TIGER II Rips Another Hole in the Federal Budget
Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood put your money where his mouth is when he dedicated well over 40 percent of the latest round of “Transportation Investment Generating Economic Recovery” (TIGER) stimulus funds to streetcars, pedestrianways, and other “livability” projects. The biggest grant was $47.67 million towards a 2.7-mile, $72 million streetcar line in Atlanta. In all, […]
NJ Governor Cancels Raildoggle
The big transportation news while the Antiplanner was in Japan was that New Jersey’s Governor Chris Christie cancelled a major rail construction project: a planned new tunnel under the Hudson River. Spurred by cost overruns, Christie said “far more than New Jersey taxpayers can afford and the only prudent move is to end this project.” […]
How to Fool Transit Riders
Recently, FTA Administrator Peter Rogoff told transit managers, “you can entice even diehard rail riders onto a bus, if you call it a ‘special’ bus and just paint it a different color than the rest of the fleet.” Eugene, Oregon’s Lane Transit District (LTD) proved this with its EMX bus-rapid transit line. When this line […]
Los Angeles Rip Off
In 2008, L.A. Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa promised voters that extending the city’s Red Line subway would relieve congestion. Voters believed him and supported a sales tax increase to build the line. Now the environmental impact report finds that the subway line will increase rush-hour traffic speeds on parallel streets by, at most, 0.3 mph (p. […]
Another Rail Project Goes Overbudget
With phase 1 already under construction, planners now say that phase 2 of Washington’s Dulles Airport rail line will cost almost 50 percent more than previously projected. Of course, the bus-rapid transit project that most people wanted could be running today at a fraction of the cost. One way to save money, planners say, would […]
Highways Safer Than Ever
It’s official: fewer than 34,000 people died in highway accidents in 2009. That is the fewest highway fatalities since 1950 and the lowest fatality rate per billion vehicle miles in automotive history. In 1910, nearly 450 people died for every billion vehicle miles driven. This declined to 150 by 1930, 72 by 1950, under 50 […]
Should Buses Use Alternative Fuels?
Fred Jandt’s rethinking rail article on the Mass Transit web site (discussed here on Monday) offhandedly mentioned “what Foothill Transit did this week” with buses. That was a reference to the introduction of some of the first all-electric buses in the U.S. A mere 10-minute recharge of the batteries on these “ecoliners” is supposed to […]
Trannie Mae: Obama’s New Bank
President Obama’s new “plan“–more of a sketch, really–to “Renew and Expand America’s Roads, Railways and Runways” calls for spending $50 billion rebuilding 150,000 miles of roads, building and maintaining 4,000 miles of rail, and rehabilitating 150 miles of airport runways and installing a modern air traffic control system. Where do these numbers come from? Is […]
High-Speed Rail Deathwatch
Will a high-speed rail line ever be built from San Francisco to Los Angeles? The California High-Speed Rail Authority (CHSRA) has less than 10 percent of the money it needs to build this line. The plan is increasingly under fire from local and state organizations. On one hand, President Obama’s vague and controversial proposal to […]
Your Tax Dollars at Work
The owner of a beauty shop who applied for a loan from a community development fund received a response calling her “one crazy ass bitch” and suggesting that she was under a “delusion that somehow you might be credit worthy.” The author of the letter, who was suspended for a week without pay, later wrote […]
We Want High-Speed Rail, As Long As It Is Free
Americans want high-speed rail, as long as someone else pays for it. States are chuffed upset, for example, because the federal government now says it wants the states to put up 20 percent of the capital cost. The original Federal Railroad Administration grant guidelines issued back in 2008 suggested that the feds might pay all […]
Living Lightly in Portland
The New York Times loves to tell stories of people who got off the “work-spend treadmill” by selling off all but about 100 personal items and moving into a 400-square-foot studio apartment in Portland. Even the Wall Street Journal has jumped on board by telling the heartwarming story of someone who bought and remodeled a […]
