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Rail Supporters Can’t Tell the Truth from Fiction

By | | Transportation, Urban areas
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Portland’s regional planning agency, Metro, has put a measure on this November’s ballot to tax all firms with 25 or more employees in order to pay for the region’s latest light-rail scheme. Fortunately, or unfortunately depending on your point of view, the scheme appears to be foundering on the weight of lies told by Metro and the measure’s supporters.

To start, Metro wanted to call the tax a “business tax” even though it would be actually a 0.75 percent tax on payrolls. In other words, it would be an income tax on employees, but it would be invisible because it wouldn’t show on paystubs as a withholding like most income taxes. Portland’s transit agency, TriMet, has used this kind of a tax to pay for its operations and always called it a “payroll tax.” But Metro wanted to call it a “business tax” on the ballot title because it believed Portlanders would be more likely to support taxes evil businesses than poor downtrodden employees.

When challenged, a judge ordered Metro to take “business tax” out of the title but didn’t order it to use the term “payroll tax.” Despite not getting the ballot title they wanted, opponents have raised hundreds of thousands of dollars to fight the measure. This includes large contributions from major employers including Nike, Daimler Trucks, Comcast, and Tillamook Creamery.

As of September 28, opponents had actually outraised supporters. Contributions to the pro-rail campaign came from rail contractor Stacy & Witbeck, the International Union of Electrical Workers, and engineering consulting firm David Evans & Associates. The Evans firm is the company that got the contract to write the environmental impact statement for building a light-rail bridge over the Columbia River and then spent the money lobbying the Oregon and Washington legislatures to build the bridge. Continue reading →

August Transit Ridership Down 63 Percent

By | | Transportation, Useful Data
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August transit ridership was 63.2 percent lower than in August, 2019, according to data released yesterday by the Federal Transit Administration. This is not much of an improvement over July, when ridership was 64.9 percent below July 2019.

As in previous months, rail ridership was down by more than bus ridership: 74.2 percent vs. 51.8 percent, reflecting the fact that rail riders tend to have higher incomes and are more likely to be able to work at home than bus riders. Similarly, the worst-performing transit systems tended to be in urban areas with large numbers of people who can work at home: San Francisco-Oakland ridership was down 79.4 percent while Washington DC-area ridership was down 79.1 percent. In contrast, ridership in San Antonio, which has no rail transit and whose riders are mainly working class, was down by 49.2 percent.

Despite staggering losses in ridership, many transit agencies have made only modest reductions in service thanks to the credulity of Congress and other funders. Congress gave the transit industry a $25 billion bailout as a part of the CARES Act, and while most transit agencies will soon have burned through those funds, they are counting on another bailout before they run out. Continue reading →

NYC Auto Traffic Back to 85-95% of Normal

By | | Transportation
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Auto traffic in New York City is back to 85 to 85 percent of pre-pandemic levels, and truck traffic is up to 100 percent or more, according to “Gridlock” Sam Schwartz. Schwartz is the traffic engineer who popularized and possibly coined the term “gridlock.”

As the Antiplanner noted a couple of weeks ago, nationwide driving in July had returned to 89 percent of July, 2019 levels. But how can traffic be that high if everyone is working at home?

According to the National Household Transportation Survey, less than 19 percent of personal auto travel is for commuting. When trucks and other commercial traffic are added, the percentage of motor vehicle trips that are made by commuters is much smaller. Thus, traffic could rise to 85 or even 90 percent of normal even if almost none of the increase was for commuting. Continue reading →

Congress Extends Pork Another Year

By | | News commentary, Transportation
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In a move that will surprise no one at all, Congress has extended federal funding for highways and public transit until September 30, 2021. Such federal funding was set to end on September 30, 2020, and rather than revise the law to take into account the latest trends and events, Congress simply extended the existing law for another year.

It’s not like there was any new information, such as a pandemic, widespread forest fires, or the acceleration of urban decentralization, that might lead Congress to change its funding priorities anyway. Or, to be more accurate, it’s not like any new information would actually persuade Congress to change its funding priorities, as those priorities are driven by ideology more than actual facts.
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The current law, known as the Fixing America’s Surface Transportation or FAST Act, was passed in 2015 and included five years of funding. It didn’t make sense to make the law last five years because Congress is so dysfunctional that it can’t pass any major legislation in even-numbered years, so it should have made it a six-year law anyway.

NYC Transit Is Not Vital to the Nation

By | | Transportation
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According to “experts,” saving New York City’s transit is “vital to the U.S. economy,” reports an article in Business Insider. These “experts” include the usual gang of transit advocates, including the chair of New York City’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA), an urban planning professor at New York University, and the Manhattan Institute’s Nicole Gelinas, all of whom fervently believe that New York financial workers are, if not the masters of the universe, still critical to making the earth successfully rotate around the sun.

