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Category Archives: Transportation

50th Anniversary of a Mistake

By | | Transportation
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Today is the 50th anniversary of Congressional passage of the Rail Passenger Service Act, which created the National Railroad Passenger Corporation, later known as Amtrak. This law was based on several factual errors, the most important one being a claim that passenger trains could make money if only they were freed from the stodgy railroad executives who supposedly preferred freight over passenger service.

Early Amtrak train to San Francisco from Chicago. It took several years to repaint all of the equipment into Amtrak colors. Photo by Drew Jacksich.

Passenger train ridership had been declining since 1920 and the decline accelerated after World War II. A 1958 report from the Interstate Commerce Commission predicted that intercity passenger trains would disappear by 1970. In response, Congress passed legislation making it easier for the railroads to stop running interstate trains. Continue reading →

Yesterday’s Transit Ten Years from Now

By | | Transportation
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France is spending $45 billion on 120 miles of new subways designed to better connect Paris with its suburbs. Known as the Grand Paris Express, the project would add four new lines to the Paris subway system.

Map of planned new subway lines by Hektor.

At $380 million per mile, the cost sounds cheap by American standards. Yet it has already suffered huge cost overruns, as it was projected to cost just $27 billion as little as four years ago. Continue reading →

Some Transit Riders Never Coming Back

By | | Transportation
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At least 20 percent of former Long Island Railroad commuter-train riders are “lost forever,” predicts Gerald Bringmann, the chair of the transit agency’s commuter council. This raises the question of whether capital improvements to the railroad that “sounded great” before the pandemic make any sense today.

“The longer people work remotely, the more businesses are finding, ‘You know what? This is working,'” says MTA board member Kevin Law, who is also the president of a Long Island business group. People like working at home, Law added, and don’t like spending hours trying to get to work on someone else’s timetable.

The decline in commuter-train ridership had “been a trend, but COVID-19 accelerated it at a massive rate,” notes the chief editor of Railway Age magazine. Commuter railroads “are going to have to adjust, if they can, to these new commuting patterns.” Continue reading →

Glaring and Frequent Errors

By | | Transportation
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A supposed “analysis” of a proposal for high-speed rail between Vancouver, BC and Seattle is full of “glaring and frequent errors” and is more of a “promotional brochure” than a serious analysis, says transportation accountant Tom Rubin in a report published last week by the Washington Policy Center. Rubin’s first clue that the so-called analysis was more like political propaganda was that it was proposing not just any old high-speed rail but ultra high-speed rail — a term, Rubin points out, that has never been previously used but that is defined in the analysis as trains going more than 250 miles per hour.

The second problem Rubin found is that the trains in the proposal didn’t meet this definition, having actual top speeds of 220 miles per hour. Rubin speculates that the company doing the analysis used the term “ultra” to try to distance its proposal from the California debacle, even though that plan was also for trains going at a top speed of 220 miles per hour.

The analysis was prepared by a company called WSP, which itself has earned $666 million on the California project and could reasonably be expecting to earn more if Washington decides to build a high-speed rail line. Rubin suggests that maybe this indicates that the company has a conflict of interest when preparing this analysis. Continue reading →

Telling Clients What They Want to Hear

By | | Regional planning, Transportation
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The Washington State Transportation Commission hired the Boston Consulting Group to develop a “sustainable growth vision” for the Cascadia Corridor, which means Vancouver, BC to Portland, Oregon. The Boston Group did taxpayers a disservice by telling the commission what it wanted to hear, rather than what it needed to know.

The group observed that the cities in the corridor have the opportunity to become “a global innovation hub.” To find out how to do that, the Bostonians looked at other major innovation hubs and discovered they fall into two rather distinct groups that it called “affordable sprawl” and “expensive and congested.” The best representative of the former is the Texas Triangle, meaning Dallas-Houston-San Antonio. The best representative of the latter is the San Francisco Bay Area.

When measured on two axes of housing affordability and a rush-hour congestion, the Texas Triangle is high on affordability and low on congestion, while the Bay Area is low on affordability and high on congestion. The Bostonians noted that the Cascadia Corridor is currently right in the middle on both, but warned that if it wasn’t careful it would end up as bad or even worse off than the Bay Area. Continue reading →

August Traffic Trends

By | | Transportation, Useful Data
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Americans drove 251 billion vehicle-miles in August 2020, about 12 percent less than they drove in August 2019, according to data released on Saturday by the Federal Highway Administration. Rural driving was down 10 percent while urban driving was down 14 percent.

