In 2006, Nashville began operating the Music City Star, a commuter train between Lebanon and Nashville. Transit officials brag that this is “the most cost-effective commuter train in the country” because they spent only $41 million to begin service.
To be cost-effective, however, you need more than just a train: that train needs to produce something. The Music City Star carries only about 250 commuters on round trips each day, riders who could easily have been accommodated in a few buses costing less than $3 million. In fact, it would have been less expensive to give each of those commuters a new Toyota Prius every year for the next 30 years than to operate the train.
Since 1970, American cities have spent about $100 billion building new rail transit lines, and virtually all of it has been wasted.…
Continue ReadingWord on the political street is that a 15 cent increase in the federal gasoline tax may well be included in the final draft of a bill being prepared by Senators Lindsey Graham (R-SC), Joe Lieberman (I-CT), and John Kerry (D-MA) to address global warming. Shell, British Petroleum, and ConocoPhillips – are said to support the tax because it’s a less costly intervention in the transportation fuel market (for them anyway) than alternative interventions that might otherwise find their way into this prospective legislation. Shell et al. may be right about that, but be that as it may, this would still constitute lousy public policy. A gasoline tax hike ought to be resisted.
Higher Taxes Will Not Alter Climate Under Anyone’s Math
The proposed gasoline tax increase will have no significant impact on greenhouse gas emissions. …
Continue ReadingEditor note: In Part I and Part II, Jon Boone set the stage for a final analysis of the Sierra Club’s current position in support of wind power. This conclusion to the series provides a discussion on the science, realities, and the unintended consequences that may be the result of current environmental movement thinking, which it typifies.
Birkenstock Tales
MBA types who wouldn’t know a bat from a bowtie now run the national Sierra Club. Their interest is in gaining membership and revenue. In a critique aptly entitled, Torquemada in Birkenstocks, Jeff St. Clair said this about Carl Pope: “[He] has never had much of a reputation as an environmental activist. He’s a wheeler-dealer, who keeps the Club’s policies in lockstep with its big funders and political patrons. Where Dave Brower scaled mountains, nearly all of Pope’s climbing has been up organizational ladders.”…
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