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Cruise Trains for Amtrak

By | | Transportation
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Amtrak plans to reduce all but one of its overnight trains to three-day-a-week service starting October 1. Doing so, says Amtrak, will save “as much as $150 million” a year. Amtrak doesn’t say so, but three-day-a-week trains offer almost as much political benefit to the agency as daily trains.

I have a better idea. Amtrak should double the routes served by its overnight trains, but run most of them just once a week. Add more lounge space to each train so that passengers have more places to go and the trains become cruise trains, not trains for getting from point A to point B. Amtrak is a slow and expensive way to get from point A to point B, but it is an excellent way to see parts of the country that can’t be seen from an interstate freeway.

Some routes Amtrak could add are the former North Coast Limited route from the Twin Cities to Seattle/Portland; the former City of Portland/Pioneer route from Ogden to Portland; the former City of Los Angeles/Desert Wind route from Salt Lake City to Los Angeles; the Golden State route from Chicago to Los Angeles via El Paso; the Gulf Wind route from New Orleans to Florida, and the Floridian route from Chicago to Florida. Continue reading →

2018 Transport Subsidies and Costs

By | | Transportation
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Last year, I published a policy brief that calculated 2017 transportation subsidies and costs for airlines, Amtrak, highways, and transit. When 2018 data for Amtrak, highways, and transit became available, I included an updated chart in a policy brief on transportation after the pandemic. But that wasn’t exactly prominent — I had a hard time finding it when someone asked me about it recently — and it didn’t have many details so I’m going to expand on it here.

The above chart is useful because it shows the disparities. Amtrak spends almost four times as much to move someone a passenger mile as the airlines. Transit agencies spend almost five times as much to move someone a passenger mile as personal automobiles. Continue reading →

Traffic Congestion After the Pandemic

By | | Transportation
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Some researchers from Vanderbilt University (and one from Cornell) asked what will happen to traffic congestion after the pandemic. If people reduced the use of transit for commuting, they concluded, congestion will get a lot worse, which is “detrimental to everyone’s commute.” Though they never say so explicitly, the implication is that we need to spend a lot of money supporting transit agencies to prevent that congestion.

Yet their paper is greatly oversimplified and ignores many things. Most importantly, people working at home are going to make a bigger difference to congestion than transit riders. Before the pandemic, more people worked at home than rode transit to work. If after the pandemic the number of people working at home on any given day is double what it was before the pandemic, then there would be less traffic even if no one rode transit.

In fact, the number of people working home is likely to much more than double. More than 40 percent of workers are working at home due to the pandemic, and at least a quarter of those say they expect to continue working at home after than pandemic. That would triple what it was before the pandemic. Moreover, half of those who expect to continue working at home say they will move to a different location, generally a suburb or smaller city. Continue reading →

Kill the Purple Line

By | | Transportation
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Anyone who carefully read the environmental impact statement for Maryland’s Purple Line would know that the proposed light-rail trains would be slow, would make congestion in the region worse, and that buses could move as many riders for a lot less money. It wouldn’t have taken much more research to learn that Maryland had a history of badly overestimating ridership and underestimating costs of its rail transit lines and that the ridership projections for this line had been particularly overinflated in order to make it eligible for federal funding.

Of course, most people didn’t read those documents or do the research, and many chose instead to believe the hype. So Maryland gave a $5.8 billion contract to a consortium of companies to build and operate the line. When, predictably, the line ran into delays and cost overruns, the companies withdrew from the project.

This naturally led opponents to urge Maryland to take this opportunity to cancel the project. Even if you believed the unrealistically high ridership estimates made before the contract was signed, the pandemic has probably decimated the market for transit. Continue reading →

Spending Money We Don’t Have on Projects We Don’t Need

By | | News commentary, Transportation
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House Transportation & Infrastructure Committee Chair Peter DeFazio yesterday released a proposal to spend tens of billions of dollars the federal government doesn’t have on projects we don’t need. Congressional authorization for federal spending on highways and transit expires this year, and DeFazio proposes to renew this with a program that will increase spending by 62 percent without increasing the taxes that support it.

