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Forum on Competing Infrastructure Plans

By | | Transportation
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On Monday, April 26, the Antiplanner will join the Reason Foundation’s Bob Poole and Cato Institute’s Chris Edwards in a forum discussing infrastructure plans now before Congress. The forum will start at noon, Eastern Time, and last one hour. To register, click here.

Biden’s Infrastructure Plan and Alternatives from Cato Institute on Vimeo.

Yesterday, just in time for the forum, Republicans introduced their own infrastructure plan. This plan would spend almost 40 percent more money on transportation than Biden’s, but the funds are distributed differently. Except for broadband and water, the plan leaves out all of the non-transportation-related things that are in Biden’s plan, allowing for its total cost to be only about a quarter of Biden’s. Continue reading →

February Driving Down 12.1 Percent

By | | Transportation, Useful Data
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When compared with the previous year, vehicle-miles of driving in February 2021 dropped by 12.1 percent, a slight dip from January which was only 11.3 percent lower than in 2020. Data released yesterday by the Federal Highway Administration indicate that changes by state ranged from -2.4 percent in Wyoming to -20.4 percent in Delaware. Driving in Texas and Oklahoma both were around 19 percent below 2020 levels while driving in California was down only 7 percent.

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Both driving and transit declined slightly in February while both air travel and Amtrak grew slightly. This could be coincidence or it could mean that intercity travel is growing while local travel is still inhibited by the pandemic. This is affirmed by TSA data showing that air travel in March had recovered to 53 percent of 2019 levels, a major gain considering February air travel was only 40 percent of 2020 and 43 percent of 2019 numbers. Amtrak is not likely to see similar gains.

Transit Is Not Resilient

By | | Transportation
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“Transit is resilient,” claims transit industry consultant Paul Comfort, who is also executive director of the North American Transit Alliance, an association of private companies that earn money providing service to transit agencies. Comfort made this claim after visiting several transit agencies to see how they were spending the billions of dollars Congress gave them to compensate for the loss of ridership during the pandemic.

I don’t think that word means what Comfort wants us to think it means. The dictionary defines “resilient” as tending to recover from or adjust easily to misfortune or change. The panicky press releases sent out a year ago by transit agencies and advocates do not suggest that an industry that adjusts easily to change. Comfort’s examples of agency “resilience” are mostly about how they are spending the money Congress gave them on masks, sanitizers, and, for some reason, complete streets. He says nothing about actual ridership or other real performance measures. Here are a few tests that can be used to tell if an industry or institution is resilient.

1. Does the industry need a big bailout every time there is a downturn in the economy? Continue reading →

Quadruple the Cost Plus 11 Years of Delay

By | | Transportation, Urban areas
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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 →

A Shared Love for Obsolete Transportation

By | | Transportation
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Transit ridership at the Santa Clara Valley Transportation Authority (VTA) has declined in every year since Nuria Fernandez was made CEO of San Jose’s principle transit agency at the end of 2013. By 2019, transit fares collected by VTA covered just 9 percent of operating costs, far lower than the national average of 32 percent. VTA light-rail cars carried an average of just 14 passengers, compared with a national average of 24. Most San Jose light-rail “trains” are just one car long, meaning they could easily be replaced by buses at a huge savings to taxpayers.

VTA light rail: a model of government waste. Notice the HOV lanes that could have supported buses carrying more people to more destinations than the light-rail line.

Before Fernandez arrived, VTA had spent billions of dollars building a light-rail system that did nothing but jeopardize the agency’s finances, which in turn contributed to the dramatic decline in ridership: Between 2002 and 2019, the region’s population grew by 15 percent yet transit ridership fell by 29 percent. While she didn’t make the decision to build those light-rail lines, she is proud that she was able to get federal funding to help build a subway line into downtown San Jose. Continue reading →

The Future of Intercity Buses

By | | Transportation
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Like other forms of mass transportation, the intercity bus industry is imperiled by the coronavirus pandemic. Unlike Amtrak and transit numbers, bus data are hard to come by, but the latest report from the Chaddick Institute for Metropolitan Development at DePaul University estimates that intercity bus ridership in December 2020 was down by more than 75 percent from December 2019.

