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Taking the Not-Stupid Option

By | | Transportation
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The Puget Sound Transit board of directors considers themselves to be between a rock and a hard place. The projected cost of the eight-mile Northgate-Lynnwood light-rail line has risen from a low of $1.2 billion to $3.2 billion. The agency is counting on getting more than a billion of that from the Federal Transit Administration, but the Trump administration has been stingy about funding new projects.

So should the board commence construction now even if it means foregoing federal support? Or should it wait until federal support is assured and take the risk that costs will rise even more?

How about a third option: Don’t build it at all. It would have been a stupid idea if it cost just $200 million. It was a really stupid idea at $1.2 billion. It is an extremely stupid idea at $3.2 billion. It’s stupid because buses can do everything light rail can do, but do it more safely and at a much lower cost. Continue reading →

FLiXBUS: A New Alternative Way to Vegas

By | | Transportation
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A new competitor is entering the American intercity transportation market: Flixbus, a German company that is just five years old, is offering rides from Los Angeles to Las Vegas for as little as $2.99. While the company adds a $2 service fee per reservation, that means a round-trip ticket is less than $8. The lowest one-way fare on Greyhound is $13.

A Flixbus in France. Flickr photo by Semvatac.

Germany deregulated its bus market in 2013, and Flixbus quickly emerged as the dominant player, with around 80 percent of the German bus market and a growing share in other European countries as well. The company works by contracting out its operations to local bus companies. Flixbus does the marketing, sells the tickets, and coordinate schedules, while the local operators provide the buses, drivers, and maintenance. Continue reading →

Transit Fatality Rates on the Rise

By | | Transportation
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Transit fatality rates have risen from 4.6 per billion passenger miles carried in 2002 to 5.8 per billion in 2016. Among major forms of transit, hybrid rail (diesel-powered rail cars that often run on light-rail schedules) is the most dangerous, killing 29 people per billion passenger miles. Light rail is next at 13, while buses and heavy rail are both less than 5.

These numbers are from the Federal Transit Administration’s safety and security time series, which counts fatalities and injuries by mode. The FTA’s spreadsheet also includes fatality numbers for 2017 and January of 2018, but does not have passenger miles for those years, so we can’t calculate rates. I’ve summarized the data in a spreadsheet showing fatalities and passenger miles by mode and year.

Commuter rail is not included on the FTA spreadsheet as that is governed by the Federal Railroad Administration. You can find commuter rail fatality numbers in table 2-34 of National Transportation Statistics. Comparing these fatalities with passenger miles reported by the National Transit Database historic time series indicates an average commuter-rail fatality rate of about 8.8 per billion passenger miles. Continue reading →

Want to Reduce Pollution? Don’t Buy a Tesla

By | | Transportation
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“Broadbased adoption of ZEVs [electric vehicles] will increase air pollution and associated environmental costs relative to new internal combustion vehicles,” concludes a new study from the Manhattan Institute. Electric cars “will increase overall emissions of sulfur dioxide, oxides of nitrogen, and particulates, compared with the same number of new internal combustion vehicles, even after accounting for emissions from petroleum refineries.”

This appears to contradict Department of Energy claims that, “In general, EVs produce fewer emissions that contribute to climate change and smog than conventional vehicles.” However, “in general” does not mean “in particular.”

A study by several economists found that, in some parts of the country that rely mainly on hydroelectricity and other non-polluting electricity, electric cars are indeed cleaner than internal combustion cars. But, as reported by City Lab, in most of the country electric cars are dirtier than gasoline-powered cars, and in much of the rest of the country they are about the same (scroll down to “What They Found” in the City Lab article or to page 35 of the paper itself). Only in certain parts of the West are electric cars significantly cleaner than gasoline. Continue reading →

Wildlife Should Be Private Property

By | | Fish & wildlife
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Some who worry about the impact of humans on wildlife might find it reassuring that — according to a new study — humans make up just 0.01 percent of the biomass on earth. But most of that biomass is trees and other plants, which make up 82 percent of life on earth.

Those who wish to be more alarmist focus on the study’s finding that humans and their domestic livestock make up 96 percent of the biomass of mammals on earth. All mammalian wildlife make up the other four percent.

The study also found that humans have wiped out 83 percent of mammals, which leads some to say we are decimating wildlife. In fact, we decimated it millennia ago, whenever humans entered a new ecosystem, while today extinction rates for mammals at least have slowed. (Most of the high extinction rates you hear about are of insects.) Continue reading →

Portland Streetcar Jumps the Tracks

By | | Transportation, Urban areas
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A Portland streetcar went off the tracks last week, totaling three automobiles and injuring at least two people. When the streetcar came to a stop, it completely blocked Grand Avenue, one of Portland’s most important north-south streets, and it took authorities close to six hours to unblock it.

