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Category Archives: Transportation

LaHood to DC Metro Board: “You’re Fired!”

By | | Transportation, Urban areas
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Washington DC’s Metro system has a multibillion-dollar maintenance backlog, declining ridership, and serious problems with labor unions. The systems problems are so bad that Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe asked former Secretary of Immobility Ray LaHood, one of the least credible people ever to hold that office, to lead a search for new funds for the agency.

Now LaHood has come out with his proposal. Has he found a billion dollars stuck in the seat cushions of Metro trains? Nope. Has he discovered a treasure map at the White House that leads to a city of gold? Nope. Has he found any money at all? None.

Instead, he proposes to replace Metro’s current sixteen-member board of directors with a “reform board” consisting of “five members who are solely responsible to the transit system, not the parochial interests of the local officials who would appoint them.” Continue reading →

What If All American Cars Were Electric?

By | | Transportation
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An Antiplanner reader writes, what “if all vehicles in USA were powered by electricity?” The reader wasn’t sure, but suspected that it would be “impossible to do with electricity as now generated and distributed.” I was inclined to agree, but when I looked into it, the results surprised me.

First, as I’ve noted before, only about a third of the power used to generate electricity ends up being delivered to the end users; the rest is lost in generation and transmission. This would seem to reduce the apparent efficiency of electric cars.

Counter to that, however, internal combustion engines dissipate most of their energy in the form of heat. On average, only about 21 percent of the energy from burning gasoline or Diesel is used to move vehicles; the rest is lost. Electric motors, however, only lose about 20 percent of their energy as heat. This more than offsets the losses from electrical generation and transmission. Continue reading →

Notes from the Transit Apocalypse

By | | Transportation
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The Antiplanner is back in the air today, but a review of recent headlines reveals the continuing decline of the nation’s transit industry, much of which is self-inflicted. None other than Streetsblog has figured out that the headlines trumpeting the great success of new Los Angeles light-rail lines are misleading considering that the county has reduced bus service and lost several times more bus riders than it gained rail riders.

Joe Mathews, writing in the Sacramento Bee, points out that the recently opened “Smart” train in Sonoma and Marin counties is actually pretty dumb. They built it from one mile away from the Sonoma County Airport to two miles away from a Marin County ferry terminal. Taxi drivers won’t take people from the train to the airport because they resent missing out on the fare they would earn from a longer ride. Of course, anyone who thinks that trains should go from where they are to where they want to go doesn’t understand the real cost of building rail transit.

The nation’s biggest rail disaster, at least on a per-capita basis, continues to unfold in Honolulu. The city’s 20-mile line was originally supposed to cost under $3 billion, but the current projection is $9.5 billion and it may breach $10 billion. Even as the state and city debate who should pay for the cost overrun, Honolulu’s bus ridership is falling. Continue reading →

This Is Why Cap-and-Trade Is Stupid

By | | Transportation, Urban areas
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Despite the fact that Los Angeles voters agreed to spend $120 billion on light rail and related transportation projects last November, the region’s transit agency, Metro, says it has a $280 million shortfall in extending its Gold light-rail line 12.4 miles to Montclair. Cap-and-trade to the rescue! Members of the state legislature representing the area have proposed to use cap-and-trade funds to fill the gap.

The cap-and-trade or emissions trading system allows people to spend money buying the right to emit greenhouse gases, and the state uses that money to do things that reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The result is a more efficient allocation of resources than if the state were to simply order everyone to reduce emissions by an arbitrary amount.

So spending cap-and-trade revenues on light rail would make sense if light rail reduces greenhouse gas emissions. But does it? According to page 4.9-33 of the supplemental environmental impact report for the project, the line would actually increase emissions. But that’s okay, says the report, because “the project would contribute less than 0.00001% to the GHG burden for the planet.” Continue reading →

No to Las Vegas Light Rail

By | | Transportation, Urban areas
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The Antiplanner is in San Antonio, the nation’s largest city not to have fallen for the rail-transit hoax. In fact, San Antonio is the epitome of a 21st-century city, since it does not pretend to have a huge downtown–only 6 percent of the region’s jobs are located in the downtown area.

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So-Called “Gaps” Not a Problem

By | | Transportation
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The Antiplanner much appreciates the work done by Dr. Joseph Schwieterman of the Chaddick Institute at DePaul University in studying and raising public awareness about the Megabus-pioneered revival of the intercity bus industry. But the institute’s latest study is both misleading and has been misreported.

