to move automobiles are boondoggles.

    9. It can’t be paid for out of user fees. The primary beneficiaries of all transportation projects are the transportation users. Paying for transportation out of user fees is equitable since it is only fair for users to pay for what they use. More important, user fees send signals to both users and transportation providers informing users of when and where travel is most cost effective and informing providers of where new transportation facilities might be needed. User fees also impose a discipline on both providers and users that prevents boondoggles from taking place. Any transportation facility that can’t be paid for out of user fees is a boondoggle.

    10. It doesn’t generate increased travel or shipping. Anti-highway groups complain that new roads “induce” more driving, and they think that is a bad thing. They advocate instead for transit projects whose users were former auto drivers. They have it backwards. Transportation projects that merely transfer users from one mode of travel to another more expensive mode are a drag on society. Projects that generate new travel create new economic opportunities. Only by generating new travel can projects stimulate economic development. Given a choice between projects that can be paid for out of user fees, the ones that generate the most new travel should be funded first.

    In truth, the last two points cover everything. But the first eight are important because there is so much pressure to do those things that are actually boondoggles.

    This piece first appeared on The Antiplanner.

    Randal O’Toole is a senior fellow with the Cato Institute specializing in land use and transportation policy. He has written several books demonstrating the futility of government planning. Prior to working for Cato, he taught environmental economics at Yale, UC Berkeley, and Utah State University.

    Photo by Josh Truelson (San Diego Trolley) [CC BY-SA 2.0], via Wikimedia Commons

  • Cincinnati Streetcars’ “Catastrophic Failures”

    The Cincinnati streetcar–now known as the Cincinnati Bell Connector since Cincinnati Bell paid $3.4 million for naming rights–is barely six months old, and already is having problems. Four streetcars broke down in one day a few months ago.

    Now the company that is contracted to operate the streetcar has warned that poor quality control by the railcar maker has resulted in “catastrophic failures” of three different major systems that cause regular breakdowns of the vehicles. Cincinnati Bell is upset enough to demand possibly illegal secret meetings with the city council over the streetcar’s problems.

    Cincinnati once counted itself lucky that it didn’t order streetcars from United Streetcar, the short-lived company that made streetcars for Portland and Tucson, many of which suffered severe manufacturing defects. But it turns out the vehicles it ordered from a Spanish company named Construcciones y Auxiliar de Ferrocarriles (CAF), which were delivered 15 months late, weren’t much better.

    The streetcar is routed through, and is supposed to revitalize, Cincinnati’s Over-the-Rhine district, a former low-income neighborhood near downtown. But that neighborhood was already revitalizing long before the streetcar opened. No doubt someone will credit the revitalization to the streetcar, but in fact it was due to millions of dollars in taxpayer subsidies.

    Many of those subsidies come from tax-increment financing (TIF). Cincinnati has liberally created dozens of TIF districts (a state law limiting TIF districts to 300 acres forced the city to create two for Over-the-Rhine, which is districts 3 & 4). The city encourages developers to simply apply for funds, effectively allowing them to use the money they would have paid in property taxes to help finance their development.

    Naturally, developers love it. Just like the streetcar, however, TIF is a raw deal for taxpayers who end up having to pay higher taxes, or receive a lower level of urban services, in order to provide services to the TIF districts that should have been funded out of the taxes paid by property owners in that district.

    This piece first appeared on The Antiplanner.

    Randal O’Toole is a senior fellow with the Cato Institute specializing in land use and transportation policy. He has written several books demonstrating the futility of government planning. Prior to working for Cato, he taught environmental economics at Yale, UC Berkeley, and Utah State University.

    Photo by RickDikeman (Own work) [CC0], via Wikimedia Commons