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Category Archives: Transportation

Does Longmont Really Need a Train?

By | | Transportation
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When Denver’s Regional Transit District proposed a tax increase to build six new rail lines in 2004, it promised it would build the lines without cost overruns by 2014. But soon after the election, it “discovered” that the lines would cost far more than projected — ultimately, about 67 percent more. With the money it had available, it wouldn’t be able to finish all of the lines before 2042.

This commuter train in Westminster, Colorado goes 6 miles to downtown Denver. Longmont wants RTD to extend the train another 35 miles even though RTD’s analysis shows few people will ride it. Photo by Xnatedawgx.

Further analysis by RTD found that most of the lines would end up costing taxpayers about $6 to $10 per ride, but one line, which went northwest of Denver to Longmont, was extra expensive and projected to carry so few passengers that it would cost more than $60 per rider. RTD decided to defer that line and build the rest. Continue reading →

Fix the Subways in Hours?

By | | News commentary, Transportation
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Donald Trump famously said he could end the war in Ukraine in 24 hours, yet the war is still raging more than two months after he took office. In the same way, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy recently said that New York City could solve all of the problems with its subway system “in hours, not days” (he generously allowed the city 36 hours instead of just 24) if it just had the will to do so. Note that Trump promised to stop the war himself while Duffy is demanding that someone else save the subways.

Photo by EmperorOfNYC.

This is the level of naïveté that we’ve come to expect from the Trump administration. New York City subways have problems with fare evasion, homelessness, drugs, property crime, vandalism, and violent crime that stretch across 472 stations, 850 miles of track, and nearly 6,800 subway cars. The idea that it could solve all of these problems by simply flooding the system with police for 36 hours is so ludicrous it isn’t even funny. Continue reading →

American Mobility in 2024

By | | Transportation, Useful Data
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Using recent Department of Transportation data, I estimate that the average American traveled close to 18,000 miles in 2024. This is down from nearly 20,000 miles before the pandemic, a change that I’ll go into below.

American Airlines carried Americans more passenger-miles than any other airline in 2024. Photo by N509FZ.

Last week, the Bureau of Transportation Statistics released December air travel data indicating that the domestic flights carried people 800 billion passenger-miles in 2024. Since the Census Bureau’s latest population estimates say that the U.S. had 340.1 million people in 2024, that’s an average of 2,350 miles per person. Continue reading →

January Driving Up 1.2% from 2019

By | | Transportation, Useful Data
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Americans drove 1.2 percent more miles in January of 2025 than the same month in 2019, according to data released by the Federal Highway Administration yesterday. These data were posted less than a week after the agency released December traffic volume data, which for some reason were later than usual.

The data show that rural driving was up by 4.1 percent while urban driving was up by 0.1 percent. While driving on urban interstates and collector and local streets was up, driving on major urban arterials other than interstates was down. Some of this difference may be due to the way the Federal Highway Administration collects its data, which concentrates more on interstates and other arterials than on local streets. In other words, the driving numbers on local streets may be overestimated. Continue reading →

January Transit Ridership Reaches 79.8% of 2019

By | | Transportation, Useful Data
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January transit ridership in 2024 was 79.8 percent as much as in 2019, according to data released late last week by the Federal Transit Administration. That’s the highest level since the beginning of the pandemic and may be due to an increased number of people returning to workplaces in Manhattan.

While transit in the New York urban area carried 88.2 percent of 2019 levels and the New York Metropolitan Transportation Authority carried 90.5 percent, transit in the rest of the country carried only 73.1 percent. Transit ridership continued to be particularly dismal in Chicago (66.7%), Atlanta (48.0%), Phoenix (50.2%), San Francisco (65.7%), Minneapolis-St. Paul (64.5%), Tampa-St. Petersburg (59.7%), and St. Louis (55.4%). Continue reading →

Privatizing Amtrak and Cutting Transit

By | | Transportation
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Every line item in the federal budget has at least one special interest group advocating for its growth and ready to cry bloody murder if anyone proposes to reduce it. So it is no surprise that Trains magazine is shocked that Elon Musk would propose to privatize Amtrak.

Amtrak received a $7.3 billion federal grant to buy 83 new trains from Siemens that will be used in the Northeast Corridor and on state-subsidized day trains.

“Amtrak’s business performance is strong,” Trains quotes an Amtrak spokesperson. “Ridership and revenue are at all-time highs.” But a “strong” performance didn’t prevent Amtrak from losing well over $2 billion on operating costs alone in 2024, and Amtrak’s all-time highs are still pretty low: in 2024, Amtrak carried the average American just 19.6 miles. Americans ride bicycles far more than they ride Amtrak, they fly more than 100 times as many miles, and they travel more than 700 times as many miles by car as they ride Amtrak. Continue reading →

December Driving 96.6% of 2019

By | | Transportation, Useful Data
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I guess Musk didn’t fire everyone at the Federal Highway Administration, as the agency finally released its December traffic volume trends indicating that Americans drove 3.4 percent fewer miles in December of 2024 than the same month in 2019. Driving over the entire year of 2024 was 0.6 percent greater than in 2019.

This compares with transit, which carried 76.5 percent as many riders in 2024 as it did in 2019. Amtrak carried 2.8 percent more passenger-miles and the airlines carried 7.2 percent more passengers in 2024 as 2019. Continue reading →

January Air Travel 11.7%, Amtrak 7.8% Above 2019

By | | Transportation, Useful Data
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The airlines carried 11.7 percent more passengers in January 2025, while Amtrak carried 7.8 percent more passenger-miles, than in the same month in 2019. The air travel data are based on passenger counts from the Transportation Security Administration, while the Amtrak data are based on its monthly performance report.

The big question is where are the highway data? The Federal Highway Administration usually releases traffic volume trends about 45 days after the end of any given month. In other words, December data should have been out in the middle of February, but here we are in March and it hasn’t yet been posted. Did Elon Musk fire the people in the Federal Highway Administration who keep track of this data? If so, it would be hypocritical for me to complain as I believe the federal government is too big, but I still hope the data appear soon. Continue reading →

Climate Change Will Reduce Transit Ridership

By | | Transportation
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Here’s the latest breathtaking finding from University of Oregon researchers: Fewer people (the article says “less people,” but it was written by journalists) ride transit during extreme weather events. As if we needed a university research study to tell us that.

There’s a flood, forest fire, tornado, or hurricane near your home today. Why aren’t you out riding transit? Photo by Howard Pelling.

Scholars at the University of Oregon Planning School wanted to know how climate change will affect transit ridership. Since everyone knows that climate change is going to increase severe weather events, they examined how such events affected ridership over the last 17 years. No one should be surprised to learn that ridership fell during such events. Continue reading →

Houston Transit: Back to Basics Not Enough

By | | Transportation
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Houston’s Metro transit is going back to basics, focusing on public safety and giving up its expensive light-rail and bus rapid transit plans. This follows the election of a new mayor, John Whitmire, who took office on January 1, 2024 and quickly replaced several members of the Metro board. Though Whitmire is a Democrat, he took office at a time when Houston was facing serious financial problems and so he is taking a fiscally conservative approach to spending.

By many measures, Houston’s Metro is doing better than most U.S. transit agencies. At the end of 2015, it implemented new bus routes, changing from a downtown-centric system to a grid system, as recommended by Jarrett Walker. Partly as a result, ridership grew by 5 percent between 2019 and 2019, a period during which ridership declined in most other urban areas. As of December 2024, ridership has recovered to nearly 88 percent of pre-pandemic levels, compared with a national average of 76 percent. Continue reading →