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3 responses to “The Maritime Highway”

1. 

   Jim Bacon

   March 22, 2006

   Responding to the Bacon’s Rebellion column, “Liberate Mass Transit,” urging reconsideration of public transit monopologies, Eddie Baird wrote as follows:

   Thanks for your blog on mass transit. I helped start HarborLink, the fast ferry that ran between Hampton and Norfolk. HarborLink started in 1999 and ended in 2002. We had to get permission from Hampton Roads Transit. That permission was freely granted. Hampton Roads Transit was very cooperative.

   However, imagine what would happen if the poor people in Park Place
   did not feel that they got sufficient bus service and contacted an entrepreneur… and the entrepreneur bought some buses, hired drivers and announced that he would serve Park Place. … And then, as the first bus drove up, out stepped a policeman and a bus driver union leader, who said: “Stop! Do not go to Park Place! Go to jail!”

   Hampton Roads Transit has a monopoly. The words “public transport” mean in this country transportation owned by the government. In Europe public transport means the transport of the public….

   Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher had the radical idea of the
   privatization and deregulation of the English economy. The British
   bus services outside of London were privatized and deregulated.
   Professor Jose Gomez-Ibanez of Harvard went to England to see how
   well the privatization of the British bus services worked in actual practice. He concluded that the privatization of the British bus services worked well. He later wrote a book about the privatization, “Essays in
   Transportation Economics.”

   The English are way ahead of America when it comes to
   transportation. The British economists “Standing Committee on Trunk Road Assessment” (SACTRA) came up with methods of doing cost-benefit studies on new highways. Old Dominion University and several other universities around Virginia have excellent economists. Why shouldn’t Virginia require a cost benefit study for proposed new roads, such as the Hampton Roads Third Crossing?

   The six proposed projects in the 2002 Referendum cost about $20 billion dollars spread out over 20 years. Hampton Roads has a $50 billion-dollar-per-year gross regional economy. The highway
   planners never asked the question of what would have happened it they pulled $1 billion dollars out of the $50 billion dollar economy
   every year in the form of additional taxes. My guess is that it would have set up a vicious downward spiral. The Referendum failed two to one.

   During the late 1960s the Army Corps of Engineers was accused of
   having a “beaver complex” because they wanted to build dams all over the place. Congress required the Corps to do cost benefit studies. Later Congress required the Corps to file environmental impact statements. Those two requirements brought the Corps dam-building program to a halt. That more or less began the Environmental Revolution that played out over the next 20 years.

   Virginia appears to be poised on the edge of the leading (bleeding?) edge of a transportation revolution. All the elements are right here.
   Your blog and your knowledge of Virginia business should well turn
   you into one of the leading transportation revolutionaries! Good luck! Eddie Baird

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2. 

   Virginia Centrist

   March 22, 2006

   I remember the discussion about a year ago.

   One question I still have:

   How would weather play into this? Would evening thunderstorms (we have maybe 30 or 40 a year during the Spring and Summer) slow these things down?

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3. 

   Ray Hyde

   March 27, 2006

   Eddie Baird makes some good points nad some bad ones. The British situation follows alng the lines suggested by Winston and Shirley in their book “Alternate Route”. They point out that under privitization you would have better tranist in areas where it pays, and none where it doesn’t. The result is better over all public benefit.

   It should be pointed out that the British experience also follows sixty years of nationalized development rights and strong central planning, at the end of which, they have problems very similar to our own, and much more expensive housing to boot.

   But the idea that the Hampton Roads project would send the area into a downward spiral is predicated on the idea that the areas economy would remain at $50 billion for the next twenty years. That gives the projects no credit at all for economic growth, not even for the $20 billion that the construction would add, which would be multiplied by three using standard economic development figures. He may be right, but I’m not convinced by the argument presented.

   I believe there is a place for high speed ferries, and also for very short distance airlines, think Charlottesville, Richmond, and Lexington Park, Md to National or Manassas.

   The problem with both of these ideas is that autos are so much more efficient that it is hard to make them pay except in niche markets, and the infrastructure costs are high. Boats are at their best carrying great loads at slow speeds, and airplanes the opposite.
   Autos and their truck counterparts can do both.

   And all three are slowed down by summer thunderstorms.

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