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Macon, Georgia – where equity means the entire city is a transit desert   Eric Bruun 30 August 2024 1126 words

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Back in the mid-90s I read an academic paper from a conference that my colleagues and I attended every year that talked about the transit system in Macon, Georgia. I recommended reading it. I got the type of response that engineers get. Rather than resort to the courts try to build physical solutions, that is, build a bigger pie. I said that I normally agree but this case was so eqregious. It was easy to demonstrate by the authors that the transit system was deliberately designed to impede access to where the jobs were. Their excuse was that the fleet was simply too small to cover all the main corridors. The system may have evolved since then to cover more corridors, but the pie has not gotten bigger.

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Macon is a city just over 150,000 people. It has a grand total of only twenty 35 foot long fixed-route buses and nine buses for ADA services. Already in 2017, the US Federal Transit Administration (FTA) comes along with a 50M USD grant with the promise to help electrify all of its buses by 2030. This was early in the Trump Administration so it would be little surprise that it would rather help manufacturers of batteries than expand transit.  People coping with an extremely minimal transit system was not their concern. The Trump Administration and the Republican Party according to their 2016 platform stated that transit is a local concern and that only six large cities even needed transit at all.

 

How minimal? Let us look at a few service indicators. The city proper is 70 Square Miles, which for a fleet of 20 buses translate to one every 3.5 square miles if there are 0 busses for the outlying Bibb County. Think of squares of almost 1.9 miles per side with only one bus present. Another way is to divide the 20 buses into 11 routes. That is less than 2 buses per route, only 1 bus on some routes if others were busier and need 3. Then there is service span, which starts at about 0500 and ends around 2100 on weekdays. Service is reduced on Saturdays and there is no service on Sundays. The tiny fleet can provide a service in which the base headway is 1 hour 15 minutes on most routes with a few routes having shorter headways for part of the day. This type of system requires those wishing to travel crosstown to come to the center to the transit center where a least there is a sheltered place to wait, historic Terminal Station. The wait might be long indeed if one misses a connection. Furthermore, the system is completely unusable for night time or Sunday workers, who are often amongst the most transit dependent.

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Enter the Biden Administration in January 2021. It retained and even increased the spending on battery buses and hydrogen fuel cell buses with its infrastructure and misnamed inflation reduction bills. But it also added a new mission for its transportation related federal agencies, specifically, to increase equity. Surely the transportation choices in Macon is an equity issue if ever there was one. Access to jobs except in the downtown area require a car or chauffeuring by someone who has one. And think of the ADA eligible, delays for service are going to be a way of life with only 9 smaller buses that carry only a few people per hour.

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The Bibb County Commission is very stingy with even this tiny service. In 2018, there was a danger of no county funding at all, making the arrival of new battery buses pointless. Georgia DoT does not even help the metropolitan region of Atlanta, making it dependent on high stakes votes in outlying counties for any investment money that would be needed to match a federal contribution. Macon and other cities in Georgia are thus exceptionally reliant on Federal spending.  

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So, if the Federal Government is really serious about equity, surely increasing the transit service is urgently needed, not to mention reducing global temperature rise. By continuing to fill out the order book of these battery buses instead of insisting on doubling or tripling the fleet size, it is adding an insult to the daily injury to the transit dependent. They hoped for better transit under a Democratic administration not to get a battery bus instead of a diesel-electric hybrid bus still a pathetic every 75 minutes. As for those who would be willing to be environmentally conscious citizens and use transit if only it would cover more of the region and cover it more frequently, they are still ignored.

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The same severe under-sizing of transit is not limited to Macon, there are other places diverting their attention to acquiring the support facilities for a handful of battery buses instead of service expansion. Tulsa, Oklahoma has a peak pullout of a mere 57 full size buses for a service area of 250 square miles and a population of 504,000. It too is already phasing in battery buses instead of expanding. Then there is an additional 88 square miles and additional 220,000 people within the Tulsa metro area. These suburbs are the a bit larger than the entire city of Macon with a 50 percent larger population. They continue to have no transit service at all.

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Is there really Federal government concern for equity for people who cannot drive, or afford to own a car, or who live in transit deserts? It would make sense for the FTA to ask the Federal Highway Administration to withhold infrastructure funds that Georgia DoT will almost certainly use about half to increase sprawl and insist that they transfer the money to buying buses, signal priority, and queue bypasses instead. Alas, there was no provision for an environmental or equity test in these bills for highway spending, just a bonanza of extra money of which they can rapidly use because they already have done Environmental Assessments or Environmental Impact Statements.

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Congress should fix this serious flaw by allowing the immediate transfer of funds to buy Macon and other near-transit-deserts enough buses to immediately triple their fleet and hire more operators. The type of propulsion cannot be batteries, even if made sense, as there is a shortage of buses thanks to Buy America aggravated by the recent bankruptcy of the US division of a Chinese battery bus manufacturer. This brings us to the next problem, which is that the Congress is not willing to waive the Buy America clauses nor is it willing to fund a massive refurbishment campaign of buses. It does not care if the bottom 80 percent have substandard transit. Indeed, Congress seems be illiterate on the entire subject of urban planning. This will be the topic of the next essay.

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CALIFORNIA SCREAMING part 1-- Implement SLEP and choke CARB to reduce GHG quickly  Eric Bruun 23 June 2024  1248 words                            

Environmental planning at the systems level is almost totally lacking in California. For decades now, many groups looked to California because it was implementing pollution standards ahead of the rest of the USA. But this is just not enough any longer. California now needs a more sophisticated analysis in order to reduce GHG rapidly while avoiding unintended consequences. Instead, as we speak many cities are looking to cut transit service. The Federal government has raised the bureaucratic hoops higher and smaller for those places looking to expand transit service while California is setting the hoops on fire. It is focusing on counterproductive technological regulations instead of the root problems. What a response to global warming.

