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Category Archives: Transportation

DC Metro Rail: Is More Money the Answer?

By | | Transportation, Urban areas
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Remember how the Washington Metro Rail system shut down for an entire weekday on March 16 so the agency could inspect all of the rail insulators, and replace any that were worn out? This was supposed to be needed to prevent fires such as the one whose smoke killed a passenger in 2015.

It didn’t work. On May 5, passengers at the Federal Center Southwest station were treated to a huge fireball of sparks when another insulator caught fire. Moreover, says the Federal Transit Administration (FTA), Metro officials responded poorly to the fire, continuing to run trains on that track until a second fire started several hours later.

On May 6–coincidentally, the day after the latest fire–Metro announced its maintenance plan that calls for shutting down some segments for as long as seven days and single-tracking many more lines for weeks at a time, which will slow service on those routes. That’s not good enough for the FTA, which ordered the agency to rearrange the schedule to work on lines that the feds think are at the highest risk sooner than Metro planned.

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Streetcar Boondoggles

By | | Transportation
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“The Dallas streetcar project is another great example of how the Recovery Act is creating jobs and providing accessible transportation,” said then-Secretary of Immobility Ray LaHood in 2011 when he funded the project. Now that it’s been open for about a year, how many people are riding it? About 150 to 300 per day.

This is just one in a series of dramatic failures documented by the transit-friendly Streetsblog. After Atlanta began charging fares for its streetcar, ridership fell below 1,000 per day. Salt Lake’s streetcar carries a few more than that, but only about a third of the original projections. Tucson’s is supposed to be more successful, carrying 4,000 per day, but most of them are students who get major discounts.

Meanwhile, the cost of the Cincinnati streetcar has gone up from $102 million to $148 million. It won’t be completed until September, so there’s still time for more cost overruns.
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Portland Metro: More Lies Per Capita

By | | Transportation, Urban areas
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“We’re driving less than other metros,” says Portland Metro, “and we’re driving less than 20 years ago.” These are the kinds of lies that are so typical of Portland planners: easy to check, but since few will bother, they get away with it. First, although Portlanders do drive a little less than residents of other large urban areas, they also drove a little less than residents of those same urban areas 20 years ago, so that’s no change.

More important, Portlanders are in fact driving more than they were 20 years ago. Metro’s source for its data is the Texas Transportation Institute (TTI) urban mobility study. But those data only count miles of driving on freeways and other arterials. Because Portland hasn’t built any new freeways or arterials in 20 years, people are forced to drive more on collectors and other roads. When all driving is counted, according to the Federal Highway Administration (which is the source of TTI’s data), Portlanders drove an average of 22.9 miles per person per day in 2014, up 13 percent from 20.2 miles per person per day in 1994.

Metro uses lies like these to implicitly claim that all of its spending on light rail is worthwhile. In fact, light rail is just not very important to Portland travel. As the Antiplanner showed last week, transit carries just 2.6 percent of motorized travel in the Portland urban areas, and since light rail is less than 40 percent of transit, that means light rail is less than 1 percent of all motorized travel.

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Comparing European and American Transport

By | | Transportation
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Americans visiting Europe often come away feeling that Europe made some very different choices regarding transportation, with a wistful notion that life would be better in the United States if we followed their example. The reality is a lot grimmer, at least for Europeans.


The view from an English train in Cornwall.

The big thing people notice is all the passenger trains. Why did Europe decide to keep its passenger trains while American decided to drive instead? Before answering this question, it is worth taking a hard look at the data to see what really has happened. The Antiplanner’s data today mostly comes from the European Union itself: the Panorama of Transport 2000 has data from 1970 through 2000; Panorama of Transport 2009 has 2007 data but is mainly useful because it compares Europe with the US and Japan; and EU Transport Statistical Pocketbook has 2010 data plus population data for 1990 through 2010. I found 1970 and 1980 European population data on Geohive.

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Warped Logic Spins Transit Measure

By | | Transportation, Urban areas
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Students graduating college used to look for jobs and then moved to the cities where the job were located. Now they move to cities they like and then look for jobs. Therefore, any city that wants to attract recent college graduates had better spend more money on transit.

That’s the logic used by John Robert Smith, who chairs Transportation for America (aka Reconnecting America), to support a proposed tax increase for Spokane Transit. There are so many flaws in this reasoning that it is hard to know where to begin, but let’s just start with the presumption that transit is at all important to the lives of more than a tiny fraction of people in Spokane.

As the Antiplanner noted Tuesday, transit moves less than 2 percent of passenger travel in all but about eighteen urban areas. In Spokane, it’s 1.4 percent. The American Community Survey says that 3.0 percent of Spokane-area commuters–that’s a bit more than 5,000 people–usually took transit to work in 2014.

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Should TIF Pay for Transportation Projects?

By | | Transportation
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The Antiplanner is no fan of tax-increment financing (TIF), which was supposed to rehabilitate blighted neighborhoods but more often is used for crony capitalism and social engineering. The Colorado legislature was considering a bill to expand the use of TIF to allow cities and counties to use incremental sales tax revenues to pay for transportation projects to “underserved areas.”

