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St. Louis Streetcar Dies a Noisy Death

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Built at a cost of $51 million, St. Louis’ streetcar line made its last run in December, 2019 when the organization operating it ran out of funds. Fittingly, it broke down on its very last run and its passengers had to walk the last few blocks of the route.

Built at a cost of $51 million, the trolley opened in November, 2018 after a decade of planning and construction. Proponents predicted it would carry 400,000 riders in its first year. In fact, it carried only about 20,000 and fare revenues didn’t come close to covering operating costs.

Streetcar lovers hoped that St. Louis’ regional transit agency, which can’t seem to decide whether to call itself Metro (the name used by numerous other transit agencies) or Bi-State (which is boring but at least original), would take over the streetcar. Last week, Bi-State’s CEO said he was prepared to take it over provided he could require every business along the line to buy a monthly pass for all of their employees. Continue reading →

November Ridership Down 0.3 Percent

By | | Transportation, Useful Data
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Transit ridership in November 2019 was 0.3 percent lower than the same month in 2018, according to data released last week by the Federal Transit Administration. Ridership in January through November 2019 was 0.1 percent below the same period in 2018.

The downward trend in ridership was in spite of a slight increase in the New York urban area, which sees 44 percent of all transit riders in the country. Without New York, year-to-date ridership was 1.5 percent lower in 2019 than 2018. Thirty-two out of the nation’s top fifty urban areas lost transit riders in 2019 to date.

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New York MTA Challenges Artist over Map

By | | Transportation
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New York’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority is in a heap of financial trouble. It is more than $40 billion in debt; it has a $60 billion maintenance backlog; plus it has more than $20 billion in unfunded health care obligations.

Instead of addressing these problems, the MTA is going after an artist named Jake Berman for violating the MTA’s copyright by making and selling a map of MTA’s subway network.

The MTA says that Berman’s map looks like the official MTA map, which is to be expected since they are both mapping the same thing. Berman’s map looks like an abstract version of the subway system known as the Vignelli map, which MTA wasn’t even using until two years after Berman started distributing his map on the web. Continue reading →

October Transit Ridership Down 1.6%

By | | Transportation, Useful Data
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The nation’s transit industry carried 1.6 percent fewer riders in October 2019 than it did in the same month in 2018, according to the latest monthly data release from the Federal Transit Administration. Ridership fell for light rail, hybrid rail, and most kinds of buses, but grew for commuter rail and heavy rail. October had the same number of work days in 2018 and 2019, so the decline in ridership can’t be blamed on a difference in work days.

Ridership declined in 31 of the nation’s 50 largest urban areas. The numbers show an increase for Dallas-Ft. Worth, but that’s due to a change in the method of counting bus riders in Dallas, so in reality ridership probably declined in 32 of the nation’s 50 largest regions.

In terms of percent, the biggest drops were in New Orleans (-17.1%), Louisville (-12.6%), Phoenix (-11.8%), Boston (-10.3%), and Virginia Beach-Norfolk (-9.9%). In actual numbers, the biggest declines were in Boston (-3.6 million riders), Chicago (-2.8 million or -5.2%), Los Angeles (-2.3 million or -4.7%), Philadelphia (-1.4 million or -4.3%), and Atlanta (-1.0 million or -7.9%). Phoenix, San Francisco Oakland, Minneapolis-St. Paul, San Juan, and Cleveland all lost more than 200,000 riders. Continue reading →

Vision Zero Isn’t Working

By | | Follow up, Transportation
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An article posted on the Atlantic‘s CityLab last week documented that many of the cities that have adopted “vision zero” policies have seen pedestrian fatalities sharply increase. These cities, notes the article, have “spent hundreds of millions of dollars in the process, rebuilding streets to calm traffic and reduce driving, lobbying for speed limit reductions, launching public awareness campaigns, and retraining police departments.” Yet Chicago, Los Angeles, and Washington, among others, saw sharp increases in pedestrian and/or bicycle fatalities after adopting Vision Zero policies.