 

NIMBYISM

One of my favorite YouTubers is Ray Delahanty, the so-called City Nerd. He recently did an analysis of which cities were the “NIMBY-est”. He used his GIS expertise with a combination of criteria including not building more housing, low vacancy rates, high rents, rents increasing quickly, high home prices, and prices increasing quickly. The first 22 cities were all in California!

But it is not just homeowners resisting the densification, even government owned land around major rail stations is still not being developed. Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) in particular deserves credit for allowing apartments to be built at the Fruitvale and Oakland central area stops, but why do so many stations remain with huge parking lots?

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BAD PROJECTS

How can the US Federal Transit Administration be approving matching funds for a deep tunnel for BART through San Jose? Its housing stock has actually decreased from 2012 to 2022!  Such a tunnel cannot be justified without many thousands of additional housing units be agreed upon in advance at the new stations. Maybe not even then. It is just going to take too long.

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If so much money and time was to be spent on the San Francisco Chinatown tunnel, why could the tunneling machines have not just kept working until the north shore? So much spent money and time for a short line. Even worse for the Los Angeles Purple Line. An entire network of metro lines was built in Shanghai in the 30 years it took to get to the west end from Union Station. Perhaps it is time to give up on further major tunneling projects for the time being. Exceptions might be places like the Sepulveda Pass base tunnel since the travel volumes by car are so huge. Do not laugh, but to get quick car reductions build an admittedly suboptimal gondola or monorail for use in the meantime. They can be built within about two years.

CARB (California Air Resources Board)

This is one agency that should just rest on its laurels. Nowadays it is just a virtue signaler causing more harm than good. Did I really see a Proposition 65 warning sticker on LA regional MetroLink trains? Is the message that we should stop riding diesel-electric trains because diesel is toxic and drive a Cadillac Escalade SUV instead as long as it is fully electric? Does a Prius also deserve this warning because it uses gasoline?

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Their main focus is now on direct propulsion technology substitution, or what systems analysts derisively call “end of pipe” environmentalism.  This may still work for farm tractors, but is actually harmful to transit and walking and bicycling. To reduce GHG rapidly, transit must be rapidly expanded with much more frequent service in order to get millions of car trips off the road. Giving more competitive and safer alternatives to driving is the real benefit, not the very minor bus emission reductions. Instead, CARB has made transit vehicles purchases more costly by all but banning even diesel-electric hybrid bus purchases. It is not 1990 anymore. Back then transit buses were straight diesel using the same fuel as large trucks, today they are diesel-electric hybrids using ultra-low sulfur fuel while the allowed alternative of compressed natural gas now often comes from fracking. 

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CARB has a proposed regulation to ban purchases of any buses except full electric by 2029. Unless several new assembly lines open in the USA, this will only aggravate woes. As for urban transit, very frequent and hilly services can be upgraded to trolley buses not needing batteries, like they have for over 100 years now. For the rest, extra expense and weight of the batteries will be required to have sufficient range to not have to increase the fleet to avoid cutting service. 

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Rural operations are a lifeline for many but electric buses will almost certainly still not have the range even if they can be purchased in a timely fashion. But who in political circles in California cares about them? This brings us to the crux of the problem of why actual GHG reduction policies are either non-existent or ineffective. The base members of the Democratic party are the ones who benefit from the current mess. They are the ones who own the expensive housing and do not use transit except perhaps for commuting to a big employer. They are the professionals who benefit from working in the current sprawl-industrial complex and the trade workers, both union and non-union, who benefit from labor shortages and high incomes due to prevailing wage laws when Federal funds are used.

 

UNIVERSITY AND GOVERNMENTAL SILOS

The housing crisis, air pollution, GHG from freight, GHG from passenger travel, traffic congestion, the high cost of taking a job, and other issues are all interconnected. It should not be necessary to keep saying this. But the silos in academia of micro experts still stand. Universities will thus probably not be contributing to effective plans in the near future. But there is hope that some city and regional governments can genuinely re-organize rapidly. 

A systems optimization approach involving workforce and input materials planning is now necessary more than ever to identify where the quickest improvements can be had and where skills will be missing. Where unintended consequences might occur because of silos is another valuable output. Using the previous example, picking on transit buses will almost surely be shown to backfire as it impedes transit growth that must occur together with housing growth to reduce auto dependency.

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SLEP (Service Life Extension Program)

When fleet shortages were anticipated, the US Navy and airlines used to pick some of their vehicles in the best condition and target them for modernizations to get them through the interval until new stock could be obtained. In the case of buses, some of them can readily be retrofitted to more recent pollution standards while being overhauled. Indeed, surplus and older buses should be solicited from agencies that cannot manage such programs and then make available to all for service increases.  

 

The money set aside for most megaprojects should instead be set aside for a massive increase in the number of both new and rebuilt buses, bus lanes, queue bypasses, bike lanes and pedestrian paths, and housing construction subsidies across all major metro regions to build transit and non-motorized friendly locations. Measure HLA, known as Healthy Streets LA, for the city of LA proper requires the city to redesign streets whenever there is a major reconstruction. Forcing one city government to act is a start, but it is still too slow. This needs to be accelerated across the entire state.     

