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This Just In: Remote Work Changed Travel

By | | Transportation
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MIT researchers are astounded to discover that the increase in telecommuting has changed how people travel. Their actual research paper is paywalled, but judging from the news release they issued, they got the numbers wrong.

Americans are 25 times more likely to commute by auto than by transit, but an image search for “commute to work” turns up mostly photos of transit riders. Photo by Oren Levine.

“A 1 percent decrease in onsite workers leads to a roughly 1 percent reduction in [automobile] vehicle miles driven, but a 2.3 percent reduction in mass transit ridership,” said one o the paper’s co-authors. Let’s check that. Continue reading →

February Driving Up 2.3 Percent from 2019

By | | Transportation, Useful Data
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After accounting for Leap Day, Americans drove almost 2.3 percent more miles per day in February 2024 than in the same month of 2019, according to data released by the Federal Highway Administration on Friday. Rural driving was 9.7 percent more than before the pandemic while urban driving was 0.8 percent less. At least some of these differences are due to people moving from urban to rural areas.

The February 2024 line for driving is obscured by the line for Amtrak, but both are approximately 102 percent.

While Amtrak, air travel, and driving have all fully recovered from the pandemic, transit has not. When I posted February 2024 transit data last week, someone commented that “Some areas have nearly recovered” while “areas like the Bay Area drag the data down.” It’s true that a handful of areas have recovered, in many cases because they are giving away transit rides for free. But most have not, unless you define 80 percent as “nearly recovered.” As of last week’s February data, out of the nation’s 50 largest urban areas, only 2 have fully recovered and only three more saw 90 percent of pre-pandemic ridership. Continue reading →

Is It Safe to Ride Transit?

By | | Transportation, Useful Data
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Less than half of New York City residents feel safe riding the subway today, down from 82 percent before the pandemic. Subway crime is so bad that New York’s governor called out the national guard to patrol subway stations. Crime is up on San Francisco BART trains despite the agency putting more police on trains. A few days ago, a mentally ill person stabbed someone to death on a Portland light-rail train.

Will putting more police in subway stations solve the crime problem? Probably not if BART’s experience is any guide. Photo by Elvert Barnes.

Some people say transit crime is dropping so it’s safe to ride transit. Others say it is getting worse. Who’s right? We can get some answers from the Federal Transit Administration’s Major Safety Events Database, which was recently updated with data through the end of 2023. Continue reading →

Transit Daily Riders Down 24.2% from 2019

By | | Transportation, Useful Data
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Transit carried 78.5 percent as many riders in February 2024 as the same month of 2019. However, 2024 being a leap year February had one more day than in 2019. Adjusting for the extra day, transit’s daily ridership was only 75.8 percent of 2019, according to data released by the Federal Transit Administration yesterday. This means it continues to lag about 25 percent against all other major modes.

Meanwhile, Amtrak carried 3.2 percent more daily riders in 2024 than February of 2019, according to its monthly performance report. Transportation Security Administration passenger counts say that daily air travel was up by 7.2 percent above 2019. Highway data will be posted here soon, but will also be around 100 percent of 2019 driving.. Continue reading →

Cordelia Is Running Ramsey County

By | | Transportation
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“When I go shopping,” said Cordelia Chase, the vapid “mean girl” in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, “I have to have the most expensive thing, not because it’s expensive, but because it costs more.” That seems to be the rule guiding Ramsey County, home of St. Paul, Minnesota.

A streetcar in Kansas City heroically manages to block five lanes of traffic all at once. Photo by Jason Doss.

The county is considering two major alternatives for a transit line from St. Paul Union Depot (SPUD) to the Mall of America (MOA) via Minneapolis-St. Paul Airport (MSP): a modern streetcar, which can move less than 3,000 people per hour at about 16 miles per hour and would cost $2.1 billion; and a bus-rapid transit line that could move 10,000 to 20,000 people per hour supposedly at 18 miles per hour (but I bet it could run much faster) and is estimated to cost $121 million to build and half as much to operate as the streetcar line. Continue reading →

Montanans Against Irresponsible Density

By | | Housing
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In what could be considered an April Fool’s joke, the Montana state legislature passed several laws mandating densification of cities. Apparently, the legislature believed the nation’s fourth-largest state, with the third-lowest population density, was running out of land and could only accommodate growth by building high-density apartment buildings in all major cities.

