Reason Magazine - Topics > Transportation

Pimp my Turnpike

mriggs@reason.com (Mike Riggs) — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 13:34:00 EDT

Stephen J. Dubner at the New York Times' Freakonomics blog posted this letter from a reader. It's chock full of suggestions for improving the New Jersey Turnpike, including the construction of a Milton Friedman "rest spa":

The citizens of New Jersey must decide how to manage a financial crisis that has resulted from both decades of wishful thinking and their leaders’ lack of political courage. A major source of anxiety is the future of the New Jersey Turnpike. Following are a few ideas for improving the finances of the Turnpike Authority, which may have escaped the notice of the planners.
1. Thorstein Veblen would instantly recognize New Jerseyans’ need to be conspicuous consumers. How else to explain the holiday mobs at Neiman Marcus and Nordstrom? The Turnpike already comprises both car and truck lanes north- and south-bound between exits 8A and 18. Why not convert the car lanes to first class? The surcharge will provide the same function as toll roads in Texas and Colorado (and alas! the late Concorde) that provide faster travel options for those who … er, think it’s worth it. And we can do it with minimal adverse travel impact by adding an EZ-Pass Express receiver at the entrances to the first class lanes. If traffic gets bad in steerage, then presto! More people will pay the surcharge. And if that is successful, maybe we can attract Wolfgang Puck and Emeril Lagasse to the first class service areas, I mean spas. We can name the first one after Milton Friedman (BA, Rutgers U., 1932)....

reason founder Robert Poole wrote about an America without toll booths here.

Nashville to Lebanon Rail Line Fails. Lebanon War to Blame?

kmw@reason.com (Katherine Mangu-Ward) — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 14:38:00 EDT

Mass transit continues to prove itself to be expensive, unpopular, and unprofitable--even when it "debuted as the least expensive commuter rail to be built in the United States" and when high gas prices are in the headlines every day.

Tenessee's Music City Star line is completely dysfunctional. Transiteers were shocked to discover that insurance, station security, and marketing cost money (who could have known!?). The inevitable $1.7 million shortfall resulted.

The Feds, who contributed some big bucks to the project, aren't pleased. When even the federal government wants its money back, you know things are bad:

The Federal Transit Administration, which invested more than $30 million in the 2006 start-up of the Lebanon-to-Nashville commuter line, would demand its money back from the Regional Transportation Authority and the return of all assets if the Music City Star were to stop running, it wrote in a letter to local authorities this week.

Note: That's Lebanon, Tennessee. Sadly, there is still no Orient Express originating in Nashville. The line was launched in 2006, however, about the same time as the Israel-Lebanon War. Coincidence?

How spectacular is the failure?:

In the first year, ridership fell considerably short of consultant projections of 1,479 daily trips. It's now averaging about half that number and recorded 938 trips on its best single day.

Via alert reader Jason Bates

DWI for Walking a Bicycle

rbalko@reason.com (Radley Balko) — Fri, 09 May 2008 16:23:00 EDT

Jeff Brown of Columbus, Ohio was arrested for DWI, spent four days in jail, and had his license suspended for six months when he refused to take a breath test after an officer confronted him on suspicion of operating a vehicle while intoxicated. Brown was walking his bicycle across his own front yard. Brown has since made a YouTube video detailing his ordeal.

Via Lawrence Taylor, who notes that in 2005, a woman in Florida was arrested for DWI for operating her own wheelchair while intoxicated. That case, fortunately, was thrown out.

MORE: The appellate court decision describes the facts of the case this way:

The record contains scant details of the underlying facts of this case, but it appears appellant was riding a bicycle on a sidewalk on December 18, 2004, when he was detained by a police officer.

Make of that what you will.

Motorcycle Helmet Laws Save Lives, but Not Very Many

jsullum@reason.com (Jacob Sullum) — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 19:09:00 EDT

A new study reported in the American Journal of Public Health finds that the repeal of motorcycle helmet requirements for adults has been associated with an increase in motorcycle fatalities, beyond the general increase that has been seen throughout the country in the last decade or so. Although the researchers argue that their study reinforces the case for universal helmet laws, the impact they found looks pretty modest:

On average, when compared to state experience with no helmet mandate, universal helmet laws were associated with an 11.1% reduction in motorcyclist fatality rates, whereas rates in states with partial coverage statutes [applying only to riders younger than 21] were not statistically different from those with no helmet law. Furthermore, in the states in which recent repeals of universal coverage have been instituted, the motorcyclist fatality rate increased by an average of 12.2% over what would have been expected had universal coverage been maintained. Since 1997, an additional 615 motorcyclist fatalities have occurred in these states as a result of these changes in motorcycle helmet laws.

In terms of fatalities prevented each year, the effect estimated by this study is not very impressive. In 2004, for example, "an estimated 135 (or 5.8%) fewer fatalities would have occurred" in the 31 states without universal helmet laws had those states forced adult motorcyclists to wear head protection. That's just a handful of fatalities per state each year.

Previous research has indicated that helmet laws do substantially increase the percentage of motorcyclists who wear helmets. The fatality numbers probably are so small for two main reasons. First, riding a motorcycle, while much more dangerous than driving a car, is also much less common, so there are only 4,300 or so total motorcycle fatalities each year, one-tenth of all road fatalities. Second, helmets are only partly effective at preventing deaths: The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration estimates that in the event of a crash they cut the chances of a fatality by about 35 percent (compared to a 60 percent reduction for motorists who wear seat belts).