REFERENCES

City Nerd 2024 These are the NIMBY-est cities in the U.S. YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NJ4T_BHFgt0   accessed 17 June 2024

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Comments on “Efficient Self-organization of Informal Public Transport Networks,” by Mittel, Timme, and Schröder

Nature June 2024      Eric C Bruun 17 June 2024   419 words

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The results “ call for more detailed, data-driven analyses to underpin the design of efficient and sustainable public transport services that include – not replace – core elements of informal transport. This requires both more detailed observations of temporal and demand data in detailed case studies and across cities as well as theoretical modeling……”

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Many of us have, in fact, tried to include core elements of informal transport. It is not so much transit planners and researchers who have resisted, it is more the non-subsidized sector itself, politicians, and big city unions that will not allow small buses who are not helping. Check out the extensive work done by the member universities of ACET who advocated for making hybrid services that incorporate high-capacity trunk lines with informal transport managing the local and connecting services. We do indeed recognize the positive qualities and ingenuity shown.

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Walter Hook already identified the key limitation of this analysis in his comments on LinkedIn. It defines efficiency in terms of circuity. But public transport networks have to measure efficiency in several ways, that is, one needs to do a multicriteria analysis. For example, Table 3.3 from Better Public Transit Systems, 2nd Edition, lists several indicators for evaluating the design and operations within a demand-responsive service area. These need to be balanced against one another. Similarly, Table 3.5 lists some indicators for assessing performance of particular fixed routes.

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This is just analyses involving transport alone. When cities are fast growing, space efficiency is also important, that is, managing the type and location of land use development.  Fixed routes can be selected to try to concentrate development instead of digging a deeper hole requiring ever larger demand-responsive areas where competition with autos is toughest. Preserving farmlands, wetlands, minimizing energy consumption with centralized power sources, improving traffic safety, maximizing housing, can all be vital goals that might justify subsidies.   

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t also seems relevant to point out that subsidies can be justified for formal systems using neoclassical economic theory based on the cost characteristics of high-capacity transit versus cars. The former has a high fixed cost but decreasing marginal cost while autos have the opposite. Providing for both reduces total spending on personal transport as proved by the Millennium Cities database.  So, while it might be true that demand-response systems are underappreciated and should be expanded, all new services must be competitive with the local auto option.

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Dali Collision Reflects a Globalized Industry

Eric C Bruun                      3 April 2024 542 words

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Check out the size difference between the container ship Dali and the Francis Scott Key bridge. Of course, it was not a surprise that the bridge would collapse completely when something with the inertia of a 95,000 ton ship hit one of its support pillars. Commercial container ships were not this big when this bridge was built 47 years ago. There is only one propulsion plant so there is no backup. The designers probably thought the occasional monster ship would be escorted with tugs precisely in case of engine failure. They probably also did not consider that such heavy and long ships might not be that easy to nudge or pull quickly such that this might not be a reliable solution either.  

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I worked on aircraft carriers when I worked for the US Navy and as a consulting engineer on teams visiting carriers. By comparison, the conventionally powered “super carriers” I worked on had 280,000 horsepower and 4 propellers compared to 55,000 horsepower and only 1 propeller for the Dali. (It also had one bow thruster but it could not be of help if it too runs on the diesel power plant.) Carriers also weighed far less, from 60,000 to 70,000 tons. Nevertheless, when they left the Naval shipyard they were escorted by two tugboats and a Coast Guard helicopter that warned away small boats.   

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Apart from the poor performance of the container ship due to the lack of backup in case of power failure, there is other blame to go around. After the Sky Bridge in Tampa Bay was collapsed in a similar event, the replacement bridge had huge bollards, sometimes called dolphins, placed in front of the bases of the pillars to prevent contact. Why did the Francis Scott Key bridge not get protected in the same way? The answer is probably the same reason such enormous and vulnerable ships do not use tugs. Ocean shipping was an early victim of the cheapness and corner cutting that comes with globalized competition.

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Increasing the depth of ports and dredging of shipping canals has been a priority for any investment funds in order to avoid losing shipping lines using ever larger ships. Even if the Francis Scott Key bridge could have had its pillars strengthened sufficiently to resist contact, it would be very costly given the extreme height and weight of ships like the Dali. Oil tankers are far heavier yet. The port of Baltimore and its competitor ports want to attract shipping companies by low docking fees. We shall see what replacement cost estimates appear and who will be proposed to pay. This was already an auto and truck toll bridge.

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Not just the sea side but the land side of container ports suffers from cheapness. Drayage trucks in the USA that bring containers to the port are often driven by low paid workers with a supposedly independent contractor business model similar to Uber or Lyft. They do not earn enough to both operate and properly maintain the latest models of diesel truck that limit emissions. By contrast, the enormous port of Rotterdam has its own fleet of drayage trucks operated and maintained by actual employees. The state of container ports is a large topic all by itself for future discussion.

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Dean Baker points out improving economic indicators but wonders why we are not impressed

Eric Bruun revised 5 March 2024  1055 words

Reference added 19 April 2024

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Economist Dr. Baker wants to know why the public is now so negative on the US economy. In a recent article in The Nation he actually says that the economic picture “looks great”. He points out that many indicators are better than pre Covid-19 and yet potential voters think it is far worse.  He is not making any new demands to shape an economy that both dramatically reduces greenhouse gasses and gives a quality of life for a majority of residents, a prescription I would offer in response. He is calling attention to it, however, as a subject for exploration.

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Let me explain some possible reasons why people might be getting more negative with a look at how sprawl, transportation policy and lack of public services are working against the rosy story that the macroeconomic indicators paint. There has now been over 60 years of sprawl enabled by the misnamed Interstate freeway system. The segments for commuting to and from suburbs were initiated in the 50s and first completed by the 60s. In the 70s, busing for integration and the loss of a tax base for inner cities kicked forces for sprawl into high gear. Building in suburbs has been a way of life ever since, indeed, it is still seen as good economic news when “new housing starts” are up. Commercial and office construction moved out of city centers as well to “edge cities.” These then competed with the old central business districts. This was an attractive solution for the upper middle class and select blue collar workers.

