BIKE: Re: The "road lobby", plus new Kunstler!

[Roger Baker]

On Mar 8, 2005, at 9:30 AM, Mike Dahmus wrote:
>
> ...Your analogy sucks.
>
> In this case, you know damn well what my preference would be if I were 
> czar:
>
> ...]
> 999. Build them as toll roads
> 1000. Build them as free roads
>
> The problem is that for 85% of the voting population out there, #1 is 
> simply not on their radar screen. The hard-core SOS guys, yes. But 
> everybody else thinks we need these roads either way. Period.

[The road lobby tells us we need the roads of course but not most of 
the rest of the public. The toll roads would be turned down decisively 
if TxDOT and the road lobby ever dared to let us vote on toll roads 
versus "free" roads. You don't need a weatherman to know which way the 
wind blows.]

>
> So in the real world, we're left with choosing between #999 and #1000 
> on that list.

[Greatly speeding up the building of roads with borrowed money is what 
as the road lobby is trying to pressure CAMPO into doing. But thats a 
crazy choice, as we know if we read page 53 of CAMPO's 2030 plan, 
because CAMPO's own travel models result in the congestion level nearly 
tripling from the current 10% to 29%, assuming we implement every bit 
of the current $22 billion plan, toll roads and all. Try to imagine 
surviving bike riding in Austin with triple the current congestion, and 
angry traffic all day long! The roads get built today whereas the bike 
stuff only gets built someday in theory, exactly the pattern you would 
expect with the road lobby in control.]

> The key difference is that in #1000, we can guarantee that 
> suburbanites will pay nearly nothing to drive on these roads, and that 
> urbanites will pay a big chunk of the bill via property and sales 
> taxes.

[Those who haven't read the 2030 plan might be tempted to ignore the 
hidden cost of toll roads,as they were sold to the public last summer. 
The necessity of widening the arterials associated with the low density 
sprawl served by the toll roads is revealed on page 183 of the plan 
which says that it will cost us (mainly Austin) over $2.5 billion to 
widen the arterials enough to handle the implied local traffic.

I don't think anyone bothered to inform the City Council before they 
voted for the toll roads last summer that they are expected to issue 
$400 million of road bonds next year, as page G-7 of the 2030 plan 
states, in large part to widen the roads enough to handle the 
spill-over traffic associated with the sprawl-conducive/addictive land 
uses implied by the planned toll road network.

That is why McCracken and the city council unanimously voted to get an 
outside expert to to closely examine the underlying soundness of 
CAMPO's toll road plan. CAMPO turned down such a dose of second opinion 
expert examination two to one. This was largely due to the best and 
most politically sensitive liberals and conservatives coming up with 
only 8 votes to 16 against on CAMPO due to suburban developer money and 
the Rick Perry-sanctioned road lobby.

Simply explained, the road lobby and RECA and the developer money does 
not control the city council so well as CAMPO, and they are doing the 
right thing, not the wrong thing in supporting McCracken's closer look 
at the full implications of the toll roads.]

> With #999, we guarantee that suburbanites will pay a big chunk of 
> change to drive on these roads, and that urbanites might be left 
> holding part of the bag if the finances don't hold up, leaving us 
> still slightly better off than in #1000.
>

[Before we decide to apply big new travel taxes to commuters as 
self-evident example of good policy, lets understand that those whom we 
might tend to regard as affluent suburban commuters are actually honest 
hard working low income workers to the east and near-in drivers on US 
183 to the east side depend on these roads to provide cheap labor, 
which soon thereafter automatically becomes more expensive in Austin.

Plus some apparently really believe we can let the bonds default and 
piss off Wall Street, and then life goes on as usual. The reality is 
that we ruin the credit rating of this area if there is no toll road 
bailout by TxDOT or the city or county or somebody. Who ultimately pays 
for this bailout? To me the current situation is to me not unlike the 
S&L land developer scammery around Austin in the mid-1980s. (I can tell 
you all about that since it was going on when I started to get 
interested in Texas road politics.)