Even the undramatic results of this study may overestimate the impact of helmet laws. To the researchers' credit, instead of doing a simple before-and-after comparison in a single state or a few states, they looked at accident data from all 50 states and D.C. for 1975 through 2004. They took into account the general upward trend in motorcycle deaths since 1996 and several potential confounding variables, including other traffic-related laws, weather patterns, alcohol consumption, population density, and the age breakdown of each state's population. But since the outcome measure they used was fatalities per 10,000 registered motorcycles, they did not take into account miles traveled. That could matter if motorcyclists who hate helmets start riding more often or longer distances once they are no longer required to wear them. In that case, some of the increase in deaths could be due to an increase in miles traveled. Another possible factor: If people who stopped riding motorcycles because they were irked by a helmet requirement suddenly start riding them again once the requirement is repealed, the percentage of motorcyclists who are out of shape and out of practice might increase, which could independently raise the frequency of crashes.

Some anti-helmet-law activists argue that helmets, on balance, decrease motorcycle safety by making riders more reckless, making their heads heavier, or impairing their hearing, peripheral vision, and sensitivity to air pressure changes. There isn't much evidence to support that claim, and I have little doubt that helmet laws reduce fatalities to some extent. It just does not seem to be a very big effect, which is one reason opponents of these laws have been so successful at rolling them back and preventing legislators from reimposing them. In principle, the fatality numbers shouldn't matter: The right to ride without a helmet should not hinge on exactly how big the risk is. But practical politics is rarely about principle, a point illustrated by the contrast between helmet and seat belt laws that I drew in reason a few years ago.

Heirs of a Terror War, That's What We've Become...

bdoherty@reason.com (Brian Doherty) — Tue, 19 Feb 2008 20:50:00 EST

Bush is once again trying to cut its budget to a mere $900 million (and will likely fail, like he did last year, when asking for that sum got him $1.3 billion appropriated by Congress), and while continuing its (sadly eternal) dying gasps, Amtrak makes the experience of riding the rails even more annoying:

Amtrak will start randomly screening passengers' carry-on bags this week in a new security push that includes officers with automatic weapons and bomb-sniffing dogs patrolling platforms and trains.
The initiative, to be announced by the railroad on Tuesday, is a significant shift for Amtrak. Unlike the airlines, it has had relatively little visible increase in security since the 2001 terrorist attacks, a distinction that has enabled it to attract passengers eager to avoid airport hassles.
Amtrak officials insist their new procedures won't hold up the flow of passengers.
"On-time performance is a key element of Amtrak service. We are fully mindful of that. This is not about train delays," Bill Rooney, the railroad's vice president for security strategy and special operations, told The Associated Press.

Peter Bagge cartoons wickedly on the Amtrak experience, from our Dec. 2005 issue.

"Personal Responsibility Underground"

kmw@reason.com (Katherine Mangu-Ward) — Fri, 07 Dec 2007 13:59:00 EST

The New York subway is (slowly) decentralizing and The New York Times editorial board is *gasp* in favor of a potential new system where "subway managers will compete to see which line is cleanest, most efficient and all-round best":

Over the last few decades New York City’s huge subway has become too centralized into a “large, unwieldy system.” The management is one big stovepipe — that is, everybody works for a few people at the top. For example, one person is now in charge of all 468 subway stations across the entire New York City area. So, when it takes more than two years for workers to mend a leak that creates dangerous, icy steps, nobody really gets blamed for it. If it works right,... subway riders will soon have a real live person to blame.

Life in the Slow Lane

info@reason.com (Robert Poole) — Thu, 08 Nov 2007 07:38:00 EST

Americans are going to be driving on toll roads a lot more in the years ahead. One of the least pleasant experiences of this form of travel is the toll booth. But it doesn't have to be this way. We can, if we want, get rid of every toll booth and toll plaza in the country.

Technology is leading the way. First came windshield-mounted transponders, like the Northeast's E-ZPass, Florida's SunPass and California's FasTrak. Transponders were first introduced merely to speed up passage through toll booths. Then engineers figured out they worked fine at highway speeds, and that plazas could be eliminated for "open-road" tolling of vehicles with transponders. Only cash-payers, off to the side, would have to queue up. This transformation has been completed on the Illinois Tollway system and is under way on Florida's Turnpike and a number of others.

Engineers are now developing new toll roads from scratch that are entirely cashless. On the Melbourne CityLink in Australia and the new toll motorway system in Santiago, Chile, you either pay by transponder, or you call in and register your license-plate number for certain days when you plan to use the toll road. They bill you when their video cameras pick out your plate number.

And in Toronto, Canada, you can drive onto Highway 407 with no transponder and no reservation. They will simply video your license plate and send you a bill. The 407 has had this system since 1997. It is one of the world's most successful new toll roads.

Why do away with toll booths? No more delays, accidents and pollution caused by long lines of waiting cars. No more need for large swathes of land for toll plazas, making it possible to fit toll roads into tight corridors where congestion relief is needed. Lower payroll costs, no buildings and no cash "shrinkage" (i.e., theft) by collectors.

