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Category Archives: Transportation

Durham: Forward into the Past

By | | Transportation
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Duke University has until tomorrow to agree to donate land to the Durham light-rail project, or the project may die. As a result, project supporters have been trotting out advocates who claim that light rail will benefit the community.

Interestingly, none of those benefits have anything to do with transportation. In particular, some leaders of the black community think that light rail will help revitalize their neighborhoods. In fact, at best it will do nothing for those neighborhoods; more likely, it will lead to subsidized gentrification pushing black residents out.

Ironically, the neighborhood they hope to benefit is one that was previously damaged by past urban-renewal projects. Somehow, it hasn’t occurred to the black leaders that the local government’s plan to tear down existing homes and building expensive transit-oriented developments will be more likely to harm than help the current residents of the neighborhood. Continue reading →

Take a Streetcar to Forest Park–If You’re Rich

By | | Transportation
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Portland’s streetcar is slow and expensive, ridership is stagnant, and fare recovery is negligible. So obviously the solution is to extend the streetcar line. At least, that’s what Portland’s Bureau of Transportation proposes.

Streetcar ridership peaked in 2016 at 4.86 million trips per year. In 2018 they had fallen slightly to 4.79 million. Although the fare is nominally $2, actual revenues amount to just 17 cents per trip. Of course, those revenues don’t come close to covering costs, which average $3.50 per rider. The city spends $39 per streetcar revenue mile running it, where TriMet buses cost only $12.50 per mile.

Despite these flaws, the report proudly announces that the city has received a $1 million grant from the Federal Transit Administration to study the possibility of extending the streetcar a little over a mile to Montgomery Park, which is not a park but a former Montgomery Wards warehouse. The terminus would be near Forest Park, which is a 5,100-acre park with hiking trails in Portland’s West Hills. Continue reading →

If You Can’t Beat Them, Outsubsidize Them

By | | Transportation
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Aiming to compete directly with Uber and Lyft, Oregon’s Lane County Transit District (LTD) has started an app-based bus service in Cottage Grove, which is 22 miles south of Eugene. LTD says that it is making transportation “affordable” because it charges only $1 for the door-to-door service, whereas Uber and Lyft would charge far more.

Called the Connector, the bus service costs riders just $1 to and from anywhere within the Cottage Grove city limits. LTD actually contracts out the service to South Lane Wheels, which is run by the city of Cottage Grove and which already was providing such a service for $3 a ride for up to three miles and roughly a dollar a mile beyond that. Cottage Grove is small enough that no trips within the city limits are three miles long, but South Lane Wheels, unlike the Connector, will go outside the city limits.

According to the city of Cottage Grove’s profile in the National Transit Database, fares collected by South Lane Wheels cover less than 6 percent of its costs. That means the average ride cost taxpayers more than $32 in 2017. Now LTD is adding its own subsidies to those rides. Continue reading →

Brightline Noise

By | | Transportation
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There’s lots of noise coming from Brightline, the company that is operating private passenger trains between Miami and West Palm Beach, with a goal of eventually reaching Orlando. Yet underneath the noise it appears nothing is really happening.

First, last September, Brightline bought XPressWest, a company that has gained permission, but not much funding, to build a high-speed rail line from Las Vegas to Victorville, California, because apparently a lot of people in Victorville (population: 121,000) have to get to Vegas really fast. Brightline supposedly paid $120 million for XPress, but it isn’t clear what it got for that money since XPress didn’t really have any assets other than building permits; most likely Brightline paid the $120 million in some sort of securities.

Second, a couple of months later, Richard Branson’s Virgin Group purchased a “minority interest” in Brightline. Branson has a lot of nice things to say about Brightline and Wes Edens, the co-founder of Fortress Investment Group and the lead supporter of Brightline. Continue reading →

Analyzing Transit’s Decline

By | | Transportation
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Ride-hailing services are not the principle cause of transit ridership decline, according to a new report from TransitCenter, a New York-based transit cheerleading group. This is based on a survey of 1,700 people in seven different urban areas.

Comparing the results with a similar survey from three years before, the group found a large increase in automobile ownership and that people who increased the number of trips they took by auto decreased the number of trips they took by transit. However, people surveyed who increased their use of ride-hailing services actually increased transit ridership, so TransitCenter concluded that increased auto ownership, not ride hailing, is the cause of transit’s problems.

A major problem with the study is that the people surveyed were not randomly selected — if they were, most of them wouldn’t have been transit riders. The amount of self-selection in the survey biases the results and says little about why the people who weren’t selected for the survey don’t ride transit — and their reasons may be completely different from those who were selected. Continue reading →

INRIX 2018 Congestion Scorecard

By | | Transportation
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INRIX has released its 2018 traffic congestion numbers for more than 200 urban areas around the world. Unfortunately, the company changed its methodology from previous years, so the numbers aren’t comparable. It also isn’t clear how INRIX ranks congestion.

