Category Archives: Policy brief

Sixty years ago, America had the finest transportation system in the world, and it was almost all unsubsidized. Congress had subsidized the construction of some railroads, but that included only about 7 percent of the nation’s rail mileage. Congress had also subsidized the construction of some airports, but by 1960 that was near an end. Most of America’s highways had been built and maintained out of highway user fees such as gasoline taxes and tolls. The nation’s transit systems were mostly private and even the public ones funded their operating costs and many of their capital costs exclusively out of transit fares.

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That began to change in the 1960s. In 1964, Congress promised capital grants to cities and states that took over transit companies. Most of the government-owned transit agencies also used tax dollars to cover part of their operating costs. In 1970, Congress took over the nation’s intercity passenger trains and subsidies to Amtrak exceeded $1 billion a year. In 1981, Congress began diverting highway user fees to pay for transit. This led to such a political demand for those funds that, in 1998, Congress gave up on the idea that expenditures out of the highway transit fund should be limited to user fees paid into that fund. Today, Congress is transferring $10 billion per year of general funds into the highway trust fund to keep the money flowing without raising gas taxes. Continue reading →

Transit ridership in April 2020 was 84 percent less than it had been in April 2019, according to data released last week by the Federal Transit Administration. The media has reported falling ridership due to the coronavirus and resulting quarantines, but these data reveal exactly how much it has fallen for each mode and urban area.

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For example, ridership is down 92 percent in the New York urban area and 93 percent in Philadelphia but only 58 percent in Dallas-Ft. Worth and Las Vegas. The Bay Area Rapid Transit District saw a 94 percent decline, but ridership in Tucson fell by just 44 percent. Continue reading →

Forbes was once a reliable opponent of central planning, but last week it published an article arguing that rebuilding the economy after the pandemic should only take place through the gatekeepers of central planners who know what is best for society. The author, a self-proclaimed futurist named Chunka Mui, has written what he thinks is a “perfect” plan for 2050, and sees the pandemic as an opportunity to impose that plan on the world.

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Mui observes that many costs are declining, including the costs of computing, communications, energy, and transportation. “Zero cost, however, does not necessarily lead to good outcomes,” he warns. “Too cheap transportation, for example, can worsen sprawl, congestion and pollution.” Continue reading →

Michelle Corson is a woman on a mission. After a successful career in the finance and venture capital industries, she started a non-profit, On the Road Lending, whose goal is to provide mobility for low-income people with poor credit. She doesn’t improve people’s mobility by giving them transit passes or bicycles; instead, she offers affordable loans for new or reliable used cars that are still under warranty.

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It doesn’t hurt that Corson herself loves to drive. But she also recognizes that transit doesn’t always reach the best jobs for low-income people and that single mothers are not going to be able to get their children to school on a bicycle. Continue reading →

Most people living through this pandemic have wondered, “What will change after COVID-19?” The transit industry in particular is worried about whether it will get back its lost riders, while airlines are just hoping to survive long enough to recover. While a lot of uncertainties remain, some things are less uncertain than others. This paper will focus on what is likely to happen in the first year or two after the various stay-at-home orders are lifted and the economy begins to recover.

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1. More People Will Work at Home

The most profound change will be number of people working at home. The American Community Survey reported that more than 8.2 million people, or 5.3 percent of the nation’s workforce, worked exclusively at home in 2018. The share was much greater in some areas: 8.6 percent of Colorado workers and 15.4 percent of Marin County, California workers worked at home. Continue reading →

What do you think of when you hear the word “city”? Most people envision a downtown filled with skyscrapers surrounded by lower-rise developments. At least, that’s what appears in most photographs, and the first two dozen of them, in a Google image search for “city.” Some even argue that cities such as Phoenix that don’t have big, skyscraper-filled downtowns aren’t “real cities.”

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However, as Joel Garreau pointed out nearly thirty years ago in his great book, Edge City, cities like that are “abberations. We built cities that way for less than a century.” Before about 1840, cities had no defined central business districts as we know them today. The first skyscrapers weren’t built until the 1880s. Since 1920, the economic forces that led to the construction of dense downtowns have been largely replaced by decentralizing forces. Continue reading →

A growing body of research shows that mass transit is the major reason why the coronavirus has been so deadly in New York City. The New York urban area (roughly New York City plus Nassau, Suffolk, and Westchester counties in New York plus Bergen, Essex, Hudson, Middlesex, Monmouth, and Union counties in New Jersey) provides 45 percent of all transit trips in the United States and, not coincidentally, has seen about 45 percent of COVID-19 deaths in the United States.

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Despite this, transit advocates have already begun promoting their heavily subsidized form of transportation along with increased restrictions on auto driving—the safest form of travel during an epidemic—after the current pandemic is over. Years of propaganda have successfully demonized cars and urban sprawl, despite the fact that these two interconnected phenomena have produced enormous benefits. Continue reading →

Why do so many science fiction & fantasy visions of future cities have monorails?
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• Starting as early as 1918, Popular Mechanics and similar magazines often featured monorails on their covers.
• Fritz Lang’s 1927 classic, Metropolis, showed a monorail-like train on a slender bridge at least 50 stories above the ground.
• Walt Disney added a monorail to Tomorrowland in 1959.
• A monorail was one of the stars of Seattle’s 1962 Century 21 Exposition.
• New York’s 1964-65 world’s fair had to have one too.
• Numerous futuristic movies and television shows also included monorails.

Continue reading →

An April 8 article in the New York Times breathlessly revealed that the coronavirus is killing blacks and Latinos in New York City at twice the rate of whites. This fits in with the Times thesis that race has been the most important issue influencing American politics and society since 1619. This allows the Times and other liberal commentators to bash right wingers, who “everyone knows” are racists.

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But the issue with coronavirus, as with so much else in America, isn’t really about race; it’s about class. The middle class is winning, which isn’t surprising since most policy decisions today are made by middle-class bureaucrats and managers. Meanwhile, the working class is losing, which is sad because it actually forms the majority of people. If there is a right-left divide in the battle between middle-class elites and working-class victims, then the left is firmly on the side of the elites while Trump has brought working-class whites, at least, to the right side. Continue reading →

If light rail was once viewed as an inexpensive alternative to true rapid transit, some cities saw commuter rail as an even less-expensive way of reintroducing rail transit into their regions. After all, most commuter-rail lines used tracks that already existed, so how much could it cost to run passenger trains on those tracks?

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Beguiled by this reasoning, nearly twenty different transit agencies have built commuter rail in urban areas that didn’t have rail transit in 1980. Many of these proved to be absolute disasters, with fare revenues covering as little as 4 percent of operating costs despite having spent hundreds of millions of dollars on capital costs. This brief will look at various commuter-rail projects that have started since 1980 to see which proved total disasters and which were only partial disasters. Continue reading →