DON'T MISS THE VICTORY PARTY STUCK IN TRAFFIC.

Saturday last, the East Troy Electric Railroad said thanks to its donors by operating a Conductor's Club dinner train.  (Want to be invited, dear reader?  Send money.  Preservation railroads welcome money.)

The museum's ticket office and gift shop includes artifacts of Wisconsin's electric railroads, including this sign salvaged from one of the stations where passengers could transfer between local rapid transit cars and the West Allis streetcars.

Imagine having that option at the baseball stadium, which is still close to where that shared trackage ran.

The vacant land in the foreground, which includes remnants of passenger platforms, is where the rapid transit cars between Milwaukee and the Lake Country, latterly stubbed at Hales Corners and Waukesha.  Imagine having a choice of city or rapid transit cars for downtown or West Allis or points beyond, rather than coping with expressway construction, which is currently ongoing immediately to the left, or south, of the treeline at left of the photograph.  Pray that construction doesn't go on for 44 years.  Or pray to the Patron Saint of Traction for the souls of Brewer fans heading to the stadium for tomorrow's victory party.

BELATED RAILROAD READING.

Eight years ago, the Independent Institute editorial staff invited me to review Randal O'Toole's Romance of the Rails: Why the Passenger Trains We Love Are Not the Transportation We Need, which I subsequenty did, as well as offer a compare-and-contrast with what the ferroequinologist press, who are more favorably disposed toward Amtrak and the local Commuter Rail or Rapid Transit operations than policy wonks with libertarian leanings.

I recently discovered David Henderson's review of Romance for Econlib from seven years ago.  "O’Toole, a long-time fan of railroads, puts his fandom aside and shows what a disaster government subsidies to, and regulations of, rail transportation have been."

Mr Henderson's summation:

On his last page, O’Toole nicely sums up his message: “[N]ew transportation technologies have replaced trains and streetcars. Planes are faster and less expensive for long distances; cars and buses are more convenient for short distances; and there is no midrange distance at which passenger rail has an advantage over both cars and planes.”

I submit that we cannot impound "cars and buses are more convenient" in ceteris paribus, not when the Republican candidate to be governor of Wisconsin is slagging on the Democrat candidate for advocating toll roads.  Recall, dear reader, that the Cold Spring Shops position on "crumbling infrastructure" is "Why should road socialism be any different from any other form of socialism?"

Our position on transportation policy remains conducting conversation about transportation policy on the merits of the modes, rather than on the ideology of the advocates.

THE DESPERATION OF THE TEXAS COMMUTER.

"Would you take a train to avoid San Antonio's I-35 traffic?"  We're not talking about a suburban commute, we're talking about getting to Dallas.

How many times have delays on San Antonio's I-35 made you late to an event? For some Texans, navigating construction, crashes or overzealous drivers is so inconvenient that they're looking for other options.

In a controversial TikTok post shared on Wednesday, October 7, one user, Heather Roberts, wrote that they would rather take a double-digit-hour train ride than brave the infamous highway. The post showed them on an Amtrak, surrounded by blankets and pillows.

"I'd rather bedrot on a train for 10 hours than fight traffic & be annoyed for 4-5 hours to get from Dallas to San Antonio," Roberts captioned their post. "But that's just me."

The Amtrak route from the 210 to North Texas takes roughly eight hours and 35 minutes, according to the Amtrak website. It's a tempting option that may not cost as much as you think. There is an option to book a private room, which starts at $191. However, coach seats start at $27, less than it costs to fuel up your tank. Still, some social media users weren't sold on the option.

At least there's one train each way between San Antonio and Fort Worth and Dallas. San Antonio to Houston, three days a week, and the train is coming from Los Angeles or New Orleans.

Texans have contemplated something resembling a Passenger Rail corridor service for years.  There are commuter trains between Fort Worth and Dallas and both of those cities have respectable-looking railway stations.

We've dealt with high fuel prices and congested roads and house prices for years: somehow the Suburban Experiment and reliance on those automobiles or Texas-sized pickup trucks goes on.

AFTER THEY'VE TRIED EVERYTHING ELSE.

Regular readers have known since at least 2020 that parking lots are productive assets and pricing them as such makes economic sense.  Maybe, rather than assessing homeowners and hoteliers for street repairs, ask the beneficiary to bear the burden.  "Milwaukee drivers could pay more to park under proposed 2027 budget to help fund road repairs."

A LATTER-DAY RED BALL EXPRESS?

A report describing Syria's attempt at geographic arbitrage, giving local teamsters a slice of the Hormuz maritime risk premium, opens with a photograph.