With their slower speeds, streetcars would seem to be less dangerous than light rail, which kills roughly 12 people per billion passenger miles, about twice as many as automobiles in urban areas and three times as many as buses. According to the Federal Transit Administration’s safety data, streetcars have killed an average of one person per year since 2011, but most of those have been in Philadelphia, which I consider to be more like light rail than streetcars.

But Portland’s 30-seat streetcars weigh about twice as much as a 40-seat bus, which makes them far more prone to damage other vehicles. According to one rather sarcastic series of articles, when new Portland’s streetcar killed a few people and the tracks are still fairly dangerous to cyclists. Continue reading →

Half a Station Is Worse Than None

By | | Transportation
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The Washington Metro is adding a new station to its rail system, and — surprise! — it is over budget and years behind schedule. Known as Potomac Yard, the station is designed to serve a high-density, mixed-use development that is being built on a former train yard located on the border between Arlington and Alexandria, Virginia.

Metro’s solution to the cost issue is, essentially, to build half a station: one that would serve the north half of the Potomac Yard development but not the south half. Metro knew this decision would be controversial because retailers and apartment renters were signing leases in the south half confident in the knowledge that their shops and homes would soon be a few steps away from the a Metro station.

For example, a group called National Industries for the Blind (NIB) agreed to build its world headquarters in Potomac Yard. The group “would not have picked out Potomac Yard town center without knowing Metro would be coming,” said the developer in 2016. Metro is “absolutely vital.” Continue reading →

French President Takes on Socialized Trains

By | | Transportation
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They say Millennials are rejecting capitalism and are drawn to socialism. It’s hard to imagine why, as nearly all the problems they face are caused by bad government policies, not selfish entrepreneurs.

This is most obvious in the field of transportation, where the public takeover of mass transit led to a 50 percent decline in productivity even as per capita transit ridership continued to fall. Yet proponents of socialized transportation argued that Europe was subsidizing their urban transit and intercity trains, so we should too. This took on special urgency as France and other countries built high-speed rail lines, creating an impression that the United States was somehow eating their technological dust.

Now, the New York Times admits the truth, which is that the French government-owned railroad, SNCF, is “heavily subsidized and deeply indebted.” Although such subsidies and debt are not supposed to exist under European Union rules, and the EU has even ordered member states to open up their railways to competition, SNCF has been particularly resistant to that policy. Continue reading →

Transit’s Share of Motorized Passenger Miles

By | | Transportation, Useful Data
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In 2016, transit carried less than 12 percent of motorized travel in the New York urban area, 7 percent in San Francisco-Oakland, 4 percent in Honolulu, between 3 and 4 percent in Chicago, Seattle, and Washington, between 2 and 3 percent in Baltimore, Boston, Philadelphia, and Portland, and between 1 and 2 percent in Denver, Los Angeles, Miami, Minneapolis-St. Paul, Pittsburgh, Salt Lake City, San Diego, and San Jose. Just about everywhere else was under 1 percent.

I calculated these numbers using table HM72 of the 2016 Highway Statistics, which the Federal Highway Administration published last month, and the 2016 National Transit Database, which the Federal Transit Administration published last October. I calculated these numbers for the 200 largest urbanized areas and included them in my summary 2016 Transit Database spreadsheet. I also corrected a few other problems with that spreadsheet (some transit agencies were assigned to the wrong urban areas), so if you downloaded it before, you should do so again even if you aren’t interested in total motorized passenger miles.

In calculating total motorized passenger miles, I used total vehicles miles multiplied by the average vehicle occupancy of 1.67. I then added transit passenger miles. There is a slight overlap as bus vehicle miles would have been included in highway vehicle miles, but it is not significant. The results are in columns AL through AQ of rows 3851 through 4050. Continue reading →

Qatar Supports the Washington Metro

By | | Transportation, Urban areas
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The Washington Capitals ice hockey team, which plays its home games in downtown Washington, is in the Stanley Cup Playoffs. The games go long enough that spectators can’t reliably take DC’s Metro rail transit home, as the trains stop running at 11:30 pm on Monday through Thursday.

This wasn’t a problem in the first two games of a best four-out-of-seven series against the Tampa Bay Lightning, as those games were played in Tampa. In the third game, Metro persuaded Exelon, which owns the local electric company, to donate $100,000 to keep the trains running for an extra hour.

For last night’s game 6, Metro somehow twisted Uber’s figurative arm into contributing $100,000 to keeping the trains running. It seems strange that Uber would give money to its competitor unless it hopes to get some political favors in exchange. Continue reading →