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Coast-to-Coast High-Speed Rail

By | | Transportation
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According to Newsweek, some nutty group called AmeriStarRail is proposing to run high-speed trains from New York to Los Angles, which it says can be done at a profit. Only they wouldn’t be high-speed trains and they almost certainly wouldn’t earn a profit.

The AmeriStarRail proposal is to run a train from New York to Los Angeles on existing tracks. The train would take 72 hours for an average speed of 45 miles per hour, which is hardly a high speed. The train would replace, not supplement, existing trains on the proposed route: the New York-Pittsburgh Pennsylvanian, the Pittsburgh-Chicago portion of the Floridian, and the Chicago-Los Angeles Southwest Chief. Continue reading →

Score: Death Train, 182; People, 0

By | | Transportation
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Brightline has now killed 182 pedestrians and motorists along its Florida route. The rail line, which lost half a billion dollars in 2024, has failed to install better crossing gates and fencing that would have prevented most if not all of these deaths even though the first deaths happened when the train was in the test stages in 2017.

Photo by BBT609.

Brightline is the deadliest train in America, killing almost 25 people per million train-miles of travel. Second is San Diego’s Coaster commuter train, at 16.6 deaths per million train-miles; followed by the Altamont Commuter Express and CalTrain, both of which were between 10 and 11 deaths per million. All others were less than ten. However, the Los Angeles Metrolink, Florida TriRail, Orlando SunRail, Seattle Sounder, and Texas’ Trinity Railway Express shouldn’t be proud of their deadly records, as all of them killed more people per million train-miles than Amtrak, which itself kills almost 150 people per year. Continue reading →

Park Service Burns Down Grand Canyon Lodge

By | | Wildfire
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The National Park Service is under fire for treating a wildfire on the North Rim of the Grand Canyon by “managing it as a controlled burn.” The fire, of course, escaped “management” and burned down the 87-year-old Grand Canyon Lodge along with scores of cabins near the lodge.

Although an Interior Department spokesperson responded by saying that “the allegation that this fire was managed as a controlled burn is not at all accurate,” I’m more inclined to believe the earlier reports from Arizona than a claim by someone in Washington DC. I suspect the official meant that the fire was not deliberately started as a prescribed fire, but the allegation is that, when the fire was started by lightning, Park Service managers decided to “let it burn” to help restore the natural fire ecosystem and didn’t start aggressively fighting the fire until it was too late to save the lodge. Continue reading →

Transit Carried 80.6% of 2019 Riders in May

By | | Transportation, Useful Data
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America’s public transit systems carried 80.6 percent as many riders in May of 2025 as the same month before the pandemic, according to data released last week by the Federal Transit Administration. That’s about the same percentage as in April; though a stickler (like me) would point it that it was three ticks lower as May was 80.58 percent while April was 80.61 percent.

May highway data will be presented here soon.

Transit’s overall ridership is boosted by New York, where nearly half of all transit ridership takes place and where May ridership was 86.4 percent of May 2019. I probably don’t need to do a roll call of urban areas where transit was above average, but transit officials in Chicago (68%), Atlanta (59%), Phoenix (57%), Denver (59%), St. Louis (57%), and Pittsburgh (57%) must be particularly nervous. Memphis cut the budget of its transit agency, forcing the agency to reduce service to 66 percent of 2019 levels, with the result that ridership was only 37 percent of that prior to the pandemic. Other cities and regions are contemplating similar cuts. Continue reading →

Mamdani Doesn’t Care about CO2 Emissions

By | | Follow up
38 Comments

In answer to critics of his proposal for free bus transit, New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani posted the video below pointing out that the Staten Island Ferry is free. “Who said public transit can’t be free?” he asks.

Yet it isn’t really free for three reasons. First, taxpayers spent $154 million operating it in 2023 (plus $19 million on capital replacement costs to keep it running), which worked out to well over $10 per trip. In 2019, before the pandemic, ridership was higher but it cost more than $7 per trips. Continue reading →

May Amtrak 8.8%, Air Travel 6.2%, Over 2019

By | | Transportation, Useful Data
2 Comments

Amtrak carried 8.8 percent more passenger-miles in May 2025 than in the same month of 2019, according to the company’s monthly performance report. Meanwhile, the Transportation Security Administration recorded 6.2 percent more air travelers.

Transit and highway data will be updated here as soon as they are available.

These numbers are consistent with previous months in 2025: Amtrak ridership has been growing by about 8 to 9 percent vs. 2019 while air travel has been about 6 percent ahead of 2019. Amtrak is not going to catch up to air travel anytime soon: May air travelers outnumbered Amtrak passengers by about 24 to one and air passenger-miles outnumbered Amtrak passenger-miles by close to 250 to one. Continue reading →

Another Stupid Monorail (But Not Really)

By | | Transportation
35 Comments

“Is Germany’s monorail the public transport of the future?” asks this video from German news source DW News. In accordance with Betteridge’s Law, the answer is a resounding “No!”

The selling point of this not-really-a-monorail (see 4:18 of above video) is that it will work on existing tracks and so doesn’t need new infrastructure built for it. The first problem is that, so far, it can’t cross switches. The second problem is that it is slow compared with almost any other form of motorized travel. Continue reading →

Another Housing Reform That Won’t Work

By | | Housing
12 Comments

Earlier this week, California Governor Gavin Newsom signed legislation aimed at making it easier to build more housing. Unfortunately, the law left out the one key reform needed to make housing more affordable.

Governor Newsom celebrates signing another housing reform bill that won’t make housing more affordable.

California housing is unaffordable because in the 1970s the fastest-growing counties in the state drew urban-growth boundaries outside of which new homes can’t be built. At around the same time, the state legislature passed the California Environmental Quality Act, which required the completion of a draft and final environmental impact report for all major government actions, which turned out to include expanding the urban-growth boundaries. Since an EIR costs about $20 million, no county has expanded their growth boundaries since then. Continue reading →

Failing to Learn the Lessons of History

By | | News commentary
14 Comments

Plenty of people have commented on New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani’s proposal to lower food prices by creating city-owned grocery stores, but there is still more to be said about this plan. Mamdani either thinks or believes that voters think that store owners are making huge profit through price gouging, and that recent increases in prices have nothing to do with inflation, tariffs, or other government actions.

@zohran_k_mamdani ? original sound – Zohran Mamdani

In fact, the grocery stores are one of the least profitable industries in the U.S.,” with profit margins of around 2 percent. They were only 1.0 percent in 2019, rose to 3.0 percent in 2020, but have since declined to 1.6 percent. Eliminating profits isn’t going to save consumers much money. Continue reading →