Even reporters at the famously-liberal Los Angeles Times have soured on California’s $100 billion-plus rail boondoggle, whose cost will far outstrip whatever the state will get from the $800 billion stimulus package to build it.  But the paper’s editorial board, which supported the stimulus package, continues to back the project, which has ballooned in cost from $33 billion to over $100 billion.  (Managing to see the bright side of even the most pernicious government waste, the paper’s board cited other boondoggles with approval, like Boston’s disastrous Big Dig project, which resulted in motorist fatalities. It praised that infamous project for replacing “what used to be an expressway” with “a downtown park”, despite the fact that it caused “severe delays” for motorists and had a skyrocketing price tag of more than $15 billion.)

But as its own reporter, Steve Lopez, recently noted, there is no telling how much the project will ultimately cost, or when it will actually be completed:

The projected completion date has gone from 2020 to 2033. The anticipated cost has ballooned to as high as $117 billion, and no one seems to have a clue where the bulk of the money would come from. The state auditor and the state Legislative Analyst’s Office have raised serious concerns, and the rail authority’s own peer review group said the project represents “an immense financial risk” to the state. And two weeks ago, the railroad authority’s top executive resigned.To top it off, a poll last fall said nearly two-thirds of registered voters would run this train off the rails if they had a chance to vote again.

The rail project won’t even be useful or economically viable once it’s finished, since travelers will be able to travel more cheaply by road or air than by taking the train.  As syndicated columnist Amy Alkon notes, “this is a totally unnecessary train (and I say that as a train lover). It’s $59 from LA to SF on Southwest if you book in advance,” less than a train ticket will likely cost.  And although the project is misleadingly called a “high-speed” rail project, it turns out that “the train couldn’t really run high speed” after all.

As Tim Cavanaugh noted in Reason, the Los Angeles Times reporter, Steve Lopez, had

the good fortune to answer to the newsroom rather the opinion section, where bullet-train belief still reigns as supremely as it does in Gov. Jerry Brown’s rumpus room. The important thing is that one more prominent Golden State blowhard is sealing the case against the vacant and bankrupt high-speed rail project. . . . In a piece I missed earlier this month entitled “Keeping faith with California’s bullet train,” the ed board praised the High-Speed Rail project because it is similar to Boston’s notorious Big Dig and the building of the pyramids by slaves.

The Obama Administration still supports this boondoggle even though it has been criticized by other liberal newspapers like the Washington Post.  That paper, which has not endorsed a Republican for President since 1952, criticized the project in an editorial entitled “California’s High-Speed Rail System Is Going Nowhere Fast.”

As we noted earlier, the small fraction of the stimulus package that was earmarked for transportation was devoted disproportionately to laying the groundwork for wasteful “high-speed” rail boondoggles that are not actually “high” in speed. These multibillion dollar rail boondoogles would provide work at inflated wages for politically-powerful unions. But these projects are expensive white elephants that would be used by very few travelers at an enormous cost per mile, and not enable trains to go anywhere near as fast as they do in Europe, Japan, or China. (Other union-backed provisions in the stimulus package wiped out jobs in America’s export sector.)

Obama relied on exaggerated claims to push through the stimulus package, claiming it was needed to prevent an “irreversible decline” in the economy,  even though the Congressional Budget Office admitted that the stimulus package would shrink the economy “in the long run.” Even an old-fashioned Keynesian stimulus might have been something that America could not afford at a time of record deficits. The Congressional Budget Office, ignoring various flaws in the stimulus package, argued that it would boost the economy in “the short run.” But even the CBO conceded that the stimulus would shrink economic output in “the long run” by increasing the national debt and thus crowding out private investment.

Four of air travelers’ five biggest complaints are about the TSA. Right up there on the list with everyone’s favorite sexy-searchers has to be airlines’ habit of nickel-and-diming customers for checked baggage, blankets and pillows, and most anything else that isn’t bolted to the cabin floor.

This business practice, called unbundling, does help keep ticket prices low, as I’ve previously explained. But it’s still annoying; people are transaction-averse.