For example, the INRIX web page notes that, “In 2018, Bogata drivers lost 272 hours due to congestion — more than any other city in the world.” Yet Bogata is ranked number three behind Moscow (where drivers lost 210 hours) and Istanbul (where drivers lost only 157 hours). The only other data offered for ranking congestion is the speed of driving in the inner city: in Bogata it was 7 mph compared with 11 in Moscow and 10 in Istanbul. So if Bogata is worse on both criteria, why is it ranked only number 3? Continue reading →

2018 Transit Ridership Down 2.0 Percent

By | | Transportation, Useful Data
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Transit ridership in 2018 was 2.0 percent less than in 2017, according to the December 2018 monthly data released by the Federal Transit Administration last Friday. Led by a 2.5 percent decline in heavy-rail ridership, total rail ridership actually declined by more than bus ridership: 2.1 percent vs. 2.0 percent.

The 2018 decline follows three straight years of previous losses, resulting in a total 8.5 percent fall since 2014. Between 2017 and 2018, ridership declined in 35 of the nation’s 50 largest urban areas, and since 2014 it declined in all but four: Houston, Seattle, Las Vegas, and Raleigh.

In November’s ridership report, the Antiplanner noted that commuter-rail numbers for Boston, New York, and a few other cities appeared to be incomplete, resulting in an apparent 15 percent decline in total commuter-rail ridership from November 2017. The December release corrects those data, revealing that total commuter-rail ridership in November didn’t fall at all, but it didn’t really increase either, gaining less than 0.05 percent. Commuter rail fell by 0.2 percent in December and was flat for the year as a whole. Continue reading →

Honolulu to Cover Up Overruns with PPP

By | | Transportation
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Oxford has added a new word to its English dictionary: hammajang, which means something is “all messed up.” The word comes from Hawaiian pidgin, which is appropriate considering how messed up Honolulu’s rail project has become. Originally expected to open this year at a cost of less than $3 billion, the current projected cost is more than $9 billion and, since they don’t have funds to complete it, it probably won’t open until 2026 at the earliest.

The latest news is that the FTA has subpoenaed the Honolulu Authority for Rapid Transit (HART) for inside documents to find out what is going on. Meanwhile, HART wants to form a public-private partnership to build the last four miles. The private partner would raise the funds for construction and, when it is completed, would operate the entire 20-mile rail line. In exchange, the city would pay the private partner hundreds of millions of dollars a year for 30 years.

No one thinks the private partner will be able to save taxpayers any money or operate the trains more efficiently than HART itself. Instead, this scheme will save HART from having to raise the funds to finish the line itself. The city can’t afford it; the state can’t afford it; the feds won’t pay any more than they have already promised. So get a private partner to borrow the money — a debt that won’t appear on HART’s books — and simply repay the private partner out of future tax revenues. Continue reading →

Sanity Reaches Sacramento

By | | Transportation
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California Governor Gavin Newsom has announced that he is cancelling the state’s high-speed rail project. The project “as currently planned, would cost too much and take too long,” he argued, and he doesn’t see “a path to get from Sacramento to San Diego, let alone from San Francisco to L.A.” (a phrase he got backwards).

Originally projected to cost $20 billion, then $33 billion, then $68 billion, and most recently $77 billion (but it would undoubtedly be even more), the state has never found the resources to fully fund even the lowest, much less the latest, cost estimate.

Newsom said the state will complete the 164 miles it is building between Merced and Bakerfield, allowing Amtrak to run its trains a little faster in that corridor. Amtrak’s San Joaquin, which goes from San Francisco to Los Angeles on that route, carries about a million trips per year and runs two-thirds empty. Amtrak claims the train lost only $11 million last year, but it doesn’t count depreciation and it counts state subsidies to the train as “revenues,” so the real loss is much larger. Continue reading →

She’s No Alexander Hamilton

By | | News commentary, Transportation
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The Antiplanner might be behind the times, but has anyone else noticed that it is the Democrats who are playing the role of Alexander Hamilton — the conservative who wanted to centralize government and concentrate power in New York banks — while the Republicans are playing the role of Thomas Jefferson — the civil libertarian who wanted to keep economic and political power decentralized? I always wondered why Lin-Manuel Miranda picked such a conservative historical figure to be the hero of his left-leaning musical.

Now we know. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Green New Deal is going to cost tens of trillions of dollars, but she just blithely says we’ll pay for it “the same way we paid for World War II”: “The Federal Reserve can extend credit to power these projects and investments and new public banks can be created to extend credit.”

That’s not how we paid for World War II. Instead, we borrowed money from banks and people that had money. Alexander Hamilton knew just creating a bank doesn’t suddenly give it credit; instead, there has to be assets or income backing up that credit. Continue reading →