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Category Archives: Transportation

Charlotte Shows Why Transit Is a Waste

By | | Transportation
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I suspect it has begun to dawn on transit agency officials that the Trump administration is not going to shovel money their way as the Biden administration did. That means many of the larger agencies are going to have to put some of their rail plans on the shelf for at least four years or until a more sympathetic administration takes power. Unfortunately, I doubt that many will seriously consider altering their long-term dreams of building rail lines all over whatever urban areas they serve.

Light-rail train in Charlotte. Photo by James Willamor.

A case in point is the Charlotte Area Transit System (CATS), whose ridership (as of December) is still less than two-thirds what it was before the pandemic. Despite this, CATS has grandiose plans for its future. Central to those plans are the development and operation of a 25-mile Red Line commuter train from downtown Charlotte to the suburb of Mount Mourne. This line is such a loser that the Federal Transit Administration refused to fund it back in 2011, so CATS tried and failed to get local communities to find half while the state would fund the other half. Continue reading →

Twin Cities Metro Transit Gets Real

By | | Transportation
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The Antiplanner called Minnesota’s Northstar commuter train a “flop” in 2016. It took the pandemic to do it, but it looks like the state has finally agreed and is now considering plans to shut the line down.

Minnesota’s commuter train was a failure before the pandemic and an even bigger failure after. Photo by Jerry Huddleston.

The line, which cost more than $300 million to start up, was supposed to carry 4,100 riders per weekday, which seems absurdly small for the price. Yet it peaked in 2017 at just 2,800 riders and fell to 2,700 riders in 2019. Since the pandemic, it hasn’t recovered to more than about a sixth of that. The state estimates that the costs of running this service would fall from $12 million a year to $2 million a year if it replaced the trains with buses. In 2023, fares covered less than $325,000 of that $12 million in operating costs. Continue reading →

Families and Transportation

By | | Transportation
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On his second day in office, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy directed federal transportation agencies to “give preference to communities with marriage and birth rates higher than the national average,” to which my friend Bob Poole responded with a profound “huh?” Matthew Yglesias, meanwhile, fretted that this policy could backfire, erroneously claiming that directing funding to low-density communities with higher birth rates would make housing in such communities even more expensive, which would reduce birthrates.

Darker colors show higher fertility rates measured in births per thousand women. Source: CDC. Click image for a larger view.

As I noted in an article published by the Institute for Family Studies, it may seem strange for the Department of Transportation to get involved in family policy, but in fact it already has been involved in such policy for many years through the Federal Transit Administration. That agency’s transit capital grant program (which was specifically cited in Duffy’s memo) favors grants to communities that provide “transit-supportive land use,” meaning zoning and subsidies favoring high-density housing. Continue reading →

December Transit 77.3% of Pre-Pandemic Ridership

By | | Transportation, Useful Data
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Transit carried 77.3 percent as many riders in December of 2024 as the same month in 2019, according to preliminary data released late last week by the Federal Transit Administration. That’s down from 78.4 percent in November. Ridership for calendar year 2024 ended up being 76.5 percent of 2019.

Highway data will be added as soon as it is available. For a discussion of Amtrak and airline data, see this post from last week.

Because monthly numbers are preliminary and FTA updates prior months with each new release, I went through and corrected transit numbers for previous months in the above chart. I counted only 96.55 percent of February 2024 riders as that month had one more day than February 2019. As corrected, transit reached a peak, relative to pre-pandemic levels, of 78.7 percent in October, and dropped in both November and December. Continue reading →

The $346 Million Business Killer

By | | City planning, Transportation
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San Francisco’s Van Ness Avenue is full of vacant storefronts, and city officials are blaming past city policies discouraging chain stores in the area. In order to fill those vacancies, city officials have promised to speed any permitting applications for new stores, chain or otherwise.

Google street view shows that 1700 Van Ness Avenue was occupied by a chain store, Staples, in 2013. Note that there is parking the entire length of Van Ness on both sides of the street plus a nice tree-filled center strip.

