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Category Archives: Transportation

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Transit’s Growth, Decline, and Pending Demise

By | | Transportation
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Who said the following? “The basic objective of our Nation’s transportation system must be to assure the availability of the fast, safe, and economical transportation services needed in a growing and changing economy. . . . This basic objective can and must be achieved primarily by continued reliance on unsubsidized privately owned facilities, operating under the incentives of private profit and the checks of competition to the maximum extent practicable. . . . This means . . . equality of opportunity for all forms of transportation and their users and undue preference to none. It means greater reliance on the forces of competition and less reliance on the restraints of regulation. And it means that, to the extent possible, the users of transportation services should bear the full costs of the services they use, whether those services are provided privately or publicly.”

Click image to go to Bookfinder.com to find the lowest current price for this book.

  1. Ronald Reagan;
  2. Milton Friedman;
  3. Ayn Rand; or
  4. The Antiplanner?

In fact, the answer is 5. John F. Kennedy. Or at least this statement was contained in Kennedy’s April 2, 1962 message to Congress on having an “efficient transportation system.” This means it was probably written by staffers in the Department of Commerce, as the Department of Transportation did not yet exist. Whoever wrote it was at least willing to talk the talk of free markets and fiscal conservatism. Continue reading →

FRA Dreams Up Amtrak Schemes

By | | Transportation
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Ever been in Billings, Montana and wanted to go to El Paso? Or have you been in New York and wanted to spend 36 hours traveling to Dallas? How about going from Minneapolis to Denver via Pierre, South Dakota? Or Detroit to New Orleans? These are just some of the 15 new long-distance trains that the Federal Railroad Administration has tentatively proposed to add to Amtrak’s network.

Click image for a larger view. Click here to download the full draft proposal that was released last week.

Some of the proposals would restore Amtrak routes that have been discontinued, including trains from Salt Lake City to Seattle, Salt Lake City to Los Angeles, Chicago to Florida, and Chicago to Seattle on the former Northern Pacific route through southern Montana. Other proposals would restore trains that were discontinued even before Amtrak, such as New York to New Orleans via Chattanooga and Montgomery, which would be in addition to Amtrak’s current New York-New Orleans route via Charlotte and Birmingham. Continue reading →

December Driving 96.9% of 2019

By | | Transportation, Useful Data
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U.S. residents drove 96.88 percent as many miles in December of 2023 as in the same month in 2019, according to estimates released yesterday by the Federal Highway Administration. Though this is down from 104.3 percent in November, driving has been hovering around 100 percent of 2019 levels all year.

In fact, the estimates indicate, Americans drove 100.1 percent as many miles in 2023 as they did in 2019 and 102.0 percent as many miles in 2023 as in 2022. I would judge that driving has completely recovered from the pandemic and is now growing at pre-pandemic levels. Decreases in rush-hour driving due to remote work are made up for by increases in non-rush-hour driving by remote workers running errands, going out for coffee, or attending meetings as well as by people moving from urban to rural areas or from some states to others. Continue reading →

Transit Carried 73.7% in December

By | | Transportation, Useful Data
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Transit carried 73.7 percent as many riders in December 2023 as the same month in 2019, according to data released by the Federal Transit Administration yesterday. As I predicted last month, this was a slight decline from the 74.9 percent reported for November because November had one more business day in 2023 than 2019 while December had one fewer.

Amtrak ridership, as a share of 2019 levels, declined from 103.1 percent in November to 93.6 percent in December according to Amtrak’s monthly performance report released last week. This may suggest that holiday travelers are still wary of taking trains. It also raises questions about why Amtrak numbers have been bouncing up and down so much over the past several months. Air travel has not been so bouncy: according to TSA passenger counts, air travel grew from 101.2 of 2019 levels in November to 103.1 percent in December. Continue reading →

Do More Subsidies Increase Efficiency?

By | | Transportation
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Streetsblog posted an article yesterday that quotes and attempts to refute the Antiplanner by claiming that increasing subsidies to transit agencies actually makes them more efficient. The article, written by former Strong Towns staffer Kea Wilson, misinterprets both the Antiplanner’s quote and the meaning of efficiency.

Does reducing the share of transit costs that are covered by farebox revenues increase efficiency? Photo by AgentAkit.

