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SEPTA Tries the Washington Monument Strategy

By | | Transportation
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Compared with 2019, the Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority (SEPTA) is carrying 30 percent fewer riders and collecting 13 percent less revenue per rider. Yet it is spending 10 percent more on operations despite having cut service by 10 percent. It previously filled this funding gap with federal COVID relief funds, but now those have run out. In order to continue operating as if there had been no ridership decline, SEPTA has demanded that the state legislature supplement its existing funding — $1.5 billion per year — with an additional $300 million in F.Y. 2026.

SEPTA Silverliner train. Photo by Adam E. Moreira.

The legislature failed to comply, so SEPTA has petulantly adopted a budget that makes what it calls “devastating service cuts & fare increases.” “This budget will effectively dismantle SEPTA — leaving the City and region without the frequent, reliable transit service that has been an engine of economic growth, mobility, and opportunity,” says an agency press release. “Once this dismantlement begins, it will be almost impossible to reverse, and the economic and social impacts will be immediate and long-lasting for all Pennsylvanians — whether they ride SEPTA or not.” Continue reading →

Do Driverless Cars Hallucinate Electric Sheep?

By | | Transportation
36 Comments

Waymo is operating driverless taxis in Los Angeles, Phoenix, and San Francisco, partnering with Uber in Atlanta and Austin, and expanding into Miami and Washington DC soon. Volkswagen is making a driverless ID Buzz available to ride-hailing and taxi companies anywhere. Tesla has begun offering robotaxis in Austin, with some opening glitches. Amazon is set to build 10,000 driverless taxis a year. A company called Aurora is testing driverless trucks between Dallas and Houston.

Volkswagen’s ID Buzz configured for driverless taxi service.

People have responded to the growth of driverless vehicle programs with predictable horror. Some worry that driverless cars will increase congestion and take people’s jobs. Others fear that they will be dangerous on the highway, especially if they begin “hallucinating.” Perhaps due to fears like these, ICE protesters set five Waymo cars on fire in Los Angeles. Continue reading →

Selling the Public Lands

By | | Public lands
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The federal government owns about 640 million acres of land — some 28 percent of the land area of the United States — but according to some press reports, members of the U.S. Senate are proposing to sell 250 million of those acres. The press reports are wrong, but even if they weren’t, I can’t help but feel schadenfreude at environment groups that are going ballistic at the proposal.

Grizzly getting a good look at some of the nation’s federal lands. (As it happens, since I took this photo a week ago, this land has been burned in a wildfire. Although the Forest Service has concluded the fire was human-caused, we didn’t do it unless the zooming of a one-year-old dog was enough to ignite the grass.)

Federal land aficionados all agree that the lands are enormously valuable. Yet Congress has given away most of the resources produced by those lands, including minerals, forage for domestic livestock, recreation, and water, to various special interest groups for nothing or well below their true value. As result, federal taxpayers lose roughly $10 billion per year managing the federal lands. Continue reading →

Amtrak Will Not Be Profitable by 2028

By | | Transportation
35 Comments

“With steady, sustained support from Congress and the administration, Amtrak’s passenger train service will become operationally profitable by FY 28,” says Amtrak in its latest request for subsidies from U.S. taxpayers. This is, at best, deceptive and at worst an outright lie.

A northbound Amtrak train on the California coastline. Photo by Circe Denyer.

Even as Amtrak promises to be profitable in three years, it admits that it is losing more money now than in 2019 despite carrying record numbers of passengers. It blames this on costs rising faster than revenues, reductions in state support for many trains, and increased costs “treated as operating costs” even though they are supposedly really capital investments. Unless Congress dramatically cuts Amtrak’s capital funding, it isn’t clear how any of these trends will be reversed in the next three years. Continue reading →

Texas Cancels Amtrak Funding

By | | Transportation
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The Texas legislature has declined to continue funding a train between Fort Worth and Oklahoma City. Amtrak calls the train a “vital transportation option,” but in fact few people ride it and it is a costly burden to Oklahoma and Texas taxpayers.