That’s nice of them, but at least one of the stores that is now vacant used to be a chain store. The Staples at 1700 Van Ness was open in May 2022 but closed by December. Continue reading →

Amtrak Does Well in December; Airlines Do Better

By | | Transportation
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Amtrak carried 7 percent more passenger-miles in December of 2024 than in the same month of 2019, according to its monthly performance report issued earlier this week. The airlines, meanwhile, carried 10 percent more passengers in December of 2024 than 2019, according to TSA passenger counts.

Transit and highway data will be added as soon as it is available.

The airlines, of course, carried a lot more passengers than Amtrak. Amtrak carried about 3.0 million passengers in December while the airlines carried 66 million. The difference in passenger-miles is even greater. While airline passenger-mile data is not yet available for December, the average Amtrak trip is about 200 miles long while the average domestic airline trip is 950 miles, which means domestic airlines carry about 100 times as many passenger-miles as Amtrak. When international airline trips are included, the difference is even greater. Continue reading →

Cordon Pricing Makes New York Congestion Worse

By | | Transportation
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Early reports claim that New York City’s so-called congestion pricing program is a great success, reducing the number of vehicles driving into lower Manhattan by 5 to 6 percent. However, because it really isn’t congestion pricing — that is, it doesn’t price roads by how much congestion there is but just charges people for crossing a line — it is likely that traffic will bounce back just as it did when London imposed a similar cordon pricing scheme.

Manhattan traffic before cordon pricing. Photo by Rachel Maddow, yes, that Rachel Maddow.

Worse, the traffic monitors at INRIX have found that cordon pricing effectively exported congestion out of lower Manhattan and into other parts of the New York urban area. The result has been a net overall slowdown of traffic. The region’s travel speeds were 3 percent slower during morning rush hour and 4 percent slower in the afternoon. People working downtown benefitted from the program; everyone else was hurt. Continue reading →

Will Trump’s Electric Vehicle Order Kill EVs?

By | | News commentary, Transportation
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One of the executive orders President Trump signed on Monday calls for ending federal subsidies to and preferences for electric vehicles. With numerous media reports that EV sales were already tanking, some think that Trump’s order will kill the market for electric vehicles. It won’t, but it will shift things around.

A Tesla Model S at a Supercharger station in Germany. Photo by Avda.

Curiously, Trump’s order is supported by Elon Musk. He claims he simply opposes all subsidies, but some think that he hopes an end to subsidies will benefit Tesla by discouraging other automakers from developing new electric vehicles. But there is a hidden cost to this order that could severely impact Tesla’s bottom line. Continue reading →

TriMet’s Definition of High-Tech

By | | Transportation
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Portland’s transit agency, TriMet, is introducing new “technologically advanced” light-rail trains to its system. Yet most of these “technological advancements” seem pretty lame to me. Among other things, the new cars have “Better temperature control for heating to keep trains warm in cold weather.” Is this an admission that past light-rail cars from the same builder were too hot in summer and too cold in winter?

The new cars also carry 168 people. That’s hardly a major “technological advance” over the previous cars, which carried 172 people. However, TriMet’s original light-rail cars, which the new ones will be replacing, only carried 164 people. They achieved this incredible technological advance by making the new cars four feet longer. Portland has the shortest city blocks in the country, and since light-rail trains can’t be longer than a city block, TriMet operates the lowest-capacity light-rail system in the country, yet it still calls its light rail “high capacity transit.” Continue reading →

November 2024 Transportation Recovery

By | | Transportation, Useful Data
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Americans drove 2.2 percent more miles, flew 4.7 percent more trips, and took Amtrak 6.2 percent more passenger-miles in November 2024 than the same month before the pandemic, according to data recently released by federal agencies. Transit ridership, however, still lagged almost 22 percent behind pre-pandemic numbers.

For once, the Federal Highway Administration, Federal Transit Administration, and Amtrak all released their monthly data reports at about the same time, late last week. TSA passenger counts are available only a day or two after each day, but I generally wait for data from other agencies before posting the airline data. Continue reading →