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Category Archives: Transportation

2022 ACS Transportation Data

By | | Transportation, Useful Data
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About 5.0 million Americans relied on transit to get to work in 2022, according to American Community Survey data released by the Census Bureau last week. This is more than the 3.8 million people who took transit to work in 2021, but far less than the 7.8 million to used transit in 2019. People who used transit represented 3.1 percent of the workforce, up from 2.5 percent in 2021 but down from 5.0 percent in 2019.

There was about 6 percent more commuter traffic on the roads in 2022 than 2021, but still about 7 percent less than 2019. Photo by Tomi Knuutila.

Transit’s share is strongly skewed by New York City, which housed 2.5 percent of the nation’s workers but 34.6 percent of the nation’s transit commuters in 2022. Outside of New York City, only 2.1 percent of workers relied on transit to get to work in 2022. That’s just the city: the New York urban area had 45.4 percent of the nation’s transit commuters, and outside of that area only 1.8 percent of workers relied on transit. Continue reading →

A Polycentric Plan for Portland

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Portland’s TriMet transit agency is attempting to serve a 2020s urban area with a 1910 transit system, says a new report published by the Cascade Policy Institute. The agency’s infatuation with rail transit underscores this problem, as rail transit makes no sense for rapidly evolving regions with multiple economic centers. TriMet’s current route map works well only for downtown employees: while more than 40 percent of downtown workers took transit to work before the pandemic, less than 3.5 percent of workers in the rest of the urban area used transit.

The Cascade Policy Institute report proposes to replace TriMet’s current bus route map with a hub-and-spoke system using nine hubs. Yellow circles are the hubs. Blue lines represent non-stop buses from every hub to every other hub. Red lines represent local buses radiating away from each hub. The lines are not exact routes and only show the origins and (in the case of the red lines) approximate destinations of each route. Click image for a larger view.

All of these problems were made worse by the pandemic, which hit rail transit especially hard and which greatly reduced the importance of downtown Portland as an economic center. According to the latest report, Portland’s downtown has the second-worst recovery of any of the nation’s 50 largest downtowns, with less than 40 percent the economic activity of the pre-pandemic period. Yet TriMet still wants to build two new light-rail lines to downtown even though the last line it opened gained no net new riders for the transit system. Continue reading →

Transport and Economic Opportunity: 2020

By | | Transportation, Useful Data
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The nation’s fifty largest urban areas housed 82.5 million jobs in 2020, and auto drivers could reach 98 percent of them in an hour of travel. Transit riders, by comparison, could reach only 8 percent in an hour while bicycle riders could reach 7 percent, according to the University of Minnesota Accessibility Observatory.

The average resident of one of the nation’s fifty largest urban areas can reach 600,000 jobs in a 30-minute auto trip but only 85,000 jobs in a 50-minute transit trip and 92,000 jobs in a 50-minute bike ride.

I’ve previously cited the observatory’s 2019 data many times, but when writing yesterday’s post about travel speeds and productivity, I noticed that it has recently updated the data to 2020. The introduction says the data were collected before the pandemic so “the 2020 results may provide a useful baseline for evaluating the impact that COVID-19 had on access across America.” Continue reading →

Do Higher Speeds = Higher Incomes?

By | | Transportation
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A new study published by the National Bureau of Economic Research (ungated copy) finds that, whaddyknow, faster urban speeds are associated with richer countries. The study looked at urban travel speeds in 1,200 cities around the world to “find that improved urban mobility is an important and previously undocumented feature of economic development.”

Important yes, but hardly previously undocumented, as researchers such as Rémy Prud’Homme in France and Sam Staley and Adrian Moore in the United States have looked at the relationship between travel speeds and economic productivity. That has also been a consistent theme of the Antiplanner, especially when comparing the ability of fast cars vs. slow transit to help people out of poverty. Continue reading →

Biden’s Senior Rail Moment

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All during the debate over the 2021 infrastructure bill, President Biden kept talking about how much the country would benefit from high-speed rail even though there was no high-speed rail in his own version of the bill. He seems to be having another senior moment with his proposal to build a railroad from India to Europe via Saudi Arabia and United Arab Emirates.

