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Category Archives: Transportation

Dead Again–This Time For Certain?

By | | Transportation, Urban areas
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The Columbia River Crossing, which was dead, then was alive, now is once more dead. This $3 billion to $4 billion project was going to replace the Interstate 5 bridge across the Columbia between Oregon and Washington, extend light rail into Vancouver, Washington, and rebuild several of the freeway interchanges north and south of the river.

Bridge supporters said it would relieve congestion, but it wasn’t clear how replacing a six-lane bridge with a twelve-lane bridge would relieve congestion when there were only six lanes approaching the bridge from the north and south. Instead, the real goal was to create lots of contracts for bridge builders, rail builders, highway contractors, and various other engineering and construction firms.

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New-Car Fuel Economy Up 30% in 7 Years

By | | Transportation
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The University of Michigan Transportation Research Institute has kept track of the EPA mileage ratings of all new cars and light trucks (pick ups, SUVs, full-sized vans) sold in the United States since October, 2007. Between that month and February, 2014, the average fuel economy of autos sold grew from 20.1 mpg to 25.2 mpg. While your mileage may vary, this is an incredible record of improvement in fuel economy.

Though we are accustomed to measure fuel economy in miles per gallon, a more appropriate way to compare vehicles is the other way around: gallons (or some other unit of energy) per mile. As Green Car Reports observes, when asked, “Which saves more gasoline, going from 10 to 20 mpg, or going from 33 to 50 mpg?” most people answer the latter but in fact the former is true. In any case, when measured in gallons per mile, new-car fuel economy improved by 30 percent between October 2007 and February 2014.

The Department of Energy hasn’t posted data for 2012 or 2013, but its Transportation Energy Data Book, table 2.13, say that over the seven years from 2005 through 2011, the average BTUs per vehicle mile of all autos on the road declined by 7 percent, from 5,600 to 5,200. Since new cars replace the old fleet at the rate of around 6 percent per year, the 30 percent increase in new-car fuel economy is not immediately seen in the entire fleet, but it will be eventually.

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Obama’s Transportation Plan

By | | News commentary, Transportation
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President Obama’s latest transportation “vision” is as unrealistic as Governor Brown’s plan to pay for high-speed rail with cap-and-trade revenues. Obama proposes that Congress spend $302 billion on surface transportation over the next four years, or $75.5 billion a year. This is nearly $25 billion more per year than Congress is spending today, which is already $10 billion more per year than federal surface transportation revenues.

In the 2012 round of transportation reauthorization, the debate was whether to limit spending to actual revenues of about $40 billion a year or continue spending at historic rates of about $50 billion a year. Senate Democrats prevailed at the $50 billion rate, but only by agreeing to limit the bill to just two years instead of the usual six. That compromise expires this year just before the Highway Trust Fund runs out of money due to overspending.

In 2012, revenues (mainly from fuel taxes but also excise taxes on truck tires, trucks, buses, and trailers) in 2012 were $40.2 billion. By law, $5.0 billion of this was dedicated to transit. Congress actually spent $8.2 billion on transit while $41.1 billion nominally went to highways (but in fact some of this also went for transit and other non-highway programs). Spending increased by more than revenues in 2013 and 2014.

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Do the Math, Governor

By | | Transportation
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Jerry Brown proposes to use cap-and-trade revenues to help pay for the state’s high-speed rail boondoggle. It’s questionable whether this is legal, and even more questionable whether high-speed trains will actually reduce greenhouse gas emissions after their entire lifecycle emissions are considered.

What everyone seems to be missing, however, is that the cap-and-trade revenues won’t come close to covering the cost of a high-speed rail line. Brown proposes to dedicate $250 million of annual cap-and-trade revenues to the rail line, but even at an unrealistically low 2 percent rate of interest, that won’t even repay $6 billion worth of bonds, much less the $9 billion in bonds that voters approved in 2008 or the far greater amount it will actually take to complete the line.

The media keeps reporting the cost of the high-speed train as $68 billion, when everyone knows that’s only for a moderate-speed train. The most recent estimate of the true high-speed train envisioned by the 2008 ballot measure is $98 billion to $117 billion–and there’s no reason to think that estimate is any more realistic than the previous estimates which started at less than $10 billion.
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Why Doesn’t Amtrak Have Metal Detectors?

By | | Transportation
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After bomb threats twice forced the evacuation of Amtrak trains in Eugene, Oregon, a local television station asks, “If the airport has screeners and metal detectors, why don’t train stations?” The answer they got from Amtrak? Such measures “would slow down the entire system and reduce the travel flow for passengers” (listen to the video starting at 4:00).

