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Category Archives: Transportation

October Transit Ridership Levels Off

By | | Transportation, Useful Data
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Transit carried 73.90 percent as many riders in October 2023 as in the same month in 2019, according to data released by the Federal Transit Administration yesterday. This is just a couple of hairs less than the 73.92 percent carried in September. Rail ridership was 71.0 percent of 2019 while bus ridership was 76.6 percent. Actual October ridership was more than September’s, which is the case for most years.

As with last month, New York, Los Angeles, Miami, and Houston transit systems are much better than average, carrying 78 to 85 percent of 2019 levels. Washington seems to have caught up with the average, carrying 73.7 percent. Atlanta, Boston, Phoenix, and San Francisco are all doing worse than average, carrying less than 70 percent and, in Phoenix’s case, less than 56 percent of 2019 numbers. Continue reading →

Building Rail It Can’t Afford to Operate

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Washington Metro is facing a $750 million shortfall in its 2025 budget and may have to cut service as soon as next spring. Meanwhile, its board of directors will be asked to approve an expansion of its Blue Line that will cost at least $30 billion and probably much more.

As the Antiplanner noted last July, the new line is supposedly needed because the existing Blue, Orange, and Silver lines all use the same tunnel under the Potomac River and the line can only handle 26 trains per hour. The Blue Line trains were running at capacity when the Silver Line opened, so Metro lost more Blue Line riders than it gained Silver Line riders when Blue Line trains were cut to make room for Silver Line trains. Continue reading →

Just Say No

By | | Transportation
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The city council of the town of Grimes, Iowa — a suburb of Des Moines — had voted to end support for the Des Moines Area Regional Transit Authority (DART). City council members noted that it is spending $646,000 a year to support the transit system and yet only 13 residents of Grimes rode transit in the last year. “When you look at the math,” commented Grimes Mayor Scott Mickelson, “you could buy everybody a couple of cars for that price.”

Des Moines has an impressive downtown, but not many people there use its transit system. Photo by Jason Mrachina.

Naturally, the transit agency was unhappy with this decision. “When you think about people who are our frontline workers, a lot of them are using DART to get to their jobs,” said DART’s CEO, Amanda Wanke. “A lot of them don’t have another option for a vehicle. During these economic times, public transit is more necessary than ever.” Continue reading →

Throwing Good Money After Bad

By | | Transportation
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The Federal Transit Administration has agreed to give Honolulu another $125 million to finish its insane rail transit line. Years ago, the FTA agreed to provide $1.55 billion for the rail line, but that was when the line was expected to cost $5.1 billion.

When projected costs exploded to $12 billion and the city proved to be an inept project manager, the FTA withheld about half of the promised money, saying that it didn’t believe the city would be able to complete the project. Now, after redesigning the system, negotiating with the FTA, and no doubt twisting some arms, the federal agency is handing over about 17 percent of the withheld funds. Continue reading →

2022 Household Transportation Data Released

By | | Transportation
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The average motor vehicle on the road carried 1.52 people in 2022, down from 1.67 in 2019, according to the 2022 National Household Travel Survey. The results of this survey, which is repeated about every five years, were recently released by the Federal Highway Administration.

The survey has lots of interesting data, including information on motor vehicles, vehicle trips, and passenger-miles of travel. Much of it, however, is not quite ready for prime time. For example, the data release indicates that households who earn less than $10,000 a year nevertheless own 6.3 million vehicles — but it doesn’t say how many households that represents or how many don’t own vehicles. Continue reading →

Will Reducing Parking Save the Planet?

By | | Transportation
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As stated previously, I can’t take climate change seriously as long as people keep putting forward their wacko ideas that they had long before climate was an issue as “the solution.” The latest example is a claim that ending minimum parking requirements is “one solution to fight climate change.” I think the proponents of this idea are just totally confused.

The article credits Donald Shoup with the idea that eliminating minimum parking requirements “could pave the way for cities to build denser housing, increase public transit options, and reduce their carbon emissions.” Shoup is a decent researcher, but he has made parking the focus of his work since 1975, long before almost anyone was talking about global warming. It is one thing to note that minimum parking requirements might not be necessary. It is another to claim that eliminating them will do all the things listed above. Continue reading →

European Passenger Train Travel Declining

By | | Transportation, Useful Data
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The media treat Americans to a constant drumbeat of how much better European passenger trains are and why we need to spend hundreds of billions or trillions improving our train system. The latest is a report that overnight trains are proving they can replace air travel by “play[ing] an important niche role on long-distance routes of between 500 and 1,000 miles.”

A look at the actual data reveal that, despite huge government subsidies to European passenger trains, rail was barely holding its own before the pandemic and has drastically declined since the pandemic. Between 2012 and 2019, the share of passenger travel carried by airlines grew from 11.6 to 15.0 percent while the share carried by trains grew only from 6.7 to 6.8 percent. Most of the growth of rail travel was at the expense of bus travel, which declined from 9.1 to 8.1 percent. Auto travel from 72.3 to 69.8 mostly because of low-cost airlines. Continue reading →

How Long Do Cars Last?

By | | Transportation
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According to one web site, “you can expect a standard car to last around 12 years or about 200,000 miles.” Another site agrees, “The average car lasts around 12 years or around 200,000 miles.” Both of these web sites are wrong.

A 1957 Mercury Montclair, made during the gaudiest era of U.S. automotive design.

This caught my attention when I was reading the MBTA’s State-of-Good-Repair report, which tried to explain Boston transit’s state of poor repair simply as a function of age, and not the agency’s own incompetence. It did so by using cars as an example, claiming that the “useful life” of a car was eight years and anything older than that was in a “state of bad repair.” Continue reading →

MBTA’s State of Bad Repair

By | | Transportation
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Back in 2003, the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority (MBTA) estimated it had a “state-of-good-repair” backlog of $2.3 billion (about $3.7 billion in today’s dollars). Proving that the people running the agency are incompetent, instead of fixing their backlog they decided to build a new 4.3-mile light-rail line that just happened to cost $2.3 billion.

One of MBTA’s light-rail trains. Although the MBTA operates several different light-rail lines, they are nearly all painted green and are known as the Green Line. Photo by Adam E. Moreira.

Congress became aware of the maintenance backlog for transit systems nationwide and since 2015 it has given out $26.65 billion in grants to fix tracks, vehicles, and stations. Problem solved, right? Continue reading →

Remote Working Increases Productivity

By | | Transportation
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Last July, I noted that studies that claim that telecommuters are less productive than those in fixed workplaces were unpersuasive because they “mostly dealt with low-skilled jobs such as call centers and data entry.” I’m not the only one who thinks so. Writing in Business Insider, Ed Zitron noted last week that studies of call centers are inapplicable because they “are extremely controlled and heavily micromanaged environments — ones rife with labor abuse.” Bottom line, Zitron concludes, managers pressing workers to return to offices “have no data to justify it.”

Working at home can be more comfortable and less stressful than working in and commuting to an office or other workplace. Photo by Roberto Nickson.

A much more persuasive report came out earlier this week comparing flex-work policies and revenue growth at 554 companies. It found that revenue growth over the past three years at companies with more flexible policies was 16 percent greater than companies that ordered employees back to workplaces when the pandemic ended. While this isn’t absolute proof that remote workers are more productive, it certainly contradicts those who say they are not. Continue reading →