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Category Archives: Transportation

Slightly Higher Speed Rail

By | | Transportation
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New York University’s Marron Institute just released a report saying that Amtrak and commuter-rail lines could improve their service by making what the institute believes are low-cost changes to their operations. Specifically, the report suggests that railroads replace Diesel locomotives with electric, place platforms at all stops so passengers don’t have to go up and down stairs, and widen the doors on their cars so multiple passengers can board at one time. Based on this report, Bloomberg concludes that “America’s railroads are losing ground when it comes to infrastructural innovation, especially compared to other countries.”

Click image to download a 32.4-MB PDF of this 146-page report.

Because wider doors and level platforms would allow people to board more quickly and electric locomotives accelerate faster than Diesels, the report estimates that making these changes would save an average of 2 minutes per commuter stop and 4 minutes per intercity rail stop. This means that Amtrak’s trains between, for example, Seattle and Portland, which have six intermediate stops, could go the distance in 24 fewer minutes. Continue reading →

They Don’t Care

By | | Transportation
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Minnesota legislators are not only considering shutting down the Northstar commuter train, they are raging at the Metropolitan Council, which is the Twin Cities’ regional planning agency which also runs its transit agency, for its light-rail cost overruns. At issue is the Southwest light-rail line, which when Metro first asked the federal government for funding was supposed to cost $1.25 billion but now, according to a state legislative audit, is costing $2.86 billion.

Twin Cities light rail: overbudget and underperforming. Photo by Central Corridor.

Even after adjusting for inflation, that’s roughly a 100 percent cost overrun. By the time the federal government agreed to share half the costs, the projected cost had risen to $2 billion. From that point on, the state or local government is responsible for all cost overruns, so what they thought was going to cost state and local taxpayers $1 billion is ending up costing them almost $2 billion. Continue reading →

“Independent” Journalists Depend on Bureaucrats

By | | News commentary, Transportation
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I remember when journalists tried to get both sides of a story. Now they are content to get the side of the poor, beleaguered bureaucrats and ignore the taxpayers who have to fund them. Case in point: a recent article in the “independent” Texas Tribune reads more like a transit agency press release than a news article.

An expensive station on the Dallas light-rail line. Photo by Mbrstooge.

The article reports on a bill in the state legislature that would redirect 25 percent of sales tax funds that are now going to transit to “general mobility” programs instead. Such programs could go for bike paths, new traffic signals, roads, and even transit. According to the lead paragraphs in the “news” article, this bill “could imperil the future of public transportation” by “sap[ping] hundreds of millions of dollars” from transit agencies. Continue reading →

Transit Carries 80.1% of 2019 Riders in February

By | | Transportation, Useful Data
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America’s public transit systems carried 80.1 percent as many riders in February 2025 as in the same month of 2019, according to data released by the Federal Transit Administration on Friday. This is the first month since the pandemic that ridership exceeded 80 percent of pre-pandemic riders.

Highway data are not yet available but will be reported here soon.

It might seem a bit picky to point it out, but the pandemic didn’t begin to have an effect on transportation until March, 2020, so February numbers should really be compared with February 2020. In that case, transit carried only 77.4 percent of pre-pandemic numbers in February 2025 (after adjusting for the fact that February had 29 days in 2020). The lines in the chart, however, are based on 2019. Continue reading →

Amtrak, Air Travel Each Grow 8 Percent

By | | Transportation
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Amtrak and the airlines each carried about 8 percent more passengers in February 2025 as the same month in 2019. According to Amtrak’s monthly performance report, the state-owned railroad carried 8.2 percent more passenger-miles, while Transportation Security Administration boarding data indicate that airlines carried 8.1 percent more passengers.

Transit and highway data are not yet available but will be reported here soon.

