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News Bulletin: Young People Are Naive

By | | Transportation
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“One thing Millennials are’t killing?” the headline on an article from National Public Radio read last week: “Public transportation.” Such a story might have been relevant a year or two ago. Today, when transit ridership is down by more than 60 percent, it is an example of spectacularly poor timing, like writing about how we should all invest in GameStop.

Millennials (ages 25-44) are a little more likely to commute by transit than previous generations, but members of Generation Z (ages 16-24) or less likely to do so.

One thing NPR is good at is putting a human face on the data published by various government and private entities. The problem in this story is that they forgot to see if the data actually backed up their anecdotes. They don’t. Continue reading →

High-Speed Rail Line Cancelled

By | | Transportation
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A planned high-speed rail line between Singapore and Kuala Lumpur has been cancelled, the governments of Malaysia and Singapore announced last month. The 217-mile line was expected to cost $17 billion, or $78 million per mile, and that was deemed too expensive for Malaysia after it was impacted by the pandemic.

Proposed high-speed rail route. Map by Seloloving.

Before the pandemic, the route was served by conventional trains and buses that took six hours as well as more than 80 airline flights a day, more than any other two cities on earth. The high-speed train would have taken 90 minutes (compared to an hour by plane) and was supposed to capture most of the air travel and contribute to the economic growth of the countries. Continue reading →

Transit 2020: Subsidies Up, Ridership Down

By | | Policy brief, Transportation
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The transit industry carried 37.5 percent as many riders in December 2020 as it had in December 2019, according to data released last week by the Federal Transit Administration. This is a slight increase over the 36.9 percent carried in November. For the year as a whole, it ended up carrying 46.1 percent as many riders as it had transported in 2019.

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

The industry had begun the year carrying about 6 to 7 percent more riders than the first two months of 2019, suggesting that it might have been about to turn around the decline that it had experienced over the previous five years. The pandemic foiled this recovery, and the industry avoided total disaster only by the American Public Transportation Association and transit agencies convincing Congress to give transit $25 billion in April and $12 billion in December, with more on the way. This has taught the transit industry a perverse lesson: it doesn’t have to actually carry many passengers to continue to receive subsidies. Continue reading →

A Global Leader in Obsolete Technology

By | | Transportation
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Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg wants to make the United States the “global leader” in high-speed rail. That’s like wanting to be the world leader in electric typewriters, rotary telephones, or steam locomotives, all technologies that were once revolutionary but are functionally obsolete today. High-speed trains, in particular, were rendered obsolete in 1958, when Boeing introduced the 707 jetliner, which was twice as fast as the fastest trains today.

Slower than flying, less convenient than driving, and far more expensive than either one.

Aside from speed, what makes high-speed rail obsolete is its high cost. Unlike airlines, which don’t require much infrastructure other than landing fields, high-speed trains require huge amounts of infrastructure that must be built and maintained to extremely precise standards. That’s why airfares averaged just 14 cents per passenger-mile in 2019, whereas fares on Amtrak’s high-speed Acela averaged more than 90 cents per passenger-mile. Continue reading →

New Flyer Announces Level 4 Bus

By | | Transportation
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Bus manufacturer New Flyer has announced that it has level 4 autonomous buses ready for sale. Level 4 means no human driver will be necessary as long as the bus says on its designated route.

New Flyer’s autonomous bus will have at least a dozen LIDAR, radar, and optical sensors. Click image to download a brochure about the bus.

The intelligence for the buses will be provided by Robotic Research, which until recently focused mainly on developing small delivery vehicles that can operate on sidewalks. Moving from tiny delivery carts to 40-foot buses is quite a leap. Continue reading →

Transit Subsidies of $108 Per Ride

By | | Transportation
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Yesterday, the Antiplanner predicted that at some point people would realize that transit is a waste. That point may have already been reached in Portland, which has voted down new taxes for transit the last four times they have been on the ballot. Moreover, on Monday a Portland television station reported that TriMet, Portland’s transit agency, is spending $108 to subsidize each and every ride on the Westside Express Service (WES).