An article on Monday argued against such an expansion, saying that it was likely to be abused to support projects that probably would not truly generate new economic growth (and thus no new taxes to pay for the projects). Fortunately, the bill died in the state house of representatives yesterday.

The article didn’t say so, but transportation projects should be paid for out of user fees, not out of imaginary economic growth. The transit industry makes a big deal of the “rate of return” on transit spending, when in fact that rate is negative. Transit advocates say that transit increases property values, but what they don’t say is, when this is true at all, it is a zero-sum game: any increase is balanced by a decrease (or slower rate of increase) elsewhere in the urban area Continue reading →

Transit’s Share of Urban Travel in 2014

By | | Transportation, Useful Data
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Transit carried 16.6 percent of motorized travel in Honolulu, more than in any other urban area in the country. New York is second at 11.9 percent, followed by San Francisco at 7.9 percent, Chicago at 4.0 percent, State College PA at 3.7 percent, Seattle at 3.5 percent, Lompoc CA at 3.3 percent, and Boston at 3.2 percent. Philadelphia, Salt Lake (but see below), Portland, Baltimore, Los Angeles, Louisville, and six smaller urban areas are between 2 and 3 percent, and 35 urban areas are between 1 and 2 percent. Transit’s share in the remaining 350 or so urban areas is less than 1 percent.

The Antiplanner calculated these numbers using the newly posted table HM-72, “Urbanized area summary,” from the 2014 Highway Statistics, and from my summary spreadsheet of the 2014 National Transit Database. The National Transit Database has annual passenger miles of transit use by agency and designates which urban area is served by each agency; my summary spreadsheet totals the numbers for each urban area. Table HM-72 has daily vehicle miles of travel by urbanized area.

To convert daily vehicle miles to annual passenger miles, I multiplied daily by 365–unlike the transit people, the highway agencies use the average of all days in the week, not the weekday average–and then by 1.6 to account for vehicle occupancy. I calculated the 1.6 based on the share of urban travel by car, motorcycle, truck, and bus from table VM-1, using 1.55 for short wheelbase vehicles, 1.84 for long-wheelbase light-duty vehicles, 1 for motorcycles and heavy trucks and 11 for buses. There’s a slight bit of double counting as slightly less than 1/2 of a percent of urban vehicle miles is buses, and most of those are transit buses, but this won’t change the numbers much.

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Few American Cities Need Busways

By | | Transportation
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The Antiplanner’s recent visit to Turkey allowed me to observe the Istanbul Metrobus. Buses from several different routes use two dedicated lanes in the median of a freeway for parts of their journeys. The forty-five bus stops on the 31-mile route have overhead walkways allowing patrons to cross the freeways.


An Istanbul Metrobus pulls out of a station.

Most buses are articulated and can comfortably carry at least 100 people. Buses operate as frequently as every 14 seconds in each direction; that’s more than 250 buses per hour. While they operate “only” every two minutes after 1 am, over the course of a 24-hour day, they still manage to run buses an average every 28 seconds over parts of the route. Each bus stop is long enough to serve at least four buses at a time.

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Washington Metro Promises to Disrupt Commutes for Months

By | | Transportation, Urban areas
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On the heels of a National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) report that found that Washington Metro “has failed to learn safety lessons” from previous accidents, Metro general manager Paul Wiedefeld will announce a plan today that promises to disrupt service for months in an effort to get the lines safely running again. While ordinary maintenance can take place during the few hours the system isn’t running every night, Wiedefeld says that past officials have let the system decline so much that individual rail lines will have to be taken off line for days or weeks at a time to get them back into shape.

The Washington Post blames the problems on “generations of executives and government-appointed Metro board members, along with Washington-area politicians who ultimately dictated Metro’s spending.” That’s partially true, but there are really two problems with Metro, and different parties are to blame for each.

First is the problem with deferred maintenance. The Metro board recognized that maintenance costs would have to increase as long ago as 2002, when they developed a plan to spend $10 billion to $12 billion rehabilitating the system. This plan was ignored by the “Washington-area politicians who ultimately dictated Metro’s spending” and who decided to fund the Silver and Purple lines instead of repairing what they already had.

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APTA Tinkers with the Deck Chairs

By | | Follow up, News commentary, Transportation
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Your largest member has just quit, complaining that your organization doesn’t do enough to help it and other large members and that they are underrepresented on your organization’s executive committee. And, oh, by the way, you’re paying your chief executive officer too much.

So what do you do? If you are the American Public Transportation Association, you fire the CEO. That’s not really going to solve any problems, but after 4-1/2 years of getting paid nearly $900,000 per year (see page 17), he probably has enough to retire on. There’s no word yet on whether his replacement will get a similar salary.

A salary and benefits of close to a million dollars a year might make sense for a company that earns billions of dollars in annual revenues. It makes a little less sense for APTA, which uses its $20 million in annual revenues to lobby Congress to get billions of federal dollars funneled to its members. It makes even less sense since the federal funds going to APTA members did not significantly increase during the reign of the newly retired CEO, part of whose qualifications are that he once drove the bus for the Indiana University basketball team coached by Bobby Knight. It is particularly galling to outsiders since taxpayers are the ultimate source of the funds used to pay him.

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