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Category Archives: Transportation

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 →

Transportation Subsidies in 2022

By | | Transportation
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Public transportation received $69 billion in subsidies in 2022, compared with $90 billion in subsidies to highways and $20 billion to airlines, according to data released by the Bureau of Transportation Statistics last week. These data include all government revenues and expenditures on these modes of travel, with the revenues broken out by “user-based” and non-user-based (meaning taxes or deficit spending).

Government Revenues and Expenses by Mode
(millions of dollars except passenger-miles in millions and Subsidies/PM in dollars)

ModeRevenueExpenditureNetPassenger-MilesSubsidy/PM
Transit11,18880,527-69,33830,082$2.300
Highways161,299251,777-90,4784,708,2700.019
Air37,66358,348-20,685992,2010.021
Amtrak2,5065,975-3,4704,8860.710

While these results are two years old, it takes awhile for data from many different sources to percolate through Department of Transportation channels. Since those sources include all state and local governments, collecting and verifying the data can be time consuming. Continue reading →

Transit Executives Rake in the Dough

By | | Transportation
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The news from California this week is that Michael Hursh, the CEO of the Alameda-Contra Costa Transit District (AC Transit), is resigning, but the agency will continue to pay him through September as a “senior advisor.” The real news is how much he was paid: according to Transparent California, in 2022 he collected $556,045.

Former AC Transit CEO Michael Hursh and current AC Transit board member Sarah Syed. Photos by AC Transit.

Transit agencies have historically paid their executives well, but $556,000 seems like a lot even for these agencies. So I decided to do a quick survey of transit agency executive pay. First, Hursh’s resignation is worth examining in a little more detail. Continue reading →

St. Louis Gates Its Light-Rail Stations

By | | Transportation
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Light rail suffers the highest crime rates of any mode of transit and this is largely due to the honor system of fare payment. St. Louis Metro is addressing this by adding gates to its light-rail stations. Unlike most cities, St. Louis can do this because its light-rail system is entirely separated from streets and sidewalks.

Gates have been installed in four of the region’s 38 light-rail stations, but Metro hasn’t yet installed fare systems. Until it does, it has security officers standing at each gate to check that customers have paid their fares before they are allowed to go on the platform. Metro expects to have gates at all 38 stations installed by January 2026, but hasn’t said how soon it will have fare payment systems installed. Continue reading →

Urban Wishful Thinking Index

By | | Transportation
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Something called the Oliver Wyman Forum has worked with the University of California, Berkeley to publish an annual “urban mobility readiness index.” This is supposed to be a measure of how ready cities are for the coming “mobility revolution.” Unfortunately, it is more a measure of how ready cities are for the nineteenth-century’s mobility revolution.

Click image to read this report.

The latest index ranks San Francisco as the best in the world when in fact it is one of the least mobile cities and urban areas in the nation. Dallas and Houston, two of the most mobile urban areas in America, are ranked 34 and 35 out of 70 major cities. Considering that Moscow, one of the most mobility-repressed cities in the world, is ranked not far below Houston, this index isn’t providing much help regarding urban mobility. Continue reading →

Highways, Amtrak, Airlines Set Records in 2024

By | | Transportation
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Americans drove 2.8 percent more miles in October 2024 than the same month before the pandemic, according to data released by the Federal Highway Administration last Friday. Both urban and rural driving were greater in October 2024 than October 2019.

Meanwhile, Amtrak brags that it carried an all-time record number of passengers in its fiscal year 2024 (which ended September 30). In that year, it carried 32.8 million riders and 6.54 billion passenger-miles. That is only a small fraction of the number carried by passenger trains when they were private, as ridership peaked at 1.2 billion in 1920 and passenger-miles peaked at 89 billion in 1944. But 2024 was a record year since Amtrak began in 1971. Continue reading →

Transit Carries 77% of Pre-Covid Riders in October

By | | Transportation, Useful Data
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The nation’s public transit systems carried 77.3 percent as many riders in October 2024 as in the same month of 2019, according to data released yesterday by the Federal Transit Administration. This is the highest level transit has achieved since the beginning of the pandemic.

The increase is likely due to more people returning to downtown jobs instead of working remotely. While President Biden seems content to let many federal employees work at home, Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy want to order them to return to work, which will create an interesting situation as the new administration takes office in January. Musk and Ramaswamy have hinted that their real goal is to get many federal employees to quit, thus relieving the president of the necessity of firing them to achieve the goal of reducing the federal budget by $2 trillion. Continue reading →

October Amtrak & Airline Riders Up 6% from 2019

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Amtrak carried 6.2 percent more riders and almost 8 percent more passenger-miles in October of 2024 than the same month before the pandemic, according to the entity’s latest monthly performance report. The airlines, meanwhile, carried 5.9 percent more passengers, according to TSA passenger counts.

October transit and highway data will be posted here when it is released by the Department of Transportation.

Although growth in air travel did not quite equal growth in rail travel, airlines still carried 25 times as many passengers and far more passenger-miles than Amtrak. While October airline passenger-miles won’t be available for a month or so, in August domestic airlines carried 110 times as many passenger-miles as Amtrak. When international air travel is included, airlines carried 226 times as many passenger-miles as Amtrak. Continue reading →

Amtrak Ridership Up in September

By | | Transportation
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Amtrak carried 4.8 percent more riders and 3.5 percent more passenger-miles in September 2024 than in the same month of 2019, according to the September monthly performance report that it posted yesterday. For Amtrak’s fiscal year, which ended September 30, it carried 0.8 percent more riders and 0.9 percent more passenger-miles than in F.Y. 2019.

Amtrak earned $2.5 billion in ticket revenues and food & beverage sales in F.Y. 2024. That works out to about 38.4¢ per passenger-mile. For comparison, commercial airline fares averaged 20.1¢ per passenger-mile in 2023. Continue reading →

SF Muni Tries Washington Monument Strategy

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Like many transit agencies, San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency (Muni) is facing a big budget deficit, and its response is to employ the Washington Monument Strategy. For those who don’t know, back in 1969 President Nixon tried to reduce the National Park Service’s budget and the Park Service responded by shutting down the Washington Monument. Tourists who wanted to ride the elevator to the top of the monument were directed to the senate and house office buildings and told to ask their elected representatives to restore the agency’s budget. Congress restored the funding, but Nixon fired the Park Service director who thought up the strategy a few years later.

Photo by Pi.1415926535.

We may need to rename this the Cable Car Strategy, as Muni is proposing to reduce its deficit by suspending service on the cable car routes as well as some streetcar routes that are mainly used by tourists. While it’s true that cable car ridership has been slow to recover from the pandemic — as of September, it was less than 69 percent of 2019 numbers — it’s also true that cable cars are the symbol of the city and an important tourist attraction. Considering all the bad publicity San Francisco has received lately, its commercial interests don’t want to do anything to depress tourism still further. Continue reading →