The Department of Transportation, knowing a good PR opportunity when it sees one, recently passed a rule forbidding one type of extra charge. Airlines may no longer charge re-booking fees if passengers re-book their flights within 24 hours of first purchasing them. Many passengers will no doubt welcome the change. The trouble, which the DOT does not acknowledge, is that it isn’t free. CNN’s Aaron Cooper explains:

The airline says the regulation forces them to hold the seat for someone who may or may not want to fly. As a consequence, someone who really does want to fly wouldn’t be able to buy that seat because the airline is holding it for someone who might or might not end up taking it.

In other words, there will be more empty seats, which costs the airline potential revenue. Passengers will also have a harder time finding a seat on nearly-full flights. That’s why Spirit Airlines, a low-fare airline that practices an extreme form of unbundling, is adding a $2 “Department of Transportation Unintended Consequences Fee.” Re-bookers’ gains come at everyone else’s loss.

It isn’t often that businesses stand up to regulators. More and more, they can be seen holding hands and gazing into each others’ eyes while dreams of increased budgets and decreased competition dance through their heads.

That’s why Spirit’s pointed sense of humor here is refreshing. The DOT isn’t taking too kindly to Spirit’s Economics 101 lesson, but then again, they’re the ones who forgot about tradeoffs. They’re everywhere.

Last week, the Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority announced it was considering scrapping the Silver Line stop at Dulles Airport.

Though the Silver line was designed specifically to provide service to Dulles Airport, MWAA Board Member Bob Brown said it “wouldn’t be much of an additional burden on riders because even if Metro stopped at the airport people would still have to take a hike to the airport terminal” (1,150 feet – more than three football fields).

That’s right, MWAA just admitted that the proposed metro stop at Dulles Airport would be so inconvenient that air travelers aren’t likely to use it. So if the Silver Line is really just a westward extension of commuter rail that might not even stop at Dulles Airport, why is MWAA still involved?

More importantly, why would Virginia (one of only eight states with a AAA bond rating and the only one to have kept it without interruption for the last seventy years) surrender authority over a $6.8 billion infrastructure project to a notoriously secretive and debt-addicted semi-private entity like MWAA?

Virginia turning the reins of a large and complex project over to an opaque agency with a worse credit rating than France might seem completely backwards, but maybe the alternative to MWAA is even worse. One argument in favor of giving MWAA jurisdiction over planning the Silver Line is that it is a less wasteful and incompetent entity than the Kafkaesque Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority, which will ultimately run it.

WMATA’s shortcomings are well documented: it boasts a credit rating of A1 (the rating Italy just lost, “somewhat more susceptible to the adverse effects of changes in circumstances and economic conditions than obligors in higher-rated categories”), expects an revenue shortfall of $89 million for FY 2012, and can’t even keep the escalators in Metro stations from falling apart and injuring riders (let alone prevent train collisions).

Virginia’s decision to play along with MWAA has led to a great deal of confusion about the Silver Line’s cost and timeline, stemming from planning decisions like the infamous underground Dulles Airport Station (a pet concern of Mame Reiley) and the Project Labor Agreement (PLA) mandate slipped in by Dennis Martire (MWAA Board member and VP at the Laborers International Union of North America).

Before MWAA decided that Dulles Airport might not need a metro stop at all, nine members of its governing board felt that building a “first-class” Dulles station was so essential that it was worth hundreds of millions of dollars in extra costs to site the station underground, 500 feet closer to the terminal. Once Virginia voters found out, an unprecedented coalition of local politicians from both parties threatened to stop the project altogether unless plans for the underground station were scrapped.

Once sufficient political pressure mounted against the PLA mandate, MWAA released a Memorandum of Agreement (MOA) that stated “no prime contractor working or seeking to work on Phase 2 shall be required…to become a party to any labor agreement other than the Phase 2 PLA.” Ironically, no one can seem to agree what this MOA means: it states in the same breath that no prime contractor shall be required to sign a Project Labor Agreement but that the Phase 2 PLA is binding.