Transit systems get more efficient when they are more heavily subsidized, Wilson asserts. How can this be true? Efficiency is economically defined as “when all goods and factors of production in an economy are distributed or allocated to their most valuable uses and waste is eliminated or minimized.” Before the pandemic, transit agencies were typically spending four times as much money moving someone a passenger-mile as automobiles. That sounds pretty inefficient to me and increasing subsidies even more is likely to be even more inefficient. Continue reading →

The Benefits of Congestion Relief

By | | Transportation
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Data published by the University of Minnesota Accessibility Observatory a few months ago reveals some of the benefits of congestion relief that resulted from the COVID pandemic. I’ve used 2019 data in the past to show that residents of U.S. urban areas can reach far more jobs in a 20-minute auto drive than a 60-minute transit trip. The latest data for 2021 reveal that the number of jobs reachable by transit or bicycle was about 9 percent greater in 2021 than 2019, but the number reachable by a 20-minute auto drive was 66 percent greater.

On average, over 50 urban areas and for trips of 10 to 60 minutes, auto users were able to reach 48 percent more jobs in 2021 than in 2019. Solid lines show 2021 and dotted lines show 2019.

These numbers are the average of the nation’s 50 largest urban areas, but for some the increased access caused by less traffic was much greater. In a 20-minute auto drive, residents of Atlanta, Boston, Los Angeles, San Francisco, San Jose, and Washington could reach more than twice as many jobs in 2021 than in 2019. Of course, jobs are only one possible set of destinations that became more accessible; other social and economic opportunities also became equally more accessible. Continue reading →

November Driving 1.2% More Than in 2019

By | | Transportation
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Americans drove 1.2 percent more miles in November of 2023 than in the same month in 2019, according to data released by the Federal Highway Administration yesterday. Rural driving was 6 percent greater than in 2019, while urban driving was 0.9 percent less. This may partially be due to a movement of people from urban to rural areas.

For a discussion of airline, Amtrak, and transit numbers, see the post from earlier this week.

A few states are still seeing major shortfalls in driving. West Virginia is 31 percent below 2019; California is down 21 percent; and the District of Columbia remains 29 percent less than in 2019. Missouri and Washington are also below 2019 levels, but only by 5 to 6 percent. Continue reading →

Another Rail Cost Overrun

By | | Transportation
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Metro Transit has raised the projected cost of the Twin Cities’ Southwest light-rail line to $2.86 billion, or $197 million per mile for the 14.5 mile line. The news stories say this is up from $2.0 billion, but the original projected cost was $1.25 billion for 15.8 miles or less than $80 million a mile (which is still outrageous for an inflexible, low-capacity system).

Light-rail trains pass through a half-empty downtown Minneapolis. Photo by Andrew Ciscel.

Considering that downtown Minneapolis is ranked as having the third-slowest recovery of the nation’s 56 largest urban areas, and Twin Cities light rail carried only 52 percent of pre-pandemic riders in November, this would be a good time for the region to scrap the project. As I’ve suggested before, it would cost a lot less to turn it into a rapid bus route than to complete the rail project. Continue reading →

Transit Carried 74.9% of 2019 Riders in November

By | | Transportation, Useful Data
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America’s transit systems carried nearly 75 percent as many riders in November 2023 as the same month in 2019, according to data released on Friday by the Federal Transit Administration. This is the most riders transit has attracted, as a share of pre-pandemic levels, since the pandemic began in March 2020.

Transit’s failure to carry even three-fourths of its pre-pandemic passengers stands in contrast to Amtrak, which carried 3.1 percent more passenger-miles in November 2023 than 2019, and the airlines, which carried 4.3 percent more riders in November than in 2019. Release of airline passenger-mile data tends to be more than a month later than passenger numbers, but in September domestic air routes carried 6.0 percent more passenger-miles than the same month in 2019. November highway data are not yet available but an update will be posted here when they are. Continue reading →

BRT “Faster and Cheaper” Than Rail

By | | Transportation
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The World Bank is promoting bus-rapid transit as “green” and “sustainable transportation” that is “faster and cheaper to build than Metros,” meaning heavy rail. When operated with all-electric buses, says the agency, BRT will “cut life-threatening air pollutants” as well as greenhouse gas emissions.

A bus-rapid transit station in Dakar, Senegal. Photo courtesy of CETUD.

The World Bank is absolutely correct about the faster and cheaper part. However, it is overpromising when it comes to taking cars off the road. “Developing country cities that have not yet fully developed their land use and transportation infrastructure around cars can leapfrog car-centered culture and prioritize efficient, low-carbon urban transport that focuses on people rather than vehicles,” says a World Bank official. This is pure rhetoric that consigns developing cities to economic stagnation. Continue reading →