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Another Stupid Monorail (But Not Really)

By | | Transportation
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“Is Germany’s monorail the public transport of the future?” asks this video from German news source DW News. In accordance with Betteridge’s Law, the answer is a resounding “No!”

The selling point of this not-really-a-monorail (see 4:18 of above video) is that it will work on existing tracks and so doesn’t need new infrastructure built for it. The first problem is that, so far, it can’t cross switches. The second problem is that it is slow compared with almost any other form of motorized travel. Continue reading →

Another Housing Reform That Won’t Work

By | | Housing
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Earlier this week, California Governor Gavin Newsom signed legislation aimed at making it easier to build more housing. Unfortunately, the law left out the one key reform needed to make housing more affordable.

Governor Newsom celebrates signing another housing reform bill that won’t make housing more affordable.

California housing is unaffordable because in the 1970s the fastest-growing counties in the state drew urban-growth boundaries outside of which new homes can’t be built. At around the same time, the state legislature passed the California Environmental Quality Act, which required the completion of a draft and final environmental impact report for all major government actions, which turned out to include expanding the urban-growth boundaries. Since an EIR costs about $20 million, no county has expanded their growth boundaries since then. Continue reading →

Failing to Learn the Lessons of History

By | | News commentary
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Plenty of people have commented on New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani’s proposal to lower food prices by creating city-owned grocery stores, but there is still more to be said about this plan. Mamdani either thinks or believes that voters think that store owners are making huge profit through price gouging, and that recent increases in prices have nothing to do with inflation, tariffs, or other government actions.

@zohran_k_mamdani ? original sound – Zohran Mamdani

In fact, the grocery stores are one of the least profitable industries in the U.S.,” with profit margins of around 2 percent. They were only 1.0 percent in 2019, rose to 3.0 percent in 2020, but have since declined to 1.6 percent. Eliminating profits isn’t going to save consumers much money. Continue reading →

SEPTA Tries the Washington Monument Strategy

By | | Transportation
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Compared with 2019, the Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority (SEPTA) is carrying 30 percent fewer riders and collecting 13 percent less revenue per rider. Yet it is spending 10 percent more on operations despite having cut service by 10 percent. It previously filled this funding gap with federal COVID relief funds, but now those have run out. In order to continue operating as if there had been no ridership decline, SEPTA has demanded that the state legislature supplement its existing funding — $1.5 billion per year — with an additional $300 million in F.Y. 2026.

SEPTA Silverliner train. Photo by Adam E. Moreira.

The legislature failed to comply, so SEPTA has petulantly adopted a budget that makes what it calls “devastating service cuts & fare increases.” “This budget will effectively dismantle SEPTA — leaving the City and region without the frequent, reliable transit service that has been an engine of economic growth, mobility, and opportunity,” says an agency press release. “Once this dismantlement begins, it will be almost impossible to reverse, and the economic and social impacts will be immediate and long-lasting for all Pennsylvanians — whether they ride SEPTA or not.” Continue reading →

Do Driverless Cars Hallucinate Electric Sheep?

By | | Transportation
36 Comments

Waymo is operating driverless taxis in Los Angeles, Phoenix, and San Francisco, partnering with Uber in Atlanta and Austin, and expanding into Miami and Washington DC soon. Volkswagen is making a driverless ID Buzz available to ride-hailing and taxi companies anywhere. Tesla has begun offering robotaxis in Austin, with some opening glitches. Amazon is set to build 10,000 driverless taxis a year. A company called Aurora is testing driverless trucks between Dallas and Houston.

Volkswagen’s ID Buzz configured for driverless taxi service.

People have responded to the growth of driverless vehicle programs with predictable horror. Some worry that driverless cars will increase congestion and take people’s jobs. Others fear that they will be dangerous on the highway, especially if they begin “hallucinating.” Perhaps due to fears like these, ICE protesters set five Waymo cars on fire in Los Angeles. Continue reading →

Selling the Public Lands

By | | Public lands
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The federal government owns about 640 million acres of land — some 28 percent of the land area of the United States — but according to some press reports, members of the U.S. Senate are proposing to sell 250 million of those acres. The press reports are wrong, but even if they weren’t, I can’t help but feel schadenfreude at environment groups that are going ballistic at the proposal.