Both of these major crises point to a central underlying flaw in MWAA’s (and WMATA’s) governance: it is unaccountable. MWAA exists in bureaucratic limbo, a “a public body corporate and politic and independent of all other bodies” (VA Code § 5.1-153), meaning that it is exempt from federal contracting requirements like competitive sourcing and from Virginia’s Freedom of Information Act (FOIA).

In response to these concerns, there are two pieces of legislation making the rounds in Richmond, HB 33 (whose many patrons include Barbara Comstock – R, 34th District) and HB 2 / SB 3 (Bob Marshall – R, 13th District / Dick Black – R, 10th District).

Both of these address themselves to clarifying the Project Labor Agreement issue: if PLAs are mandated for Phase 2, Virginia will not fund Phase 2. HB 33 is a strongly worded piece of legislation aimed at ensuring that future joint infrastructure investments with neighboring states will not conflict with Virginia’s Right to Work law.

However, HB 2/SB 3 goes a step further by explicitly requiring MWAA to comply with Virginia’s Freedom of Information Act in order to become eligible for Virginia funds, addressing the underlying flaw in MWAA’s governance that allows this type of controversy to fester.

Biologists like to joke that the platypus is an animal designed by committee, being possessed of features that seem to have no practical necessity like a duck bill, poison claws, electroreception, and egg-laying.

The Silver Line extension of Metro is the platypus of infrastructure projects: a confusing and often contradictory mess of atavistic regulation and bureaucratic overlap that ought to be scrapped and redesigned from the ground up.

It remains to be seen whether the Virginia legislature has the wherewithal to do so.

Various media outlets are trying to scare the bejesus out of us by reporting on a new study published in this month’s issue of Injury Prevention, a leading peer-reviewed journal focused on — you guessed it — research related to reducing injuries. “Deaths of Headphone-Wearing Pedestrians Increase, Study Finds,” was the title of Bloomberg’s article on the research paper. This is one of the more accurate headlines I’ve seen on the study, although even this one is likely being misinterpreted by many, as I’ll explain in a moment. An example of an inaccurate, sloppy, scaremongering title comes from the Toronto Sun, “Wearing headphones while walking can be deadly: Study.” Please. Wearing headphones while walking will almost certainly not kill you.

Many in the media have been conflating what the researchers found, that more pedestrians involved in vehicle collisions have been reported to have been wearing headphones, with “headphone-wearing increases pedestrian-vehicle crash risk.” While the authors note that there is most likely a link between increased risk of pedestrian-vehicle collision and the pedestrian wearing headphones, they specifically point out in their conclusion: “Also, since this is a retrospective case series, neither causation nor correlation can be established between headphone use and pedestrian risk” [emphasis added]. This is because the methodology used by researchers to determine the number of collisions in recent years relied heavily on searches of news databases, such as LexisNexis and Google News, which is not the most scientifically robust way to tabulate incidents given media biases.

It is also worth noting, as the researchers themselves note in their paper, that while these headphone-wearing-pedestrian collisions more than tripled over the six years studied, MP3 player ownership quadrupled over the same period. Simply because more pedestrian-vehicle collisions involving headphone-wearing pedestrians while ownership of headphone-dependent devices increased at a greater rate does not prove headphones necessarily increase pedestrian-vehicle collision risk by much. If a greater proportion of pedestrians are wearing headphones, you would expect that more vehicle-pedestrian collisions would involve pedestrians wearing headphones.

This is not meant to dispute the researchers. After reading it, their study is quite sound given the limitations of data collection. I believe that wearing headphones while walking, all else being equal, almost certainly increases the risk of vehicle collision both by increasing distraction and blocking out the audible environment. Rather, I am trying to highlight another example of media irresponsibly misinterpreting health and safety research in order to unduly frighten the public. As is always the case, the devil is in the details and many reporters have no time for details.

