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Ridership Is Down, But APTA Still Wants to Spend $232 Billion on Transit Infrastructure

By | | Transportation
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The American Public Transportation Association released its fourth quarter 2018 ridership report showing what Antiplanner readers already know: transit lost 2 percent of its riders last year. While admitting the decline, the accompanying press release focused on the few places where ridership grew, such as Columbus, the Long Island Railroad, and West Covina, California. You know they’re desperate when they have to go to West Covina — population 108,000 — to find good news.

Although APTA did issue a press release, it isn’t visible on the lobby group’s home page. Instead, the top “news update” is a March 18 press release demanding that taxpayers pony up $232 billion for transit infrastructure. As previously noted here, this is just a wish-list of transit project, most of which are new and don’t fix the $100 billion maintenance backlog with existing infrastructure.

The ridership press release barely hints at the really bad news, such as the 24 percent decline in Baltimore heavy-rail riders, the 20 percent decline in Boston light-rail riders, or the 12 percent decline in Atlanta bus riders. Unlike the few positive results APTA reported, these aren’t rare exceptions; more likely they are bellwethers of things to come for the few transit agencies that have seen ridership gains. Continue reading →

China’s Motorways

By | | Transportation
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We often hear about how China has the world’s longest high-speed rail network. But we hardly ever hear about how China has the world’s longest and fastest-growing freeway network. Jeremy Clarkson is changing that, noting that China has built 84,000 miles of motorways (the Britishism for limited-access highways), and the network is expanding by 6,000 miles a year — about six times the growth of its high-speed rail lines.

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In contrast, the United States had about 67,000 miles of freeways in 2017, an amount that has grown by less than 1,000 miles a year since 2010. To be fair, we built most of our freeways in the 1950s and 1960, so our freeway network shouldn’t expand as fast as China’s. But since the United States has far more motor vehicles than China (about 272 million vs. 240 million), we should have at least as many miles of freeways. So, next time you hear someone ask, “Why can’t we have high-speed trains like China?” ask back, “Why can’t we have freeways like China?”

No More Gas Taxes for Transit

By | | Transportation
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Taxpayers United is releasing a report today in opposition to raising Illinois gas taxes to fix supposedly crumbling infrastructure. Illinois highway infrastructure is actually in good shape, the report argues; the real infrastructure problems are with Chicago’s transit systems.

Over the past three years, nearly 30 percent of Illinois gas taxes have been diverted to transit, mostly in Chicago. The state’s remaining highway infrastructure problems could be solved by ending such diversions. Despite the subsidies, Chicago transit ridership declined by 9 percent since 2014 and is likely to continue to decline in the foreseeable future.

As noted here yesterday, a new report from Moody’s found that the Chicago Transit Authority had more debt and unfunded obligations than any other transit agency, which measured as a percent of each agency’s annual budgets. This doesn’t even count Chicago transit’s state-of-good-repair backlog, estimated to be $36 billion. Continue reading →

Confirmation

By | | Regional planning, Transportation
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The Antiplanner has focused on a few themes in recent years: density is expensive; buses can move more people than rails; transit systems are mismanaged; transit is losing rides to ride hailing. Recent research papers from a variety of sources have confirmed these ideas, at least in part.

First, Steve Polzin and Jodi Godfrey at the University of South Florida’s Center for Urban Transit Research have examined transit ridership trends, noting that ridership in Florida is declining twice as fast as the rest of the nation. These declines aren’t due to decreasing service, as some have said; in fact, service in many Florida urban areas has increased and, if it decreased, did so only after ridership declined. Instead, they blame the decline on “the fact that more travelers now have additional options,” notably ride hailing, working at home, and increased auto ownership.

Transit systems in the Miami-Ft. Lauderdale area have been hit particularly hard by ridership declines. Broward County Transit (Ft. Lauderdale) has lost more than a quarter of its riders since 2014. To make matters worse, the agency is under investigation for falsifying overtime records for favored employees and, for some reason, hiding buses from Federal Transit Administration inspectors. Continue reading →

The Nation’s Worst Transit Agencies

By | | Transportation
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The Antiplanner has often called San Jose’s Valley Transit Authority (VTA) the nation’s worst transit agency (with some competition from DC Metro). It would be nice, however, to confirm that with hard data. The question is what are the best ways to measure agency performance?

A previous comparison of transit agencies used 23 different measures of performance. Some of these were outputs, such as trips per capita and farebox recovery. Most, however, were inputs, such as revenue miles, expenses per capita, and vehicle miles between failures. But inputs are not a sound measure of performance; an agency can spend a lot of money but carry few riders; it can run a lot of vehicle miles, but if they don’t go where people want to go, they are not serving the public well; it can have lots of breakdowns, but if people are still riding it, it must be doing something good.

So I want to focus on outputs, and I’ve tentatively identified four: Continue reading →

Transport Then and Now

By | | Transportation
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The Guardian has published comparison maps showing historic transit systems vs. modern systems in those same cities, leading commenters to lament that “big oil and the automobile industry destroyed public transport.” Yet the maps that make up the article were made more for artistic purposes and not as any scientific study of the history and fate of public transit.

The first thing to note is that the maps only include rail lines, not buses. Yet, as another article in the Guardian notes, American transit systems began converting rails to buses as early as the 1920s, with 20 percent of them having completed the conversion by 1930 (years before the so-called General Motors streetcar conspiracy). The maps misleadingly make it appear that transit service has shrunk when all it did was change modes.

