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Should New York Rebuild the Subways?

By | | News commentary, Transportation, Urban areas
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After Hurricane Katrina, some people argued that we shouldn’t rebuild New Orleans, not simply because it was below sea level but because the city was economically and politically dysfunctional. The same argument could be made for the New York City subway system, which was so heavily damaged by Sandy that repairing it could cost “tens of billions of dollars.”

You could always swim to work.

It’s not just the subways, of course: the entire transit system has been damaged. But in the suburbs, at least, buses on streets can easily substitute for rail.

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Playing the Numbers Game

By | | Regional planning, Transportation, Urban areas
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Planners for Metro, Portland’s regional planning agency, are playing an interesting game. They did a travel survey in 1994, when gas prices were low and the economy was booming. Then they did another survey in 2011, when gas prices were high and the economy was in recession. They found that Portland travelers in 2011 are more likely to bicycle or ride transit and less likely to drive. Naturally, they credit their land-use policies with the change.

The Oregonian is rightly skeptical of the “spin” Metro planners are putting on the numbers. There are several reasons justifying such skepticism.

First, the sample size was small–4,800 people for a region of well over a million people. Second, the numbers do not tally well with the results of the Census Bureau’s American Community survey. The Metro survey found that 81 percent of Portland-area commuters rode in cars and 11 percent took transit to work in 2011. The Census Bureau, however, found that more than 84 percent drove and only 8 percent took transit in 2008. Since the census data are based on a larger sample–more than 25,000 households in Oregon, of which about a third are from the Portland area–it is probably more reliable.

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Private Transit in Detroit

By | | Transportation
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The Detroit Bus Company, a private operator, is offering $5 door-to-door service in inner Detroit. So far, the service only operated from 6:00 pm to 2:00 am on Fridays and Saturday nights, but if this is successful, it will no doubt expand.

Service area for Detroit Bus’ door-to-door operation.
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Within a certain operating area, the company will pick you up at your door in a biodiesel-fueled bus and take you where you want to go. Outside this operating area, the company has some specific stops it will make.

“It’s time this city had a transit system to be proud of,” says the company. The Antiplanner agrees and sends best wishes to this new venture.

Will They Ever Learn?

By | | Transportation
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Arizona Shuttle offers 19 buses a day between Tucson and Phoenix. Greyhound offers at least eight. But that’s not good enough for some people, so the state is spending $6.3 million studying the idea of running passenger trains between the two cities.

The state’s first guess is that the start-up cost would be a mere $1 billion. Phoenix and Tucson are about the same distance from one another as San Diego and Los Angeles, where Amtrak runs something like 11 trains per day. Of course, those trains run just 35 percent full despite the fact that they serve urban areas whose combined populations are four times greater than Phoenix and Tucson.

To make the case for rail, the state is spreading scare stories about how bad congestion will be in 2050. Of course, trains won’t do anything about that congestion, since so few people will ride them. Given that most cars on the road in 2050 are likely to be driving themselves, congestion will probably be a lot less than today even if the region’s population doubles, as planners forecast.
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Private Buses or Public Boondoggles

By | | Transportation
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A team of graphics artists has attempted to map the private buses that carry workers from San Francisco to Silicon Valley, reports the Wall Street Journal. At least six employers–Apple, ebay, Electronic Arts, Facebook, Google, and Yahoo–offer such services, but they are very secretive about where they go and how many people they carry.

Click image for a larger view.

The artists who developed the map estimate that these private buses carry about a third as many people as CalTrains commuter trains between San Francisco and San Jose. CalTrains cost taxpayers more than $110 million a year, but Silicon Valley firms obviously don’t believe they adequately serve their employees, probably because the rails don’t go near their campuses. Google alone has more than 100 buses in its fleet, about as many as serve the entire fixed-route system in the city of Stockton.

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“Just One-Seventh of Capacity”

By | | News commentary, Transportation
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The San Francisco Chronicle is aghast that new 140-seat ferry boats between South San Francisco and Oakland/Alameda are filling an average of just 20 of their seats (scroll down to “On the line”). The service, which cost $42 million to start up, was expensive enough at projected ridership rates, but actual ridership so far is just a third of those projections. Even before such low ridership was known, the paper opined that the ferry service may not be “prudent.”

