According to Los Angeles Times reporter Ralph Vartabedian (see: Cost overruns hit California bullet train again amid a new financial crunch, October 8), the troubled California high speed rail system could face additional cost overruns. According to Vartabedian, “The California bullet train is facing at least another billion dollars of proposed cost increases from its contractors, following a history of sharp cost growth on construction work over the last eight years, The Times has learned.”
The already much delayed start of service could be delayed further: “The current plan would start train operations by 2030, but officials working on the project say privately that it appears difficult, if not impossible, to meet that timetable.” At the time of the 2008, when voters approved Proposition 1-A to authorize $10 billion in bonds, the Los Angeles (Anaheim) to San Francisco (Transbay Terminal) line was to have cost $33 billion and entire route was to have opened in 2020. Current cost estimates are in the area of $100 billion, though that is after scaling the project back significantly and sharing conventional commuter rail tracks in the Los Angeles and San Francisco metropolitan areas.
Joseph Vranich and I authored a report on the system in 2008 (see: The California High Speed Rail Project: A Due Diligence Report). In that report we projected cost overruns of 30% to 60% for the entire system, which was to have included spurs to Sacramento and San Diego. Our projections were embarrassingly low, with the much more modest system now likely to cost more than the full promised system with its Sacramento and San Diego branches, little of which appears likely to be opened even 10 years late.
The announcement that Tesla is moving its headquarters to Texas may not be a surprise, but it confirms trends that California’s progressive gentry simply refuse to acknowledge. Tesla, among the diminishing number of large manufacturers based in the state, joins a growing exodus that includes such tech giants as Oracle and Hewlett Packard, financial firms like Charles Schwab, and a host of high-end engineering and business service companies.
None of this will change the “What, me worry?” crowd in Sacramento, fresh off an impressive recall win, and their media claque, who see no “exodus” despite the fact that since 2000, 2.6 million domestic migrants — a population larger than the cities of San Francisco, San Diego, and Anaheim combined — have moved from California to other parts of the United States.
According to the The Wall Street Journal, “The accounting and consulting giant PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP says most of its U.S. employees can now live anywhere in the country, in the latest sign that the pandemic is upending traditional working arrangements in a variety of white-collar roles. The article, by Chip Cutter cites similar development among other major companies. For example, Facebook is expanding eligibility for remote work to “all levels of the company.” Those employees not able to obtain permission to work remotely “would be expected to come into the office, at a minimum, 50% of the time.” This means that employees will be able to work remotely up to a maximum of 50% of the time, a practice virtually unheard of among major companies before the pandemic.
The article also references a Massachusetts Mutual Life Insurance Company survey finding that only 41% of pandemic remote workers “looked forward to returning to the office.” A hybrid approach, working both in the office and remotely, was favored by 29%. Ten percent of workers were not comfortable returning to the office “in any capacity.” This is similar to a research by Jose Maria Barrero, Nicholas Bloom, and Steven J. Davis to the effect that many employees will resist returning to the office, out of a “residual fear of proximity” (infection).
The city of Indianapolis is building a new jail and criminal justice center on the southeast side of the city. This means many of the current users of the City-County Building, namely the courts, will be vacating the property. There’s a lot of discussion locally about the future of that building and whether it should be redeveloped. The Indianapolis Business Journal asked me to contribute my thoughts, and I revisited my old idea to demolish the building entirely and redevelop the site.
Monday I was in Washington to participate in a book discussion of Howard Husock’s new work The Poor Side of Town: And Why We Need It. Obviously we talk about the intersection of zoning and housing affordability, but the conversation ranges well beyond that. Here’s a replay of the event:
Aaron M. Renn is an opinion-leading urban analyst, consultant, speaker and writer on a mission to help America’s cities and people thrive and find real success in the 21st century. He focuses on urban, economic development and infrastructure policy in the greater American Midwest. He also regularly contributes to and is cited by national and global media outlets, and his work has appeared in many publications, including the The Guardian, The New York Times and The Washington Post.
A recent op-ed in The Seattle Times written by transit activists claims a high-speed railroad from Portland to Vancouver B.C. would reduce air pollution. Although the piece doesn’t provide a source, it claims the project would “prevent 960 metric tons of harmful pollutants such as particulate matter and carbon monoxide from entering our atmosphere over the first 40 years of operation.”
Although that sounds like a lot, it is an absolutely minuscule amount. It shows how high-speed rail advocates must grasp at arguments to justify the tens of billions of dollars the project would cost to build.
The authors didn’t cite a study, but mentioned two particular pollutants: particulate matter and carbon monoxide (not carbon dioxide which is a greenhouse gas). They claim a reduction of 960 metric tons of pollutants over 40 years, which amounts to 24 metric tons a year.
Rail-based transit yields infinitesimal environmental benefits despite the massive cost. Advocates throw in the numbers, and multiply them by 40 years, in the hopes that people won’t check to see if they are meaningful.
This is a consistent pattern from transit activists.
In 2015, members of Sound Transit’s board justified spending billions on extending light rail to Lynwood saying it would reduce CO2 emissions. As we noted at the time, the same amount of emissions could be reduced for about $1 million a year - far less than the cost of constructing, let alone operating, the light rail extension.
The following year transit activist Shefali Ranganathan and the Transportation Choices Coalition implied the third phase of Sound Transit (ST3) would reduce 793,000 metric tons of CO2 annually. The real number was much smaller - only about 130,000 MT. After initially denying it, they were forced to add a footnote to an e-mail (an odd way to correct the record) acknowledging they were misleading.
