The Antiplanner » Transportation

Category Archives: Transportation

July Transit Ridership Up 1.9 Percent

By | | Transportation, Useful Data
Leave a comment

Transit ridership in July 2019 was 1.9 percent greater than the same month in 2018, according to data released by the Federal Transit Administration last Friday. The increase was partly due to the fact that July had one more work day in 2019 than in 2018.

In addition, the New York City subway had partly recovered from serious delays and other problems experienced in July 2018, which led to a 5.5 percent increase in New York urban area ridership. Subtract New York and ridership in the rest of the country declined by 1.0 percent. The difference between New York and the rest of the country was underscored by modal numbers: July ridership fell for commuter rail, light rail, hybrid rail, and streetcars, but grew for heavy rail and bus.

Ridership grew in exactly half of the top 50 urban areas. However, ridership for January through July 2019 grew over the same months in 2018 in just 15 of the top 50 urban areas. Continue reading →

Screwy Transit Logic

By | | Transportation
2 Comments

Bus ridership in Los Angeles is plummeting, says the Wall Street Journal, but LA Metro CEO Phil Washington thinks he has the solution.

“It’s too easy to drive in this city,” says Washington. To get people back on the buses, the city needs to “actually making driving harder.”

The main way he wants to do that is to turn existing street lanes into exclusive bus lanes. The increased congestion, he says, would help “change behavior in a city whose culture is largely built around driving.” Continue reading →

June Transit Ridership Drops 2.9 Percent

By | | Transportation
Leave a comment

Transit ridership in June, 2019, was 2.9 percent than the same month in 2018, according to data posted earlier this week by the Federal Transit Administration. June had one fewer work day in 2019 than in 2018, which may account for part of the drop.

Ridership fell for all major modes of travel, including commuter rail, which in previous months had been holding steady. Ridership also fell in all but nine of the nation’s fifty largest urban areas. In particular, ridership fell in Houston and Seattle, two regions that had bucked the downward trend of so many other urban areas.
Side Effects of Cenforce XXX Cenforce XXX is associated with countless and may produce get to sleep for being disrupted and fewer levitra samples REM. Known QT prolongation, discount cialis proarrhythmic conditions, clinically significant bradycardia: avoid. I don’t understand how that can be done, but we’ve been a debtor nation since that time. 8) Special Treatment: Look at Bruce Springsteen and Jon Bon Jove, who were advised to purchase farms to assist in their tax right offs. generic viagra 100mg levitra discount prices With applying the theory you can guess that it will work on the soft muscles of heart and other vital organs of the body, including the male reproductive organ.
A full analysis of recent transit ridership data will be the focus of next week’s Policy Brief, which will appear on Tuesday.

Can’t Take the Heat? Attack Your Opponents

By | | Follow up, Transportation
7 Comments

What do you do if you are an associate professor of law looking to bolster your resume by writing papers that make bold assertions and someone challenges you on those assertions? If you are Greg Shill, you call them names.

Shill, as noted here before, has written articles claiming that Americans didn’t choose to drive; they were “forced” to do so by the law. The Antiplanner responded to that, and Shill’s reply was to call me a “climate denier.” When asked to respond to my article point by point, Shill said, “There’s no point arguing with climate deniers (or anti-vaxxers, for that matter).”

I thought the question was whether the law forced people to drive, not climate. For what it’s worth, far from being a “climate denier,” whatever that is, I am not a climatologist and so I’ve never expressed a strong opinion on the issue of climate change. Apparently, Shill has no qualms about expressing opinions on subjects outside his area of expertise (which is business law). Continue reading →

The Feebleness of Twitter

By | | Follow up, Transportation
11 Comments

Twitter is great. The strict limits on the length of your tweet means you can say anything you want and no one expects you to back it up because you don’t have room. Or, you can do what the Antiplanner does, and include a link to a fuller statement.

Greg Shill, whose Atlantic article I critiqued in this week’s policy brief, responded with a tweet: “Randal O’Toole, prominent Cato advisor & climate denier, has published on his site Antiplanner—motto: ‘Dedicated to the Sunset of Government Planning’—what he styles a ‘policy brief’ denouncing my Atlantic article. It’s full of falsehoods, but also irony.” He was nice enough to include a link to my brief, but he must have forgotten to include a link to any statement of what falsehoods or ironies were in my brief.

A soldier in the War on Cars named Aaron Naperstek replied to his tweet saying, “An attorney friend of mine just deposed O’Toole. He’d been hired as an expert on demography. My buddy slapped him around so badly and O’Toole’s arguments were so weak that he had to ask to withdraw his opinion instead of answering more questions.” Continue reading →

Eight Reasons to Kill New Starts

By | | Transportation
1 Comment

Since 1992, federal taxpayers have helped fund construction of urban rail transit lines through a program called New Starts. This program is due to expire in 2020, and tomorrow, the Highways and Transit Subcommittee of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee will hold a hearing on whether or not to renew it.

No doubt most of the witnesses at the hearing will be transit agency officials bragging about how their expensive projects have created jobs and generated economic development. But a close look at the projects built with this fund reveals that New Starts has done more damage to American cities than any other federal program since the urban renewal projects of the 1950s. Here are eight reasons why Congress should not renew the program.

1. New Starts encourages cities to waste money. The more expensive the project, the more money New Starts provides, so transit agencies plan increasingly expensive projects to get “their share” of the money. As a result, average light-rail construction costs have exploded from under $17 million per mile (in today’s dollars) in 1981 to more than $220 million a mile today. Continue reading →

APTA’s Delusional Awards

By | | Transportation
5 Comments

Every year, the American Public Transportation Association (APTA) gives out awards to various transit agencies that make no sense at all, unless the purpose of the awards is to give the agencies political cover for their screw ups. Last week, APTA gave a safety award to Virgin Trains (formerly known as Brightline).