Today there are only a handful of no-cash toll roads in the U.S. The half-dozen high-occupancy toll lanes now operational in California, Colorado, Minnesota, Texas and Utah are all cashless, as they have to be to make use of market pricing, with toll rates changing to reflect periods of higher and lower demand. So is the recently built Westpark toll road in Houston and Tampa's new elevated express toll lanes on the crosstown expressway. Several new toll roads in Texas are being planned as cashless, and so are planned HOT lanes in northern Virginia, Miami, Dallas and elsewhere. But I've been able to identify only two existing toll-road systems that have made firm plans and set deadlines for getting rid of all toll booths: the North Texas Tollway Authority in Dallas and the Miami-Dade Expressway Authority.

Why isn't everybody doing this, since the technology works and has been proven overseas? There are legitimate concerns to be weighed. Unless the toll road already has high transponder market share, some fraction of cash customers may simply stop using the toll road if the cash option is eliminated. There are also real costs (staffing and technology) involved in video license-plate recognition and billing. And there is the problem of what to do with all the now-redundant toll collectors, especially if they are unionized.

It is not coincidental that the pioneers in cashless tolling have been investor-owned toll road companies: the 91 Express Lanes in California, Highway 407 in Toronto, the Cross-Israel Highway, the Melbourne CityLink and Santiago's toll motorways. All of these cashless toll roads were developed by private companies under long-term public-private concession agreements.

It is also not coincidental that the public-sector toll agencies in Florida and Texas going cashless are among the most businesslike and entrepreneurial, in a public-sector industry that has historically been very conservative and in some states highly politicized.

To a company whose business is offering its customers high-quality mobility (and to public toll agencies that think and operate like businesses), going cashless and boothless is a no-brainer. One of the very first actions taken by the companies that leased the Chicago Skyway in 2005 and the Indiana Toll Road in 2006 was to introduce electronic toll collection.

Elsewhere one can sense the first stirrings of change. In recent weeks, the Port Authority of New York & New Jersey, the Massachusetts Turnpike Authority and Denver's E-470 toll agency have all announced studies of going cashless. The new North Carolina Turnpike Authority is seriously considering developing its new toll roads without any toll booths or plazas.

I'm confident that the growing number of private-sector toll companies can be counted on to put their customers' interest first, by eliminating cash tolling. Since most U.S. toll roads are still operated by public-sector agencies, however, voters should demand that they phase out toll booths and toll plazas by a date certain -- a decade from now should be plenty of time.

Mr. Poole is director of transportation studies at the Reason Foundation. An engineering graduate of MIT, he has advised the U.S. Department of Transportation and a number of state DOTs.

The rest of this column appeared in the Wall Street Journal, where you can read it now.

Tear Down the Toll Booths!

gillespie@reason.com (Nick Gillespie) — Mon, 05 Nov 2007 14:30:00 EST

Reason Foundation founder Robert W. Poole argues for toll roads and against toll booths in the Wall Street Journal:

Americans are going to be driving on toll roads a lot more in the years ahead. One of the least pleasant experiences of this form of travel is the toll booth. But it doesn't have to be this way. We can, if we want, get rid of every toll booth and toll plaza in the country....
Why do away with toll booths? No more delays, accidents and pollution caused by long lines of waiting cars. No more need for large swathes of land for toll plazas, making it possible to fit toll roads into tight corridors where congestion relief is needed. Lower payroll costs, no buildings and no cash "shrinkage" (i.e., theft) by collectors.

The article is behind the subscriber wall, but this link ought to get you through to the whole thing.

More from Poole and Reason Foundation regarding transportation and other issues here.

Travis Shrugged

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Tue, 23 Oct 2007 13:04:00 EDT

New York's cabbies go on strike to protest new city regulations:

Since Oct. 1, all yellow cabs have been required to carry an onboard GPS and credit-card machine, as well as a television on the back of the driver's seat that plays advertisements and short programs. The devices were required as part of a 2004 deal that increased fares by 25%.

According to [Taxi Workers Alliance chief Bhairavi] Desai, there are glitches with the GPS devices, which she said slow the meters and take minutes to load. The TVs heat up the driver's seat, and credit cards lead to a 5% surcharge for cabbies - problems she said the city has ignored.

[Via Roderick Long.]

Why Cities Decline, Case Study No. 1,223 (Idiotic Streetcar Edition)

gillespie@reason.com (Nick Gillespie) — Tue, 16 Oct 2007 07:25:00 EDT

Officials in Cincinnati, a city that's been in decline for decades (maybe a century), have finally hit on a way to pull re-enthrone the Queen City (a.k.a. Porkopolis) as urban royalty: Build a $100 million, 4-mile streetcar route with the money they don't have.

Yeah, that's the ticket. To rub salt in the wounds of taxpayers, officials are claiming that the project will add $2 billion to the city's economy and revitalize a long-unrevitalizable section of town.

Cincinnati today will unveil plans on how to pay for a four-mile, $100 million downtown streetcar line that advocates believe will contribute $2 billion to the city's economy and transform [the] Over-the-Rhine [section of town].
The plan's cheerleaders include politicians, transit activists and urban developers. So far, it seems to have no enemies, although that could change when the city explains where it will get the money to fund the plan.

More here. The project is a fantastic example of how city officials delude themselves into thinking that whipped cream and sprinkles--or a goddamn transit technology that is one of the most frustrating, underperfroming rides imaginable--can save cities. What is it about trains? Or light rail? Or streetcars? Is there a Freudian analysis that's relevant here?

