Category Archives: Policy brief

2001: Terrorists fly commercial airliners into the World Trade Center and Pentagon, leading to–among many other things–the shutdown of commercial air service in the United States for several days.

2005: Hurricanes Katrina and Rita slam into the Gulf Coast, leading some 4 million people to evacuate their homes and causing hundreds of deaths and severe hardships for thousands of people who were unable to evacuate.

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2008: The deflation of the housing bubble leads to the second-worst financial crisis in American history and the largest decline in personal travel since World War II.

2020: The COVID-19 pandemic shuts down much of the American economy, resulting in, among other things, 80 percent reductions in travel by airlines, transit, Amtrak, and other modes. Continue reading →

Now that the COVID-19 pandemic has reduced ridership in many transit systems by as much as 90 percent, it almost seems nostalgic to look back to a time when transit ridership was only dropping because of low gas prices, ride hailing, and inept transit agency management. Among those ineptitudes documented in recent Antiplanner policy briefs were Los Angeles Metro’s insistence on building light rail despite its proven track record of losing five bus riders for every rail rider gained and Portland’s insistence on sticking with light rail despite the fact that doing so reduced the capacity of the transit system to move people through downtown Portland.

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This raises the question of whether light rail has worked anywhere in the country. Transit agencies in seventeen urban areas that had no rail transit in 1980 have built light rail lines since then. This paper will look at each of these systems to see whether they have contributed to or detracted from their regions’ transit systems. I’ll also include Cleveland and Pittsburgh, both of which upgraded older streetcar lines to light-rail standards after 1980. Continue reading →

A minor footnote in the history of the COVID-19 pandemic is that this may be the first major crisis in history that was assisted by driverless vehicles. A Chinese company named Neolix is using its driverless delivery vans to transport medical supplies and sterilize streets in Wuhan.

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I’ve been promoting the idea that the advent of driverless cars means we shouldn’t be wasting money building archaic rail transit projects since 2010. Now, a decade later, seems an appropriate time to see how far the industry has come and how far it has to go to make widespread use of driverless cars a reality. Some say that the task of creating a fully driverless car is more difficult than anticipated and we won’t have them for many more years. Continue reading →

Building new freeway lanes “has utterly failed to stop congestion,” says a new report from Transportation for America (T4A) titled The Congestion Con. “We have added 30,511 new freeway lane-miles of road in the largest 100 urbanized areas in the U.S. between 1993 and 2017, an increase of 42 percent,” continues the report, yet “congestion has grown by a staggering 144 percent” due to “induced demand.” The report concludes that the nation should stop building new roads and instead “bring jobs, housing, and other destinations closer together.”

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This report makes several fundamental errors. First, at least a third of the “new freeway lane-miles” that the report claims were “added” between 1993 and 2017 already existed in 1993, and thus can’t be claimed to have been built since 1993 to reduce congestion. The authors of the report knew this but dismissed it as irrelevant. Continue reading →

Nearly fifty years ago, a friend of mine named Ron Buel (who at the time was the chief of staff to Portland city commissioner Neil Goldschmidt) wrote a book titled Dead End: The Automobile in Mass Transportation. Buel argued that cars harmed cities and the people living in them, and at the time he and other critics of the automobile seemed to make a lot of sense.

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After all, in 1965, Ralph Nader’s Unsafe at Any Speed had shown that cars were death traps, killing almost as many Americans each year as ten years of the Viet Nam war. A look out a Portland window on a sunny day showed that cars were pollutomobiles, putting a grey layer of unhealthy smog over the city that was so thick people couldn’t see Mt. Hood, 50 miles away. In 1973, the OPEC oil embargo would make Americans painfully aware that their automobiles were also gas hogs. Continue reading →

Portland’s transit agency, TriMet, has spent nearly $5 billion (in present-day dollars) building 59 miles of light-rail lines. Now the agency says it has to spend another $7 billion correcting the mistakes of its previous decisions. Meanwhile, the city of Portland is responding to urban congestion with a plan that will make congestion far worse.

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The eagerness of Portland officials to build light rail—an eagerness not shared by Portland-area voters—has given the city the reputation of being some sort of transit mecca. The reality is that the urban area’s transit planners have made a series of bad decisions that continue to cost the region dearly. Continue reading →

This policy brief is a summary of a lengthy report by Thomas Rubin and James Moore that was recently published by the Reason Foundation as fifteen separate documents. A complete copy of their report in one document, with a few error corrections and other improvements, can be downloaded here.

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In February 2019, the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority (Metro) board of directors adopted the 28 by 2028 Plan, which proposes to complete 28 major transportation projects prior to the beginning of the 2028 Los Angeles summer Olympics. This proposal includes 20 projects specified in Measure M, a 2016 sales tax ballot measure, plus accelerates the completion of eight more projects.

Continue reading →

State and local subsidies to highway users averaged 1.9¢ per vehicle mile in 2018, according to data recently released by the Federal Highway Administration. The average vehicle on the road has about 1.67 occupants, so subsidies per passenger mile average 1.2 cents.

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By far the majority of these subsidies were at the local level. While exact calculations are not possible, I estimate state subsidies averaged 0.3 cents per vehicle mile while local subsidies averaged 4.4 cents per vehicle mile. Continue reading →

Thanks to a late-year surge in New York subway ridership, nationwide transit ridership in December 2019 was 3.0 percent greater than December 2018, and ridership for 2019 as a whole was 0.1 percent greater than in 2018, according to data released last week by the Federal Transit Administration. Take away the New York City subways and nationwide ridership fell by 1.5 percent in December and 1.2 percent for the 2019 as a whole.

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New York City subway ridership (not including PATH trains) grew by a phenomenal 14.7 percent in December and 3.6 percent for the year as a whole. While subway ridership peaked in 2014, it rose in 2019 to the second highest in its history. Its post-World War II peak was only about 2.0 billion trips a year compared with 2.7 billion in 2019. Continue reading →

Late last month, the Department of Transportation signed a full-funding grant agreement with Seattle’s Sound Transit to partly fund a 7.8-mile light-rail extension to Federal Way, a community midway between Seattle and Tacoma. While the Trump administration has resisted signing any new full-funding grant agreements, insiders say that the department has had to a sign a few because Congress has appropriated the funds, so it is trying to pick the least offensive projects before Congress forces it to spend the money on even worse projects.

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While there are truly no light-rail projects that are inoffensive, the Federal Way project is worse than most. With a total cost of nearly $3.2 billion, the line is projected to cost more than $400 million per mile, which is absurdly expensive for a low-capacity transit project. Of course, there have been even worse ones, such as the Honolulu rail project, which will cost at least $450 million per mile, and Seattle’s own University line, which cost $626 million per mile. But the average light-rail project now in planning or under construction is “only” $200 million a mile, which itself is outrageous considering the first light-rail projects built in this country cost (in today’s dollars) under $40 million per mile. Continue reading →