Airline passenger-mile data for February won’t be available for several more weeks. However, as of December, the latest month for which data are available, domestic air passenger-miles were 5.1 percent greater than in December 2019. Domestic airlines carried Americans 108 times as many passenger-miles as Amtrak in December 2024. Continue reading →

Maine Needs Less Transit, Not More

By | | Transportation
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Transit agencies and supporters arrogantly believe that we should be dependent on them, thus justifying their gigantic subsidies, rather than being dependent on (meaning liberated by) automobiles. A case in point is the Maine Public Transit Advisory Council (PTAC), whose latest report claims that Maine transit is falling 89 percent short of meeting transit “needs.”

Click image to download a 5.8-MB PDF of this 66-page report.

The report counts “need” by estimating the number of trips that zero-car households would have taken if they had cars, based on how many trips people who have cars take per day, and assuming that all of those trips would be taken by mass transit. This completely ignores such facts as people who don’t have cars often don’t have the same mobility needs as people who do and they meet what needs they do have with other ways of travel that usually don’t involve mass transit. Continue reading →

Does Longmont Really Need a Train?

By | | Transportation
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When Denver’s Regional Transit District proposed a tax increase to build six new rail lines in 2004, it promised it would build the lines without cost overruns by 2014. But soon after the election, it “discovered” that the lines would cost far more than projected — ultimately, about 67 percent more. With the money it had available, it wouldn’t be able to finish all of the lines before 2042.

This commuter train in Westminster, Colorado goes 6 miles to downtown Denver. Longmont wants RTD to extend the train another 35 miles even though RTD’s analysis shows few people will ride it. Photo by Xnatedawgx.

Further analysis by RTD found that most of the lines would end up costing taxpayers about $6 to $10 per ride, but one line, which went northwest of Denver to Longmont, was extra expensive and projected to carry so few passengers that it would cost more than $60 per rider. RTD decided to defer that line and build the rest. Continue reading →

Fix the Subways in Hours?

By | | News commentary, Transportation
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Donald Trump famously said he could end the war in Ukraine in 24 hours, yet the war is still raging more than two months after he took office. In the same way, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy recently said that New York City could solve all of the problems with its subway system “in hours, not days” (he generously allowed the city 36 hours instead of just 24) if it just had the will to do so. Note that Trump promised to stop the war himself while Duffy is demanding that someone else save the subways.

Photo by EmperorOfNYC.

This is the level of naïveté that we’ve come to expect from the Trump administration. New York City subways have problems with fare evasion, homelessness, drugs, property crime, vandalism, and violent crime that stretch across 472 stations, 850 miles of track, and nearly 6,800 subway cars. The idea that it could solve all of these problems by simply flooding the system with police for 36 hours is so ludicrous it isn’t even funny. Continue reading →

American Mobility in 2024

By | | Transportation, Useful Data
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Using recent Department of Transportation data, I estimate that the average American traveled close to 18,000 miles in 2024. This is down from nearly 20,000 miles before the pandemic, a change that I’ll go into below.

American Airlines carried Americans more passenger-miles than any other airline in 2024. Photo by N509FZ.

Last week, the Bureau of Transportation Statistics released December air travel data indicating that the domestic flights carried people 800 billion passenger-miles in 2024. Since the Census Bureau’s latest population estimates say that the U.S. had 340.1 million people in 2024, that’s an average of 2,350 miles per person. Continue reading →

January Driving Up 1.2% from 2019

By | | Transportation, Useful Data
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Americans drove 1.2 percent more miles in January of 2025 than the same month in 2019, according to data released by the Federal Highway Administration yesterday. These data were posted less than a week after the agency released December traffic volume data, which for some reason were later than usual.

The data show that rural driving was up by 4.1 percent while urban driving was up by 0.1 percent. While driving on urban interstates and collector and local streets was up, driving on major urban arterials other than interstates was down. Some of this difference may be due to the way the Federal Highway Administration collects its data, which concentrates more on interstates and other arterials than on local streets. In other words, the driving numbers on local streets may be overestimated. Continue reading →