Sixty million of federal debt is involved on US 183A alone, and it got 
special white White House level approval. I would imagine this alone 
puts it in the bullet-proof region of public policy, but it doesn't 
shield against ultimate bond default. Recall that the bonds themselves 
say that they would only be sound invests assuming that the price of 
gas remains below $3 per gallon for the next 30 years. Hello?]

> You guys can argue all you want that the Route #1000 train bearing 
> down on you shouldn't be there, and that you're just being a cowardly 
> appeaser if you jump off the tracks rather than hold your ground. Good 
> luck with that.

[Spare me. This is almost purely an emotional argument lacking, so far 
as I can tell, any pretense of a factual basis.

We should not as a sensible public policy let ourselves be pressured by 
the road lobby into voting in April to approve making 50% of the total 
roads in this area become toll roads -- that seems pretty self-evident 
to me.  But not Mike, apparently.

Is this the time to speed up the toll road approval process or slow it 
down? I'll say it once again; speeding up the building of roads with 
borrowed money flies directly in the face of  warnings echoing through 
the business press, like the following:

http://www.businessday.co.za/articles/topstories.aspx?ID=BD4A25840

Plus I'll append a new Kunstler rant below. -- Roger]


>
> - MD


                ***************************

Willful blindness
<http://www.kunstler.com/mags_diary13.html>
By James Howard Kunstler

Last Thursday the price of oil inched above $55 dollar a barrel, which
is at least $15 barrel more than it was a year ago. On Friday, the oil
story was buried on page six of the New York Times business section.
Apparently the price of of oil is not considered significant news,
even when it goes up five dollars a barrel in the span of ten days.

On Friday evening, CNN reported that the Dow shot up over one hundred
points because of favorable employment numbers issued by the
government and also because there were no signs of inflation in
government-reported price data.

Stock markets are generally understood to behave on the basis of a
consensus among traders about future prospects. Apparently stock
traders in America think there is no connection between the price of
oil shooting up ten percent in little more than a week, and the price
of things that depends on oil for their manufacture or distribution --
which is to say, virtually everything.

Our inability to process information is reaching an impressive level.

I, for one, would be concerned about the price of oil and inflation --
that is the loss of purchasing power in the dollar. The recent price
jump in oil is happening in March, you see, a couple of months shy of
the so-called spring driving season. Typically, in recent years, oil
prices have seen their biggest bumps around Memorial Day, when
Americans resume long-distance motoring in earnest after staying close
to home all winter. If oil stays in the low to mid $50 range for a
while, it would not be unreasonable to expect $60 a barrel oil in May.
And that is assuming that no untoward geopolitical shock will occur,
say the assassination of a Saudi prince, or an attack on an oil
installation.

On Sunday, the New York Times ran a roundtable discussion (in the Book
Review) between three prominent young "liberal" intellectuals (Katrina
vanden Heuvel, Michael Tomasky, and Peter Beinhart) about what the
Democratic Left can do to reclaim its place as a credible opposition.
None of these hotshots mentioned the fact that the nation faces a
defining crisis over our energy supplies. I don't think the word "oil"
was even mentioned by this clueless trio. They have no idea what kind
of convulsion we are heading into.

Somebody ought to bring this to the Democrat's attention. America has
a problem bigger than social security, or the price of prescription
drugs, or gay marriage. America is heading into a situation in which
it will no longer have an economy. The Republicans at least have an
excuse for their willful blindness -- they've already taken the
position that the life of extreme car-dependency and everything it
implies is not negotiable. They are committed to defending that
position, no matter how foolish it may be.

The Republicans will certainly be disgraced by the coming vicissitudes
that they allowed the nation to sleepwalk into. But the Democrats may
have less credibility in the future because they were not obligated to
defend a foolish status quo, and they did anyway.

I wonder if Howard Dean ever thinks about these things.