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Category Archives: Transportation

DC Metro Should Just Shut Down

By | | Transportation, Urban areas
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With transit ridership off by 84 percent in July, what better time than now to simply stop running the expensive and failed DC Metro rail system? Apparently hardly anyone really depends on it, as driving was back to at least 80 percent of its pre-pandemic levels in July.

Based on a budget update provided to the Metro board, the Washington Metropolitan Area Transportation Authority (WMATA) may have to shut down, as it expects to run out of money around next January. WMATA says it needs at least $212 million to operate through June, 2021 (the end of its fiscal year), plus more, of course, for the following year.

To deal with this, WMATA is proposing to reduce rail and bus frequencies, cut back late-night service, cancel 39 bus routes, and defer some capital improvement projects to a later date. But even these cuts won’t completely close the gap between shrinking revenues and costs. Moreover, due to the need for public hearings and other requirements, WMATA won’t even be able to implement any changes until December, so it will continue to hemorrhage money for few riders for several more months. Continue reading →

Save the Planet: Stop Riding Transit

By | | Transportation
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SUVs “ruined the environment,” says to a rather shrill article in the Guardian that was also reprinted in Mother Jones and other publications. It reached this conclusion based on a study showing they were the “second largest contributor to the increase in global carbon emissions from 2010 to 2018.”

The author of the article, who frets that people with SUVs also have a hard time finding a place “to park the things,” obviously hasn’t looked at an SUV lately. No more are all SUVs Chevy Suburbans or Ford Excursions. Most of them are about the same size as regular cars, just a little taller. Nor are they all four-wheel drive gas guzzlers; in fact, they only use a little more energy than regular cars.

It’s the extra height that makes them attractive to people. A taller car allows drivers to see further down the road. Occupants also sit higher, like at a dining table, rather than low with their legs sticking out in front of them, like a sports car. Thus, they are both more comfortable and easier to drive. Continue reading →

July Transit Ridership Down Almost 65 Percent

By | | Transportation, Useful Data
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Transit ridership in July 2020 was 64.9 percent less than it had been in July 2019, according to data released last Friday by the Federal Transit Administration. This is only a slight improvement from June, when ridership was down by 69 percent from June 2019. July bus ridership was down by 52 percent (vs. 56% in June) while rail ridership was down by 77 percent (vs. 83% in June).

Worst off was Washington DC, whose July ridership was still down by 82 percent, about the same as in June. At the other extreme was Richmond, Virginia, where July ridership was down by only 21 percent. Many urban areas in Florida and Texas were down by less than 50 percent. Apparently, the South has risen again, or at least transit ridership in the South has risen faster than in the north.

As usual, I’ve uploaded an enhanced version of the FTA’s spreadsheet, which has month-by-month data for each transit agency and mode. My enhanced version has annual totals in columns HY to IQ, mode totals in rows 2190 through 2211, agency totals in rows 2220 through 3219, and urban area totals for the nation’s 200 largest urban areas in rows 3220 through 3424. These enhancements are made on both the ridership (UPT for unlinked passenger trips) and service (VRM for vehicle revenue miles) pages. Continue reading →

Table 1-40 Redux

By | | Transportation
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Last July 14, I devoted an entire Antiplanner policy brief to a review of a single table in the Bureau of Transportation Statistics’ publication, National Transportation Statistics, table 1-40, passenger-miles by mode. My main concerns were that the table overestimated bus miles and failed to include walking and cycling miles.

Just four weeks later, on August 11, the Bureau of Transportation Statistics issued an update to table 1-40. The update reduces the number of bus passenger-miles (though not by as much as I estimated) and added walking and cycling miles.

Walking and cycling numbers are based on the National Household Travel Survey, which is repeated every five to eight years. As a result, table 1-40 only includes numbers for the years of that survey. Fortunately, the most recent survey was in 2017, so the numbers should be pretty comparable with the latest numbers for other modes, which are for 2018. Continue reading →

Post-Pandemic Propaganda for Rail Transit

By | | Transportation
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Writing in the September Trains magazine, which isn’t available on line, transit advocate Malcolm Kenton argues that rail transit agencies can thrive in a pandemic and post-pandemic world by shifting strategies. But he doesn’t mean shifting business strategies to attract more riders; he means shifting propaganda strategies to attract more tax dollars.