The problem with this plan is there are 600 to 700 miles of Arabian Sea between India and United Arab Emirates. If you are shipping from India to Europe, once you transfer cargo from a train to a ship, you might as well run the ship all the way to Europe because it costs a lot less than transferring the cargo back to a train and running a train to Europe. Continue reading →

July 2023 Transit Ridership 65% of July 2019

By | | Transportation, Useful Data
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After reaching 70 percent of pre-pandemic numbers in June, transit ridership in July fell back to 65 percent of July 2019, according to data released last week by the Federal Transit Administration. Since July 2019 had 22 working days while July 2023 only had 20, this decline is not surprising.

Meanwhile, Americans drove 97.2 percent as many miles in July 2023 as in the same month of 2019, according to Federal Highway Administration data released last week as well. Amtrak’s monthly performance report indicates that the railroad carried 91.2 percent as many passenger-miles in July 2023 as July 2019, while the Transportation Security Administration says that 98.8 percent as many travelers passed through security in July as in 2019. Continue reading →

The Next Step in Driverless Cars

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Elon Musk took a drive in one of his cars using the latest version of its full driverless software. The current software uses 300,000 lines of code to tell the cars how to turn left, how to respond to pedestrians and other vehicles, and so forth. Instead of code, the latest beta software is based on neural networks, meaning the computer has learned and will learn how to deal with various situations based on past experiences.

“It’s all nets, baby,” he said during the drive, “nothing but nets.” As I understand it, this is the approach George Hotz was taking when he was working on an his autonomous car software. Hotz tried to train his software without going through all of California’s state licensing requirements, and when the state and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration tried to force him to comply with their regulations, he left the business. Continue reading →

Driver Shortage; Money Shortage; What to Do?

By | | Transportation
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Transit agencies are “scrambling” to find funding to keep operating in the face of permanently lower ridership. At the same time, driver shortages are hampering agencies’ ability to keep running buses and trains.

This driver was so overworked that she fell asleep at the wheel and crashed into a utility pole. Yet the bus she was driving was empty, so why were she and the bus there in the first place?

There’s an easy solution to both problems: reduce service. Why run buses and trains that are nearly empty? Ridership isn’t going to come back just because the transit vehicles are there. Cutting service to the levels agencies can afford to operate without further subsidies will also help alleviate driver shortages. Reducing service will in turn reduce greenhouse gas emissions and improve social equity because most of the taxes that would be needed to maintain service are regressive.

How to Pay for Amtrak’s Deficits

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Amtrak operations lost $1.2 billion last year without even counting depreciation and the other costs that Amtrak pretends aren’t real. (The $1.2 billion is calculated by adding $885 million “adjusted operating earnings” to the $329 million “state supported train revenue” that Amtrak pretends isn’t a subsidy.) A railroad in Japan provides an example of one way Amtrak could cover this deficit.

The Choshi Electric Railway hit some hard times in the 1990s, as did most Japanese businesses, due to the nation’s economic slump. The railway almost went out of business, but then it hit upon the idea of asking its customers and patrons to buy rice crackers. Today, it makes twice as much money on its rice crackers than on the rail line itself. Continue reading →

“Priming the Pump” = Subsidizing the Myth

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Maryland has decided it needs to “take a more active role in promoting development around transit stations,” according to an article in the Baltimore Banner. “It’s priming the pump to get these things moving,” says Secretary of Transportation Paul Wiedefeld, who used to be general manager of Washington Metro.

Maryland’s stack-’em-and-pack-’em vision for transit recovery. But what if nobody wants to live there?

As of May, Baltimore transit ridership was about 67 percent of pre-pandemic levels, slightly less than the national average. But most of that was due to buses, which were at 73 percent. Baltimore light rail was only 59 percent and Baltimore’s subway was just 58 percent. Wiedefeld hopes that promoting transit-oriented developments will boost ridership. Continue reading →