Why won't cities such as Cincinnati do far more basic things to lure people back into their craptacular clutches? The list might include: Generally reducing taxes and regulation so that it's relatively cheap to live and easy to do business in an area; creating a safe climate with regards to crime; reforming a public school system so people who don't have kids (a majority pretty much everywhere) don't have to worry about school issues and people with kids have some decent measure of choice; not spending billions of dollars on the owners of jerk-off sports teams.

Somehow I don't think building a 4-mile streetcar from point Y to point Z is going to help.

Back in 2001, as Mr. Mxyzptlk at Suck, I wrote about Cincinnati's woes as a way of talking about the plight facing many other mid-sized (for now) cities.

Cincinnati's leaders (if you can call them that) are predictably holding up Portland, Oregon as a model. Here's Randal O'Toole in reason on why that is totally off-target. And here's Dan McGraw on why sports welfare is destructive of just about everything it touches, except the wallets of fatcats.

O'Toole (named after his father, perhaps [scroll down]), wrote a good piece for Cato cleverly titled "A Desire Named Streetcar."

Get Caught in Gridlock with Drew Carey at Reason.tv!

Mon, 15 Oct 2007 06:30:00 EDT

...

Waltz Across Texas

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Mon, 24 Sep 2007 10:35:00 EDT

Not all the opposition to the Trans-Texas Corridor is coming from paranoid nationalists. From a Time story on the project:

David Langford, an activist for the Texas Wildlife Association, is organizing farmers and ranchers whose land could be cut in half or condemned by the Trans-Texas Corridor. An early plan for central Texas showed a corridor passing near the homestead Langford's family settled in 1851. With the state's new "quick claim" ability -- granted under TTC legislation -- his family homestead could be gone in 90 days, he says, transferred to private investors operating the corridor. Though he would be compensated financially, he's still steamed. "I can't believe Rick Perry's grandfather would want his house and ranch taken and turned over to Paris Hilton's family to build a hotel on one of these roads," he says.

Opponents argue the roads may require the seizure of "more than half a million acres of private property." Gov. Rick Perry's "Trans Texas Corridor Fact Sheet" doesn't mention a total -- it gets vague whenever the interesting criticisms come up -- but it does claim that the project "will ultimately result in the purchase [sic] of less public land than would otherwise be needed to keep up with growth, and all the needed land will be purchased during one process, instead of on a piecemeal basis as we need to build out infrastructure one project at a time." Apart from the moral issues involved in taking private property, this runs up against the possibility that a process of "piecemeal" evolution is less likely to grab giant chunks of land that aren't actually "needed."

One thing that isn't clear to me, as a fellow who hasn't lived in Texas for years and hasn't been following this story closely: How much is the state planning to spend on the corridor, and how much is coming from private sources? Perry's factsheet says that "The first segment of the corridor...will require no tax dollars up front for construction while ensuring a $7.2 billion private investment in the corridor." The phrases "first" and "up front" imply that Texas taxpayers will be paying money down the road, but somehow a document that can cite the exact amount a private company will be spending doesn't say how much the state plans to kick in.

Politicians Love Transit, Just Not For Themselves

info@reason.com (Ted Balaker) — Mon, 17 Sep 2007 13:35:00 EDT

“You’ve got to use public transit,” Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa declared. “You can't keep on pointing to someone else and saying it's their responsibility.”

Imagine the credibility and public relations points Villaraigosa could have racked up uttering those words while commuting on a bus to City Hall. But instead of being the “eco-friendly transit-riding mayor” Villaraigosa rides an SUV to work.

Yet many Angelinos probably sympathize with the mayor. “Give me a first-rate transit system, and I’ll use it,” they might say. Until that system arrives, they support new transit proposals, like the $5 billion “subway to the sea,” while continuing to drive everywhere.

But what would it say about the practicality of mass transit if the mayor of the city with the nation’s best subway system also took an SUV to work?

After Michael Bloomberg became mayor of New York City, he invited reporters to follow him to work. The billionaire mayor didn’t slip into a limo—he piled into a subway car like a “regular Joe mayor.” Positive press gushed forth. Bloomberg was the real-deal, a green leader and blue-collar populist. One transit group dubbed him “the MetroCard Mayor.” Bloomberg bragged about taking transit, and urged others to follow.

Yet, after a five-week stakeout, New York Times reporters discovered that Bloomberg’s enthusiasm for transit has since fizzled. These days he only takes the subway to work about twice a week. That’s more transit travel than Villaraigosa, but not enough to meet the federal government’s definition of a transit commuter.

Even during transit days, Bloomberg doesn’t schlep to the nearest subway stop. Staffers drive him 22 blocks so he can hop aboard an express train, avoiding the hassle of making a transfer and shrinking his commute time by about a third. Avoiding transit is commonplace for those who run some of our nation’s other top-tier transit systems.

The Philadelphia Inquirer discovered that only four of 14 transit board members interviewed used that city’s system at least twice a week. And when asked by the Washington Post, only five out of 10 local transit board members said they rode their rail system even occasionally (two others refused to talk, so it’s probably safe to file them under “infrequent transit user”).

Villaraigosa’s actions make the obvious point that his words never would: Public transit doesn’t work for the vast majority of Angelinos, 95 percent of whom find another way to get to work. Still he and other public officials fuel a double fantasy.

First, they claim our existing public transit system is a better choice for motorists, at least those who aren’t serving as mayor.

