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Amtrak Ridership Up in September

By | | Transportation
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Amtrak carried 4.8 percent more riders and 3.5 percent more passenger-miles in September 2024 than in the same month of 2019, according to the September monthly performance report that it posted yesterday. For Amtrak’s fiscal year, which ended September 30, it carried 0.8 percent more riders and 0.9 percent more passenger-miles than in F.Y. 2019.

Amtrak earned $2.5 billion in ticket revenues and food & beverage sales in F.Y. 2024. That works out to about 38.4¢ per passenger-mile. For comparison, commercial airline fares averaged 20.1¢ per passenger-mile in 2023. Continue reading →

SF Muni Tries Washington Monument Strategy

By | | Transportation
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Like many transit agencies, San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency (Muni) is facing a big budget deficit, and its response is to employ the Washington Monument Strategy. For those who don’t know, back in 1969 President Nixon tried to reduce the National Park Service’s budget and the Park Service responded by shutting down the Washington Monument. Tourists who wanted to ride the elevator to the top of the monument were directed to the senate and house office buildings and told to ask their elected representatives to restore the agency’s budget. Congress restored the funding, but Nixon fired the Park Service director who thought up the strategy a few years later.

Photo by Pi.1415926535.

We may need to rename this the Cable Car Strategy, as Muni is proposing to reduce its deficit by suspending service on the cable car routes as well as some streetcar routes that are mainly used by tourists. While it’s true that cable car ridership has been slow to recover from the pandemic — as of September, it was less than 69 percent of 2019 numbers — it’s also true that cable cars are the symbol of the city and an important tourist attraction. Considering all the bad publicity San Francisco has received lately, its commercial interests don’t want to do anything to depress tourism still further. Continue reading →

City Auditor: Vision Zero Doesn’t Work

By | | Transportation
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Portland adopted a Vision Zero plan in 2016. At first, it seemed to be working; at least, traffic fatalities declined from 42 in 2016 to 35 in 2018. The only problem is that few of the steps of the plan had been implemented by 2018, so that decline was merely a coincidence.

Click image to download a 2.1-MB PDF of this report.

The plan called for reduction of speed limits, stricter enforcement of speed laws, reconfiguration of dangerous intersections, and improved street lighting. Not everything was completed, but some of it was and the city saw a dramatic change in fatality rates — upwards. By 2022, the city had 62 fatalities; so far in 2024 it has had 69, so by the end of the year it is likely to be more than double 2018. Continue reading →

Memo to Musk & Ramaswamy: Incentives Count!

By | | News commentary
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As co-leaders of a “Department of Government Efficiency,” Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy are tasked by President-elect Trump with finding ways to “dismantle Government Bureaucracy, slash excess regulations, cut wasteful expenditures, and restructure Federal Agencies.” Judging from recent tweets from Musk and others, this effort will be all about finding and cutting government waste.

We’ve been down this road before and it leads to a dead end. Back in 1993, less than two weeks after Bill Clinton took office, Penguin books released Reinventing Government, a book that promised to “transform the public sector.” Clinton was so enamored with the ideas in the book that he quickly created a National Partnership for Reinventing Government whose goal was to make a government that “that works better and costs less.” Clinton placed his vice-president, Al Gore, in charge of the “partnership.” Continue reading →

September Driving 2.25% More Than in 2019

By | | Transportation
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Americans drove 2.2 percent more miles in September 2024 than they did in the same month of 2019, according to data released by the Federal Highway Administration yesterday. September driving in rural areas was 7.9 percent greater but driving in urban areas was 0.2 percent less in 2024 than in 2019.

Amtrak has yet to release its September results, possibly because September is the last month of its fiscal year and it wants to get the year-end results right. When it does, I’ll post an update here.

Meanwhile, I discovered that I accidentally left the greenhouse gas emissions from some electric transit lines off of the enhanced spreadsheet I prepared of the 2023 National Transit Database. In going through the data, I also discovered some duplicate entries, which I deleted. If you downloaded my spreadsheet, which summarizes the 25-spreadsheet database into one worksheet, please download the corrected version now.

