Coyote Blog

Portland is the poster child for light rail "success," but this is an interesting definition of success:

"Many (Portlanders) use their public transportation system," says
Weyrich. In fact, 9.8 percent of Portland-area commuters took transit
to work before the region build light rail. Today it is just 7.6
percent. In a story repeated in numerous cities that have built rail
lines, rail cost overruns forced the city to raise bus fares and reduce
bus service. That's a success?

A lot more money for fewer total transit riders.  This is absolutely predictable.  Light rail creates huge investment along one single route.  The assets created are totally inflexible -- unlike buses, they can only run one single route.  For most western cities with low density and literally hundreds of different commuting routes this way and that, light rail is silly.  Here are a couple of analysis I did for Albuquerque, LA and Phoenix.  Here is more about Portland.

Cyd Malone shares a historical story with which I was not familiar, Eleanor Roosevelt's attempt to create a government-supported back-to-the-earth commune in West Virginia.  It's quite a fascinating tale, with several elements that seem stolen right out of an Ayn Rand novel.  Her goal seems to have been to reverse the division of labor:

As projected, Arthurdale was to be immune from the ups and downs of the
business cycle, with its citizens farming their five-acre plots part
time and working part time in a local factory; a perfect combination of
town and country floating through life as just the happiest little
autarkic bubble you ever did see.

I will let you read the whole story if you are interested, which is pretty interesting.  I suppose you can guess how it all turned out:

Sadly, despite all the money, tough love, removal of their "mental
and physical impediments," and grafting on of "the things that help,"
the people of Arthurdale weren't displaying the attributes of the New
American Man, or at least not the type the planners planned for.
Instead, they behaved like dirt-poor coal miners and part-time farmers
who had become accustomed to living off of other peoples' money.

They displayed what we now call "dependency." Nancy Hoffman writes
that "there were times they depended too much on her [Mrs. Roosevelt's]
help and not enough on their own resources," leading Eleanor to lament
that "they seemed to feel that the solution to all their problems was
to turn to government" (Hoffman 2001, p. 85). In one defining moment,
the town's school bus broke down and the good people of Arthurdale,
rather than fixing it themselves, had it towed over two hundred miles
to the White House garage for repairs.[16]

Phoenix is in the process of tearing up half the city to put in its first light rail line.  There seems to be a hard core of people out there who get a huge hard-on for light rail, and I just don't get it.  Some random observations:

• We are building light rail that is essentially a "trolley."  This means it runs at street levels, often down the median strips of roads, and has to stop at stoplights just like cars and buses.  My question is, in this configuration, how is light rail any different than a bus?  Except for the fact, of course, that it is far more expensive and far less operationally flexible. 
• The system is not up and running yet, so I have not seen ridership numbers, but I will make a bet:  If we take the entire cost of the system's construction, plus its annual operating losses/subsides, I will bet that we could have bought every regular rider of the rail system a nice car instead and gas for life cheaper than the cost of the rail system.
• It looks to me like the rail system will actually increase congestion.  For most of its route, it is removing lanes from busy roads, and by running down the middle it will make left turns more difficult and complex. 
• Supporters of these systems point to NY or London as examples of what we can achieve.  Bullshit.  No city that has embarked on this light rail stuff has had the success or the political will or the money to build out a network with the critical mass that these larger cities have.  Most end up with orphaned routes (see LA, for example) that don't tie into anything. 
• Phoenix is the last city on the planet that a rail based system should work for.  I don't have the book in front of me, I will have to get it from home, but I remember a book on urban development that showed Phoenix had the flattest population density distribution of any city studied.  What this means is that we don't have a city center and suburbs - it means that we are basically all one big suburb.  So there are no single routes (for example in Chicago from the northern suburbs into downtown) that have any critical mass of traffic.  People are driving from everywhere to everywhere.  In fact, my suspicion has been that there are a group of politicians and business people who want to try to create a downtown area, and are using massive public funds in the form of light rail lines converging on the city center to try to jump-start such development.
• The Commons Blog has a link-rich post on the failure of the Portland light rail system, supposedly the model all light-rail promoters point to.

