from Randal O'Toole's Transportation Newsletter #24 15 July 2014
The war against the automobile is being waged on three fronts:
1. Congress to Pass Short-Term Fix to Highway Fund 2.
Metropolitan Planning Organizations Write So-Called Sustainability Plans 3.
Cities and Transit Agencies Plan Obsolete Rail Transit Systems 4. Preserving
the American Dream Conference
1. Congress to Pass Short-Term Fix to Highway Fund
Congressional authority to collect the federal gasoline tax expires
on September 1 and, more important to some, the Highway Trust Fund is expected to run out of money at about the same time. The media has inundated the public with dire warnings of what will happen if the trust fund is exhausted and how our highways are crumbling and need federal funding.
In fact, our highways are in good shape: the number of
bridges that are structurally deficient has declined by 50 percent since 1990
and the average smoothness of pavement has improved each year. The trust fund
is running out of money because of overspending, not underfunding: Congress has
diverted at least 20 percent of gas taxes to non-highway programs and mandated
spending even if revenues weren't sufficient to cover those costs.
A proposal to increase gas taxes by 12 cents a gallon was
enthusiastically endorsed by Democrats in Congress who want more money to
spend, but was entirely unnecessary for America's highways or transportation in
general. Fortunately, it appears this proposal will not pass. Instead, Congress
appears likely to pass a very short-term bill that will replenish the trust
fund and reauthorize the gas tax for less than a year. That means we can expect
this debate to pop up again next Spring.
Unstated is that both parties hope to make gains in the
2014 elections, and if one house or other switches party whichever one that is
in power thinks it will be able to do what it wants in 2015. If instead the
Republicans continue to hold the House and the Democrats hold the Senate, then
next year will see the same near-gridlock as this year.
Links
2. Metropolitan Planning Organizations Write So-Called Sustainability Plans
Early in Obama's first term, the secretaries of
Transportation and Housing & Urban Development and the director of the
Environmental Protection Agency agreed to jointly require that metropolitan
planning organizations (MPOs) write "smart-growth" plans for their
regions. This would be done through the regional transportation plans that MPOs
are required to update every five years.
To promote this idea, in 2010 and 2011 the administration
gave $165 million in "sustainability planning" grants, ranging from
$225,000 to $5 million, to 58 cities, states, and--mainly--MPOs. Now the plans
funded by these grants, and similar plans in other cities, are being released,
and they all call for the same pack-and-stack policy: invest in transit rather
than highways and somehow require that most if not all new housing and other
development take place in transit corridors. Plan Bay Area (for the San
Francisco-Oakland-San Jose region) and Plan Lafayette (for a Louisiana city of
100,000) both followed this pattern. Now the Twin Cities Thrive 2040 plan and
Chattanooga's Thrive 2055 plan appear on the road to following the same pattern
as well.
To justify these one-size-fits-all plans, several of the
planning agencies have hired Arthur Nelson, a University of Utah planning
professor who claims that Americans want to move into smaller homes and
estimates the U.S. will have 20 million surplus single-family homes by 2025.
His analysis are shallow and poorly documented. Over the past few months, I've
had a running debate with Twin Cities planners who support the region's plans
to concentrate most new housing in transit-oriented developments. I encourage
people in other regions to engage their MPOs in similar debates and will be
glad to help.
Links:
3. Cities and Transit Agencies Plan Obsolete Rail Transit Systems
Except in extremely dense urban areas--and New York City
is the only one this dense in the United States--urban rail transit is
obsolete, and will become even more obviously obsolete as driverless cars enter
the market in a few years. Yet cities and transit agencies all over the country
are pressing to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on streetcars and billions
on light rail.
Austin, Tx and St. Petersburg, FL will vote on light rail
this November. San Antonio, Anaheim, St. Paul, Santa Ana, CA, and Arlington, VA
are among the many cities pushing to fund and build streetcar lines under the
mistaken belief that an 8-mph, low-capacity streetcar alone will somehow
generate billions of dollars worth of economic development, and San Antonio may
vote on this in November.
Links:
Watch my page on Cato's web site or my blog for a soon-to-be-released paper on why rapid
buses can do better than light rail at a lower cost.
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