New York is “the only place where you have an abundance of face-to-face contact,” says Gelinas, which is supposedly is why its economic productivity was so high. Because Manhattan is so compact, “you can have many, many meetings every day with your potential vendors, your customers, your competitors,” something that supposedly isn’t possible in the suburbs.

I skeptical that maximizing the number of boring meetings per day somehow makes people more productive. Besides, what good are face-to-face meetings when everyone is wearing a mask? If they need to, people can have more meetings per day over Zoom, Skype, or FaceTime without masks and without having to travel from one meeting to the next. Continue reading →

Giving Transit a Pass

By | | Transportation
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Everyone knows that transit is so morally superior to driving that we aren’t supposed to ask about how much it costs. Pay no attention to the fact that the next light-rail line Portland wants to build will cost nearly $3 billion; planners don’t mention the cost in their presentation of the proposal.

Nor are we supposed to ask whether anyone is actually riding transit. When Portland’s last light-rail line, which cost $1.5 billion, opened a few years ago, transit ridership declined. But that’s no reason to question the next line.

Now we have some new questions are we aren’t supposed to ask. A bill signed by California Governor Gavin Newsom on Monday has exempted transit projects from detailed environmental review, meaning we no longer get to find out that the rail project that’s supposed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions will actually increase them. Not surprisingly, the bill was written by state Senator Scott Wiener, who also wants to force single-family neighborhoods to accept high-density transit-oriented developments in their midst. Continue reading →

Public Transit’s Last Stand

By | | Transportation
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As transit agencies run out of money running nearly empty buses and trains, the rhetoric for another Congressional bailout of transit has gotten even more shrill. Yet it is all just hot air.

“Without public transit, there will be no economic recovery,” says transit advocate Nick Sifuentes. In case Mr. Sifuentes hasn’t noticed, the economy is already recovering, thanks in part to driving recovering to 89 percent of pre-pandemic levels but no thanks to transit, whose ridership remains nearly 65 percent below last year’s.

“America faces a mobility crisis that will have ‘profound’ implications — especially for those on low incomes and people of color — if Congress does not step in to fill the nation’s $32bn public transport funding gap,” says the ever-Left Guardian. How serious can a mobility crisis be when only 5 percent of low-income workers rely on transit to get to work? Continue reading →

Transport Policy in the Age of Coronavirus

By | | Transportation
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“The coronavirus pandemic is going to leave behind major changes in America’s transportation system, and those changes, in turn, call for changes in transportation policies today,” says a paper published by the Reason Foundation yesterday. “While the exact numbers are uncertain, the direction of trends is fairly certain, and these trends demand changes in existing transportation policies.”

Click image to download a PDF of the report. Click the link in the previous paragraph to go to an introduction to the report.

For example, “states and cities that are planning mega-transportation projects should at least pause and most likely cancel those projects, especially if they depend on assumptions that people will continue to live in dense cities and ride mass transportation instead of driving. Even projects that are in early construction stages should be reconsidered, as it isn’t worth throwing good money after bad if the project is going to fail to accomplish its goals.” The Maryland Purple Line, whose future is uncertain as the contractor quit in a dispute over cost overruns, is an example of a project that should be permanently halted. Continue reading →

Years to Days

By | | Transportation
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In 1987, the Eno Transportation Foundation published a book called Commuting in America by transportation researcher Alan Pisarski. The book was based on 1980 census data, and included information about differences in vehicles per household and commuting habits by sex, age, race, incomes, and poverty status.

Last Thursday, the Census Bureau published data from the 2019 American Community Survey just 9-1/2 months after the end of the year. I downloaded much of the data related to transportation and wrote up my draft analysis by Saturday afternoon, sending it to Pisarski for review. My analysis looked at vehicles per household and commuting habits by sex, age, race, incomes, and poverty status.

“It’s almost comical,” he responded, recalling that that it took the Census Bureau several years to get the 1980 census data ready for him to use, and then it took him two years to analyze the data and write the book, whereas I was able to draft a mini-replication of his work in two days. “Years to days is nice,” he said. Continue reading →

Transit Not Yet Safe to Ride

By | | Transportation
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Earlier this week, I noted that a Washington Metro survey found that most of its former transit riders are unwilling to go back to riding transit until an effective COVID-19 vaccine is found. It appears they were right to say that, as a recent study by epidemiologists from Johns Hopkins University has concluded that, even after “adjusting for social distancing,” “public transit use . . . remained significantly associated with SARS-CoV-2 infection.”

The study found that “NPIs” (non-pharmaceutical interventions, e.g., masks & social distancing) “while visiting indoor and outdoor venues helps reduce SARS-CoV-2 transmission.” However, the two exceptions were public transport and places of worship. “Even NPIs may not be possible or sufficient” to prevent the virus’ spread on public transit, the study concludes. Although the study doesn’t say so, I suspect the problem is that transit vehicles are too small to permit true social distancing.

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