Update:  Jackalope Pursuivant has more on Phoenix light rail

During the last election, politicians and pundits made a lot of hay trying to argue that the labor market was somehow broken and not functioning like it always has.  First, the argument was that we were having a "jobless recovery."  Then, when employment took off, the argument was that wages were somehow broken and trailing productivity.  Whether this was a secret plot by GWB or by Wal-Mart was never quite made clear.

Well, it turns out that the job market works like it always has.  In a cyclical economic recovery, employment and productivity gains always precede wage gains.  Wages tend to go up late in the cycle, after excess available labor is soaked up:

After four years in which pay failed to keep pace with price
increases, wages for most American workers have begun rising
significantly faster than inflation.

With energy prices
now sharply lower than a few months ago and the improving job market
forcing employers to offer higher raises, the buying power of American
workers is now rising at the fastest rate since the economic boom of
the late 1990s.

The average hourly wage for workers below
management level "” everyone from school bus drivers to stockbrokers "”
rose 2.8 percent from October 2005 to October of this year, after being
adjusted for inflation, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Only a year ago, it was falling by 1.5 percent.

I am not one to really accept the "active bias in media" argument (I believe in a more passive bias based on reporters failing to apply skepticism to stories that fit their view of the world).  However, the bias crowd predicted that reported economic news would suddenly improve after the election and that certainly seems to be the case.

One final note - be careful of folks who are claiming that wages have not kept up with inflation for years.  Make sure they are using "total compensation, including benefits" and not just "wages."  The former number has consistently outpaced inflation.  These numbers diverge because the portion of compensation paid out in non-cash benefits has been growing as a percent of total compensation.

My independent work in college was on interfacing micro computers with mechanical devices.  Most of the work was in assembler language on an S-100 bus CP/M computer tied to some simple devices.  In one project, for example, I used an ultrasonic range-finder stripped off a Polaroid camera (brand new auto-focus technology, for the time) and put it on a stepper motor.  I wrote a program to turn it into a radar that painted a picture of the room on the screen.  In the next iteration, I experimented with having it control a "gun"  (a pencil on a stepper motor) and keep it locked onto a moving target in the room.  Seems pretty basic but it was not that easy in 1982  (also, coincidently, the last year I ever ran a mainframe computer program from a card deck).  In the spring of 1983, we programmed electronic devices that managed various functions on an N-Scale model railroad, a dream class for me given that model railroading has always been my preferred hobby.

Anyway, in this context I thought this was really cool:  A Lego robotics machine that solves the Rubiks cube.

Its not very often that you can tell, right at birth, that a new meme or catchphrase has been created, but General Honore's "Your Stuck on Stupid" seems to be such a case.  Radio Blogger has the context and transcript.  I will quote the key part, but its good to read the whole thing. 

The General had been trying to explain the evacuation approach so the press could get the message out to citizens who needed to know where to go.  Actually, the mayor had been trying to do that first, but was getting eaten alive by a press who were less interested in getting information out on the new storm than with scoring points** about the last storm. Both the mayor and the general kept getting peppered with questions like "why didn't we do that last time" and "That didn't work before".  At this point, General Honore was clearly frustrated with reporters who wanted to have a political finger pointing discussion when he was trying to communicate evacuation information.  So then there was this:

Honore: ...Right now, to handle the number of people that want to leave, we've got the
capacity. You will come to the convention center. There are soldiers there from
the 82nd Airborne, and from the Louisiana National Guard. People will be told to
get on the bus, and we will take care of them. And where they go will be
dependent on the capacity in this state. We've got our communications up. And
we'll tell them where to go. And when they get there, they'll be able to get a
chance, an opportunity to get registered, and so they can let their families
know where they are. But don't start panic here. Okay? We've got a location. It
is in the front of the convention center, and that's where we will use to
migrate people from it, into the system.

Male reporter: General Honore, we were told
that Berman Stadium on the west bank would be another staging area...