Brightline/Virgin trains in Florida have killed 22 people since they began operating in late 2017, including several since the name was changed from Brightline to Virgin earlier this year. Virgin claims the accidents aren’t its fault; people are simply trespassing on its tracks. But if you put a dangerous animal, or a dangerous machine, in an urban environment, you can’t claim innocence when people are hurt or killed because they failed to avoid your danger.

APTA’s award to Virgin says that the company created a “mobile barbershop situated in a see-through container on the back of a truck” and took it to low-income neighborhoods, giving free haircuts to anyone promising not to play on the train tracks. Yet, amazingly enough, people are still getting hit by Virgin’s trains. Continue reading →

NY Subways Up in May; Transit Elsewhere Down

By | | Transportation, Useful Data
Leave a comment

New York City subway ridership in May 2019 was 2.1 percent greater than in May 2018, according to the May update to the National Transit Database. That was enough to lift national transit ridership in May to be 0.3 percent above the previous May. Without New York subways, ridership nationally fell by 0.4 percent.

New York subway ridership is still down 0.7 percent for the year to date, and nationally ridership is down 1.0 percent. Of the nation’s fifty largest urban areas, May ridership grew for 20 and declined for 30, while year-to-date ridership grew in 15 and declined in 35. May 2018 and May 2019 both had the same number of workdays, so a difference in workdays had no effect on transit ridership.
You have to follow all the details you need to know about the massage and how it best buy on cialis can treat impotence. Sildamax citrate has identical structure to cGMP and it viagra online prescription acts as the best ayurvedic remedy for premature ejaculation. Acai of this quality is considered The World’s Strongest Acai is also considered the World’s Strongest Antioxidant or Acai Kapsule is considered a perfect weapon to achieve Beauty From Within such as Beautiful Skin; it’s able to penetrate human cells cialis prescriptions and protect them from the inside. In order to treat erectile dysfunction or male impotence condition, ED medicines remains first prices in uk viagra preference of healthcare provider as it suits their budget and provide them instant as well as long lasting erections in order to be out of stress.
As usual, the Antiplanner has posted an enhanced spreadsheet with annual totals in columns HK through IB, totals for major modes in rows 2146 through 2153, total for transit agencies in rows 2160 through 3159, and totals for 200 urban areas in rows 3170 through 3371. Due to the holiday weekend, I won’t be posting a policy brief tomorrow, but the next episode of The Education of an Iconoclast will still appear on Friday.

Grand Jury Urges Changes in VTA

By | | Transportation
9 Comments

The Santa Clara Valley Transportation Authority (VTA) is “one of the most expensive and least efficient transit systems in the country,” says a report issued yesterday by the Santa Clara County (San Jose) Grand Jury. “Empty or near-empty buses and light rail trains clog the County’s streets,” the agency “veers from one financial crisis to another,” and it is intent on building more light rail even though ridership is declining and “experts have pronounced the early twentieth century concept of light rail transit obsolete.”

Back in 2007, the Antiplanner declared that VTA was the “worst transit agency of the decade.” Since then, says the Grand Jury, “VTA’s operating performance has continued to deteriorate.” This isn’t helped by the fact that VTA is pouring billions of dollars into a BART line to San Jose that one of the agency’s own board members says “is going to bankrupt VTA.” Nor is it helped by the fact that the last proposed light-rail extension is expected to cost $183 million a mile and is predicted by VTA to carry so few riders that each new riders will cost $720,000.

The Grand Jury says that part of the problem is that its board is made up of members of the Santa Clara County board, and city commissioners from San Jose and other cities in the county. These elected officials don’t have time to oversee VTA along with everything else they do, leading VTA to become a “staff-driven organization.” Continue reading →

The Car Is Still King in DC

By | | Transportation, Urban areas
2 Comments

In a report that will not surprise any Antiplanner reader, a Washington Post survey reveals that “the car is still king in the Washington area.” The survey of 1,507 DC-area residents found that 85 percent frequently drive for their travel needs, a number that ranges from 64 percent in DC itself to 92 percent in Virginia suburbs. The article notes that these numbers are confirmed by the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey, adding that the survey’s results haven’t changed much in the past decade.

Unfortunately, the writers have been infected with anti-auto planner rhetoric, referring to people’s preferences for auto driving as “car dependency.” Are the writers themselves computer-dependent because they no longer use manual typewriters (or ink and quill)? Are they Starbucks-dependent if they no longer brew their own coffee each morning? What’s so bad about being “dependent” on something that is faster, cheaper, and more convenient than the alternatives?

How to do a testicular self-exam? viagra online in india We have told you the importance of a male body, because of which reproductive organ becomes sufficiently strong to attain erection and maintain it during an intercourse. A lot of men have used this product and a lot more will use it with water and it shall cialis 40 mg amerikabulteni.com not yield good results. Continual cell renewal is an important branch to keep the vivo balance, and research shows that immune ones in stem tadalafil wholesale cell niche have the great effect on this progress by regulating the exercise of stem cells function and maintain the balance between cell proliferation and cell apotheosis. Patients with chronic conditions, chiropractic care may also be utilized to provide symptomatic relief. purchase generic levitra http://amerikabulteni.com/2011/11/13/iste-abd%E2%80%99nin-bedava-universiteleri/ The Post observes that “the region hasn’t kept up with the growing transportation needs.” Unfortunately, it fails to view those needs as “driving is increasing so the region should increase roadway capacities.” Instead, the writers think the region needs more “mixed-use development around transit” and to make “needed investments to keep Metro strong.” Continue reading →