Villaraigosa says he’d use transit more often, “But my problem is I have to go all over the city … It’s very tough because of my schedule.”

City Councilman Herb Wesson, a transportation committee member, says the same thing, "Given the type of work I do, it just doesn't work for me to take public transportation."

Don’t the rest of us also have busy schedules - jobs to get to, kids to pick up, and errands to run?

Why are we being urged to ditch our cars for a transit system that is ill-suited to serve city officials?

The second fantasy is that each new rail transit project represents a step toward building a New York-style transit system. New York’s subway system boasts 468 stations; LA’s 78 (if you generously count light rail stations too). The current piecemeal transit approach should get LA to New York’s level sometime in the middle of the next millennium, and the “build it all at once” strategy made fashionable by Denver is really just a replay of LA in 1980, when Prop A was supposed to fund 11 rail transit lines. What committing to rail really did was soak up funds that could have gone toward more sensible fixes: mainly improving and expanding bus service for the transit dependent poor

Bloomberg’s falling out with transit adds another disturbing wrinkle: Maybe even a system as extensive as New York’s couldn’t transform Villaraigosa into a transit-riding mayor. In Metro New York, 25 percent of commuters rely on transit, much more than LA’s 5 percent, but not in step with the popular view that “everyone” takes transit in New York.

Back when workers traveled in beelines from homes in the suburbs to offices in a city center, it was relatively easy to design successful transit systems. Today, old fixed-route systems don’t serve most travelers. Yet officials still prefer to fund snazzy rail lines over buses because for them transit’s primary use isn’t transportation but a backdrop for photo ops: Cut the ribbon, huddle around the others who fought for funding, smile, and then jump back into your SUV

Imagine how much transit might improve if public officials actually had to ride the systems they tout.

Ted Balaker is a policy analyst at Reason Foundation and author of The Road More Traveled: Why the Congestion Crisis Matters More Than You Think and What We Can Do About It (Rowman & Littlefield, 2006). This column originally appeared in the Los Angeles Daily News.

Reducing Accidents By Removing Street Signs

gillespie@reason.com (Nick Gillespie) — Wed, 12 Sep 2007 10:17:00 EDT

Reader SPD points to a town in Germany that is taking a novel approach to reducing auto-related accidents: getting rid of all traffic signs.

The idea of removing signs to improve road safety, called "Shared Space," was developed by Dutch traffic specialist Hans Monderman, and is supported by the European Union.
The EU will cover half of the 1.2 million euros ($1.66 million) it will cost Bohmte to ditch its traffic lights.
Monderman's ideas have already been implemented in the town of Drachten in the north of the Netherlands, where all stop lights, traffic signs, pavements, and street markings have gone.
"It's been very successful there," Goedejohann said, adding that accidents in Drachten had been reduced significantly.

The area covered has about 13,500 car trips a day, plus pedestrians, etc. The theory apparently is that autos will need to be careful since they don't have the right of way. Or something. As a reflexive jaywalker, I applaud the experiment, even if it takes away the thrill of jaywalking.

More here.

Amtrak Boom Just One More Sign the Terrorists Have Won

gillespie@reason.com (Nick Gillespie) — Mon, 10 Sep 2007 09:00:00 EDT

The 9/11 attacks and rising fuel prices are just two more ways to say that there's something magic about a train!

Amtrak is proud to report, in the Wash Times' motion-sickness-inducing, pun-inflected gloss, that it "is chugging toward its fifth-straight record year for ridership nationwide....The money-losing service...says it is riding higher, illustrated by the hundreds of thousands of additional riders flocking to expanded routes in Illinois and California."

How big is the jump in ridership? In the fiscal year that ended last September, 24.3 million rode the service, setting a record for the fourth consecutive year; the odds look good that this fiscal year will set a fifth straight record.

But hey, Casey Jones, you better watch your speed. Trouble ahead, trouble behind:

The service has never been out of the red since its start in 1971, meaning it must rely on government handouts year after year.

In trying to hash out the federal budget for next year, Congress is weighing how much U.S. taxpayers should underwrite the passenger service. Amtrak has requested $1.53 billion, nearly twice the amount the Bush administration wants to give it. In the past, President Bush has proposed giving the service nothing.

The House Appropriations Committee recently agreed to boost Amtrak's federal funding to $1.4 billion - a modest increase from the service's $1.3 billion in government help - while a Senate panel has endorsed spending $1.37 billion. But Mr. Bush has promised to veto any spending bills exceeding his budget requests, forcing Amtrak to slice service if the president makes good on his threat....

The service also continues to be nagged by travel delays, mostly tied to having to share the tracks with freight haulers that own the rails and charge Amtrak a modest fee....With freight traffic soaring in recent years, Amtrak's on-time performance slid to an average of 68 percent last year, its worst showing since the 1970s....

More here.

I don't know about the current numbers, but in 2002, reason's Mike Lynch calculated that Amtrak cost $3.37 for every $1 they took in from passengers (I know, I know, they'll make it up on volume). And that same year, I noted that 71 percent of Americans--real Americans, the kind who drive everywhere, god bless their souls--absolutely loved Amtrak, "the state-sponsored terrorist network that has extorted billions of dollars from taxpayers over its tortured 31 years of existence."