Unattributed photograph retrieved from Yahoo News.

SIMPLICE! SIMPLICE! TOJOURS LE SIMPLICE!

For years, I've groused about overdesigned rotaries.  "The point of rotaries is to simplify traffic flow, and it defeats their purpose to provide multiple lanes."  My gripe is impressionistic, based on my frustration with Wisconsin's penchant for slip lanes and overhead signage.  "Too much nuance in the construction of a rotary defeats its purpose."  Consider, dear reader, when among all the government follies to mock on April Fools Day, the Wisconsin rotary gets dinged.  "Overdesigned rotaries make motorists mad, so much so that Right Wisconsin posted an April Fool capturing the spirit in Wisconsin, a state notorious for overdoing the channeling and signage of the rotaries."

The good news is that Charles "Strong Towns" Marohn has the traffic engineering expertise to ask the Credentialed Experts to reconsider.  "A dangerous Minnesota roundabout shows what happens when engineers preserve future traffic capacity at the expense of safety today."  For "dangerous," read "overdesigned."  "This story ends with drivers being blamed for failing to navigate a design that engineers have spent more than a decade trying (and failing) to make understandable, and engineers continuing to deprioritize safety, in spite of recent policy directing them to make it their first priority."

PEOPLE DIE WHEN GOVERNMENT MESSES UP.

Object to more government action, though, and somebody will carp, "You must want people to die."

Sometimes, no matter what action governments take, people die.  Consider Strong Towns contributor Patricia Tice asking, "What if There Had Been No Interstates?"  Based on a small sample, New Hampshire with its contrarian traditions and understanding the ways federal matching funds ensnare politicians, things look pretty good.

The first 16-mile segment got built quickly, but that was a coastline connector that reinforced existing transportation patterns. As they started pushing in toward the center of the state, progress slowed dramatically. By the time they got past Manchester and headed toward Concord, sections got built as local concerns were addressed, but it was slow-walked. The Franconia Notch project dragged out well into the 1980s. Ultimately, they stretched the implementation across nearly 50 years for a bare-bones system.

Well, this is North of Boston, where "You can't get there from here" is a tradition.

DIVIDE THE RISKS AND MULTIPLY THE TRANSACTION COSTS.

Institutions that make possible the separation of risks in order that each be priced separately, for instance the risk of a cargo being lost at sea separated from the risk that the cargo doesn't command a remunerative price when it arrives, have long contributed to a broader prosperity.  "We thus take for granted the slicing and dicing of risks to ships, even if there no longer is a Lloyd's coffeehouse with a bell that rings to announce a sinking, and we understand foreign-exchange hedges against loss in the value of the cargo on delivery."

A LAMENT FOR ROAD SOCIALISM.

Strong Towns contributor Ryan Puzycki rebuts claims that Austin's unbuilt light rail line is evidence transit is useless.

For more than a century, American policy has systematically favored the automobile. It is not entirely unreasonable, given the long history of state-funded roadways and municipal control of city streets, that roads are seen as an unquestioned function of government. Many transit systems, by contrast, were originally private, always regulated, increasingly constrained, and eventually absorbed as they were “outcompeted” by government roads. The collapse of private transit, and its subsequent strangulation, is considered a natural outcome — as if this was not engineered by policy.

That highways are considered politically neutral is itself ideology masquerading as common sense. Transit is treated as “socialism on wheels” while highways are the American way: a big-government, government-funded, deficit-financed free-for-all. Yet these highway socialists still argue that transit should “compete in the marketplace.”

But there is no marketplace for transportation. Transit competes with highways in the same way that the Washington Generals compete with the Harlem Globetrotters: the Globetrotters always win.

Never mind for the moment the way the rent-seeking of railway promoters in the nineteenth century gave the Good Roads movement (which started with bicyclists!) an opportunity to seek their own rents.  We're now at the stage of road socialism where the highway builders run out of other peoples' money.

Interstate highway projects are eligible for up to 90% federal funding, meaning a state may contribute as little as ten cents on the dollar, with the rest drawn from a trust fund kept alive by general revenue transfers that every American taxpayer finances. So Governor Abbott’s claim that Texas is building transportation “without local tax increases” is narrowly true: Texas is building highways through nationalized inflationary deficit-spending, seizing private property unilaterally, and handing cities the bill for the damage. The professed fiscal conservatives who lecture Austin and other cities about responsible spending perpetuate the largest federally subsidized transportation entitlement in American history and call it freedom.