In a failed effort to make housing more affordable, Bozeman has subsidized the construction of four-story apartment buildings such as this one. Similar buildings would be mandated in other Montana cities if the laws challenged by this lawsuit go into effect.

These laws were passed in response to a “housing crisis” that resulted when Bozeman (Gallatin County), Kalispell (Flathead County), and Missoula (Missoula County) passed the functional equivalent of urban-growth boundaries, making housing in those counties unaffordable (value-to-income ratios greater than 5 in 2022). Billings (Yellowstone County), Great Falls (Cascade County), and Helena (Lewis & Clark County) have not, and housing in those counties remains affordable (value-to-income ratios below 5 and mostly below 4). Continue reading →

Europe More “Auto-Dependent” Than U.S.

By | | Transportation, Useful Data
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Before the pandemic, Europeans relied on automobiles for 70 percent of their travel, compared with 77 percent for U.S. residents. But after the pandemic, in 2021, the European share of passenger travel that used automobiles climbed to 80 percent, while the U.S. share increased only to 78 percent (and dropped to 74 percent in 2022), according to a recently released report from the European Union. That means that Europe is more auto-dependent than the U.S.

Click image to download a 12.4-MB PDF of this report.

Although the report is labeled “2023,” it actually was released in late January 2024 and includes data through 2021. The title of the report is “key figures,” which is literally true: it consists almost solely of figures as in charts, with little or no actual data. However, the charts are clear and can be read to the nearest percent or so. Meanwhile, National Transportation Statistics table 1-40 shows the share of passenger travel in the United States that relies on autos, airplanes, rail, and other modes. Continue reading →

2022 Highway Subsidies Were 1¢/Passenger-Mile

By | | Transportation
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U.S. highways, roads, and streets received a little over $65 billion worth of subsidies in 2022, according to data recently released by the Federal Highway Administration. Apportioning these subsidies to passengers and freight, they work out to about 1.0¢ per passenger-mile and 0.7¢ per ton-mile. For comparison, subsidies to transit averaged $2.39 per passenger-mile while subsidies to Amtrak averaged about 40¢ per passenger-mile.

The Key Bridge in Baltimore collapsed yesterday due to being struck by a ship. If this had happened before 2021, it is likely that some lobby groups would have blamed the collapse on poor maintenance. Such claims led Congress to give the Federal Highway Administration an additional $90 billion, to be spent over six years, in the 2021 infrastructure law.

I calculated the highway subsidy numbers from the Federal Highway Administration’s latest edition of Highway Statistics. The agency once published this report as a book but now issues it as a series of spreadsheets. Earlier this month, I reported on spreadsheets showing the volume of traffic carried on the highways, but the financial spreadsheets were not yet available. Now they are. Continue reading →

A New View of Congestion

By | | Transportation
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The GPS company TomTom recently published its rankings of urban areas by the amount of congestion people face. Like many other congestion studies, the rankings estimate the amount of time the average motorist wastes during rush hour. But that may not be the best measure of mobility.

Is Vancouver the most congested urban area in the U.S. or Canada?

TomTom also listed the average speed of traffic in each city center and metro area, both during rush hours and over the course of a day (calculated using the number of minutes required to go six miles). The time wasted was calculated by measuring how much slower traffic was during rush hour compared with the rest of the day. Urban areas could reduce the hours of delay by increasing traffic speeds during rush hour. But they could also reduce the calculated hours of delay by reducing traffic speeds during non-rush-hour periods. Continue reading →

The Best State to Live in Is . . .

By | | Regional planning
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Louisiana is the worst state to live in, according to self-storage company Pink Storage. The company has rated the 50 states using sixteen different criteria including income, congestion, housing, education, crime, and life expectancy. California is the fifth-worst, thanks to its low housing affordability, followed by South Carolina, Arizona, Tennessee, and the afore-mentioned Louisiana.

Any state that has scenery such as this doesn’t look too unlivable to me. Photo by glynn424.

Louisiana, South Carolina, and Tennessee score poorly on income while Arizona is mediocre to poor in several categories including high school graduation rates, number of police per capita (though its crime rates aren’t particularly high), and utility bills (to pay for air conditioning no doubt). Other states at the low end of the scale include Texas, Nevada, Oregon, Hawaii, and Alabama. Continue reading →