Grizzly getting a good look at some of the nation’s federal lands. (As it happens, since I took this photo a week ago, this land has been burned in a wildfire. Although the Forest Service has concluded the fire was human-caused, we didn’t do it unless the zooming of a one-year-old dog was enough to ignite the grass.)

Federal land aficionados all agree that the lands are enormously valuable. Yet Congress has given away most of the resources produced by those lands, including minerals, forage for domestic livestock, recreation, and water, to various special interest groups for nothing or well below their true value. As result, federal taxpayers lose roughly $10 billion per year managing the federal lands. Continue reading →

Amtrak Will Not Be Profitable by 2028

By | | Transportation
35 Comments

“With steady, sustained support from Congress and the administration, Amtrak’s passenger train service will become operationally profitable by FY 28,” says Amtrak in its latest request for subsidies from U.S. taxpayers. This is, at best, deceptive and at worst an outright lie.

A northbound Amtrak train on the California coastline. Photo by Circe Denyer.

Even as Amtrak promises to be profitable in three years, it admits that it is losing more money now than in 2019 despite carrying record numbers of passengers. It blames this on costs rising faster than revenues, reductions in state support for many trains, and increased costs “treated as operating costs” even though they are supposedly really capital investments. Unless Congress dramatically cuts Amtrak’s capital funding, it isn’t clear how any of these trends will be reversed in the next three years. Continue reading →

Texas Cancels Amtrak Funding

By | | Transportation
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The Texas legislature has declined to continue funding a train between Fort Worth and Oklahoma City. Amtrak calls the train a “vital transportation option,” but in fact few people ride it and it is a costly burden to Oklahoma and Texas taxpayers.

The Heartland Flyer stops in Norman, Oklahoma.

The train, Amtrak says, served “over 80,000 customers in FY24 and reach[ed] $2.2 million in ticket revenue,” which is supposed to somehow sound impressive. Amtrak’s press release fails to mention that the train cost $9.6 million to operate, not counting depreciation, which means it cost taxpayers at least $92 per rider, and probably much more. In short, taxpayers have to pay more than three quarters of the cost, much more than the average Amtrak train, for which taxpayers cover “only” about 59 percent of the cost (which is still too much). Continue reading →

Affordable Housing for $1.3 Million Per Unit

By | | Housing
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The Washington Post has discovered that there are “inefficiencies” in the nation’s affordable housing programs, including its largest one, low-income housing tax credits. Due to these inefficiencies, one non-profit developer in DC is spending up to $1.3 million per housing unit. Another developer spent $800,000 per unit, while right next door the very same developer built market-rate housing for just $350,000 per unit.

Ontario Place, a so-called affordable housing project that is costing $1.2 million per unit.

Ontario Place, the project pictured above, “will include a rooftop aquaponics farm to produce fresh fruits and vegetables for its tenants,” which contributed to the $1.2 million per unit cost. Another expensive project found by Post writers, which cost “only” $815,000 per unit, “includes a fitness room to encourage physical activity, a library, a large café with an outdoor terrace, a large multi-purpose community room with a separate outdoor terrace, an indoor bike room, on-site laundry, lounges and balconies on every floor.” Continue reading →

April Transit Ridership 80.6% of April 2019

By | | Transportation, Useful Data
24 Comments

America’s transit systems provided 96.3 percent as much service in April 2025 as they did in the same month of 2019, yet carried only 80.6 percent as many riders, according to data released late last week by the Federal Transit Administration. This is slightly less than the percentage of 2019 riders they carried in March.

Transit ridership as a share of pre-pandemic riders dipped slightly in April.

Rather than scale back service to meet reduced ridership demand, transit agencies complain that they are suffering “deficits” that need to be made up for by taxpayers. While I would define “deficits” as “fares minus costs,” transit agencies define them as “fares plus existing tax revenues minus costs.” Continue reading →