Hawaii saw the biggest decline in driving with a 33 percent drop from 2019. Delaware was a distant second at 24 percent, followed by Vermont (-20%) and Rhode Island (-19%). Around 95 percent of the residents of California live in urban areas, and driving in those urban areas dropped by a relatively modest 18 percent. Rural states saw the smallest declines: Wyoming (-2%), Montana (-3%), Arkansas, Idaho, and Arkansas (-5% each).
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Interstate highways saw the biggest declines while the drops in driving on both urban and rural local roads were much smaller. The 12 percent drop in overall driving contrasts with August transit ridership, which was 63 percent less than in August 2019.

Waymo Is Back in Business

By | | Transportation
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Last March, Waymo suspended its driverless taxi operations in Arizona due to the pandemic. Now, it has not only started up again, it has opened the service to all members of the public. Previously, it had been available only to about a thousand people who had signed up for and been accepted as “early riders.”

Waymo’s taxis are geofenced, meaning they can only operate in an area that has been carefully and precisely mapped. At the moment, that includes about 50 square miles of Chandler, Mesa, and Tempe, Arizona. Technically, autonomous cars that need maps to work are classed as level 4 vehicles. Level 5 vehicles should be able to drive themselves anywhere without maps.

In response to a tweet about Waymo’s progress, Elon Musk tweeted that level 4 “gives a false sense of victory being close” and that Tesla is aiming for level 5; he claims its “new system is capable of driving in locations we never seen even once.” Continue reading →

Joe Biden’s Tired Old Infrastructure Plan

By | | Transportation
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The infrastructure plan recently released by the Biden campaign is a collection of tired ideas that have consistently failed in the past. Too much of the plan is based on last year’s groupthink and not enough of the plan recognizes the new realities that have emerged from the pandemic.

A large part of the plan is based on getting people out of their cars and onto transit and bicycles. American cities have been trying to do this for the last fifty years, spending $1.5 trillion subsidizing transit, and it hasn’t worked anywhere. The plan calls for connecting low-income workers to jobs by building more transit, yet people can reach far more jobs by automobile than by transit while auto ownership, not transit subsidies, are the key to getting people out of poverty.

The plan is based on assumptions about transportation dollar and environmental costs that are fundamentally wrong. Transit, the plan says, saves money while cars impose a burden on low-income people and produce too many greenhouse gas emissions. In fact, when subsidies are included, American transit systems spend five times as much moving a passenger one mile than the average automobile. Ignoring subsidies, average transit fares are still more than the average cost of driving per passenger mile. Transit also uses more energy and emits more greenhouse gases per passenger mile. Continue reading →

Electrification Cost Shocks Caltrain

By | | Transportation
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Electrifying the commuter trains between San Francisco and San Jose not only cost $2 billion, it will increase the cost of operating those trains by 33 percent. When seeking federal funding for part of the capital cost, local officials called the route “overburdened” and said that electrification would increase capacity. Today, the route is carrying just 6 percent as many riders as it did before the pandemic, and since it is likely that many of those passengers will never return, the new capacity probably isn’t needed.

As I’ve previously noted, the real reason California wanted to electrify the train was as a hidden subsidy to the San Francisco-Los Angeles high-speed trains. Those trains needed to be electrified and if the cost of doing so could be counted against the commuter trains it would make the high-speed rail project look less expensive than it really was.

The problem with that was that the state had promised to run trains between San Francisco and Los Angeles in two-and-two-thirds hours, which would require faster trains than the commuter trains. Since 220-mph trains can’t safely run on the same tracks as 50-mph trains, the original plan was to build brand-new high-speed rail tracks between San Jose and San Francisco. Cost overruns and revenue shortfalls made that impossible, so California officials came up with the idea of running the high-speed trains on the same tracks as the commuter trains, which would make it impossible to run them fast enough to keep the promise of SF-LA run times of 2:40. Continue reading →

Ideologues or Experts?

By | | Transportation
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The goal of the original Progressive movement, which started in the 1890s and peaked in the 1910s, was to put experts in charge of government bureaucracies. That meant doctors should head health-care agencies, foresters should head forestry agencies, and engineers should head transportation agencies. The system actually worked fairly well, especially for agencies such as state forestry and highway departments that were funded mainly if not entirely out of user fees. The feedback from the user fees combined with the expertise to know what to do with that feedback led the production of tremendous resource values.

Today’s Progressives aren’t interested in experts. In fact, they often would rather have anyone but an expert head a government agency because they view the experts as people who have bought in to some world view that the Progressives don’t like.

Case in point: the director of the Colorado Department of Transportation (CDOT) is not an engineer, nor even a transportation planner, but a historian. Shoshana Lew, who has been in charge of CDOT since February, 2019, has a bachelor’s degree in history from Harvard and a master’s degree in history from Northwestern. Prior to working for CDOT, she spent two years as chief operating officer for the Rhode Island Department of Transportation. Continue reading →