The Heartland Flyer stops in Norman, Oklahoma.

The train, Amtrak says, served “over 80,000 customers in FY24 and reach[ed] $2.2 million in ticket revenue,” which is supposed to somehow sound impressive. Amtrak’s press release fails to mention that the train cost $9.6 million to operate, not counting depreciation, which means it cost taxpayers at least $92 per rider, and probably much more. In short, taxpayers have to pay more than three quarters of the cost, much more than the average Amtrak train, for which taxpayers cover “only” about 59 percent of the cost (which is still too much). Continue reading →

Affordable Housing for $1.3 Million Per Unit

By | | Housing
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The Washington Post has discovered that there are “inefficiencies” in the nation’s affordable housing programs, including its largest one, low-income housing tax credits. Due to these inefficiencies, one non-profit developer in DC is spending up to $1.3 million per housing unit. Another developer spent $800,000 per unit, while right next door the very same developer built market-rate housing for just $350,000 per unit.

Ontario Place, a so-called affordable housing project that is costing $1.2 million per unit.

Ontario Place, the project pictured above, “will include a rooftop aquaponics farm to produce fresh fruits and vegetables for its tenants,” which contributed to the $1.2 million per unit cost. Another expensive project found by Post writers, which cost “only” $815,000 per unit, “includes a fitness room to encourage physical activity, a library, a large café with an outdoor terrace, a large multi-purpose community room with a separate outdoor terrace, an indoor bike room, on-site laundry, lounges and balconies on every floor.” Continue reading →

April Transit Ridership 80.6% of April 2019

By | | Transportation, Useful Data
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America’s transit systems provided 96.3 percent as much service in April 2025 as they did in the same month of 2019, yet carried only 80.6 percent as many riders, according to data released late last week by the Federal Transit Administration. This is slightly less than the percentage of 2019 riders they carried in March.

Transit ridership as a share of pre-pandemic riders dipped slightly in April.

Rather than scale back service to meet reduced ridership demand, transit agencies complain that they are suffering “deficits” that need to be made up for by taxpayers. While I would define “deficits” as “fares minus costs,” transit agencies define them as “fares plus existing tax revenues minus costs.” Continue reading →

Amtrak & Flying Up, Driving Down in April

By | | Transportation, Useful Data
22 Comments

Amtrak carried 9.0 percent more passenger-miles in April 2025 than in the same month before the pandemic, according to the state-owned company’s monthly performance report. The airlines did almost as well, carrying 5.8 percent more riders in April than in 2019. However, Americans drove only 98.5 percent as many vehicle miles in April as in 2019.

April transit data are not yet available and will be posted here as soon as possible after the FTA releases them.

It’s hard to guess why driving dropped, at least as a percentage of 2019. The economy was slowing, rail freight was declining (though still more than 2019), but perhaps truck freight had fallen. Continue reading →

Portland Has the “Worst Housing Crisis Outlook”

By | | Housing
69 Comments

Portland, Oregon is suffering from the “worst housing crisis outlook” in the country, according to a study published last week by LendingTree.com. The study compared housing prices with household incomes and current vacancy rates to conclude that Portland and three other cities in the Northwest — Boise, Spokane, and Salt Lake — are four of the five worst housing markets out of the top 100 metro areas.

While I appreciate anything that knocks Portland, I have a lot of quibbles with this study. The researcher used data for metropolitan areas, which are political units (being drawn on county boundaries), instead of urban areas, which are economic units (being drawn based on population densities). The researcher compared median housing prices with median household incomes, while median family incomes make more sense because non-family households (such as college housemates) rarely buy homes. Continue reading →

Give It to Brightline

By | | Mission
39 Comments

“High-speed rail is a global disaster,” says one YouTuber, “but we must build it anyway.” “I don’t care about the cost,” says another, “California high-speed rail is fine.”

Are these people on the payroll of the companies earning millions in profits building rail lines that few people will ever use? Or are they just train lovers with no conscience who think everyone else owes them a heavily subsidized ride on trains that will travel less than half as fast as and cost more to ride than airliners? Continue reading →