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Category Archives: Transportation

City Auditor: Vision Zero Doesn’t Work

By | | Transportation
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Portland adopted a Vision Zero plan in 2016. At first, it seemed to be working; at least, traffic fatalities declined from 42 in 2016 to 35 in 2018. The only problem is that few of the steps of the plan had been implemented by 2018, so that decline was merely a coincidence.

Click image to download a 2.1-MB PDF of this report.

The plan called for reduction of speed limits, stricter enforcement of speed laws, reconfiguration of dangerous intersections, and improved street lighting. Not everything was completed, but some of it was and the city saw a dramatic change in fatality rates — upwards. By 2022, the city had 62 fatalities; so far in 2024 it has had 69, so by the end of the year it is likely to be more than double 2018. Continue reading →

September Driving 2.25% More Than in 2019

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Americans drove 2.2 percent more miles in September 2024 than they did in the same month of 2019, according to data released by the Federal Highway Administration yesterday. September driving in rural areas was 7.9 percent greater but driving in urban areas was 0.2 percent less in 2024 than in 2019.

Amtrak has yet to release its September results, possibly because September is the last month of its fiscal year and it wants to get the year-end results right. When it does, I’ll post an update here.

Meanwhile, I discovered that I accidentally left the greenhouse gas emissions from some electric transit lines off of the enhanced spreadsheet I prepared of the 2023 National Transit Database. In going through the data, I also discovered some duplicate entries, which I deleted. If you downloaded my spreadsheet, which summarizes the 25-spreadsheet database into one worksheet, please download the corrected version now.

September Transit Ridership 76.3% of 2019

By | | Transportation, Useful Data
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Transit agencies carried 76.3 percent as many riders in September of 2024 as they did in the same month in 2019, according to data released yesterday by the Federal Transit Administration. This is transit’s best performance, when measured as a share of pre-pandemic numbers, since the pandemic began.

Highway and Amtrak results for September will be posted here when it becomes available.

Highway travel had fully recovered from the pandemic by around July 2021. Air travel, which the Transportation Security Administration says carried 108.7 percent as many travelers as in September 2019, had recovered by January 2023 and Amtrak by October 2023. In October 2023, transit ridership still hadn’t reached 75 percent of pre-pandemic numbers, but that is probably the best it was going to do. Some of the growth in transit since then is due to some people returning to downtown offices, but much of that growth is probably more attributable to regular growth, not to recovery from the pandemic. Continue reading →

NM’s Rail Runner Is “Financially Healthy”?

By | | Transportation
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I’ve heard there is an election somewhere today, but it doesn’t sound all that important. What is important is that the state of New Mexico recently released a report on the “Cost Effectiveness and Operations of the New Mexico Rail Runner Express.” The most positive finding in the report is that, since hardly anyone was riding the train before the pandemic, the loss of ridership during the pandemic had little impact on the rail line’s finances. Taxpayers provided nearly all of the line’s financial support before the pandemic, and they continue to do so today. The report calls this “financially healthy,” and I suppose it is in the sense that bank robbers are financially healthy until they get caught.

Click image to download an 888-KB pdf of this report.

Such financial health will be small comfort to the state taxpayers who spent some $400 million getting the train running and are on the hook for spending well over $40 million a year operating it. The line carried 1.35 million riders in 2009, the first year it went all the way from Albuquerque to Santa Fe, and ridership declined in almost every year since then. By 2019 it was down 45 percent to 744,000. Operating expenses more than doubled during that time but fare revenues declined until they covered just 7 percent of operating costs. Continue reading →

The Dangers of Bus Rapid Transit

By | | Transportation
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A week ago, a pedestrian stepped onto Eugene’s 11th Avenue, a one-way street, and got clobbered by a bus going the wrong way. The accident broke the pedestrian’s collar bone, pelvis, and six ribs.

Click image for a larger view.

It turns out that 11th, which had been a one-way street for decades, was recently turned into a two-way street with the contra flow being a dedicated bus lane, which has one bus every 10 to 15 minutes. Not only is this a complete waste of space — the cars that previously used that lane moved far more people per hour than a six-times-per-hour bus could possibly carry — it completely subverts all of the benefits of one-way streets. Continue reading →

August Driving Nearly 103% of Pre-Pandemic Miles

By | | Transportation, Useful Data
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Americans drove 102.7 percent as many miles in August of 2024 as in the same month of 2019, according to data released yesterday by the Federal Highway Administration. Moreover, this is the first month I can remember since the pandemic began that driving exceeded pre-pandemic numbers on all types of roads, including urban and rural interstates, other arterials, and other roads.