Transit and environmental activists like to claim their projects will help reduce pollution. A look at the data shows that environmental benefits are little more than marketing afterthoughts, rather than sincere efforts at environmental policy.
On this episode of Feudal Future hosts Joel Kotkin and Marshall Toplansky are joined by Ross Elliott, Chairman of the Urban Land Institute of Australia, and Dr. Aaron Kheriaty, Professor of Psychiatry at UC Irvine. This show covers the psychological impact of COVID-19 and how governments are managing it.
Ross Elliott is the co-founder of Suburban Futures (formerly The Suburban Alliance). He has 30 years’ experience in the property and urban development industry, including a number of national leadership roles for the Property Council of Australia as its Executive Director, then Chief Operating Officer and later as National Executive Director for the Residential Development Council. In this time he pioneered a number of policy initiatives for the industry on urban growth and cities policies for Australia. He has both authored and edited a number of monographs on urban development policy, housing and cities policies for Australia. Ross was also founding CEO of Brisbane Marketing, winning an International Downtown Association’s (USA) award for City Marketing in 2003. A frequent speaker, author and commentator on urban development policy, he was in 2016 invited to be international keynote speaker for the American Planning Association’s Utah conference and in 2017 was published in a global joint MIT/Chapman University project “Infinite Suburbia.”
Aaron Kheriaty is Professor of Psychiatry at UCI School of Medicine and Director of the Medical Ethics Program at UCI Health. He serves as chairman of the medical ethics committees at UCI Hospital and at the CA Department of State Hospitals. Dr. Kheriaty graduated from the University of Notre Dame in philosophy and pre-medical sciences, earned his MD degree from Georgetown University, and completed residency training in psychiatry at UCI. He has authored books and articles for professional and lay audiences on bioethics, social science, psychiatry, and religion. His work has been published in the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, Public Discourse, and First Things; he has conducted print, radio, and television interviews on bioethics topics with The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, CNN, Fox, and NPR. On matters of public policy and healthcare he has addressed the California Medical Association and has testified before the California Senate Health Committee.
This show is presented by the Chapman Center for Demographics and Policy, which focuses on research and analysis of global, national and regional demographic trends and explores policies that might produce favorable demographic results over time.
Recent California housing policies may result in the decimation of forests in both urban and suburban single-family neighborhoods of Los Angeles. L.A.-based policy analyst and writer Chris LeGras shows us drone footage of LA's "secret" forests that may be affected by the state's recent changes in housing policy.
In 2019, Washington Policy Center asked national transportation expert Wendell Cox to evaluate transportation planning in the Puget Sound region. He looked at data showing where people choose to live, where they choose to work, and how they choose to travel. Specifically, he addressed the policy question: does our regional transportation plan reflect reality or wishful thinking?
Key Points about the report and WSDOT's drafted response:
A 2019 WPC study by Wendell Cox found that public transit has little potential to serve employment destinations outside of downtown Seattle.
The study emphasized that transportation planning should focus on access to jobs.
WPC asked for feedback from the Washington State Department of Transportation (WSDOT) on the study, but never heard back.
Through public disclosure, WPC found WSDOT had drafted a response but never sent an official response.
WSDOT’s complaints are largely around methodology and authorship, without any real dispute with our data.
A thoughtful and data-focused reply should have been compiled and sent, which would have contributed to the public’s understanding of transportation policy and spending.
A brief excerpt follows:
"Lastly, Secretary Millar stoops to ad hominem attacks, stating that Cox is a “proponent of auto-centric development” so it’s not surprising that the study “downplays the positive contributions that transit and other options have on congestion mitigation.” On the contrary, Cox is a demographer and national urban policy expert whose values have been readily published online in an invited European journal essay and on Demographia’s website as follows: “The objective of urban policy should be to achieve widespread affluence and eradicate poverty” and that this “requires transport that maximizes mobility and minimizes travel times."
Mariya Frost is the Director of the Coles Center for Transportation at Washington Policy Center. Mariya has lived in both Eastern and Western Washington, and believes strongly in the freedom of mobility for all Washingtonians. She is on the Board of Directors for the Eastside Transportation Association, a member of the Jim MacIsaac Research Committee, and a member of the Women of Washington civic group. She and her husband live in Tacoma.
The Census Bureau has just announced that median household income in the United States declined by 2.6% in 2020 compared to 2019. This is the first statistically significant reduction in income since 2011. In 2020, the median household income was $67,521, down from $69.560 in the last pre-pandemic year of 2019.
Alex Chisholm, chief operating officer of the United Kingdom civil service and permanent secretary of the Cabinet Office, said that the new-found ability of officials to vary working patterns was a “huge positive,” according to The Times of London. He told the House of Commons public accounts committee that “letting people work flexibly would also allow the civil service to shrink its footprint on Whitehall, the location of a number of national ministries and other offices of the national government in London. He cited the costly London real estate costs as a consideration favoring downsizing the government’s presence in Westminster (central London).
Infinite Suburbia is the culmination of the MIT Norman B. Leventhal Center for Advanced Urbanism's yearlong study of the future of suburban development. Find out more.
Authored by Aaron Renn, The Urban State of Mind: Meditations on the City is the first Urbanophile e-book, featuring provocative essays on the key issues facing our cities, including innovation, talent attraction and brain drain, global soft power, sustainability, economic development, and localism.
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