And back in 1997, reason foundation founder Bob Poole counseled "Kill Amtrak Now!", a title that was reportedly optioned by Russ Meyer. And in 2005, reason cartoonist Peter Bagge devoted four fun-filled pages to the self-evident truth that Amtrak Sucks.

More Amtrakania (and it's all ania) here.

Bad Transportation Policy at a Higher Price

schapman@tribune.com (Steve Chapman) — Mon, 13 Aug 2007 06:58:00 EDT

In the wake of the Minnesota bridge collapse, House Transportation Committee Chairman Jim Oberstar (D-Minn.) was struck with a blinding insight on how to solve the problem of neglected infrastructure. Before you continue reading, let me suggest that you take a pair of vise grips and use them to get a tight hold on your wallet. Because what occurred to Oberstar is that the federal government needs more money to spend on aging bridges.

"If you're not prepared to invest another five cents in bridge reconstruction and road reconstruction, then God help you," he declared. Actually, he doesn't want just a single nickel, but a nickel on every gallon of gas sold to motorists, which would amount to a 27 percent increase in the federal fuel tax. This boost, he insists, would last only three years, bringing in $25 billion in new revenue.

But just two years ago, Congress and the president agreed on a federal highway bill with a six-year price tag of $286 billion. Nationally, all bodies of government spend in the neighborhood of $150 billion a year on roads. Somewhere in that mountain of cash, you might think, there must be funds that could be spared to keep bridges from rotting and falling down.

You would be right. When the 2005 package passed, it included 6,736 special projects inserted by members for the benefit of their home districts, which had a total price tag of $24 billion—helping to make it what the organization Taxpayers for Common Sense called "by far the most expensive, wasteful highway bill in the nation's history."

Among the worst federal road projects identified by the group in a 2004 report was $121 million to add new ramps to, yes, Interstate Highway 35W in Minneapolis. It's just a hunch, but maybe those funds would have been more wisely spent on maintenance than expansion.

President Bush has not always been a voice for fiscal discipline, but in this case he wisely rejected the idea of entrusting additional resources to the same people who helped create the problem. "My suggestion would be that they revisit the process by which they spend gasoline money in the first place," he said.

Oberstar's proposal, however, betrays the strange mentality that prevails among many elected officials. When people mess up royally in the private sector, they are punished by the loss of money and even the disappearance of the entities that employ them. When people mess up royally in the public sector, they often get more money and more responsibilities.

That's not the only perverse pattern on display here. The story of federal highway spending is one of funding glamorous construction projects and neglecting more tedious obligations. Former Rep. Bud Shuster, R-Pa., who served as House Transportation Committee chairman from 1995 to 2001, managed to get an interstate highway built back in his home state. It is now known as the "Bud Shuster Highway." What congressman has ever had a resurfacing project or bridge repair named after him?

Anyone can see that it makes no sense to add a rec room to your house when the roof is leaking and the lights are shorting out. Somehow, though, spending money to build new transportation links while letting existing ones deteriorate masquerades as sound policy on Capitol Hill.

Much of the problem of neglected maintenance arises from the fact that almost all roads and bridges are owned and operated by the government—which doesn't have the same incentive as private companies to preserve valuable assets.

If a shopping mall lets its facilities decay, customers will go elsewhere. If authorities let a major bridge or road fall into disrepair, by contrast, motorists may have no alternative, except other bridges and roads that are also under-maintained by the same authorities. A corporation whose negligence is lethal will face a flood of lawsuits, but governments are generally exempt from such accountability.

There are other problems with transportation funding. Robert Poole, the peerless director of transportation studies at the Reason Foundation, says the federal highway formula systematically diverts money from "fast-growing, highly populated states to slow-growing, less populated states." This serves political needs at the expense of genuine priorities. "We couldn't have designed a more perverse approach to solving our highway investment problem if we tried," says Poole.
Actually, we could. We could keep the perversities and lavish more money on them.

COPYRIGHT 2007 CREATORS SYNDICATE, INC.

Light Rail to Nowhere

jsullum@reason.com (Jacob Sullum) — Wed, 08 Aug 2007 19:14:00 EDT

A front-page story in yesterday's New York Times noted that politicians' transportation vanity projects drain money away from the sort of maintenance work that apparently was needed on the Interstate 35W bridge that collapsed in Minneapolis last week. I was pleasantly surprised to see the Times put light rail lines in the same category as boondoggles like Alaska's Bridge to Nowhere:

Further, transportation and engineering experts said, lawmakers have financed a boom in rail construction that, while politically popular, has resulted in expensive transit systems that are not used by a vast majority of American commuters.
Representative James L. Oberstar, Democrat of Minnesota and the chairman of the Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure, sent out a news release last month boasting about Minnesota's share of a recent transportation and housing appropriations bill.
Of the $12 million secured for the state, $10 million is slated for a new 40-mile commuter rail line to Minneapolis, called the Northstar....
Some transportation experts also said that though light rail and other public transportation projects made sense in cities, investing in them in sprawling suburban regions might not, even if the systems were supported, in theory, by the public.
"Too many American cities are spending far too much money on expensive rail transit projects, which are used for only 1 to 2 percent of local travel, and far too little on highway projects which are used for 95 to 99 percent of local travel," Randal O'Toole, a senior fellow with the Cato Institute, said in an e-mail interview.