This is not a free market in transportation. This is not fiscal conservatism. It’s central planning for cars, paid for by everyone, yet accountable to no one.

Until the real debt ceiling crashes in, which might be sooner than you think.  Interstate highways and junk bonds, bought for a dime on the dollar.

SOCIALISM FOR CARS AND PLANES.

Not so much, though, for Florida's Brightline, which has borrowed heavily to build its concept fast passenger railroad between Orlando and Miami.

Brightline took on far more than just labor and rolling-stock costs.

It bought right of way in one of America’s most expensive real estate markets; built nearly 170 miles of new track alongside an active railway corridor; constructed stations in downtown Miami, Fort Lauderdale, West Palm Beach, and Orlando; installed modern signaling and grade crossing safety systems; and navigated several years of environmental review, litigation, and regulatory approvals.

The upfront capital costs, running into the billions, were financed through private loans at commercial interest rates. That debt, which is now strangling the company, results from a system rigged against trains.

When you fly, you use infrastructure built and maintained by the government (at various levels), including airport terminals, runways, and air-traffic control systems. When you drive, you’re using a highway system that cost more than half a trillion public dollars to build—plus tens of billions, annually, to maintain. And to be clear: The federal government covers roughly half of those costs from general tax revenues—not gas taxes.

With Brightline, there is no equivalent public backstop. The company built the tracks, paid for the land, financed the stations, and carries the full capital cost of its infrastructure—borrowed at market rates—on its balance sheet.

It's not that the air traffic control system or the Interstate Highways are any model of Public Excellence, and the hoops Amtrak or the Commuter Rail authorities have to jump through to add service are that much more favorable.

Unfortunately, the essay, a policy brief from the High Speed Rail Alliance, looks to the wrong place for relief.  "Tell Congress: It’s time to reconnect the country with high-speed and regional rail!"

No.  Tell Congress to privatize the airports and air traffic control system, end the "essential air service" subsidies and all the other rents to general aviation enthusiasts and the owners of executive jets, and privatize and allow tolling on the interstate highways and the remaining Universal System highways.

THE ROAD TRIP TRADITION.

Never mind those temporarily high motor fuel prices, "America's Love Affair With the Road Endures," according to Salena Zito.

Since the first American road, the Lincoln Highway, opened in 1913, Americans have found that their relationship with their nation and the roads that connect us north, south, east, and west is almost patriotic in concept.

Whether you are on the road for hours or days, whether you stay in your home state or visit multiple others, there is a breadth of history, scenery, and experiences that connect all of us, whether we stay ensconced with our families in our cars or stay in campgrounds with a community fire ring, or at a motor lodge, or if you just take a day trip to the local state park. One of the most interesting things we could do this summer is take a road trip, large or small, to experience the country for the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence.

Ah, yes, the Lincoln Highway.  "Not far from Cold Spring Shops headquarters is the first seedling mile of the Lincoln Highway, an attempt by early twentieth-century entrepreneurs to build a paved highway from coast to coast.  The effort was as much an attempt to lobby for federal funds as it was to improve the roads."

SILLY, MEANINGLESS WORDS.

Streetsblog's Kea Wilson has long taken up the cause of getting around by anything other than a motorcar.  Which is fine.  Using the Student Affairs vocabulary polluted by fake psychiatry is not.  She goes there all the same.  "Meet the NIMBY’s Toxic Cousin: the NOMS (Not On My Street)," with the sub-headline, "Are neighborhood 'car supremacists' taking over our community meetings — and what do we do about it?"  That might get the Streetsblog set nodding their heads and stroking their hipster beards.  It does little to change minds, and the point of holding a community meeting might be to ... offer information and persuasion to shape transportation policy.

SUBURBANIZATION IS A SOCIALIST DISASTER.

That might not be what Grant Ennis, Brent Toderian, and Tom Flood had in mind when they wrote "The One-Hour City Conspiracy" for Streetsblog, positing "Too many people are forced into car-dependent lives, with more health harms, more crashes, more noise, more air pollution, more social isolation — and less space for everything good our streets should be giving us."

Read on, though, and note Your Tax Dollars at Work (I remember the signs hailing the a-building next section of Interstate 94 in that way) with Technocratic Overreach and Government Spending as far as you can pedal a bike.

WHAT'S YOUR ALTERNATIVE?

Earth Day always brings out the sort of people who would like to scold us for being prosperous.  Carbon Outfront! by Lloyd Alter identifies those things we most deserve to be spanked for.  "Our planetary boundaries are being breached by cars and cows."  The author confesses to "spitballing."  Read his conclusions though, and ask yourself whether he wants the ongoing energy crunch to continue or not.