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What about the rest of us? Jobs were gradually dispersed all over the landscape as lower real estate prices on the perimeter drove relocation of so many businesses. Zoning laws further guaranteed that even light industrial tasks would be separated from housing areas. And these same zoning laws would also block apartment buildings, aggravating housing affordability. The decreasing average building density, in turn, increased auto dependency. In the bigger metropolitan regions, travel distances and times to reach work became major employment decision considerations.

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Then there were the public policy decisions and all too often the lack of policy decisions. Companies could get away with misclassifying people as exempt workers, meaning they are management to be paid a salary instead of overtime and could be pressured to work off the clock. And they were using increasing amounts of part timers and the “self-employed” to avoid important benefits like health insurance. Unstable work hours also made finding childcare ever harder. Transit services became unreliable and sparse as congestion and sprawl increased while these systems did not expand enough to cover these new housing areas. Transit might not help for commuting anyway when housing was located far from the job centers.

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Perhaps what Dr. Baker is witnessing is really the culmination of decades of an almost total neglect of public policy on urban planning that would have benefited the majority of workers and would be workers in their daily lives. A partial explanation for the negative impression is that the Covid-19 epidemic revealed to many who lost their jobs that the added value from taking a job was lower than they realized. They also began to appreciate that their work was dependent on unpaid childcare. Thus, many did not return to paid work.

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Maybe they could revisit the job market right now and find circumstances better. The recent increases in hourly wage rates are attempts by individual companies to attract workers from a dis-agglomerating urban form. Only by raising these hourly rates does it begin to make sense to take the job. Perhaps the traditional set of indicators of a strong economy are not so insightful any longer. Instead, we are witnessing a job market increasingly burdening companies with costs that are covered by governments in less dog-eat-dog societies.

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The Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and the misnamed Inflation Reduction Act are part of the reason for the heightened competition for workers at the moment. Yes, it is a stimulus for the time being. But while it is too early to say for certain about the many impacts, it is shaping up to be a net negative for the environment and for the majority of workers. It is further turbocharging sprawl by enabling environmentally non-vetted highway projects and incentivizing companies to locate on newly broken land instead of locating in existing cities like Detroit or Youngstown. (T4America, 2024)

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The failure to increase vocational training under the advertised Build Back Better slogan, combined with record military manufacturing, means very high pay for some qualified individuals but not widely shared prosperity. Perhaps some job seekers who do not have the right qualifications or live in rust belt locations sense they are being left out of this improved economy.

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Debt is also a huge burden on the economy. There is about $1.7 trillion in student debt, $1.5 trillion in car debt, and credit card debt is rapidly expanding with the increase in fed interest rates to over 5 percent. Millions are one medical episode away from losing one’s life savings. The increase in interest rates did not happen until after the Covid-19 epidemic subsided, so this might be part of the reason for the negative vibes, too.

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Then there are the daily stresses blocking relocation to better jobs, like the increase to a 3 months security deposit instead of 2 months, record high rents (even in cities without population increases), terrible traffic congestion, and background checks including drug tests, even for the most innocuous jobs. No-compete agreements block even restaurant workers from shopping around, as if one were going to give away the recipe for a secret sauce. (This practice is actually being challenged by Lina Khan at the US Federal Trade Commission).

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Most people have nothing to look forward to that might reduce their living costs. No forgiveness for student loans, ever increasing health insurance copayments, no transit system improvements or sometimes even sidewalks being promised, no childcare centers promised. Nor is universal healthcare coming which would provide a huge relief across a wide spectrum of the population. Upon retirement, some are being pressured to accept privatized Medicare, thus moving further away from the goal of wider coverage.

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With so little improvement for so long, is it any wonder that so many people have become more negative about the economy even when there is an upturn?

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T4America. 2024. Available at https://t4america.org/2024/02/28/the-iija-is-a-climate-time-bomb-will-states-defuse-it/?eType=EmailBlastContent&eId=4c7db44a-96ac-449e-9334-be9eb704e1d4

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Sorry state of US Postal Service buildings Eric Bruun 29 Jan 2024 

The two photos on the left of post office buildings with their front parking lots were taken in December of 2022 while out walking around like us urban planning types like to do. One is in Bellevue, Washington at the north end of a fast growing downtown of what used to be called an “edge city”. It is located only about one kilometer from Medina, where Bill Gates has his mansion complex on Lake Washington. The other is in Tukwila, Washington near the Southcenter Mall, one of those malls that is still thriving with strip malls and big box stores metastasizing around it. Ken Galbraith wrote a bestselling book in 1958 called The Affluent Society where he described a modern US economy of private affluence and public squalor. What better examples that this is still true?

 

There is no need to point out a few signs of neglect. They are painfully obvious and indeed embarrassing, with boarded up windows and parking lots of broken pavement. The interiors are not much better. Is it still the official US policy to starve post offices of capital budgets? There was a controversy about the appointment by President Trump of a new Postmaster General Louis DeJoy in June 2020 because he had a conflict of interest coming as he did from the logistics business. Yet, he is still there!

 

Post offices are not obsolete, They still allow delivering of modest amounts of paper for a small fraction of the cost of an expediting service. This applies especially to rural towns because the postage is independent of whether the destination is across town or across the continent. Indeed, small post offices could be of even greater value by adding basic banking services so that people can avoid predatory check cashing storefronts and ATMs. It costs about 3 USD to use “out of network” ATMs to access either my US or Finnish bank accounts when I visit Seattle but it costs nothing to access either of these same accounts in Finland where there are only two major ATM providers. This is not like the USA where each bank has their own ATM. The fact that nothing is being done to revitalize post offices either as public infrastructure or provider of vital public services to protect low income workers from gouging is just more evidence that much of the population is unrepresented at the federal level.   