O'Toole explained the folly of light rail in this 2004 paper (PDF) co-published by the Reason Foundation, which has assembled its light rail links here. reason's coverage of the subject includes a 1999 piece by O'Toole and an article by Sam Staley and Ted Balaker in our April issue.

Bridge Politics

peron@global.co.za (Jim Peron) — Wed, 08 Aug 2007 15:06:00 EDT

Politicians are drawn to tragedy like flies to pie. Take the Minneapolis bridge collapse. President Bush took a 10-minute helicopter fly-over of the bridge—just long enough to appear compassionate and promise to rebuild the bridge.

But you have to wonder what makes this a federal responsibility. The typical excuse is that the state can't afford such pricey projects, so it behooves the federal government to step in to help. Of course the federal government is also deeply in debt, so it's difficult to pin down exactly what "afford" actually means. Either way, Washington appears set to provide about $250 million to Minneapolis for a new bridge.

Whatever Minnesota's spending constraints, the state can apparently afford to spend hundreds of millions for corporate welfare to Carl Pohlad, the owner of the Minnesota Twins, for a new baseball stadium. Hennepin County, where the bridge is located, recently passed a new .15 percent sales tax solely to pay for Pohlad's new stadium.

Pohlad basically blackmailed Minnesota. Unless they bilked taxpayers for his personal benefit, Pohlad threatened to take his baseball team elsewhere. When voters in North Carolina rejected an attempt to fund a baseball park for Pohlad there, he shuffled back to Minneapolis, where he was rewarded with the corporate handout.

In addition to the baseball franchise, Pohlad owns Marquette Financial Companies and United Properties. Next to PepsiCo Inc., his family is the largest shareholder in PepsiAmericas. Pohlad is a billionaire, several times over. Yet the state of Minnesota, which apparently is too poor to properly maintain its bridges, was willing to hand him a few hundred million more. And Pohlad's subsidy was just one part of a massive $1 billion package the legislature put together, which also included funding for a new stadium for the University of Minnesota football team.

The bridge didn't collapse because Minnesota couldn't afford to maintain it. The bridge collapsed because the state had other priorities, unrelated to the proper functions of government.

The problem isn't unique to Minnesota. If you compare the percentage of bridge deficiencies with taxes raised, you'll find that some of the highest-taxed states also have some of the worst problems with bridge maintenance. Rhode Island is in the top ten when it comes to taxes collected, and has a higher percentage of deficient bridges than any other state. Pennsylvania has taxes higher than 31 other states, and a bridge deficiency rate that is the second worst in the country. New York is number ten in taxes collected, and is one of the worst when it comes to maintenance. In fact, half of the top ten-taxed states are in the bottom ten when to comes to bridge maintenance.

President Bush is now promising around $250 million for a new bridge in Minneapolis. That is considerably less than what the state gave Pohlad, and $750 million less than the state poured into its various sports stadiums. And of course, simply repairing the bridge would have cost a lot less than now having to replace it.

Even if we assume that maintaining local bridges is a federal project, the involvement of politicians means perverted priorities, and maintenance of existing infrastructure, which has no clear constituency, isn't going to rank very high.

Consider the earmark debate. As the Wall Street Journal recently editorialized, "The $250 million in emergency appropriations now flying through Congress for Minnesota is slightly more than half the amount appropriated to Alaska for the 'Bridge to Nowhere' and 'Don Young's Way,' two of the more infamous earmarks from the 2005 bill."

And here's the kicker:

“A main problem with these earmarks is that they often supersede the more urgent repair and replacement needs identified by state and local officials." Earmarked funds often go unspent because these "vanity projects" are unwanted.

“A full five years after the 1987 transportation bill, for example, no less than 64% of its earmarked money was still unspent because states had more urgent priorities for their share of the spending. By 1997, 55% of the $6.2 billion in earmarks from the 1991 highway bill had gone unspent. We can't report the same numbers for the 1998 and 2005 highway bills because the federal Transportation Department stopped disclosing the figures, lest it embarrass Members of Congress.”

Earmarks divert spending from the necessary projects to the frivolous. The New York Times reports that in spite of historically high spending on transportation, highway funds are allocated according to "the political muscle of lawmakers, rather than dire need," which means "construction on new, politically popular roads and transit projects rather than the mundane work of maintaining the worn-out ones."

The Times adds that politicians are keen to fund politically-correct projects for transport over actual maintenance projects. This has "resulted in expensive transit systems that are not used by the vast majority of American commuters."

The chairman of the House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure is Representative James Oberstar, a Democrat from Minnesota. Oberstar recently bragged about bagging $12 million in funds for the state, but the New York Times notes that $10 million of that "is slated for a new 40-mile commuter rail line to Minneapolis, called the Northstar," and "the remaining $2 million is divided among a new bike and walking path and a few other projects, including highway work and interchange reconstruction."

Senator Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) says that the political process means "that routine but important things like maintenance always get shortchanged because it's nice for somebody to cut a ribbon for a new structure."

Hans Bader at the Competitive Enterprise Institute notes that in Europe, some commentators have been posting messages at Dutch and German newspaper web sites blaming the collapse on low taxes. And C. Michael Walton of the University of Texas seems to endorse this. Walton says that the lack of maintenance was the result of "our backlash to increases in taxes." And even though Sen. Schumer correctly identified the misallocation of transportation spending, his own solution was also to call for new taxes, not for the reallocation of wasted funds.

However, the problem in Minnesota was not the result of low taxes. It's the seventh highest-taxed state in the country.