Whereas the previous law spent an average of $61 billion per year over the last five years, DeFazio’s proposal would spend almost $99 billion a year over five years. At one time, federal spending on highways and most transit came out of gas taxes and other highway user fees and Congress didn’t spend more than came in. Since the mid-2000s, however, Congress has ignored actual revenues and spent billions of dollars a year out of general funds. The 2015 law, for example, simply appropriated $51 billion of general funds into the Highway Trust Fund (which despite the name spends money on both highways and transit).

DeFazio’s bill would not only increase this deficit spending, it includes a poison pill for highways while it unleashes spending increases on transit. For highways, the bill would include a “fix it first” provisions that says that states cannot increase highway capacity until they get existing roads in a state of good repair. No similar provision is made for transit even though transit is in a much poorer state of repair. Continue reading →

Private Buses: The Forgotten Mode

By | | Transportation
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A couple of weeks ago, more than 600 motorcoaches — that special breed of buses with extra-comfortable seats and large luggage bays beneath the passenger area — held a rally in Washington DC to complain that their government-subsidized competitors received a bailout but they did not. Yesterday, California motorcoach operators held a similar rally in Sacramento asking the governor to re-open the state, but it was overshadowed by George Floyd protests.

A few years ago, the Antiplanner wrote a paper called Intercity Buses: The Forgotten Mode, but I guess it is still forgotten. When we think of intercity travel, we think of planes, cars, and Amtrak, but rarely think about buses. Congress seems to be the same way.

The American Bus Association‘s most recent motorcoach census estimates that buses carried 64 billion passenger miles in 2017. That’s 10 times as many as Amtrak. In fact, it’s more than Amtrak and urban transit combined. Continue reading →

Trump Administration Favors BRT

By | | Transportation
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The Federal Transit Administration has announced that it is providing capital funding for twelve transit projects in 2020. Eight of the projects are bus-rapid transit and the other four are extensions of existing rail lines.

The Trump Administration’s proposed 2019 budget called for “winding down” the New Starts (capital grants) program “by limiting funding to projects with existing full funding grant agreements only” (p. 87). Congressional authorization for the New Starts program expires this year, and the budget called for “eliminating discretionary grants programs” including New Starts.

The administration’s proposed 2021 budget calls for renewing the BUILD program (formerly known as TIGER), which is a discretionary grants program, but says nothing about New Starts. This presumably means that the administration still wants to not renew it. Continue reading →

CDC Recommends Single-Occupant Cars

By | | Transportation
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For more than a month, transit agencies have been telling people not to ride transit unless they are “essential workers.” Now those same agencies are outraged that the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) is giving people the same advice as they go back to work.

In an advisory page for employers of office workers, CDC urges employers to “Offer employees incentives to use forms of transportation that minimize close contact with others, such as offering reimbursement for parking for commuting to work alone or single-occupancy rides.”

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Maybe 35 Percent Wasn’t Enough

By | | Transportation
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When I let associates know that I was projecting that transit ridership after the pandemic would be 25 to 35 percent lower than before, some of them suggested I was overestimating. Now Reuters reports that in China, “transit ridership in large cities remains down about 35% two months after lockdown restrictions were lifted.” At the same time, auto sales there have sharply increased.

Reuters also frets that a shift from transit to cars will lead to more congestion. In fact, in most cities not enough people ride transit to make a different in traffic congestion. Where there is a difference, I suspect there will be less congestion, not more, because the real switch will not be from transit to driving but from transit and driving to working at home.
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Transit agencies, of course, want people to feel like they can safely ride the obsolete transportation they are offering. New York’s MTA alone says it will cost $500 million more a year to keep everything from ticket machines to transit seats disinfected. That’s just one more reason to rethink whether we really need transit all that much.

Not the Best Timing

By | | Transportation
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A group called the High-Speed Rail Alliance was pleased to announce that Massachusetts Representative Seth Moulton is proposing that the federal government spend $240 billion on high-speed rail lines. This is, says the Congressman, “a vision worthy of the moment.”

Is it worthy because ridership of Amtrak is down 95 percent? Or is it worthy because Americans are rethinking their use of mass transportation?

No, apparently it’s worthy because President Trump started a trade war with China that was exacerbated by accusations over COVID-19. China, says Representative Moulton, is expected to “invest” (meaning spend) $46 billion a year on high-speed rail between 2020 and 2030. So, since China is doing it, we have to do it too in order to stay “competitive.” Continue reading →