September Transit Ridership 76.3% of 2019

By | | Transportation, Useful Data
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Transit agencies carried 76.3 percent as many riders in September of 2024 as they did in the same month in 2019, according to data released yesterday by the Federal Transit Administration. This is transit’s best performance, when measured as a share of pre-pandemic numbers, since the pandemic began.

Highway and Amtrak results for September will be posted here when it becomes available.

Highway travel had fully recovered from the pandemic by around July 2021. Air travel, which the Transportation Security Administration says carried 108.7 percent as many travelers as in September 2019, had recovered by January 2023 and Amtrak by October 2023. In October 2023, transit ridership still hadn’t reached 75 percent of pre-pandemic numbers, but that is probably the best it was going to do. Some of the growth in transit since then is due to some people returning to downtown offices, but much of that growth is probably more attributable to regular growth, not to recovery from the pandemic. Continue reading →

NM’s Rail Runner Is “Financially Healthy”?

By | | Transportation
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I’ve heard there is an election somewhere today, but it doesn’t sound all that important. What is important is that the state of New Mexico recently released a report on the “Cost Effectiveness and Operations of the New Mexico Rail Runner Express.” The most positive finding in the report is that, since hardly anyone was riding the train before the pandemic, the loss of ridership during the pandemic had little impact on the rail line’s finances. Taxpayers provided nearly all of the line’s financial support before the pandemic, and they continue to do so today. The report calls this “financially healthy,” and I suppose it is in the sense that bank robbers are financially healthy until they get caught.

Click image to download an 888-KB pdf of this report.

Such financial health will be small comfort to the state taxpayers who spent some $400 million getting the train running and are on the hook for spending well over $40 million a year operating it. The line carried 1.35 million riders in 2009, the first year it went all the way from Albuquerque to Santa Fe, and ridership declined in almost every year since then. By 2019 it was down 45 percent to 744,000. Operating expenses more than doubled during that time but fare revenues declined until they covered just 7 percent of operating costs. Continue reading →

The Dangers of Bus Rapid Transit

By | | Transportation
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A week ago, a pedestrian stepped onto Eugene’s 11th Avenue, a one-way street, and got clobbered by a bus going the wrong way. The accident broke the pedestrian’s collar bone, pelvis, and six ribs.

Click image for a larger view.

It turns out that 11th, which had been a one-way street for decades, was recently turned into a two-way street with the contra flow being a dedicated bus lane, which has one bus every 10 to 15 minutes. Not only is this a complete waste of space — the cars that previously used that lane moved far more people per hour than a six-times-per-hour bus could possibly carry — it completely subverts all of the benefits of one-way streets. Continue reading →

The Value of Single-Family Neighborhoods

By | | Housing
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The YIMBY movement argues that people who oppose densification of their single-family neighborhoods are racist. But race has nothing to do with it. A new paper by Wharton economist Joseph Gyourko and Brown University economist Sean McCulloch finds that a 1/2-unit per acre increase in density imposes a loss of $9,500 per home in single-family neighborhoods. Moreover, the loss is significantly larger if the increase density is in the form of multifamily housing or rental housing.

What Gyourko and McCulloch really found is that people are willing to pay more to live in low-density neighborhoods, and their willingness to pay for a home drops when the neighborhood is densified. This means densification is effectively a taking of private property, which the Fifth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution suggests should require compensation. Continue reading →

August Driving Nearly 103% of Pre-Pandemic Miles

By | | Transportation, Useful Data
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Americans drove 102.7 percent as many miles in August of 2024 as in the same month of 2019, according to data released yesterday by the Federal Highway Administration. Moreover, this is the first month I can remember since the pandemic began that driving exceeded pre-pandemic numbers on all types of roads, including urban and rural interstates, other arterials, and other roads.

For a discussion of Amtrak and airline data, see this post. For a discussion of transit data, see this post.

August 2024 driving was greater than 2019 driving in 28 states, while it was less in 22 states plus DC. DC driving was slightly less than 80 percent of 2019 miles, and miles of driving were also particularly low in Delaware (82%), Hawaii (84%), West Virginia (86%), and Massachusetts (88%). Continue reading →