I'm personally familiar with two other bridge collapses: the 1983 collapse of the Mianus Bridge, which killed three, and the 1989 collapse of the Cypress Street Viaduct in Oakland, which killed forty.

The Mianus Bridge is in Connecticut, the state with the second highest tax level in the country. And the Cypress Street Viaduct is in California, which ranks at number 12. Both collapses were maintenance related. Though an earthquake triggered the Oakland collapse, the state had neglected to fund retrofitting for the bridge for years, in favor of other projects.

After the Mianus incident I, along with Douglas Conway, wrote a policy paper caled "The Road Not Taken," which outlined how politics misallocates highway spending, leading to incidents like the Mianus collapse. Apparently nothing has changed. But then, it wouldn't as long as roads remain under political control. Higher taxes rarely improve roads, since politicians will always be tempted to use money for projects that are more immediately politically advantageous.

A city, for instance, may need to spend $100 million on policing and fire protection, which are popular. But the politicians may also want to spend $20 million on an unpopular vanity project. They may allocate $20 million to the vanity projects and $80 million to fire and police. Then they go to the public asking for an additional $20 million in new taxes in order to "adequately fund" fire and police services.

By diverting funds from popular programs to unpopular programs they are able to push through tax increases that would otherwise be difficult to pass. Rarely do they have the integrity to actually raise taxes for the express purpose of funding vanity projects.

What's the alternative? One possible solution would be to turn each state road system into a non-profit corporation funded entirely from tolls, not taxes. The stockholders in the corporation would be the road users. They elect a board to run the roads and determine road spending and tolls. Funds cannot be diverted to other vanity projects since all funding belongs only to the road corporation. And the only source for funding would be the tolls, not taxes subject to political manipulation.

If tolls are too high, and surpluses are routinely generated, then the tolls would be reduced. Any profit is returned to the road users themselves in direct proportion to what they paid. People who don't use the roads pay nothing directly, and pay indirectly relative to the benefits they receive. Trucking services, whose use of the roads are subsidized by taxpayers, would pay more. We'd then pay a bit more for the products they move.

With electronic road pricing systems like E-ZPass, there's really no need for toll booths, save perhaps for out-of-state travelers—who normally get a free ride, but who, under this system, would actually pay for the harm they inflict on the state's roads. We could then abolish the taxes normally (purportedly) used for roads.

Each consumer would know the exact cost of his road services. The funds couldn't be diverted to vanity projects unrelated to transportation, or to other states. The precise mechanism for non-state provision of roads is open to debate. But the political provision surely has already proven itself deficient.

James Peron is a freelance writer currently living in Europe. He is the editor of The Liberal Tide: From Tyranny to Liberty, and the author of Zimbabwe: Death of a Dream, and other books.

Now that You Mention It...

rbalko@reason.com (Radley Balko) — Fri, 03 Aug 2007 11:08:00 EDT

Fark headline:

Minnesota Twins postpone groundbreaking for new $1.1 billion stadium due to I35 bridge collapse. Apparently up until this week they didn't have any more pressing construction projects on which to spend that money.

Two-thirds of the stadium is publicly funded. The land was acquired through eminent domain.

Virginia Speeding Fines Update

rbalko@reason.com (Radley Balko) — Fri, 03 Aug 2007 09:39:00 EDT

A judge has thrown out Virginia's odious new speeding fines on equal protection grounds—the fines only apply to motorists with Virginia license plates, not motorists from other states passing through or visiting. The fines, you may remember, range from $1,000 to $3,000, and can be applied for as minor an infraction as an improper signal, or driving 15 mph over the speed limit.

Typically, House of Delegates Speaker William Howell and Gov. Tim Kaine have responded to the ruling and to mounting public criticism by promising to address the fines in the next legislative session. Unfortunately, both have said they don't plan to revoke the fines or to make them more reasonable, only to apply them to all drivers, not just Virginians. Meaning they plan to address the public outrage by applying the fines to more people, not fewer.

Also on topic, Tim Carney explained in the D.C. Examiner this week the role private developers have played in pushing the fines into law.

Meanwhile, despite the backlash, the man most responsible for the fines and who probably stands to benefit from them more than any other individual—Del. David Albo—has no opponent in the November election.

My prediction: Supporters of the measure will use the Minneapolis bridge tragedy to explain why the fines are needed to shore up Virginia's infrastructure. The state announced just this morning that 400 of its bridges aren't up to snuff.

Minneapolis Bridge Disaster

gillespie@reason.com (Nick Gillespie) — Thu, 02 Aug 2007 09:48:00 EDT

Authorities lowered the death toll from an interstate bridge collapse to four Thursday, but warned the final number could change as divers comb the twisted steel and chunks of concrete that crashed into the Mississippi River.
Police Lt. Amelia Huffman said: "This morning, the medical examiner's office only has four sets of remains." Initial reports of seven people killed were based on the best estimates authorities had Wednesday night, she said.
The eight-lane Interstate 35W bridge, a major Minneapolis artery, was in the midst of being repaired and two lanes in each direction were closed when the bridge buckled during evening rush hour Wednesday....
Gov. Tim Pawlenty said the bridge was inspected by the Minnesota Department of Transportation in 2005 and 2006 and that no immediate structural problems were noted. "There were some minor things that needed attention," he said....

Awful stuff. More here.