According to one news article, “eight of the 50 most heavily-traveled routes between cities 120 to 400 miles apart in America have lost either express bus or Amtrak service since 2014.” Low gas prices are supposed to be responsible for the loss in service; “As long as gas remains cheap,” says the article, “public transportation seems bound to suffer.” Supposedly, according to another article, these changes are “forcing more to drive.”

In fact, all of the declines in Amtrak service documented by the Chaddick study took place prior to 2006, well before today’s low fuel prices. While Megabus did drop some services since 2014, Megabus will go anywhere people want to go, so if it dropped service between some cities, that probably means there weren’t many potential riders for it to carry. Continue reading →

Purple Line Losers

By | | Transportation, Urban areas
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Travelers and taxpayers both lose as Secretary of Transportation Elaine Chao caved in to Maryland’s Republican Governor Larry Hogan and Democratic Congressional delegation by approving federal funding for the Purple Line. As Antiplanner readers know, the state’s own transportation analysis found that the Purple Line will dramatically increase congestion in Montgomery County suburbs of Washington DC, while the $5.6 billion cost represents exactly $5.6 billion that could have been spent to better effect on just about anything else: buses, roads, schools, or health care, to name a few things.

Administration officials justified the decision by saying that the project was too far along to cancel and the planned public-private partnership was something that President Trump wants to encourage. But, in this case at least, the public-private partnership does not save any money or produce any better service; it is merely a way of avoiding debt limits because the debt from the project will be on the books of the private partner, not the public agency.

As for being too far along to stop, every project on FTA’s New Starts and Small Starts list has already received some federal money for engineering and design work. The Department of Transportation recently told Durham to go ahead with engineering work on its light-rail project, so it too will presumably reach the point where it is “too far along” to stop. Continue reading →

“Quick Win” for Buses = Loss for Commuters

By | | Transportation
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New York City rail transit lines have fallen on hard times, with frequent delays, accidents, and even trains not running at all. While Governor Cuomo has declared a state of emergency, some transit advocates want to make sure buses aren’t forgotten in any multi-billion-dollar fix.

Some of their ideas, such as having people pay before they board to hasten loading, are good ones. But they also want more dedicated bus lanes and to have traffic signals be programmed to give buses priority at intersections.

In any city but New York, giving transit priority over other traffic is foolish because cars typically move 50 to 100 times as many people and trucks move far more freight than transit. In New York City, however, transit carries well over half of commuters to work, so deserves more consideration. But how many of those transit commuters take the bus? Continue reading →

“True” BRT Clogs Up the Roads

By | | Transportation, Urban areas
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The strange notion that bus-rapid transit isn’t “true” bus-rapid unless it uses lanes dedicated only to buses has infected Denver. The city is now considering converting two lanes of Colfax, the most important (and most congested) east-west street in the region, into dedicated bus lanes.

This would make the remaining lanes even more congested, yet Denver’s Regional Transit District (RTD) simply does not have enough buses to fully utilize dedicated lanes. Despite this, the idea has gained the editorial endorsement of the Denver Post, which nonsensically claims that this would “fix” Colfax’s congestion problems.

Recall that Istanbul has a dedicated busway that supports more than 250 buses per hour. RTD has less than 1,200 buses in total, the vast majority of which never go on Colfax. It would never be able to run more than a small fraction of 250 buses per hour down Colfax, even if the demand existed, which it does not. Continue reading →

Make [Some] Commuter Pay Their Share

By | | Transportation, Urban areas
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New York City subways are falling apart. The Metropolitan Transportation Authority has a $38 billion debt and $18 billion in unfunded health-care obligations. Governor Andrew Cuomo and Mayor Bill de Blasio spend most of their time blaming each other for the region’s transportation woes.

The New York Times thinks it has a solution: “Make commuters pay their share again.” That sounds like a great idea! The people who ride the trains should be the ones to pay for them.

But that’s not what the Times means. Instead, it wants people who live outside the city to pay a commuter tax to work in the city. Such a tax, equal to 0.45 percent of each commuter’s income, once was in place, but was repealed in 1999. If renewed, the Times estimates, it would add nearly a billion dollars a year to the city’s coffers, which it could use to restore the subways, though it is more likely that it would spend it on such frivolities as extending the Second Avenue subway. Continue reading →