For a discussion of Amtrak and airline data, see this post. For a discussion of transit data, see this post.

August 2024 driving was greater than 2019 driving in 28 states, while it was less in 22 states plus DC. DC driving was slightly less than 80 percent of 2019 miles, and miles of driving were also particularly low in Delaware (82%), Hawaii (84%), West Virginia (86%), and Massachusetts (88%). Continue reading →

Lower Fares, Higher Operating Costs

By | | Transportation, Useful Data
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Transit agencies carried 18 percent more riders in 2023 than 2022, but 29 percent fewer than in 2019. Average trip lengths declined from 5.5 miles in 2019 to 5.0 miles in 2023, probably because commuter rail and commuter buses, which tend to carry riders the longest distances, did particularly poorly. Overall transit carried 35 percent fewer passenger-miles in 2023 than in 2019. These data are based on the National Transit Database and in particular the 2023 database that the Federal Transit Administration released last week.

A bus-rapid transit line has generated lots of positive publicity for Cleveland transit, but the truth is that Cleveland has one of the worst-performing transit systems in the country, with ridership falling 35 percent between 2014 and 2019 and another 30 percent between 2019 and 2023. Photo by GoddardRocket.

Fares were proportional to passenger-miles being 35 percent less than in 2019, while operating costs were 22 percent greater. The result was that the operating subsidy per rider, at $7.26, was more than twice 2019’s, which was $3.51 and only a slight improvement over 2022’s operating subsidy of $7.59 per rider. Operating subsidies per passenger-mile grew from 64ยข in 2019 to $1.51 in 2022, declining only slightly to $1.45 in 2023. Continue reading →

Baltimore’s Red Line: Insane or Idiotic?

By | | Transportation
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Maryland transportation planners are considering spending a breathtaking $9 billion to build a 14-mile light-rail line that would never come close to carrying the 33,000 to 35,500 daily passengers they claim. This $640-million-per-mile cost would be incurred if they built the line in a tunnel.

Although Baltimore’s light-rail system is capable of accommodating three-car trains, two cars are more common simply because ridership is so low. Photo by Pi.1415926535.

The alternative would be to build it on the surface, which is still projected to cost around $5 billion, or more than $350 million a mile. Back in 1990, before Congress began spending billions of dollars on transit capital improvements, $50 million a mile was considered outrageously expensive for light rail. Now $350 million a mile is just routine. Continue reading →

Charlotte Wants to Tax Low-Income Families to Give High-Income Workers Fancy Transit Rides

By | | Transportation
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In 2012, the Charlotte Area Transit System (CATS) proposed to operate commuter trains between uptown Charlotte and the suburb of Mount Mourne. In 2011, it predicted (based on 2009 prices) that start-up costs for the 25-mile Red Line route would be about $452 million, slightly more than the cost of Charlotte’s first light-rail line (which was $444 million). While the commuter-rail route was almost three times as long as Charlotte’s first light-rail line, it was projected to carry fewer than a third as many riders: 5,600 per day as opposed to 18,100 per day.

Map of proposed Red Line commuter train.

Due to the high cost and small number of riders, the Federal Transit Administration refused to provide any federal funding for the project. At the time, the FTA’s cost-effectiveness rule limited federal funding to projects that cost less than about $25 per hour saved by transportation users, and the commuter train wasn’t projected to save enough hours to get the cost below this threshold. Continue reading →

Transit’s Ride into Irrelevance

By | | Transportation, Useful Data
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Just 3.5 percent of American workers commuted to work by public transit in 2023, according to American Community Survey data recently released by the Census Bureau. That’s down from 5.0 percent in 2019. Since transit ridership so far in 2024 is only about 4 percent more (when measured as a share of 2019 numbers) than it was in 2023, the 3.5 percent number is not likely to improve much in the future.

The increase in remote working has permanently shifted transportation patterns and particularly devastated transit ridership.

According to the survey data, the share of people working at home in 2023 was 13.8 percent, down from 15.2 percent in 2022 but up from just 5.7 percent in 2019. As I’ve noted before, the increase in remote working has a double impact on transit ridership. First, the downtown workers who were transit’s main customers before the pandemic are more likely to work at home than many other people. Second, the reduction in congestion resulting from increased remote working will lead some people who were avoiding congestion by riding transit to return to driving. Continue reading →