For an infamous example of media stoking the walking-with-headphones-will-kill-you-dead! flames, see this story from a few years back:

The death of a pedestrian in Cranbrook, B.C., on Tuesday has raised the question of how loud is too loud when it comes to listening to iPods and other personal music players.

Isaiah Otieno, a 23-year-old student, was killed when he was struck and dragged by a helicopter that crashed to the ground as he was walking to the mailbox.

That’s right, bipedal music-lovers. Not only will cars almost certainly run you down the moment you set foot on the sidewalk with a functioning iPod, helicopters will be randomly targeting you from above for execution. You are not safe, anywhere, ever!

In a letter sent Tuesday to the Government Accountability Office, 11 House Democrats called on the watchdog agency to investigate California’s high-speed rail program. The rail system has faced increasingly harsh criticism as costs have ballooned, leading many to suspect misconduct on the part of California officials and the project’s supporters in the Obama administration.

The Democrats joined their Republican colleagues, who had sent the original request [PDF] to the GAO in December.

Also on Tuesday, the state-appointed California High-Speed Rail Peer Review Group recommended [PDF] that the Legislature refuse to issue $2.7 billion in bonds due to major funding concerns, management problems, and failure to disclose key details of demand forecasting models. Long-term federal funding no longer seems likely and the estimated construction costs have nearly tripled since 2008 to $98.5 billion. The panel concluded that moving forward without addressing these concerns would “represent[] an immense financial risk on the part of the State of California.”

The Obama administration has been strongly supportive of passenger rail boondoggles and had originally made it one of its infrastructure centerpieces. But now all of it seems to be going down in flames. Of the new corridors backed by Obama, only two would allow trains to travel at fast enough speeds to actually qualify as high-speed rail: California and Florida. Florida has since scuttled the project, and California’s may soon be killed as well due to growing opposition in the Legislature and public. In addition, Wisconsin and Ohio rejected medium-speed Obamarail, and the proposed Midwestern network is on life support.

This past summer, CEI filed two Freedom of Information Act requests with the federal Department of Transportation seeking information related to California’s proposed “train to nowhere” in the Central Valley. The two DOT agencies — the Federal Railroad Administration and the Office of the Secretary of Transportation – have yet to comply. So much for Obama’s lackeys being “the most transparent administration in the history of our country.”

October 2011 marked the eighth straight month [PDF] of declining year-over-year vehicle-miles traveled (VMT) in the U.S. Compared to October 2010, driving was down 2.3 percent. Since reaching its peak of 3.031 trillion VMT in 2007, driving has essentially plateaued. With gas prices continuing to hover as high as they have been in recent years, this is not surprising. Most of the decline is coming from rural areas, which makes sense given that the rural residents’ share of total population continues to fall [PDF], with most of the U.S. population growth taking place within metropolitan areas. Rural residents’ average auto trips tend to be longer, so they are likely forgoing a few trips — thanks to high gas prices and a weak overall economy — that end up showing significant declines in vehicle-miles traveled.

But part of the decline can be attributed to anti-automobile public policy. With the substantial increase in the U.S. urban population in recent decades, lane-miles have not kept up with population growth trends [PDF]. Rather than increasing physical lane space to benefit drivers, transportation planners at the local, state, and federal levels have been using their taxes to fund infrastructure and service that benefits a tiny fraction of the population, at the expense of drivers. About one-fifth of federal fuel tax revenue collected from highway users is siphoned off to expensive, underused, heavily subsidized mass transit systems. Traffic congestion now costs the economy more than $100 billion annually [PDF].

Congress is set to take up the multi-year surface transportation reauthorization bill this year (House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee Chairman John Mica has said by the end of January). Here’s to hoping they start fixing the problems they created, starting with: ending direct highway user subsidies of mass transit, permitting more tolling on federally funded highways, expanding private financing opportunities, and reining in the “flexing” of federal highway funding for non-highway purposes. But given their track record over the past 20 years, I’m not holding my breath.

Have a listen here.