I taught my students about planetary boundaries because I realized I was too carbon-brained and wasn’t giving them enough information about many of the other problems we face. But after a week of thinking about them, I realize how interrelated they all are, and they almost all come back to the problems caused by cars and cows, both of which are directly or indirectly products of the fossil fuel economy.

I know it is a simplistic view of things, but we may see it play out in real time if this stupid war continues and the cars have no fuel and the cows have no feed.

Then I suppose we'll all live like it's 1825.

INFRASTRUCTURE IS THEIR LEAST IMPORTANT PRODUCT.

In Transportation for America, Corrigan Salerno asks, "This Congress is focused on how federal dollars go out the door in the next surface transportation reauthorization, and it looks like states might win big time. But with a track record like theirs, why shouldn’t Congress consider who else might use their money better?"

Nobody?

With the vast majority of funding flowing directly to them, State DOTs are, in effect, in charge of the federal highway program. If they are to claim credit for successes, they need to be held accountable for their failures. While local-led planning and project delivery could get things wrong just as much as state DOTs do today, they may also end up being more accountable to the priorities and nuances of communities, based purely on their proximity. When your city or county misspends money or fails to take care of obvious needs, it’s a lot easier to hold them accountable than a faceless, faraway, typically unelected state transportation agency.

As an indication of just how far away they are from thinking about outcomes, one of AASHTO’s top talking points revolves around how good they are at spending other people’s money quickly.  Obligation rates, meaning simply the speed at which federal dollars are spent by a recipient, do not imply any measurement of success based on outcomes. If anything, the use of obligation rates as a metric should be scrutinized. What are you getting for that spending? Are results improving at unprecedented rates? Or are DOTs just prioritizing funding any investment as fast as possible?

In the manner of anything governmental, one requires a list of acronyms. "DOT" refers to state departments of transportation.  "AASHTO" refers to the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials.  That "and transportation" is a recent addition, as the acronym used to be "AASHO" which offers opportunities for all sorts of mischief.

None of which matters.  County road commissioners and state departments of road building are competing to get federal matching funds, which is to say, the local rent-seekers get to wet their beaks and future generations are on the hook to repair or replace it, which means hoping some future Member of Congress will write that project into some future porkulus.

IF ONLY THERE WAS A QUICKER WAY HOME.

The Green Bay Packers just put up two touchdowns on the Bears.  Oh, sorry, the Major League Baseball season opened in Milwaukee, with the Brewers allowing the White Sox a home run in the first and a home run in the ninth and otherwise battering Pale Hose pitching, 14-2.  And as I type, the Milwaukee traffic reporters are talking about all those people trying to get home.  Oh, did I mention that Interstate 94 is being widened in the vicinity of the Stadium.  Construction delays they'll never get back.  Wait, isn't that a line from "Take Me Out to the Ball Game?"

Now, look closely at this partially-colorized photograph, showing Milwaukee County Stadium, which the county built with the hopes of attracting a Major League Baseball team.

I forget the timing of the construction of Milwaukee County Stadium: it was there a few years before the Braves decamped from Boston, and this event took place before the outfield bleachers were built.  Focus, dear reader, on the embankment in black and white back behind the third-base grandstand and parking lot.  Two electrified tracks last operated by The Milwaukee Rapid Transit and Speedrail Corporation, and the substantial girder and truss bridge carrying trains over the Menominee River and The Milwaukee Road's main line.  And Speedrail had hoped to hang on long enough to be able to cash in on ball game traffic, as well as on passengers headed for the new Milwaukee County Zoo, a-building not far from where the electric cars ran.

That was not to be.

The photographer did not yet know that this photo, taken Labor Day of 1950 in downtown Hales Corners, was of the last run of duplex streetcar 39-40, which was wrecked in a fatal collision on a return working with the special train.

That was the end of Speedrail, although some of the right-of-way was available for streetcar service to the stadium.

That curved retaining wall on the southeast corner of Calvary Cemetery is still there, over seventy years on.  I have noted before that no Milwaukee team has won a World Series since the streetcar to the stadium went out of service.  I'm not sure whether the expansion of the expressway, which runs just to the left of the photo, will encroach on any of the trees or of those electric transmission towers, which are still in place with no streetcars or interurbans to run under them.

But I want to end this post on a cheerful note.  There have been too many gloomy posts of late.

THE FAILURES OF ROAD SOCIALISM.