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No bus to Yosemite National Park this year?Eric Bruun 19 Ja 2024

​It seems that the bus from Fresno to the park is no longer funded and renewal is in doubt. At the same time, Yosemite has blocked all visits by car without an advance reservation. The 40 USD round trip fare included the 35 USD park admission. Can someone find a solution to this? Maybe the US National Park Service? 

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Self-certification and the double standard Eric Bruun 10 Jan 2024

The long awaited Cybertruck is finally out. I mentioned already two years ago that this design even on casual inspection proves that motor vehicle safety is not a matter for prior government certification, unlike the airliner industry. Instead, the crackdown on bad features will come only after a record involving deaths and injuries. Nor is there any criterion based on fuel economy or power to weight ratio or size as long as the design fits in the lanes (but not necessarily the parking spaces). I raced motocrossers in my youth and this “truck” can out accelerate them. The batteries are sized for this unneeded and even potentially dangerous power output, increasing risk of loss of control and size of battery fire, and contrary to sustainability concerns, wasting precious metals and carrying dead weight around.

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Contrast this with the attitude towards individuals. They are not trusted and are to blame. The 2009 airliner crash in Buffalo resulted in an increased number of hours to 1500 before eligibility to be an airline pilot. Fatigue was important if not central, so a better solution would have been to force airlines to pay for motels for junior pilots like senior ones. Or Amazon delivery trucks that are monitored by the company for delivery speed, where drivers can be fired for moving too slowly. This is promoting unsafe driving and risky street crossings during deliveries, but was not blocked by the same safety regulators so concerned that a person might have smoked pot 3 weekends ago on their own time.

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I do not wish to romanticize that airliner certification was always so strict, either. Any industry might capture a regulator or pressure for more lenient fix schedules to save money. Both the DC 10 and 747 had known problems with cargo doors that could open as they climb out. In both cases, there was no Emergency Airworthiness Directive requiring immediate repairs until there were horrific accidents where people died. The more recent Max 8 fiasco was a result of drift towards self-certification by the manufacturers as people forget previous history.  

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Is President Biden a friend of intercity rail? Eric Bruun 5 Jan 2024

I have just two words to anyone who believes this: John Kasich. He was invited to speak at the 2020 Democratic party convention as a show of bipartisanship. This is mere vice signaling.

 

When Kasich was governor of Ohio during President Obama’s popular intercity higher speed rail investment program initiated back in 2009, Kasich declined the funding. He also confiscated (is stole too strong of a word?) a competitive grant won by Cincinnati for their new streetcar and gave it to a rural bridge project instead.

 

You may object that he supports Amtrak as evidenced by his use of the earlier Metroliner, later Acela Express. This is a premium extremely high fare service not for the masses. He helped Amtrak obtain a $2.45 Billion loan for the new rolling stock. Big deal, a few percentage points off of a market loan. It was not a grant. It guarantees fares must stay high to pay off this loan.   

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Are electric buses needed in all Nordic cities?

Eric Bruun  4 Jan 2024

​I live in Helsinki, a city and region with 11 electric tram routes, an extensive electric regional rail network, and a metro with two branches. There is rarely an air pollution problem.

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There are several bus operators who provide the vehicles,the depots, the drivers and supporting infrastructure for 7 year contracts. I noticed a huge shift to electric buses not only here but in cities throughout the Nordic countries. So much so that the resale value of Euro 6 buses with half of their life left have a resale value near zero!

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Surely there is better use for money than this. Agencies should start communicating with one another to determine who has the oldest fleets, the dirtiest fleets, the most pedestrians for whom NOx might be a concern and which cities are planning to expand service and concentrate on them. The saved money could be used as foreign aid to buy Karachi or Lahore or Delhi or Mumbai electric buses instead, places choking in thousands of older generation buses and millions of cars.

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With environmentalists like this who needs Republicans?

Eric Bruun 5 January 2024

​The silo-ing of university education is really starting to show. Combine this fact with well off people in the top roughly 20 percent of the population looking to virtue signal. The result is a toxic brew of regulations and policy prescriptions that must have the car industry lobbyists laughing.

 

A systems approach is needed to do the best job of reducing GHG generation quickly. Do not obsess with zero targets by a certain date. Instead use management by objective. There are almost always diminishing returns. Getting the last 10 percent of gasoline powered cars out of service may cost almost as much as the first 90 percent. For example, rural full electric and even hybrid diesel-electrics would be problematic. So move on to something else with better returns. Anticipate this by also tracking the available workforce and skills. Do what has the best match at present and increase teaching capacity in fields and skills needed in the near future.

 

And what about the hardship generated with GHG reduction? I recently saw a report about New Jersey Transit being scolded for buying 900 diesel and diesel-electric hybrid buses. It seems some environmental groups would rather NJ Transit buy nothing. The general manager stood his ground, unlike many others. He pointed out that the electrics would take a long time to receive, meanwhile the older buses would be worn out. Furthermore, the replacement buses are to be built to the current highest EPA standards. Also, it should be obvious, but apparently not to wealthy virtue signalers who do not depend on transit, that people depend on NJ Transit to get to work. Environmental groups would do better to lobby for subsidies to build more bus factories instead of handouts to profitable companies to build battery and chip factories and unproven hydrogen and CO2 re-injection plants. This way both replacement and rapid expansion of transit can occur.

 

Many have lost sight of the fact that getting people out of their cars and onto buses, regardless of propulsion plant, decreases pollution. If a bus carries 15 people and the car 1 person, but it also burns three times as much fuel, it is still five times better. This is only the first order effect. The medium to longer term effect is that average trip length goes down and bicycle and walking trips increase. There are desperate housing shortages around many US cities and infill with “missing middle” apartments is only possible if there is sufficient transit. This is an example of why silos like housing, car transportation, and public transportation need to be busted.