Land-use and Transportation Policy Analyst Marc Scribner looks at House Republicans’ “drilling for roads” proposal and finds it wanting. Under this proposal, the federal government would allow more fossil fuel extraction from federally owned lands, as well as offshore. Some of the revenue would go into the federal Highway Trust Fund. This would politicize transportation even more than it already is, and would lead to adverse consequences.

The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) yesterday called on all states to ban “the nonemergency use of portable electronic devices (other than those designed to support the driving task) for all drivers.” This was in response to an August 2010 three-collision accident in Missouri involving two school buses traveling in a convoy, a pickup, and a truck-tractor. The accident killed two people and injured 38. It went like this:

Collision 1: The pickup driver, who was engaging in a text-message conversation, rear-ended the truck-tractor after failing to notice that it had slowed or stopped.

Collision 2: The first school bus, whose driver was distracted by a passenger bus pulled over on the side of the road, then struck the pickup, killing the pickup driver.

Collision 3: The second school bus, following the first bus too closely, was unable to stop in time to avoid the collision, killing a high school student seated in the rear of the first bus.

There were multiple factors involved: the pickup driver was distracted by his cell phone, the pickup driver was fatigued, the first school bus driver was distracted by the other passenger bus on the side of the road, and the second school bus driver failed to follow at a safe distance. However, it was the inattention and unsafe behavior of the school bus drivers that ultimately resulted in fatalities, and these collisions involved external, rather than internal factors. It is worth noting that at the time of the accident, Missouri had a law on the books that banned texting while driving for drivers under 21. The texting driver of the pickup was 19 years old.

After studying the causes of the accident, NTSB issued a number of recommendations, one of which is garnering a significant amount of media attention: calling on the states to institute bans that would include texting while driving, use of a hand-held mobile phone while driving, and use of a hands-free mobile phone while driving.

Distracted driving is certainly a problem, although it is not responsible for as many fatalities and injuries as drunk driving [PDF], speeding [PDF], or aggressive driving [Figure 7]. But calling on states to institute bans on cell phone use will do little to reduce distracted-driving deaths. First, these bans are extremely difficult to enforce, particularly if the driver is using a hands-free device. Second, most distracted driving accidents are not caused by cell phone use. In fact, drivers distracted by conversations with passengers is a factor in far more crashes than cell phone use [Figure 1].

Obviously NTSB isn’t going to call for bans on speaking in motor vehicles or isolating the driver from the rest of the cab with soundproofing technology. But there are plenty more potential internal distractions to worry about: watching your kids in the backseat through the rear-view mirror, reading a map, eating and drinking, smoking, grooming, adjusting the stereo, using a navigation device, adjusting climate controls, retrieving objects from seats or the floor, etc.

All of these internal distraction factors are primarily or partially responsible for some accidents. Rather than instituting bans on what drivers may or may not be doing inside their automobiles, licensing and testing authorities ought to be educating drivers on safe driving behaviors. Multitasking while driving naturally increases crash risk, but does anyone for a minute believe that prohibiting all multitasking (whatever that even means) would be enforceable or even beneficial?

But even if distraction bans are enforced, they may not even work. According to research by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety’s Highway Loss Data Institute, hardly a pro-distraction outfit, state bans on hand-held phone use while driving do not reduce crash risk [PDF] and state bans on texting while driving may actually increase crash risk [PDF]. “[C]learly drivers did respond to the bans somehow, and what they might have been doing was moving their phones down and out of sight when they texted, in recognition that what they were doing was illegal. This could exacerbate the risk of texting by taking drivers’ eyes further from the road and for a longer time.”

The move by NTSB is clearly political and lacks any rational basis. Given their limitations and not wanting to appear useless, as is often the case for nanny state bureaucrats, they must do “something” — even if that “something” will fail to achieve what its backers claim. If states are serious about improving highway safety, they ought to ignore NTSB’s recommended bans and work on improving their driver education programs. NTSB’s handwaving is nothing more than a distraction from a very serious issue.