The second thing to note is that, on most maps, the artist only included streetcars and rapid transit (light and heavy rail). One historic map shows interurban lines, but none show commuter rail. In Los Angeles, for example, commuter rail has replaced some of the longer-distance Pacific Electric lines, but this isn’t shown on the maps. Continue reading →

Rolling Homeless Shelters

By | | Housing, Transportation
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Transit advocates have a new reason to justify subsidies to public transit: transit vehicles provide shelters for homeless people. San Jose’s perennially cash-strapped Valley Transportation Authority is proposing to cut its only all-night bus route, but homeless advocates are protesting the plan because the buses are “another lifeline” to homeless people. The night-time buses cost taxpayers half a million dollars a year, money that could probably be more effectively spent on behalf of either homeless people or transit riders.

In Minneapolis, the Green Line light rail, which runs all night, has become the shelter of choice for 200 to 300 people seeking to escape the winter’s cold. Heartless people who have their own homes complain that the homeless people make light-rail cars overcrowded, filthy, and smelling of urine, so much so that Metro Transit has had to add four staff members to clean the cars every morning. Some suggest that Metro Transit should stop running the trains from 2 am to 4 am to keep homeless people from using them overnight, but homeless advocates object that such people “need our help.”

The link was strong even levitra cialis viagra after considering other factors associated with impotence – such as smoking, drinking alcohol, diabetes, high blood pressure and bad effects of certain drugs. The most encouraging part from the group was that they improved their blood glucose purchase generic viagra level is gained. CBT is performed by viagra without prescription free a licensed therapist – a reputable practitioner that your main physician can recommend – and focuses on changing the pondering and behavior from the nervousness sufferer. Feeling commonly begins to return within a viagra prescription canada few weeks and the numbness might be entirely gone after several months. While there are several different causes of homelessness, the problem is clearly worsened by growth-management planning that makes housing expensive. One study estimates that a 10 percent increase in housing prices results in a 14 percent rise in the rate of homelessness. A study released last month in Oregon concluded that “high rents are to blame for the severity of the state’s homelessness crisis.” Continue reading →

Regulating Affordability

By | | Housing
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Two recent op-eds illustrate the dilemmas lawmakers face when dealing with unaffordable housing. The first explains to readers on Capitol Hill how Oregon is pretending to make housing more affordable when in fact almost everything it does makes it less affordable.

The article points out that in 1971 Oregon’s then-governor Tom McCall told a national group, “We want you to visit our state, but for heaven’s sake, don’t move here!” To make sure they didn’t, the Oregon legislature passed and McCall signed a 1973 land-use law that ended up limiting all urban growth to less than 1.2 percent of the land in the state. Naturally, developable land has become expensive and housing has become unaffordable, which helps keep people from moving to the state.

The article suggests, however, the state officials must be disappointed that Washington has made itself even less affordable despite not passing a similar law until 1990. As a result, many of the efforts made to provide “affordable housing” must be viewed as ways “to prevent a flood of Washingtonians from moving into more affordable Oregon.” Rent control, which every economist agrees makes housing less affordable, is only one of the ways the state is doing that. Continue reading →

Transit Ridership Falls Again in February

By | | Transportation, Useful Data
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America’s transit systems carried 4.7 percent fewer riders in February 2019 than the same month in 2018, according to data released last Friday by the Federal Transit Administration. All major forms of transit saw declines except hybrid rail, which grew because of a new San Francisco Bay Area line that opened in mid-2018. Overall, rail and bus each declined by 4.7 percent.

Ridership dropped in 39 of the nation’s 50 largest urban areas. The biggest declines were in Providence (-15.9%), Milwaukee (-14.3%), Louisville (-13.0%), Detroit (-11.1%), Kansas City (-11.0%), Phoenix (-10.8%), and Philadelphia (-10.2%). Ridership even declined in Seattle (-5.8%), which had been enjoying a sustained period of growth.

The biggest ridership growth was in Richmond (12.6%), testimony in favor of that transit system’s redesign with the help of Jarrett Walker. Ridership also grew significantly in Dallas-Ft. Worth (12.2%), Denver (5.3%), Austin (5.2%), Buffalo (4.5%), Atlanta (2.8%), and Salt Lake (2.3%). Ridership also grew by less than a percent in Houston, Washington, Tampa-St. Petersburg, and San Juan. Continue reading →

Driving Is Growing But Growth Is Slowing

By | | Transportation, Useful Data
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Late last month, the Federal Highway Administration reported that Americans drove a record number of miles in 2018: 3.225 trillion miles in all. While the Department of Transportation heralded this as a sign of a “robust economy,” detailed data show that driving grew by only 0.38 percent over 2017. This is slower than the previous year’s growth of 1.21 percent, and slower than the nation’s population growth of 0.62 percent, which means per capita driving declined by 0.24 percent.

While any growth at all is better than the transit industry is doing, this slow growth may be more of a sign of an on-coming recession than a robust economy. According to the Bureau of Economic Analysis, personal incomes declined by 0.1 percent in January, 2019, though they grew by 0.2 percent in February. Bloomberg says that some indicators suggest that we are facing the highest chance of a recession since 2008.

Of course, some people are using the growth in driving as one more argument for a big infrastructure spending bill. In fact, the need for a new federal spending program is becoming more questionable every day. Continue reading →