 

Environmental groups might do well to lobby to abandon Buy America as well. Never mind the hypocrisy of a US government that is always advocating for open markets and against protectionism for private companies while restricting public agencies. The actual execution of Buy America has been bad for the environment on multiple fronts. Like the car industry, new factories are built on greenfields and sprawling suburbs rather than in abandoned parts of de-industrialized cities. Then, tax breaks and non-union labor make the existing companies less competitive. The result is a dynamic of anti-environmental (and anti-union) decline.

 

To make matters worse, there have been recent huge price increases for smaller buses and delivery backlogs just at the time that transit would need to expand, not contract. Let in foreign manufacturers’ products who pay their full taxes (and probably pay union wages) for immediate relief. Also, the federal government could change its procurement regulations to require that agencies receiving grants add the value of the tax subsidy a manufacturing plant receives to the bus purchase price during evaluation. (The local taxpayers who help other locales buy buses made in their region when their own state government gives zero to help them buy buses for their own use would be grateful).

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​Rousseau was right–part 1- state and local government Eric Bruun 10 Sept 2023 

slight revision 24 January 2024

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Jean-Jacques Rousseau was one of the great social philosophers of the post-enlightenment of the western world. He was writing from Geneva at the beginning of industrial revolution until just before the French Revolution. Even today he remains one of the most important thinkers for political science students. His exhaustive categorization of government types and what it takes to establish the various types and sustain them is his famous essay The Social Contract. In particular what does it take and how does one judge if one lives in a genuine democracy or an oligarchy. Of particular relevance in the USA today:

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“……..a high degree of equality in rank and fortune, without which equality of rights and authority can’t exist for long; and •little or no luxury—for luxury either comes from riches or makes them necessary. It corrupts both rich and poor, the rich by having it and the poor by wanting it; it sells the country to softness and vanity; it robs the state of all its citizens by putting some of them into the service of the others and putting all of them into the service of public opinion.” Rousseau Jean-Jacques. 2017 translation

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There are lots of sectors of society where democratic input by the majority of the population exists or not can be tested, mine was transit but evolved into public works in general. This sector is unlike, say, selling vegetables or clothes, because they require no or minimal public spending to enable. There are many ways to see if Rousseau was right, these are only examples from urban public spending.

Valley Transit Authority (VTA) rail shutdown

There was a horrendous shooting of nine employees by another employee of VTA in May 2021 at the Light Rail Transit (LRT) depot. Rail service remained shut down for over three months, until the end of August. And when it reopened, and would you not know it, it was in time for a 49ers football game, and then only on one line at a very minimal 30-minute headway.  The bus service remained, but buses only is a very slow way to traverse the sprawled San Jose region and no doubt many people lost their jobs. Like in war time, the General Manager should be replaced if they cannot get the unwounded troops and weapons back into combat readiness quickly after a skirmish to carry on. Could one imagine nearby Monterey airport that is full of private jets being open only to commercial aviation for over three months? Who was there to defend the transit dependent who really depend upon the LRT services for their livelihood? These people clearly did not count.

 

Majority viewpoints have been suppressed systematically. The basic game plan for lower levels of governments is to not allow votes on investments that the majority of the lower tier would oppose, but force votes on investments that the lower tier already support or even initiated, but applying odious conditions. Some examples:

Miami-Dade County

There are different interest groups involved in south Florida governance. One is what used to be called the highway lobby, but this oversimplifies. So does the term “growth coalition” described by Professor Bill Domhoff over an evolution of more than 100 years up to the early 2000s that now seems almost quaint (Domhoff 2005). It is now better characterized as a sprawl-industrial complex involving not just local government but the state government, nationwide banks with hedge funds instead of local banks, private equity, huge construction companies, engineering consulting firms, environmental testing companies, and tens of thousands of workers, often unionized. The disappearance of local newspapers that used to cover them further enables it (Hendrickson 2019). In Florida it has succeeded in getting financing and is in the midst of building a massive new freeway interchange in the heart of Miami. This was opposed to more or lesser extents by other interest groups, like the Miami tourism lobby, local governmental departmental staff concerned about extra traffic, and by environmental lobbies not part of the complex.  The majority of residents could be all but ignored in the writing of the Environmental Impact Statement and eminent domain is still a thing.

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The evidence of the lack of influence by residents is everywhere, like the lack of tree planting almost anywhere except the wealthiest districts (Feinstein 2023), by long neglected major transit upgrades in several corridors, except Metrorail serving the giant airport, and especially the seriously overcrowded buses to South Miami, the route over the MacArthur Causeway carrying 10,000 per day. This has been discussed since at least 1988. This last one actually would have supported the tourist industry as well, but apparently still receives more influential opposition from the wealthy living in this area (Hanks 2023).  

Nashville and Davidson County

The mayor in 2018 was a charismatic figure and seriously promoting a transit bill big enough to be transformative and, being a southern city, no doubt would have put her in the history books. It promised some fairly timely improvements for all sectors of the city and near suburbs. It was not vulnerable to the attack that it only benefits one corridor or an upper tier. On the other hand, with zero help from the State of Tennessee, it would be dependent on a major local sales tax increase in order to obtain Federal matching funds. So, it was still vulnerable to the charge that the poor needed other things more badly. In the midst of the campaign, an expose came out about how the mayor was misusing funds (Boucher 2018). Thus, momentum was lost. It went down to defeat and it was not close.