As most of the candidates for the Republican presidential nomination try to outdo each other in blasting undocumented immigrants, they should take a break to look at new survey data from Vanderbilt University that show that anti-immigration rhetoric costs Republicans votes among Hispanics, the nation’s fastest growing ethnic minority — including third- and fourth-generation ones.

As Vanderbilt Political Science Professor Efren Perez explains, the data show that, “[W]hen politicians make very aggressive references to illegal immigrants, they are in essence turning off many Latinos, a growing segment of the American electorate…. There are many third and fourth generation Latinos who have very little connection to Latin America anymore. These folks are very integrated into American society. They are business owners and might be more responsive to Republican ideas and principles.”

But Republicans aren’t taking advantage of this fact. President Obama’s approval rating among Latinos is at an all-time low, and for good reason. He is on pace to deport more undocumented immigrants in one term — over 1.5 million — than President Bush did in two. Meanwhile, Republicans are offering more of the same, and it is costing them politically. According to a Latino Decisions poll, 72 percent of Latinos feel that Republicans either don’t care or are hostile toward the Hispanic community.

Florida Republican Senator Marco Rubio has urged his colleagues to try a different strategy. “The Republican Party should not be labeled as the anti-immigration party,” he said recently. “Republicans need to be the pro-legal immigration party.” It’d be a winning move. When George W. Bush made substantial overtures to Hispanics, including an attempted immigration reform, he won 44 percent of the Latino vote and thus reelection. Most notably, he won Florida, Nevada, New Mexico, and Colorado, all states won by Obama in 2008.

Moreover, state-level anti-immigration laws, such as those in Alabama and Arizona, actually undermine law enforcement. As the Associated Press reported this week, “[L]ocal police may focus on enforcing the state law rather than concentrating illegal immigrants who have committed serious crimes.” Maintaining the status quo immigration restrictions ultimately makes criminals harder to distinguish by diverting law enforcement to go after non-violent undocumented workers.

What Americans care about — particularly Latinos whose unemployment levels are higher than average — is a prosperous economy, and the radical enforcement measures endorsed by  many of the Republican candidates will not help. The evidence is already pouring in from around the country: Anti-immigration laws in Arizona, Georgia, and Alabama are wreaking havoc on those states’ economies. All three of those states have seen crops rot as labor shortages created by the new laws have taken effect.

The Guardian reports the case of one Alabama farmer who has lost $100,000 worth of tomatoes after the new law passed. As workers fled Georgia, Governor Nathan Deal turned to using ex-convicts on probation to pick crops. But slave labor won’t cut it. The AP found that the Latino workers were nearly six times as productive as the probationers.

It’s not just labor shortages either. The draconian penalties are scaring off businesses. The chief executive of the Retirement Systems of Alabama, David Bronner, has said that the law drove BBVA Compass out of state, and thus abandon plans to build an $80 million bank tower in Birmingham. Bonner has also said that Golden Dragon Precise Copper Tube Group “is having second thoughts” about building $100 million plant due the new law.

Draconian regulations on businesses and human movement are not conservative. E-Verify and other laws like it won’t revitalize the economy or solve the immigration problem because the problem isn’t caused by a lack of enforcement efforts (see Obama), but by massively restrictive limits on legal immigration. Any successful candidate needs to recognize that prosperous countries are built by free labor markets, not walls keeping people out.

The TSA has allegedly strip-searched an elderly woman for wearing a back brace. They suspected it was a money belt; turns out it was a back brace, just as the woman said. Two points to make here:

One, how degrading for the poor woman. Life is hard enough with a bad back.

Two, this strip-search was security-unrelated. Suppose the woman was wearing a money belt. Even the crispest of $100 bills can’t bring down a plane. Currency does not pose a safety threat of any kind.

The TSA is also explicitly disallowed from searching for criminal evidence unrelated to passenger safety. And there isn’t even anything criminal about carrying hidden cash. If anything, it’s probably safer to carry it that way.

Fortunately, the GOP is stepping in with a strong response that cuts to the heart of the problem: a new bill that would remove badges from official TSA uniforms. Agents might also lose the stripe on the side of their pants.