Demand for Free Money Continues to Grow
The demand for rail transit “is strong all across the country,” says a new report from Reconnecting America. How do they know? They simply added up all the “planned and proposed fixed-guideway transit projects” they could find. They found a total of 643 projects (1-mb Excel spreadsheet) in about 80 urban areas whose total costs […]
Life-Cycle Budgeting? No, Thanks
Life-cycle budgeting is suddenly the latest transportation-planning fad. Even some free-market groups are promoting it as a way to save tax dollars. The theory is that a life-cycle analysis will look ahead at all future costs, not just the initial cost, of transportation projects. At first glance, this sounds great. Most transportation fixed infrastructure needs […]
Dutch Superbus
Last fall, the Onion made fun of Obama’s high-speed rail plan with an alternative high-speed bus proposal. But Wubbo Ockels, a physicist and the first Dutch astronaut, wasn’t laughing. High-speed trains, Ockels says, are too slow and don’t go where people want to go. So he has designed and built a prototype electric-powered bus capable […]
High-Speed Rail Is Out of the Budget
Early Tuesday morning, Congressional leaders agreed on a 2011 budget package that zeros out funding for high-speed rail and rescinds $400 million in 2010 funding that remains unspent (transportation begins on p. 404). The package has the support of Senate Majority Leader Reid, House Speaker Boehner, and House Appropriations Committee Chair Hal Rogers. The budget […]
TriMet Tax Fraud
TriMet, Portland’s transit agency, gets about half its operating funds from a payroll tax. In 2004, this tax was 0.6218 percent, meaning employers had to pay TriMet $62.18 for every $10,000 they paid employees. Employees, other than the self-employed, are largely unaware of this since it is on top of pay, not a deduction from […]
Dead or Not, States Want High-Speed Rail Money
High-speed rail may be dead, but numerous states would be happy to get some of Florida’s $2.4 billion in rejected high-speed rail funds. Yesterday was the deadline for applications for this money, and some of the applicants include: California, of course, would like it all, even though that would still leave it $50 billion or […]
EUs War on Cars
Some people say the “war on the automobile” is a right-wing myth. Then the European Union goes and proposes to ban cars (or at least fossil-fuel-burning cars) from cities by 2050. To complement this ban, the EU proposes to significantly increase fuel taxes (as if they were not already high enough). It also hopes to […]
The Washington Times Gets It Wrong
The Antiplanner generally appreciates the efforts of the Times, a fiscally conservative paper that tries to watchdog government agencies that waste tax dollars. But an editorial last Friday about highway user fees missed the point. The article was written in response to Congressional Budget Office (CBO) report on highway user fees. “The claim is that […]
Is LaHood Admitting Defeat?
Last week, Secretary of Immobility Ray LaHood designated the Boston-to-Washington corridor as an eleventh high-speed rail corridor. This makes Amtrak eligible for some of the $2.4 billion in high-speed rail funds released when Florida rejected federal funds for the Tampa-Orlando route. Of course, $2.4 billion won’t even scratch the surface of Amtrak’s $117 billion plan […]
Reallocating Florida’s HSR Grant
When Ohio and Wisconsin elected governors who promised to cancel those states’ high-speed rail projects, Secretary of Immobility Ray LaHood redistributed the federal grants to those projects to other states (including $342 million to Florida) before the new governors even took office. Now that Florida has also cancelled its high-speed rail project, LaHood is being […]
It’s Still Dead
Sometimes I feel like Chevy Chase proclaiming, week after week, that Franco, by which I mean Florida’s high-speed rail, is still dead. Yet people are still trying to revive Florida’s high-speed boondoggle. The latest is a just-released ridership projection showing that the rail line, if built, would earn an operating profit as soon as it […]
Why Do Reporters Love Trains So Much?
As C.P. Zilliacus noted in one of his comments yesterday, Slate published an article subtitled, Why Do Conservatives Hate Trains So Much?. The writer, David Weigel, covered most of the bases, but a couple of clarifications are in order. First but not foremost, Weigel seems to confuse passengers with passenger miles when he writes, “Amtrak […]