Honore: Not to my knowledge. Again, the current
place, I just told you one time, is the convention center. Once we complete the
plan with the mayor, and is approved by the governor, then we'll start that in
the next 12-24 hours. And we understand that there's a problem in getting
communications out. That's where we need your help. But let's not confuse the
questions with the answers. Buses at the convention center will move our
citizens, for whom we have sworn that we will support and defend...and we'll
move them on. Let's not get stuck on the last storm. You're asking last storm
questions for people who are concerned about the future storm. Don't get stuck
on stupid, reporters. We are moving forward. And don't confuse the people
please. You are part of the public message. So help us get the message straight.
And if you don't understand, maybe you'll confuse it to the people. That's why
we like follow-up questions. But right now, it's the convention center, and move
on.

Male reporter: General, a little bit more about
why that's happening this time, though, and did not have that last time...

Honore: You are stuck on stupid. I'm not going
to answer that question. We are going to deal with Rita. This is public
information that people are depending on the government to put out. This is the
way we've got to do it. So please. I apologize to you, but let's talk about the
future. Rita is happening. And right now, we need to get good, clean information
out to the people that they can use. And we can have a conversation on the side
about the past, in a couple of months.

Awesome.  The press does a great job, and I couldn't do what I do as a blogger without them gathering the basic facts on which I comment***.  However, I think a lot of people are tired of their self-righteous shtick.

Footnotes:
**  While I am convinced that reporters seem more interested in scoring points in these press conferences than obtaining facts (have you ever watched a White House press briefing?), it is interesting to ask "score points with whom?"  With each other?  With CSPAN viewers?  Are either of these really a sustainable constituency?

***  Vodkapundit has a great analysis that I think is dead-on about the NY Times putting their editorial copy behind a paid firewall.  The WSJ charges for news, but puts out opinions for free.  The NY Times does the opposite. 

Look. I usually suspect any New York Times story to be biased - but I can
expect it to be researched and fact-checked. And in this day and age, I can rely
on some smart blogger somewhere to tell me exactly what the NYT got wrong. But
what I can't expect blogs to do - at least not yet - is to do the dreary,
day-in-day-out work of getting the news in the first place. For all its faults,
the MSM is still far better than blogs at reporting.

Given all that, do recent decisions at the New York Times make any sense?
They're forcing people to pay for opinions they can get most anywhere else for
free, while cutting back on doing the one thing they can still do better than
anyone else.

Rep. Don Young (R-AK) is vying to become the new Huey Long.  As head of the House transportation and infrastructure committee, he is in prime position to bring home massive, unnecessary infrastructure projects to his district.  Huey Long, former emperor governor of Louisiana, is justly famous for acquiring funds to build some spectacularly unnecessary bridges over the Mississippi above and below New Orleans.

Representative Young seems to be headed for the same achievement.

If Rep. Young succeeds, tiny Ketchikan, Alaska, a town with less than 8,000 residents (about 13,000 if the entire county is included) will receive hundreds of millions of federal dollars to build a bridge to Gravina Island
(population: 50). This bridge will be nearly as long as the Golden
Gate Bridge and taller than the Brooklyn Bridge.

The Gravina
Bridge would replace a 7-minute ferry ride from Ketchikan to Ketchikan  Airport on Gravina Island. Project proponents tell the public that the bridge is a transportation necessity, though the ferry system adequately handles passenger traffic between the islands, including traffic to and from the airport.1  Some herald the project as the savior of Ketchikan because it will open up land on Pennock Island to residential development, despite the fact that Ketchikan's population has been shrinking.

Taxpayers for Common Sense have a great article here on how the whole earmark thing works.  Here is just a taste:

By the time
this is over, Congress will have packed this with a record level of transportation pork. The political formula was simple: $14 million was the minimum for every district. Anybody who sits on the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee can expect $40-60 million, and House
and committee leadership will get $90 million or more.

If you look at it on a per capita basis,  the highest per capita earmark spending is ... in the home state of the committee chairman, Young (gee, what a weird coincidence):

In total dollars,
California is the biggest winner so far with nearly $1.4 billion in earmarks. Delaware receives the smallest share, with only $12
million. On a per capita basis, however, Alaska wins going away.
Based on the $722 million in earmarks for Alaska in the bill's current
version, $1,151 would be shipped north for every man, woman, and child in the state. Rep. Young's isn't done yet, however, and before this bill is law, Alaska's share of earmarks will likely increase
even more. Alaska did nearly as well last year; during the failed
attempt to pass a transportation bill, Rep. Young secured nearly
$600 million for Alaska, including $375 million for two bridge projects, Gravina Access project in Ketchikan and the Knik Arm Crossing in Anchorage.