Kea Wilson's "What If The Rising Costs of Car Dependency Were As Visible As Gas Prices?" in Streetsblog is a couple weeks early to be an April Fool post.  There is imaginative editing of gas station signs and message boards to accompany a secondary headline reading "Gas station billboards remind U.S. residents every day that driving is getting more expensive. What if they told a different message about the high costs of our autocentric transportation system?"

SNOW CLEARING MAKES DRIVERS LESS VIGILANT.

Well, why not?  Automobiles go faster because they have brakes, and safety appliances make drivers less vigilant.  So, too, with snow clearance.

Perversely, aggressive winter road treatments with salt—beyond their documented harm to the environment, infrastructure of all kinds, and human health—also appear to make us less safe by converting icy conditions into wet ones. Not because of the treatment itself but, I believe, because it diminishes the natural traffic-calming effect of snow and ice. It shifts us from cautious drivers in slick conditions—who simply cannot drive too fast for those conditions—back into ordinary drivers on over-designed roads.

Chuck Marohn of Strong Towns has previously written about the increase in traffic injuries and fatalities that occurred during the COVID-19 pandemic, and how the actual cause of increased danger was reduced congestion and therefore greater freedom to drive at unsafe speeds on roads that were designed to prioritize speed over safety. I believe these statistics about winter driving reflect the same phenomenon. As with crashes in congested traffic, winter weather crashes, while possibly more frequent, tend to occur at slower speeds and are correspondingly less deadly.

Winter weather causes all of us to drive carefully and patiently, alert for the unexpected. It reduces the illusory margin of safety provided by wide lanes and excessive shoulders. Just as snow throws leafless trees into stark relief against a background of white, so it also exposes the dangers of conventional roadway design.

That's not a surprise.  "The safer people perceive their cars to be, the more risks they take with them."  But fitting passenger automobiles with a spear on the steering column to encourage less aggressive acceleration and braking, or using cosmetic curves, trees, the full suite of traffic taming methods, all of which produce fewer crashes and longer travel times, are not easy policies to sell.

PREDATORY SPEED TRAPS?

Reason discovers one.  "Brookside, Alabama, made national news in 2022 after investigations revealed it was bankrolling itself through predatory traffic enforcement."

Advantage, Cold Spring Shops?  "Financially strapped suburbs shaking poor people down with all sorts of niggling fines (a Strong Towns theme)?"

CAPTURED BY RENT-SEEKERS.

In the fall of 2017, I took advantage of the off-season hotel rates to explore the rapid transit projects of the Cities.  Those included the Northstar commuter line, running between the baseball stadium in Minneapolis and a parking lot in Big Lake.  My impressions:  "Most laid-back commuter train I've ever seen. Train pulls into Minneapolis and probably half the passengers on the upper deck just sat there. I will confess to getting a bit antsy, even though I let the Chicago mob detrain before I leave my seat, that's usually a wait of two or three minutes."

The coaching stock was laid out in the German regional train fashion, with grouped seats facing tables, mostly used for electronic devices rather than a low-stakes card game.

And now the service has shut down.  "Doomed From the Start" according to Charles "Strong Towns" Marohn.

In 2001, a county commissioner named Peter McLaughlin came to my graduate transportation class to pitch a project called Northstar Commuter Rail. He was one of the central political figures behind the effort, and his presentation reflected that. He talked about coalition-building, federal funding formulas, and the work required to align the two. What he didn’t talk much about was how the system would function as transit.

At the time, commuter rail sounded exciting. I went into the class curious. I left unsettled.

During the lecture, I asked some basic questions about viability. Why would the line stop in Elk River instead of continuing to St. Cloud, the major regional center north of Minneapolis? McLaughlin’s answer had nothing to do with ridership, service, or making the system work. It had everything to do with where the politics and the funding allowed the project to go.

This was long before Strong Towns. I didn’t yet have the framework to name what bothered me. I just knew that if the goal of the presentation was to convince me this was a good transportation project, it had the opposite effect.

Northstar opened in 2009. Today, it’s widely regarded as a failure. Ridership never materialized as promised, service was steadily scaled back, and last month the state shut the line down, once its obligation to repay the federal government for the grant funding expired.

Mr Marohn was asking the right questions.  There have been many Strong Towns posts dealing with highway improvements over the years, and the ones that go bad, and there are many, tend to be the ones where there's funding available for a specific sort of improvement, such as an overpass or a diverging diamond interchange or a cluster of rotaries and getting the money is more important than, oh, keeping pedestrians and bikers safe and reducing the severity of motor vehicle collisions.