Portland Update

I am so glad that Bojack — that is, Lewis & Clark Law professor Jack Bogdanski — is back on line, as he provides a daily reminder of why I am so happy that I moved out of Portland. Bojack’s old blog chronicled Portland’s political hijinks from 2002 through 2013, then sadly went silent.

Photo by Victoria Ditkovsky.

Now he’s back with an even darker view of what life is like in the place whose motto was once “the city that works.” Here are just a few of his recent posts. Continue reading

Transportation After COVID-19

Minnesota transportation agencies need to reinvent themselves if they are to survive after the pandemic, according to a new report published yesterday by the Center of the American Experiment, Minnesota’s free-market think tank. Off the Rails: Minnesota Transportation After COVID-19 says that the world has changed so much that any transportation plans written before 2020 will no longer make sense (if they ever did).

Click image to download a 3.1-MB PDF of this 48-page report.

In case you can’t read the fine print on the image above, the report was written by yours truly and so all of its themes — increased numbers of telecommuters, the follies of light rail, the importance of funding transport out of user fees, not to mention more than a dozen brightly colored charts — will be familiar to Antiplanner readers. But in some respects, the Twin Cities’ post-pandemic experiences have been more extreme than most. Continue reading

October Driving 97.7% of Pre-Pandemic Levels

Americans drove 277.5 billion vehicle-miles in October 2021, which was 7.1 percent more than in 2020 but 2.3 percent less than in 2019, according to data released yesterday by the Federal Highway Administration. Driving on rural interstate highways was 4.0 percent greater than in October 2019 and total rural driving was 0.3 percent greater, while urban driving was 3.5 percent less than in 2019.

Transit numbers are from the National Transit Database; Amtrak numbers are from Amtrak’s Monthly Performance Report; air travel numbers are from the Transportation Security Administration.

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More Honolulu Rail Follies

You don’t hear much about Howard Hughes anymore, but he — or, more precisely, a real estate development company named after him — is helping to delay completion of the Honolulu rail line, the $12 billion project we love to ridicule. Hughes is the midst of developing a master-planned community called Ward Village that’s smack in the pathway of the rail line, and the Honolulu Authority for Rapid Transit (HART) says it wants two acres for the line.

Hughes is willing to sell the land to the Honolulu Authority for Rapid Transit (HART), but there is a teensy disagreement over the value of the land. HART offered Hughes $13.5 million; Hughes thought it was worth “about” $100 million more. HART is attempting to take the land by eminent domain, leading Hughes to counter sue, asking for $200 million in damages. HART has already approved $23 million to pay its legal fees in the eminent domain suit.

I wonder if HART is trying to pull the same fast one that Denver’s RTD tried, which was to claim that the rail line would increase the value of the remaining property so landowners should be willing (or forced) to sell the land needed for the train for less than market value. Hughes, however, will probably argue that the success of its development makes the remaining land in the development even more valuable. Continue reading

San Jose Discovers Light Rail Is Not Resilient

As of this writing, light-rail service in San Jose remains cancelled more than 24 hours after the mass shooting that left 10 people dead. This was a terrible event, and I join Governor Gavin Newsom in wondering “what the hell is going on in the United States?” Beyond that, I don’t feel qualified to write about gun control, mental illness, or other factors that may have played a role in this tragedy.

However, it does point out one more problem with light rail or any rail transit: such systems require central control that can easily be disrupted by accidents, terrorists, or other criminals. Buses, which the Valley Transportation Authority is using in place of light rail in the aftermath of the shooting, don’t need such central control and are less vulnerable to natural or human-caused disasters.

Light rail has been a thorn in the side of Silicon Valley transportation since the 1980s. San Jose’s bus-only system carried 38.5 million trips in 1984, or 29 trips per resident of the San Jose urbanized area, also known as Silicon Valley. Continue reading

Quadruple the Cost Plus 11 Years of Delay

Today the Cato Institute is publishing a new report on high-speed rail. In consideration of the work that went into that report (which is partly based on past Antiplanner policy briefs), I am taking this week off of my usual Tuesday policy brief.

Honolulu buses could easily move the number of passengers likely to ride the train, for far less money. Photo by 123TheBusHonolulu6969.