Fast forward, and now the State of Tennessee does want to be involved, but this time in building a new NFL football stadium. All the billionaire team owners had to do is agree that it is the Tennessee Titans, not the Nashville Titans. There was no vote by local citizens even though it would have had a huge impact on the region including many public works expenses involved with connecting a giant stadium to a city with minimal transit.

City of Buffalo and Erie County

In 2021, the City of Buffalo had a major upset for in the mayoral primary with India Walton. The angry incumbent four term Democrat Byron Brown then ran as an independent write-in and defeated her with the backing of many Democratic voters and no doubt many Republicans. The financial stakes were apparently very high as shortly thereafter the State of New York legislature approved a giant appropriation for a new Bills football stadium which she almost certainly would have opposed. The City and Erie County were on the hook for their 20 percent, about $250 million. There was no opportunity for the public to vote on this. It is a lot of money for a poverty-stricken city with ancient infrastructure. (The region is so cheap towards the lower tier that the transit agency recently downgraded student passes from system wide to school trips only.) The Erie County sheriff also recently requested $200 M for a new combined jail with a capacity of 1500 (Banks 2023). A similar amount of money could have been temporarily leveraged for an additional $1 Billion for tearing down the aptly named Skyway, extending the downtown transit tunnel, repairing inner city streets and sewers, etc., etc. Rousseau was a strong advocate of the French Revolution. As a transit planner, this idea is starting to appeal to me.  

Las Vegas

If ever a place needed an elevated transit line, or at least bus lanes, it is Las Vegas Boulevard. Lots of talk but no action for decades. It is not just transit that is being neglected, the private company Brightline may soon begin a high-speed rail line to the LA area, but neither the city nor the state has volunteered to help with the train station. There is a monorail serving the back doors of several hotels that could easily be taken over by the public transit agency and extended a few miles for a modest price to the north to the old downtown and south to the airport, one of the largest in the United States. The taxi union apparently opposes it, but surely they cannot have enough influence to stop this on their own.

The complex has found the Oakland As to be the highest priority, little surprise since Las Vegas Boulevard already has four turn lanes. The state legislature recently approved an approximately $600 million subsidy for this new stadium, and one located in a place guaranteed to add to the traffic madness. But the lower tier are fighting back, with school teacher unions creating a Political Action Committee (PAC) called Schools Over Stadiums announcing their intention to file a referendum to rescind this law.   Chicago versus Arlington Heights

There have been lots of stadium justifications over the decades claiming that local businesses share in the bounty on game days. In pro football it is only about 10 days per year. So quite a modest benefit at best. Local and national news clips recently showed some plans for the proposed new Arlington Heights Bears stadium boasting that it would have an entire deck dedicated to bars and restaurants. Apparently, there is such confidence in winning nowadays that proponents do not even bothering to pretend that surrounding businesses will benefit any longer.

Phoenix metro region

Arizona is a rare case where the public was actually been asked to vote on highways. There was to be a vote for spending on transportation in general with transit and highways combined known as Proposition 400. But this was then split into one-half cent sales tax for highways first, successful in 1985, and then one-half cent for transit in 1989, which failed (Duda 2023). There was another vote in 2000, which succeeded this time, with the first light rail line opening in 2008 and a few extensions since then. But opponents do not give up. Proposition 105 in 2019 would have all but outlawed building any more light rail transit, but it failed by a large margin, probably in good part when backing by the Koch Brothers was exposed (Hsieh 2019). But maybe Charles Koch (David is deceased) wins in the end. Very recently, the state legislature has been opposing all rail transit yet again. How about this statement of principle:

“It was a sticking point for House speaker Ben Toma, who told reporters in July: "Nobody in their right mind would think that encasing a Republican legislature with light rail would be a good idea." (Boehm 2023)

No sir, there will be no LRT running within 150 feet (46 meters) of the Capitol even if it was approved by voters and would be useful to government employees. The latest agreement between the governor and legislature leaders saw to that. They agreed to extend the transit sales tax for another 20 years but none of it can be used for further LRT extensions. A recent constitutional amendment now requires 60 percent votes to increase taxes, so do not expect any new alternative funding legislation to pass either, until if and when the legislature is completely upended.

It does not seem that the transit agency has a constituency demanding that they fight back over this usurpation of planning authority by a non-local level of government. It is not exactly showcasing what a good LRT transit line can do for a city. The service is offering a 15-minute headway in the daytime and 20 minutes after 8pm, substandard for a large city and perhaps even a betrayal of the voters.

State of Alabama

After Rosa Parks, who really won? The transit system in Montgomery was all but shut down by steady reductions, shrinking by 70 percent over 40 years, then entirely shut down in 1997, something that really should have been taught more in schools (Wypijewski 2000). In 1959, four years after the bus boycott, the highway lobby got the Alabama constitution revised, which ostensibly makes it illegal to assist transit. Transit was restarted in the 1999 with a new Mayor but still with no help from the state government. In reality, there would have been ways to flank this restriction, like empowering the state highway department to install the road features needed to assist city traffic department with features like bus lanes. It remains very minimal today, with 60 or even 90-minute headways.

The prohibition somehow does not apply to for-profit industries, like a car factory for Mercedes or even helping to subsidize the manufacturing of transit buses used in other states. Airbus Industries now has an assembly plant in Mobile which puts downward pressure on unionized factories elsewhere in the USA. Boeing followed suit by moving its entire 787 assembly from Everett, Washington to non-union South Carolina, even after accepting tax breaks in the hundreds of millions of dollars to stay.

The county had a population of about 400,000 but only 29 fixed route buses as of 2020 so 99 percent of employees must drive to work. Alabama is currently pondering how to do more to assist aerospace. There are several companies trying to make a new generation of electric Vertical Takeoff and Landing (eVTOL) aircraft (Denham 2023). No doubt Alabama will be played off against other states for subsidies. Which will somehow be Ok to give to companies but not their own citizens for an essential public service.