Needless to say, worries about slowing down the air travel system certainly haven’t prevented the government from forcing an onerous screening system on airline travelers. The television reporter points out that trains have been bombed in London and Madrid and a train station has been bombed in Russia, so perhaps Amtrak needs to do more than just rely on passengers reporting suspicious activities.

The truth is that Amtrak is protected by what might be called the “Macintosh effect.” A few years ago, computer viruses attacked mainly Windows machines and Macintoshes seemed to be immune. But they weren’t; in fact, there were just too few Macintoshes around for hackers to bother with. In the same way, the fact that American airlines carry almost a hundred times as many passenger miles a year as Amtrak makes them a much more tempting target.
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Sign Me Up

By | | Transportation
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Amtrak has so many empty seats on its trains that it is creating a writers-in-residence program offering free long-distance train rides to writers provided that they tweet their journeys. Despite my skepticism for government subsidies to trains, I love trains and have always dreamed of living on one. So I’m ready to take up my residency.

For Amtrak, the rationale for this program might be that the marginal cost of carrying someone a train that is already going somewhere with empty seats is not a whole lot more than zero. (It’s much more than zero if they ride in a sleeping car, but presumably all Amtrak is offering is coach.) The potential downside is if the train is significantly late or has other problems, which are all-too-frequent on certain Amtrak routes, the negative publicity would outweigh the positive.

On the other hand, where does this end? Should Amtrak offer residencies to photographers? Painters? Model railroaders? On average, Amtrak trains only fill half their seats, so there is plenty of room for this program’s expansion.

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Killing High-Speed Rail Even Deader

By | | News commentary, Transportation
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Even as the prospects of stopping Honolulu’s $5 billion low-capacity rail project grow dim, the prospects for ever building the California high-speed rail system grow even dimmer. This week, California’s Lieutenant Governor, Gavin Newsom–once a strong rail supporter–has come out against the project. As theSan Diego Union-Tribune says, this is “another nail in the coffin of high-speed rail.”


At the 2010 groundbreaking ceremony for what was supposed to be San Francisco’s high-speed rail station, then-San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom (left) tells then-Secretary of Immobility Ray LaHood that he is “extraordinarily excited” about the future of the train. Flickr photo from Mayor Gavin Newson‘s photostream.

Asked about his former support for the project, he said it was “a $32 billion project then, and we were going to get roughly one-third [each] from the federal government and the private sector.” Now, “We’re not even close to the timeline, we’re not close to the total cost estimates, and the private sector money and the federal dollars are questionable.”

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Courts Approve High-Cost, Low-Capacity Transit

By | | News commentary, Transportation
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The Ninth Circuit Court dismissed objections to the plan for Honolulu’s 20-mile, $5 billion rail line. Though proponents call it a high-capacity rail line, in fact it uses trains whose capacity is actually lower than light-rail–which term really means “low-capacity rail.”

A line with three-car light-rail trains can move about 9,000 people per hour. The maker of the Alstom trains Honolulu wants to run claims they can move 15,000 people per hour, but that’s at crush-capacity. At crowding levels that Americans will accept, the capacity is probably less than 7,000 people per hour.

By comparison, the Antiplanner estimates double-decker buses can move 17,000 people per hour on a city street and more than 100,000 people per hour on a freeway lane. Buses are faster too: Alstom trains in other cities average just 20 mph.
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Another City Gets Conned into Building a Stupid Rail Line

By | | Transportation
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Mumbai opened a monorail last week, the first 12 miles of what is planned to be an 84-mile system costing a total of US$2 billion. A high-density city like Mumbai may be one of the few places in the world where rail transit makes sense. But the Mumbai monorail has a design flaw that makes it as stupid as the most idiotic rail lines in the United States (of which there are many candidates).


Not only are the monorail trains small, their average speed is just 20 mph. Wikimedia commons photo.

That flaw is that the trains are no more than six short cars long, and can run only every three minutes. Even at crush capacity, the system can move only 7,400 people per hour. That’s a tiny fraction of what a real high-capacity rail system can move. New York’s Eighth Avenue subway line can move 30 ten-car trains per hour, and each car has a crush capacity of 240 people, making it capable of moving 72,000 people per hour. Americans won’t accept crush-capacity conditions, but even at American levels of crowding, New York subways can move at least six times as many people per hour as the Mumbai monorail.
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Idiots Didn’t Build California

By | | Mission, Transportation
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“Wimps didn’t build California,” claims this pro-high-speed rail video. Instead, California was built by “people with grit”: people like Walt Disney, who hated subsidies so much that he paid extra to have Disneyland get its electrical power from a private company rather than the public power company that served Anaheim.


If you have trouble viewing this video here, see it on Youtube.

“People said the Golden Gate Bridge was impossible,” the video says. It turned out to be possible because it was paid for entirely out of user fees, unlike high-speed rail whose costs would come mainly from people who would never use it.

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