“Transit advocates will need to tell a different story that de-emphasizes ridership as the key measure of success and focuses less on attracting higher-income riders,” he says. “Instead, the pandemic reveals how dependent we all are on effective transit even if we never set foot on a train or bus, and even if trains or buses carry much less than their capacities.” Continue reading →

Highway Subsidies in 2018

By | | Transportation, Useful Data
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Highway subsidies in 2018 totaled to $47.1 billion, substantially less than the $54.3 billion in subsidies received by transit agencies. Considering that highways move about 100 times as many passenger miles (and infinitely more freight) than transit, this is a serious disparity.

Click image to download the table in Excel format.

I base the $47.1 billion on the latest issue of Highway Statistics, table HF-10, which was recently posted by the Federal Highway Administration. Although this table is dated April, 2020, it wasn’t available in June when I most recently calculated transportation subsidies. Continue reading →

A Project That’s No Longer Needed

By | | Transportation
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A proposed new 2-mile transit line connecting LaGuardia Airport with the New York subway system will cost $2 billion, make traffic congestion worse, dump 87,000 metric tons of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, and probably isn’t necessary due to the pandemic. The first three conclusions come from a draft environmental impact statement (DEIS) released last week by the Federal Aviation Administration, while the fourth is based on the huge changes in transportation habits that have already taken place as a result of the pandemic.

LaGuardia, the New York area’s smallest commercial airport. Photo by Patrick Handrigan.

According to the environmental impact statement, the new transit line, which would be an automated people mover, is needed primarily because of “increasing and unreliable travel times” to the airport as a result of traffic congestion. A survey of air travelers conducted by the Port Authority of New York & New Jersey (which runs the airport) found that slightly more than half of air travelers took taxis or ride-hailing services to the airport, another 36 percent took a car, and close to 6 percent took courtesy shuttles. Only 6.2 percent took mass transit. Continue reading →

Transit “Is Riddled with Inequities”

By | | Transportation
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The transit industry has developed two systems: one for “choice” riders and one for “dependent” riders, “that is to say white and Black,” says urban planner Christof Spieler. A former member of the Harris County (Houston) Metro board of directors, Spieler points out one place where Metro offers riders a choice between bus-rapid transit and a local bus. The BRT is three times faster than the local bus, has plusher seats, and costs $3.25 a ride compared with $1.25 for the local bus.

Spieler makes many good points and I am glad that an urban planner is finally taking this issue seriously. Unfortunately, his inevitable solution — that we should spend more money on transit — is wrong.

Spieler never mentions the Los Angeles Bus Riders’ Union case, in which the NAACP represented minorities whose bus service had declined so that Los Angeles Metro could pay for new rail transit lines to middle-class neighborhoods, but maybe he was unfamiliar with that case. As documented here, LA Metro was ordered by the court to restore bus service for ten years, which it did. Bus ridership recovered, but as soon as the ten years was up, it cut bus service and went back to building rail transit. Continue reading →

June Driving Down 13 Percent

By | | Transportation
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Americans drove 13 percent less in June 2020 than they did in the same month of 2019, according to data released yesterday by the Federal Highway Administration. This is an improvement from May, which was 25 percent less than in 2019, and April, which was 40 percent less.

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Brightline’s Future Not Too Bright

By | | Transportation
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As decribed in the lates Trains magazine (not available on line), Brightline is currently building tracks so that it can privately operate high-speed trains from Miami to Orlando. A few weeks ago, the company’s effective parent, Fortress Investment Group, was headlined in Forbes for “betting $9 billion that America’s transportation future is passenger rail.”

But things aren’t looking too bright for Brightline since then. For one thing, it has completely shut down its existing passenger train operations due to the pandemic, and doesn’t know when it will be able to revive them. (That may be just as well, as it was losing money on those trains anyway.)

More recently, plans to rebrand the operation “Virgin,” presumably with a significant investment by Richard Branson’s Virgin group, have fallen through. Branson told reporters that he had not actually invested any money into Brightline and that the plan to rename Brightline after Virgin was just a “marketing agreement.” Continue reading →