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Rousseau was right–part 2–US federal government                        

Eric Bruun 10 Sept 2023 slight revisions 5 and 11 February 2024

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The Federal government would have the power to fully pay for new infrastructure unlike lower levels since they control the sovereign currency. But it typically refuses without matching funds from lower levels of government.

US Senator from Kentucky

The Honorable Rand Paul has said that no fed help should be expected from future storms and is a global warming denier.  He strenuously opposes Medicare for All, claiming the current US system is efficient. Thus, a citizen must pay Federal taxes but expect no emergency services in time of hardship. This raises the question of why the military spending, which is more than the next 12 countries combined, is so important. If there is no real national promise of help in time of need, in a democracy, the residents should be able to pick the types of insurance they favor, should they not? Maybe they are more worried about the Mississippi overflowing or forest fires or alternative transportation to be available for evacuation before tropical storms.

Military versus other priorities

Defending the USA from external attack is more compelling for those that own lots of property. This is exactly the trend, ever increasing spending on the military but decline of commitment to the bottom tier. Examples include the freezing of public housing with the Faircloth Amendment in 1998, then increases in the amount of matching funds required for transit improvements from 20 percent to 50 percent while leaving highway funds at a 20 percent match, and incrementally raising of the Social Security retirement age to 67.  

Do you want the state to be solid? Then make the wealth-spread as small as you can; don’t allow rich men or beggars. These two conditions are naturally inseparable: ·any state that has very wealthy citizens will also have beggars, and vice versa·. And they are equally fatal to the common good: one produces supporters of tyranny, the other produces tyrants. It is always between them that public liberty is put on sale: one buys, the other sells (Rousseau p12)

Not just people living in the USA, but everywhere, are paying the price for its weak democracy as time is of the essence to deal with global warming. The lower tier should try to insist that proposals for public projects to address it now be tested for which parts can be done quickly while also decreasing inequality.  

The new independent candidate for the House of Representatives Dennis Kucinich and the group Strong Towns recently said that we need to reduce the deficit. They and all other populist candidates and groups need to give up on this if they want to represent the unrepresented. People in power do not care at all about the national deficit, it backfires to demand budget cuts or tax increases as they will be in the wrong areas. Many state and local governments now need not just capital investment help but operating and maintenance cost help to run their infrastructure as witnessed by the numerous locations either unwilling or unable to restore cuts made during the pandemic.

References

Banks Rob. 2023. Both jails shutting down in Erie County. Wyrk Radio. https://wyrk.com/jails-erie-county-closing/ 14 April

Boehm Jessica. 2023. Phoenix voters approved light rail to the Capitol 23 years ago. Now, it's dead. Axios. August. https://www.axios.com/local/phoenix/2023/08/14/phoenix-light-rail-alternatives-mass-transit-options?utm_medium=partner&utm_source=microsoft-start&utm_content=link&utm_campaign=subs-partner-msfot-dailyessentials

Boucher Dave. 2018. Analysis: Mayor Megan Barry must 'get everything right' to regain political stature, trust. The Tennessean. 10 February. https://eu.tennessean.com/story/news/local/davidson/2018/02/10/megan-barry-affair-nashville-mayor-scandal-reelection-analysis/319885002/

Denham Hannah. 2023. Alabama Wants to Get Ahead on Investing in Air Taxis. August 03 https://www.govtech.com/transportation/alabama-wants-to-get-ahead-on-investing-in-air-taxis

Domhoff G. William. 2005. Power at the Local Level: Growth Coalition Theory. in Who Rules America. University of California Santa Cruz https://whorulesamerica.ucsc.edu/local/growth_coalition_theory.html

Duda Jeremy. 2023. A 1989 election defeat delayed the Valley's adoption of light rail by nearly 20 years. Axios. August.    https://www.msn.com/en-us/lifestyle/lifestyle-buzz/a-1989-election-defeat-delayed-the-valley-s-adoption-of-light-rail-by-nearly-20-years/ar-AA1ffOwF?ocid=msedgdhp&pc=U531&cvid=b98cafca1ce7474f840712a2dd1e7011&ei=55

Feinstein Naomi. 2023. CityNerd: Miami Is "Walkable Urbanism for the Rich" Miami New Times. July 28. https://www.miaminewtimes.com/news/citynerd-breaks-down-miami-dade-transit-metrorail-pedestrian-access-17481533?fbclid=IwAR0U5b0nysDQAGLPiEzVYUNt2ieyQfkd3B1t3xqnabSCRwk514ibJnb_b4I

Hanks Douglas. 2023. “SoBe Trains are packed - while Dade rail plans are under attack”. Miami Herald. 6 March. https://www.miamiherald.com/news/local/community/miami-dade/miami-beach/article272649688.html

Hendrickson Clara. 2019. Local Journalism in Crisis: Why America Must Revive its Local Newsrooms. Brookings Institution. Available at: https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/Local-Journalism-in-Crisis.pdf

Hsieh Steven 2019. Koch-Funded Group Helped Develop Plan to Kill Future of Phoenix Light Rail. Phoenix New Times. August 6. https://www.phoenixnewtimes.com/news/koch-group-behind-anti-light-rail-campaign-in-phoenix-11336419

 Rousseau Jean-Jacques. 2017. The Social Contract, translated and annotated by Jonathon Bennett. Available at https://www.earlymoderntexts.com/assets/pdfs/rousseau1762.pdf

Wypijewski JoAnn. 2000.  Back to the Back of the Bus: Montgomery’s transit system isn’t segregated anymore. It barely exists. The Nation. December 25. https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/back-back-bus/

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