Click image to download this 2.5-megabyte, 26-page report.

Intercity bus travel grew rapidly after 2006 thanks to the introduction of the Megabus model, which was infrastructure-light. Instead of maintaining expensive bus stations and ticket sales offices, Megabus sold tickets over the internet and loaded and unloaded passengers at curbsides. Megabus sometimes contracted out its operations to other companies but also owned a large fleet of its own buses. All of these savings allowed it to sell tickets for much lower prices than Greyhound, which still depended on maintaining its own bus stations. Continue reading →

Keeping the Highway Trust Fund Solvent

By | | Transportation
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When Congress agreed to finance the Interstate Highway System in 1956 by dedicating taxes on gasoline, tires, autos, and trucks to a Highway Trust Fund, it also adopted a policy of not spending more from the fund that was actually collected in highway fees into that fund. This delayed completion of the interstate highways because inflation increased costs without increasing gas taxes and other revenues, but it ensured that the fund remained solvent.

Congress dipped into the Highway Trust Fund to give the Antiplanner’s favorite airline, Alaska, $500,000 to paint a salmon on a plane. Is it any wonder the Trust Fund is insolvent? Photo by Cubbie_n_Vegas.

That is no longer the case, and today Congress spends about $14 billion more per year out of the fund than it collects in highway user fees. Yesterday, the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee held a hearing on the “long-term solvency of the highway trust fund.” Most of the witnesses at the hearing spoke about problems with gasoline taxes and why they should be replaced with mileage-based user fees. Continue reading →

Repeating History

By | | Housing
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In 1947, the U.K. Parliament passed the Town & Country Planning Act, which limited urban development to 6 percent of the land area of the country. Housing soon became expensive. Politicians responded by promising to build lots of new housing, mostly high-rise but some mid-rise.

The new housing proved to be a disaster. It created lots of social problems including crime and congestion. Much of the housing was also poorly built. Meanwhile, housing affordability continued to decline. Today, only the upper classes own their own homes while most working-class Brits live in “council housing.” Continue reading →

Amtrak Won’t Connect Us

By | | Policy brief, Transportation
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Biden’s American Jobs Plan proposes to spend $115 billion on highways that carry 87 percent of all passenger-miles in the United States and $80 billion on Amtrak that carries 0.1 percent of passenger-miles. That’s what rail advocates call “balanced transportation funding.”

Click image to download a six-page PDF of this policy brief.

Biden’s plan “is what this nation has been waiting for,” enthuses Amtrak’s CEO. It’s certainly what many railfans–the people who collect old railroad timetables and model trains–have been waiting for. But I’m not sure many other Americans care enough about an obsolete form of travel they never use to say they have been eagerly waiting to have more deficit dollars spent on it. Continue reading →

Our Over-Promiser in Chief

By | | Transportation
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“The Interstate Highway System transformed the way we traveled, lived, worked, and developed,” said President Biden in his March 31 speech introducing his American Jobs Plan. “Imagine what we can do, what’s within our reach, when we modernize those highways,” he continued. “You and your family could travel coast to coast without a single tank of gas onboard a high-speed train.”

The late Senator Arlen Specter shares a ride on an Amtrak train with then-Vice President Joe Biden in 2009.

When I read this, I had to wonder: is Biden’s speechwriter a total ignoramus when it comes to transportation? Or did Biden depart from the speech and allow his mind to drift to a total non-sequitur? I wondered this because, in case you weren’t aware, high-speed trains will not go on even modernized interstate highways. Although many people talk about building rail lines in the median strips of interstate highways, that’s just a fantasy: trains cannot handle the grades and high-speed trains cannot handle the curves found on interstate freeways. Not to mention the fact that there is no money for high-speed trains in Biden’s infrastructure plan anyway. Continue reading →