Update: Via the Club for Growth, comes this related story of the $1.5 million bus stop in Anchorage.

Tom Wilson is faced with a problem many city administrators would envy: How to
spend $1.5 million on a bus stop.

Wilson, Anchorage's director of public transportation, has all that money for
a new and improved bus stop outside the Anchorage Museum of History and Art
thanks to Republican Sen. Ted Stevens (news,
bio,
voting
record) "” fondly referred to by Alaskans as "Uncle Ted" for his prodigious
ability to secure federal dollars for his home state....

The bus stop there now is a simple steel-and-glass, three-sided enclosure.
Wilson wants better lighting and seating. He also likes the idea of heated
sidewalks that would remain free of snow and ice. And he thinks electronic signs
would be nice....

"We have a senator that gave us that money and I certainly won't want to
appear ungrateful," he said. At the same time, he does not want the public to
think the city is wasting the money. So "if it only takes us $500,000 to do it,
that's what we will spend."

That is still five to 50 times the typical cost of bus stop improvements in
Anchorage.

For a variety of reasons, my wife and I, who usually get along swimmingly, get into fights when I am trying to help her with the computer.  She has never developed a high comfort level with computers, while I have been using them since I was about 15, programming assembly language on S-100 bus CP/M computers (and yes, I have used punch cards too -- I am just old enough to have had that experience).

I realized today what the problem is.  She called me on my cell, trying to elicit from me the set of commands to do something-or-other in Word.  I kept saying I don't know and she got mad at me because she knew I had done it before, and she thought I was just blowing her off.

In truth, the difference is in how we have both learned to use the computer, and maybe even a fundamental difference in how each of us learns anything.  My wife is a memorizer and note taker.  If I explain to her how to, say, embed an image in a word document, she will carefully write down each step in a notebook she has.  She will never ask me again or falter at the task of adding an image to Word, because she now has either memorized how to do it, or she can look in up in The Book.

I, on the other hand, am nearly incapable of memorizing anything, and the sum total of the notes I took in college probably would not fill a single spiral notebook.  In fact, I suspect I switched from chemical engineering to mechanical engineering in college because, at least at my University, chemical engineering had a ton of memorization (can you say, Isomer?) while mechanical engineering was all about open book problem solving.

When I sit down to a computer, I just sort of figure things out.  When I had my old S-100 bus computer, that was essential, because there was no manual.  Today, its just how I am.  The disadvantage is that every time I insert a graphic in Word, I may have to fiddle around in the menus to figure out, for the 100th time, how to do it.  The advantage is that, if I am suddenly required to insert a spreadsheet rather than a graphic, I am not thrown for a loop - I just follow my usual process of poking around through the menus.

So, I have explained to my wife that to help her, I need to be at the computer.  Once I figure out how to do something, she can then document it in The Book. 

I have had friends who work like me try to insist that my approach is better than my wife's.  I don't think it is - just different.  Take driving directions.  I have no problem trying to find someplace I don't have clear directions for, because I have a good sense of direction and can usually get there by visual reckoning.  As a result, though, I sometimes cannot give street names to get to places I have been as many as 10 or 20 times.  Since I navigate visually and by real-time reckoning, any knowledge I have gained in my successful exploration is very difficult to pass on, just like I have difficulty passing on my computer knowledge.  If the world was all like me, technological society would end after this generation, because no one could pass our knowledge on.

In fact, as I write this, I am getting an epiphany about myself and why I did not do so well as a consultant at McKinsey & Co. (the reader is welcome to stop at this point, because what follows will likely be real-time self analysis rather than of general interest).  I was very very good at analysis, and quickly getting to a sort of 70% confidence level as to conclusions, and then I would hit a wall.  I had little tolerance for continuing to build evidence and analysis and the perfect polished presentation once I thought I "got it", and I had absolutely no tolerance for sitting down and writing a white paper or other published article about our experiences.  This profile probably makes me perfect for running my own business - I wish I had figured it out about 10 years earlier.