Just Say No

The city council of the town of Grimes, Iowa — a suburb of Des Moines — had voted to end support for the Des Moines Area Regional Transit Authority (DART). City council members noted that it is spending $646,000 a year to support the transit system and yet only 13 residents of Grimes rode transit in the last year. “When you look at the math,” commented Grimes Mayor Scott Mickelson, “you could buy everybody a couple of cars for that price.”

Des Moines has an impressive downtown, but not many people there use its transit system. Photo by Jason Mrachina.

Naturally, the transit agency was unhappy with this decision. “When you think about people who are our frontline workers, a lot of them are using DART to get to their jobs,” said DART’s CEO, Amanda Wanke. “A lot of them don’t have another option for a vehicle. During these economic times, public transit is more necessary than ever.” Continue reading

How Long Do Cars Last?

According to one web site, “you can expect a standard car to last around 12 years or about 200,000 miles.” Another site agrees, “The average car lasts around 12 years or around 200,000 miles.” Both of these web sites are wrong.

A 1957 Mercury Montclair, made during the gaudiest era of U.S. automotive design.

This caught my attention when I was reading the MBTA’s State-of-Good-Repair report, which tried to explain Boston transit’s state of poor repair simply as a function of age, and not the agency’s own incompetence. It did so by using cars as an example, claiming that the “useful life” of a car was eight years and anything older than that was in a “state of bad repair.” Continue reading

No Amount of Money Is Too Much

Is there any transit construction project that is so expensive that a transit agency will say, “Let’s not do this”? The Antiplanner has argued that the answer is “no”; instead, the only question agencies ask is, “Where are we going to get the money to do this?” Evidence for this view has recently come to light in San Francisco and Baltimore.

Architect’s model of the planned San Francisco transit center. Note the bottom level has commuter trains on the outer tracks and high-speed trains on the center tracks even though the prospects of high-speed rail ever reaching San Francisco are dimming every day.

Last January, I observed that the price of a 1.3-mile commuter-rail extension that San Francisco was planning had increased from $5.0 billion to $6.7 billion, or more than $5 billion a mile. I pointed out that there were several viable alternatives to spending what would be a record amount of money per mile on a transit project, including replacing the trains with buses or terminating the trains at a different location just seven minutes away. Now comes the news that the cost of the project has increased again to $8.25 billion, or more than $6.3 billion a mile. Continue reading

32 Years of Transit Data

When the Federal Transit Administration released the 2022 National Transit Database, it also released updated time series data tables. These tables have operating data (including costs and ridership) from 1991 through 2022, capital costs from 1992 through 2022, and fare revenues from 2002 through 2022.

This chart shows ridership for six urban areas that I consider to be basket cases, with ridership steadily declining despite — or more likely because of — the construction of light-rail or some other transit infrastructure. Of course, ridership declined everywhere due the pandemic, but most of these are among the slowest to recover to their already low 2019 levels.

The release includes six data tables, but I find just two of them useful as they are the only two that break down data by mode. Table TS3.1 has capital costs by transit agency and mode. Table TS2.1 has all other information — operating costs, fares, service in miles and hours, ridership, passenger-miles, and miles of rail lines — by agency and mode. Continue reading

2022 National Transit Database

Last year, Americans took about 6 billion trips on transit covering about 30 billion passenger-miles, according to the 2022 National Transit Database, which the Federal Transit Administration released late last week. This was about 61 percent as many trips and 56 percent as many passenger-miles as in 2019. Annual numbers in the National Transit Database are based on transit agency fiscal years and will not agree with calendar year numbers.

Portland’s transit mall has both buses and light rail; it’s worth noting that adding light-rail to the mall reduced the number of people that the mall could move per hour. Photo by Steve Morgan.

The 2022 database comes in the form of 29 different spreadsheets. To simplify it, I have collapsed these into a single spreadsheet that contains that data I find most useful for every transit agency and mode of transit. These data include trips, passenger-miles, service (in VRM or vehicle-revenue-miles and VRH or vehicle-revenue-hours), average weekday ridership, fares (including fares paid by riders and fares paid by organizations), operating costs, capital costs (including costs for existing service and costs for expanded service, plus unspecified costs for smaller agencies), number of vehicles, number of seats, amount of standing room, and revenue rail miles. Continue reading

Driverless Buses in Abu Dhabi

Abu Dhabi, the capital of United Arab Emirates, has begun operating a bus-rapid transit system with a couple of twists. First, the buses are gigantic: with two trailers (illegal in most U.S. cities), they can easily hold 200 passengers and squeeze in 240. Second, they will be completely automated despite using existing infrastructure. Some videos show a driver at the wheel, but I presume this was solely during a trail period.

The battery-powered buses operate over a 27-kilometer route with about one station per kilometer. The city of Abu Dhabi consists of several islands, and the buses connect Abu Dhabi island with Yas Island, a major tourist center. Because the buses are oriented around tourists, for now they only operate on Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays. Continue reading

Fixing MBTA’s Financial Mess

Boston’s transit agency, the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority (MBTA or T for short), appears to be on the verge of collapse. Eight years ago, it reported a $7.3 billion repair backlog, which has probably grown since then. As I read its 2022 financial statement, it also has $5.4 billion in unfunded pension and health care liabilities.

No one was particularly surprised when an Orange Line train caught fire last year. Photo by Marissa Babin.

State officials have known about the T’s serious maintenance and safety problems at least since 2009, when an outside report commissioned by the governor found that it had a $3 billion maintenance backlog and wasn’t even spending enough on maintenance to keep that backlog from growing further (which is why it grew to $7.3 billion six years later). This was creating serious safety problems, the report charged, finding that the agency’s maintenance program was addressing only about 10 percent of the system’s most serious safety issues. Continue reading

Changing the Game for the Worse

A 3/4-cent sales tax increase for transit is “seen as a game-changing model to fund transit service — and the envy of many cities nationwide,” reports the Minneapolis Star Tribune. What the article doesn’t say is how the tax will change the game for the worse for transit riders and transportation users in general.

Twin Cities transit ridership had been going downhill before the pandemic, declining nearly 10 percent between 2015 and 2019. Photo by Metro Transit.

What this means is that Metro Transit will no longer care about ridership numbers. Instead, it can freely spend hundreds of millions of dollars a year on projects that do little to generate ridership with no repercussions. Continue reading

A Polycentric Transit Plan for St. Louis

St. Louis has more miles of light rail than any other Midwestern urban area, yet fewer people rode St. Louis transit in 2019 than in 1991, before the region opened its first mile of light rail. According to a new report from the Show-Me Institute, this is because Metro, the region’s transit agency, has planned its transit system for the 1910s, not the 2020s.


Click image to download a 4.3-MB PDF of this report.

That means that Metro has built a system that assumes that most people work downtown, live in dense residential neighborhoods close to light-rail stops, and don’t have access to automobiles. None of those conditions have been true for at least 50 years, and Metro’s system is especially unsuited to the post-pandemic world. Continue reading

A Realistic Transit Game

Here’s a fun new game you can buy. It’s called Transform Transit and the goal of the game is to complete new transit projects such as building new stations or replacing the vehicle fleet. While attempting to manage projects, players have to keep employee morale up and get stooges transit bloggers to write glowing reviews of the projects.

One thing that is missing is actually getting people to ride transit, but that’s perfectly realistic as that no longer seems to be a goal of transit agencies. Related to that is increasing fare revenues, but again that’s no longer a goal of transit agencies. Instead, the goal is to keep politicians and political allies happy so the transit agency can get a continuous stream of subsidies to fund more projects. Continue reading