Category Archives: Policy brief

The first electric streetcars and the first internal-combustion engine automobiles were first developed just over 130 years ago. Initially, each went about 8 to 10 miles per hour. Today, people routinely drive automobiles at 70 to 80 miles per hour, and some supercars can go well over 200 miles per hour. Meanwhile, according to the American Public Transportation Association, the average speed of streetcars is a whopping 6.9 miles per hour.

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Streetcars were rendered obsolete in 1927 with the introduction of the Twin Coach bus, the first bus that was both cheaper to buy and cheaper to operate than streetcars. Within a decade, half of America’s streetcar systems had converted to buses. The infamous General Motors streetcar conspiracy, which began in 1937, was actually a conspiracy to take business away from Twin Coach buses, not to destroy streetcars which were already rapidly disappearing. By 1974, only six cities still had streetcars, usually because they went through tunnels or used a dedicated right of way not open to buses. Continue reading →

Metro. Rapid transit. Subway. Elevated. Underground. U-bahn. All of these types of transit are included in what the Federal Transit Administration calls heavy rail. Unfortunately, none of these terms are very accurate.

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Heavy-rail train cars weigh less than light-rail cars. Even the best metros can’t get you everywhere in a metropolitan area. Rapid transit isn’t very rapid, averaging around 20 miles per hour not counting the time it takes to get to or from a station or to wait for trains. Subways aren’t always under the ground and elevateds aren’t always above the ground. Continue reading →

Everybody knows that transit saves energy and protects us from climate change. Everybody knows that transit helps the poor. Everybody knows that transit generates economic development. None of these things are true, but many people believe them because public transit is backed up by a powerful lobby.

Wikipedia has an entry on the highway lobby, but no entry on a transit lobby. In fact, the transit lobby is much bigger than the highway lobby even though highways move a hundred times as many passenger miles as transit, not to mention far more freight. The transit lobby is nonetheless bigger for good reason: most federal and state highway funds come from user fees, so the only thing the highway lobby has to do is protect those user fees from being diverted to other uses, whereas less than a quarter of transit costs come from user fees, so the industry has to scramble for every last transit dollar it can get. Continue reading →

Soon after you read this, you may hear that the world’s first long-distance hyperloop has been placed in operation in the United Arab Emirates (UAE). The plan is to build a line connecting Dubai (population 3.4 million) and Abu Dhabi (1.5 million), which are about 87 miles apart, a distance planners say can be covered in 12 minutes in the hyperloop.

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However, that won’t happen until 2023 at the earliest. This year, Hyperloop Transportation Technologies (HTT) hopes to open a 10-kilometer prototype in Abu Dhabi to both test and demonstrate the technology. Ten kilometers isn’t very long, but it is approximately 9.5 kilometers longer than previous hyperloop test tracks. Continue reading →

Congress recently passed the Great American Outdoors Act, a law trumpeted as the greatest conservation bill in a generation. But really, it’s just pork barrel. President Trump threatened to veto the law, but after he was shown photos of some scenic areas, he said he might sign it. He may have signed it by the time you read this (Update: he did), but this policy brief shows why he should veto it.

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The bill does two things: it provides funding for fixing the maintenance backlog on the national parks and it creates a dedicated fund for the Land and Water Conservation program, which buys federal lands for recreation. Neither of these sound like bad things, but in large part they are a waste. Continue reading →

Central Florida politicians face difficult choices about the future of SunRail, a commuter-rail line out of Orlando. One question is whether to finish the originally conceived project by improving 12 miles of tracks and building a new station for a cost of about $100 million, which is expected to add 200 riders per day. A second question is whether to build a new extension to the Orlando Airport, which is expected to cost about $200 million.

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Beyond new construction, a major problem is how to get anyone to ride the trains, as ridership is well below expectations and 2018 fare revenues only covered 5 percent of operating costs. A final question is how to pay to continue operating the trains, which lost more than $40 per passenger in 2018. The state has been subsidizing operations but wants four county governments to take over. Continue reading →

One of the candidates for president in this November’s election is known by the nickname, “Amtrak Joe.” The Democratic-controlled House wants to triple federal funding for intercity passenger trains. A member of Congress from Massachusetts has proposed spending $205 billion on high-speed rail.

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Given the growing momentum behind these ideas, it is instructive to take a look at how well the last frenzied spending on intercity passenger trains worked. In 2009 and 2010, President Obama persuaded Congress to dedicate $10.1 billion to high-speed rail projects around the country. To this was added at least $1.4 billion in other federal funds and at least $7 billion in state and local funds. After ten years, some of those projects must be working, right? Continue reading →

One source of data that I frequently cite is National Transportation Statistics, which is compiled and regularly updated by the Department of Transportation’s Bureau of Transportation Statistics. Table 1-40 in particular shows passenger-miles in the United States broken down by mode, with annual data going back as far as 1960 for at least some of the modes.

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The table shows four general categories: air, highway, transit, and rail. Note that almost all of the modes listed under “transit” are also listed under either “highway” or “rail,” so the total is less than the sum of all of the categories. I also don’t count the passenger-miles shown for heavy trucks, as these represent drivers and truck drivers are no more “passengers” than airline pilots or Amtrak engineers. Continue reading →

Last week, the federal debt reached $26.3 trillion, and it is going nowhere but up. In fact, it grew by $1 trillion in just the previous 40 days.

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Not to worry, say some people. After all, federal assets are worth somewhere around $200 trillion. President Trump once suggested that it might be possible to pay off the federal debt by privatizing federal assets. This paper will take a realistic look at whether this is true. Continue reading →

Is there a huge demand for high-density housing that is unmet due to oppressive land-use regulations such as single-family zoning? Do homeowners support single-family zoning in order to create a cartel boosting their home values? Can denser housing reduce housing prices in high-priced regions?

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Market urbanist Scott Beyer and I have been addressing these kinds of questions in our continuing debate over whether densification or sprawl are better solutions to housing affordability problems. This debate began in a Reason Foundation video called “Density or Sprawl? How to Solve the Urban Housing Crisis.” We met face-to-face, sort of, in a webcast last week titled “Build Up or Build Out: Solving the Housing Crisis,” in which we were joined by Cato scholar Scott Lincicome. The webcast generated a number of questions from the audience that weren’t answered during the event due to technical difficulties. I also posted a short article last week on the Antiplanner and Scott Beyer put up a post on his Facebook page. Continue reading →