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No More Car Ownership?

By | | Transportation
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When I heard that the World Economic Forum proposed to ban car ownership, I dismissed it as left-wing nonsense that would never get far with elected officials. But earlier this week the Scottish government announced it planned to ban car ownership as a part of its campaign to reduce per-capita driving by 20 percent by 2030.

Of course, they say such actions are needed to reduce climate change, but the truth is that a lot of people have hated automobiles for decades and are just using climate change as an excuse to carry out their vendetta against personal mobility. They also claim to care about income inequality, but the automobile did more to reduce income inequality in the 20th century than just about anything else. Continue reading →

November Driving 1.5% More Than in 11/2019

By | | Transportation, Useful Data
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Americans drove 1.5 percent more miles in November 2022 than November 2019, according to data released by the Federal Highway Administration yesterday. This is the third month in a row that driving exceeded 100 percent of pre-pandemic levels. For the year to date, Americans drove 99.99 percent as many miles as in 2019, so if December is even just 0.2 percent above 100 percent, the year as a whole will be as well.

States where driving was well ahead of 2019 include South Dakota (20%), Florida, Missouri, and Rhode Island (all 14%), and Hawaii (12%). Hawaii is surprising as much driving there is by tourists, and the tourist industry has been decimated by the pandemic. Apparently, it is recovering. States where driving remains short of 2019 include West Virginia (-22%), California (-13%), Minnesota (-9%), and New Jersey (-8%), as well as the District of Columbia (-14%). Continue reading →

Fabricating Reality with ChatGPT

By | | News commentary
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Last month, a non-profit group called OpenAI made available an artificial intelligence program called ChatGPT that has educators worried that students will use it to write fake essays. ChatGPT relies on information it can find on the World Wide Web up through the end of 2021 and is able to converse on a wide range of subjects.

When it first came out, I was doing research on the history of steam locomotive technology for my other blog, Streamliner Memories. I asked it some questions that I already knew the answers to and it made some reasonably intelligent replies. Continue reading →

Amtrak November PM 91% of November 2019

By | | Transportation, Useful Data
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Amtrak carried 90.8 percent as many passenger-miles in November 2022 as it did in November 2019, according to the monthly performance report released by the company last week. This is the first time since the pandemic that it has exceeded 90 percent of pre-pandemic numbers.

Amtrak remains behind air travel, which first breached 90 percent in April 2021. Yet it appears that Amtrak, unlike transit, will eventually come pretty close to 100 percent of pre-pandemic numbers. Continue reading →

Bandon Is Urban After All

By | | Useful Data
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Last week, I complained that, under the Census Bureau’s new definition of “urban,” Bandon, Oregon is rural. It turns out that it squeaked into the list of urban areas by virtue of having 2,012 housing units. (My count of housing units was based on the Census Bureau’s 2018 estimates.)

This large shopping center in California City, California isn’t enough for the Census Bureau to classify it as “urban.”

However, 1,143 areas that had been classified as urban in 2010 were counted as rural in 2020. To be urban, an area had to have either 5,000 people or 2,000 housing units and an urban core that had at least 1,275 housing units per square mile. Continue reading →

Steve McCarthy R.I.P.

By | | News commentary
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My first real job was a summer internship with the Oregon Student Public Interest Research Group (OSPIRG) in 1972. Steve McCarthy was the flamboyant director of OSPIRG, and my work that summer on low-cost ways to improve TriMet, Portland’s transit system, helped propel him into the job of TriMet’s general manager. He implemented some of my suggestions and made other improvements and by the end of the decade Portland was one of the few urban areas in America where transit ridership had grown faster than driving.

Steve McCarthy growing pears in bottles that will soon be filled with Clear Creek pear brandy. Photo courtesy of Clear Creek Distillery.

Nearly two decades later, Steve invited me out to lunch in Northwest Portland where he had started a new business making pear brandy. Over lunch, he told me that after leaving TriMet he took over his father’s business making hunting accessories and then bought a pear orchard in Oregon’s Hood River Valley, where his family had been in the fruit-growing business since 1910. He wanted to prove to other orchardists that they could make more money by adding value to their fruit than by just selling fruit to grocers. Continue reading →

The Most Congested Cities

By | | Transportation
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The most congested urban area in America in 2022 was Chicago, where the average auto commuter lost 155 hours to traffic delays. That was only one hour less than London, the most congested urban area in the world, or at least the most congested city evaluated in the latest INRIX global traffic scorecard.

Prior to the pandemic, more than half the people who worked in downtown Chicago took transit to work, but the city was still very congested and — according to INRIX — is even more congested today. Photo by Michael Kappel.

The second-most congested U.S. urban area was Boston, with 134 hours of delay per driver, followed by New York at 117 hours. Los Angeles, which has often been at the top of the list, was way down in 2022, suffering 95 hours of delay per driver, and was edged out by San Francisco at 97 hours. Miami and Philadelphia were between New York and San Francisco. Continue reading →

The Bureau of Transportation Deceptions

By | | Transportation
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Last Friday, the Bureau of Transportation Statistics, which keeps track of all kinds of transportation, released 2020 data on government revenues and expenditures in transportation. The new data, however, are based on a radically altered definition of revenues and should be rejected.

Under the Bureau of Transportation Statistics’ new definition of revenues, transit revenues more than tripled and highway revenues nearly doubled.

The agency has kept track of this information for many years, with revenues being recorded in table 3-32 and expenditures in table 3-35 of an annual report called National Transportation Statistics. In the latest tables, the numbers go back to 2007, but in earlier editions (such as the 1995 edition), they go back as far as 1980 (in five-year intervals). Continue reading →

Transit Carries 67.5% of 2019 Riders in November

By | | Transportation, Useful Data
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Transit ridership in November 2022 was 32.5 percent below November 2019, according to data released late last week by the Federal Transit Administration. This is in spite of the fact that November 2022 had one more work day than November 2019.

Amtrak and highway data are not yet available but this chart will be updated when they come out.

U.S. airlines saw 94.3 percent as many travelers in November as in the same month in 2019, down slightly from 94.5 percent in October. Amtrak data should be available soon; highway data seem to take a little longer. Continue reading →

Drawing the Line Between Urban & Rural

By | | News commentary
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Is urban sprawl overrunning the countryside? To answer this question, it is important to define the difference between urban and rural. The Census Bureau is proposing to change its definition, but I don’t believe the proposed change makes sense.

Is this urban or rural? Under the Census Bureau’s old definition, it is urban, but by its new definition, it is rural. Photo by Visitor7.

In 1900, the line between urban and rural was pretty easy. If land was in an incorporated city, it was urban. If it was outside the city limits, it was rural. The main transportation of the day was streetcars, and if you couldn’t get somewhere on a streetcar, it wouldn’t be developed. If a developer built a new streetcar line outside the city and developed that area (which is how most suburban streetcar lines got built), the city would quickly annex the newly developed land. Continue reading →