It’s too bad Bay Area papers don’t put their analytical skills to work on other transit systems. If the ferries are just one-seventh (14.3 percent) full, how full are other transit lines?

According to the 2010 National Transit Database (summary Excel file here), San Jose’s light-rail line is pathetic at 11.1 percent (one-ninth full). San Francisco Muni’s light rail is not much better at 11.6 percent. By comparison, the BART system is doing relatively well, operating at a healthy (?) 15.3 percent of capacity.

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More on the European Transport Myth

By | | Transportation
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While many people believe that European travel modes are quite different from those of the United States, a close look at the data reveals two main points. First, Europeans travel a lot less than Americans: including flying, the average American travels about 85 percent more miles per year than the average Western European. Second, the percentage shares of various forms of travel are about the same except that Europeans travel a little more by rail and a little less by auto.

But what about trends? Is Europe becoming more like the U.S., with increasing overall mobility, rail’s share declining, and auto’s share increasing? Or have Europe’s high-speed rail programs and urban transit policies led to a resurgence of rail travel?

We can answer these questions based on three sources of data. First, in 2004 the European Union published a report titled Key Facts and Figures About the European Union and included transportation data, broken down by air, rail, bus, trams & metros, and autos, in part 3. The numbers were mode shares for 1980 and 2000.

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Renationalization or True Privatization?

By | | Transportation
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United Kingdom’s Department for Transportation is in trouble over a plan to transfer the franchise to run passenger trains over the London-Glasgow West Coast route from Virgin Trains (which is 49 percent owned by Stagecoach) to rival First Group. After fifteen years, Virgin Trains’ franchise is set to expire in December, and when the government put a new franchise up for bid, First Group had the low bid (meaning it asked for the least subsidies).

A Virgin Train. Photo by Andrew Butcher.

Virgin argued that having the low bid should not be the only factor in selecting a winner, and hired Europa Partners to evaluate the bidding process. The consultant’s report (a full version of which doesn’t seem to be available on line) argued that selecting the low bidder carried a high risk that the operator would go bankrupt, thus disrupting rail service.

The government awarded the contract to First Group anyway, leading Virgin to sue. Thanks in part to a timely appeal from Virgin’s Richard Branson to Prime Minister David Cameron, the government withdrew its award the night before it was supposed to defend it in court, saying that it had found irregularities in the bidding process, just as Europa had indicated. Now the government may be on the hook for millions of pounds to First Group, which says the reversal injured it and that its share value fell by 240 million pounds after the government withdrew the contract.

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The European Transport Myth

By | | Transportation
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An article in Transport Reviews compares U.S. and European transit usage and argues that Europeans use transit more because they have better transit service, low fares, multi-modal integration, high taxes and restrictions on driving, and land-use policies that promote compact, mixed-use developments–all things that American planners want to do here. One obvious problem with the paper is that it doesn’t quantitatively assess how much each of those factors actually contributes to transit usage. If high fuel taxes are responsible for 95 percent of the difference, then efforts to promote transit-oriented development or multi-modal integration in American cities are likely to be a big waste.

A more subtle problem with the paper is that it measures transit usage in trips, not passenger miles. This leads to a bias in favor of shorter trips: Netherlanders, the Transport Reviews article says, take 26 percent of their trips by bicycle, but they certainly don’t cycle for 26 percent of their passenger miles. Yet longer trips are actually more valuable than shorter ones because they can reach more destinations: a two-mile trip can access four times as much land as a one-mile trip.

When measured in terms of passenger miles, instead of trips, European transit mobility looks a lot less impressive. Eurostat measures four kinds of personal mobility by country: autos, buses, intercity trains, and metros/trams. The agency’s latest report that shows passenger kilometers by country has data through 2006. The table below compares these numbers (converted to passenger miles and divided by 2006 populations) with similar data for the United States.

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