Instead, behold the latest revelations about the Honolulu rail transit line, which is currently under construction. Originally projected to cost less than $3 billion, the Honolulu Authority for Rapid Transit (HART) now admits that it is expected to cost $11.3 billion, or “about $12 billion” when finance charges are included. This is after years of denying that the cost would rise above $10 billion. Continue reading

Bus vs. Rail in Manhattan

The formerly free-market Manhattan Institute, which has lately become a shill for transit and other big-government subsidies, has taken a stand against spending $10 billion on a bus terminal in New York City. The only problem is that, instead of the bus terminal, the Manhattan Institute proposes to spend multiple tens of billions of dollars on new underground rail transit lines connecting Manhattan with New Jersey.

The Port Authority Midtown Bus Terminal. Photo by Hudconja.

The 1937 opening of the Lincoln Tunnel led to hundreds of buses roaming the streets of Manhattan after bringing commuters and other travelers from New Jersey. To reduce congestion, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey built a midtown bus terminal near the Manhattan entrance of the tunnel in 1950. That terminal cost $24 million, less than $210 million in today’s dollars. Continue reading

Plotting Transit’s Demise

A new website designed to help people plot the demise of public transit has been posted and is being publicized by, of all groups, the American Public Transportation Association (APTA). To be fair, by “plot” I don’t mean “scheme” but “make a graph.”

Click image for a larger view.

The web site makes graphs showing weekly ridership for the nation or for any region or transit agency. Graphs can show the last four, 13, 26, or 52 weeks. Users can also access data showing ridership in the last 52 weeks either in absolute numbers or as a percentage of the same week from the year before. Continue reading

Rail Supporters Can’t Tell the Truth from Fiction

Portland’s regional planning agency, Metro, has put a measure on this November’s ballot to tax all firms with 25 or more employees in order to pay for the region’s latest light-rail scheme. Fortunately, or unfortunately depending on your point of view, the scheme appears to be foundering on the weight of lies told by Metro and the measure’s supporters.

To start, Metro wanted to call the tax a “business tax” even though it would be actually a 0.75 percent tax on payrolls. In other words, it would be an income tax on employees, but it would be invisible because it wouldn’t show on paystubs as a withholding like most income taxes. Portland’s transit agency, TriMet, has used this kind of a tax to pay for its operations and always called it a “payroll tax.” But Metro wanted to call it a “business tax” on the ballot title because it believed Portlanders would be more likely to support taxes evil businesses than poor downtrodden employees.

When challenged, a judge ordered Metro to take “business tax” out of the title but didn’t order it to use the term “payroll tax.” Despite not getting the ballot title they wanted, opponents have raised hundreds of thousands of dollars to fight the measure. This includes large contributions from major employers including Nike, Daimler Trucks, Comcast, and Tillamook Creamery.

As of September 28, opponents had actually outraised supporters. Contributions to the pro-rail campaign came from rail contractor Stacy & Witbeck, the International Union of Electrical Workers, and engineering consulting firm David Evans & Associates. The Evans firm is the company that got the contract to write the environmental impact statement for building a light-rail bridge over the Columbia River and then spent the money lobbying the Oregon and Washington legislatures to build the bridge. Continue reading

DC Metro Should Just Shut Down

With transit ridership off by 84 percent in July, what better time than now to simply stop running the expensive and failed DC Metro rail system? Apparently hardly anyone really depends on it, as driving was back to at least 80 percent of its pre-pandemic levels in July.

Based on a budget update provided to the Metro board, the Washington Metropolitan Area Transportation Authority (WMATA) may have to shut down, as it expects to run out of money around next January. WMATA says it needs at least $212 million to operate through June, 2021 (the end of its fiscal year), plus more, of course, for the following year.

To deal with this, WMATA is proposing to reduce rail and bus frequencies, cut back late-night service, cancel 39 bus routes, and defer some capital improvement projects to a later date. But even these cuts won’t completely close the gap between shrinking revenues and costs. Moreover, due to the need for public hearings and other requirements, WMATA won’t even be able to implement any changes until December, so it will continue to hemorrhage money for few riders for several more months. Continue reading