The report quotes the Cascade Policy Institute‘s John Charles as saying, “They should just admit it was a mistake.” Even a representative of the Association of Oregon Rail and Transit Advocates agrees that “it’s too expensive.” Continue reading →

APTA Demands $39.3 Billion More for Transit

By | | Transportation
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The American Public Transportation Association (APTA) has proclaimed that transit agencies will need nearly $40 billion more in subsidies, on top of the tens of billions in subsidies they already get, to survive through the end of 2023. It backs this up with a so-called “independent study” that is hardly independent as APTA paid for it. APTA also points out with distress that 65 percent of transit agencies were forced to cut service in 2020.

This $39.3 billion is part of a $111.3 billion transportation package being sought by unions and other interest groups. The package includes $40 billion for school buses, motor coaches, and ferry companies; $15 billion for airline employees; and $17 billion for airports. Note that almost none of this money will end up assisting any actual travelers; it is all for unions and bureaucrats.

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer has promised to include $30 billion for transit in the next COVID relief bill. This is $10 billion more than President Biden asked for in his $1.9 trillion relief bill. Transit agencies like the New York MTA are already rubbing their hands in gleeful anticipation of these funds. Continue reading →

Increasing Safety, Improving the Economy

By | | Policy brief
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Eighteen months ago, an Antiplanner policy brief scrutinized the recent increase in pedestrian traffic fatalities and concluded that much of that increase was due to risky behavior. Most of the increased fatal crashes took place at night and involved pedestrians entering or crossing streets outside of designated areas. Much of the increase also involved either pedestrians or drivers who were under the influence of alcohol or drugs.

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

The policy brief concluded that road diets, complete streets, and similar planning fads were the wrong solutions as they didn’t address the real problems. Policies such as Vision Zero, which advocate wholesale reductions in speed limits, threaten the timely distribution of goods and movements of people, thus harming urban economies, without necessarily addressing the real causes of traffic fatalities. Continue reading →

Bay Area Arrogance

By | | Transportation
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The Bay Area Rapid Transit District (BART) has seen ridership fall in every year since 2015. The district was originally created to bring office workers from the suburbs into downtown San Francisco, yet downtown is now a ghost town with some of the highest vacancy rates in its history and actual occupancy rates — that is, offices that are actually being used — are probably below 20 percent. BART’s latest ridership numbers themselves are less than 15 percent of 2019 levels. Many of San Francisco’s high-tech employers have already announced that they will allow many of their employees to continue to work from home after the pandemic.

What better time is there for BART to announce its proposal to significantly expand its service? Called Link 21, the heart of the proposal is to build a second tube under the bay connecting San Francisco with Oakland costing a mere $30 billion. Continue reading →

Will COVID Kill Robotaxis?

By | | Transportation
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One of the victims of COVID-19 may be robotaxis and with them one path towards a future of autonomous vehicles. Before the pandemic, there were two views of how driverless cars would take over the road.

One model, which I’ll call the Waymo model but it was also endorsed by Uber, General Motors (through its Cruise subsidiary), and Ford, was that robotaxis would replace privately owned automobiles, especially in the urban areas that house 80 percent of the nation’s population. These robotaxis would rely heavily on maps, and would only work in areas that had been mapped. Since many people would be unwilling to buy a car that could only go on some roads, Waymo and other software companies planned to put them in robotaxi or ride-hailing services, at least until the entire country was mapped.

The other model, which I’ll call the Tesla model but it was also endorsed by Volvo and perhaps Volkswagen, continued to rely on private ownership of automobiles. Instead of depending on precise maps, the autonomous vehicles would rely mainly on their own sensors, which would enable them to go anywhere, even potentially off-road. To get to that point, Tesla and other companies planned to incrementally improve the on-board electronics until the computers could completely take over driving. Continue reading →