This won’t be a surprise to Antiplanner readers. As described in Policy Brief #25, Vision Zero is an overly simplistic strategy that fails to solve the real problems that are causing pedestrian fatalities to rise.

Vision Zero is based on the observation that pedestrians hit by cars traveling at high speeds are more likely to die than if the cars are traveling at low speeds. So Vision Zero’s primary tactic is to reduce driving speeds. Vision Zero’s secondary goal is to reduce driving period by making auto travel slower and less desirable compared to the alternatives. Neither of these are working very well. Continue reading →

Amtrak Report Refutes Press Release

By | | Follow up, Transportation
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A couple of weeks ago, I noted that, if Amtrak were a publicly traded company, it would have been guilty of securities fraud for misrepresenting its 2019 financial results in a press release before those results were officially published. Now Amtrak has published an unaudited edition of its 2019 returns and it verifies everything I said.

The document is the company’s monthly performance report for September, 2019, which also reports on year-to-date results. Since September 30 is the end of Amtrak’s fiscal year, this is in effect a preliminary annual report.

Page 3 of the report notes that Amtrak collected $2,288.5 million in ticket revenues, $143.9 million in food and beverage revenues, and $234.2 million in subsidies from the states. All of these are counted as “passenger related revenue.” Of course, subsidies from the states are not really passenger revenues, but they were portrayed that way in the press release. Continue reading →

Strike a Blow Against Capitalism Socialism

By | | Transportation
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Here’s someone’s idea of a brilliant plan: get all your friends to fight the evil capitalistic system by refusing to pay for one of the most socialistic services in this country: public transit. On November 29 (the day after Thanksgiving), people are supposed to protest “the rich getting richer” by jumping turnstiles or otherwise refusing to pay for their transit rides.

Under the name “No Fare Is Fair,” people in Portland are refusing to pay and demanding free public transit, which supposedly represents social, economic, and climate justice. Similar groups are promoting fare strikes in Seattle, San Francisco, New York City, and no doubt elsewhere. Continue reading →

Water or Transit?

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San Antonio politician Nelson Wolff has proposed to take a sales tax that currently supports the region’s water supply and give it to VIA, San Antonio’s transit agency, instead. He apparently believes it’s more important to subsidize a transit system that carries less than 2.6 percent of city commuters to work than the aquifer that supplies 70 percent of the water for the region.

An op-ed in response points out that VIA is already so generously funded that it was able to increase service by 17 percent since 2012. Despite that increase in service, ridership dropped 24 percent. In 2017, VIA spent $205 million on operations and collected less than $24 million in fares.
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Wolff was long the strongest voice of building a light-rail or streetcar line in San Antonio. He wants to subsidize transit, he claims, because “there will be less pollution.” Hardly: VIA buses emit twice as much greenhouse gases per passenger mile as the average car and 80 percent more than the average SUV. None of this matters to Wolff, who seems to believe that taxpayers exist to support transit, not that transit exists to support mobility.

Transit Ridership Up in September

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America’s transit systems carried 2.9 percent more riders in September 2019 than September 2018, according to data released by the Federal Transit Administration yesterday. After deducting New York, ridership still grew by half a percent. Moreover, ridership grew in 27 of the nation’s 50 largest urban areas, though one of those was Dallas-Ft. Worth, where the apparent ridership growth is really just due to a change in the method of counting bus riders.

September 2019 had one more work day than September 2018, which accounts for some of the increase. A recovery from some of the maintenance delays experienced in New York and Washington explains some of the rest of it. Every major mode of transit saw an increase in riders except light rail, which experienced a 5.4 percent decline.

Year-to-date ridership is not so positive, as it fell by 0.1 percent nationwide, 1.4 percent outside of New York, 4.0 percent for light rail, and 0.8 percent for buses. Continue reading →

Traffic Safety Data for 2018, First Half 2019

By | | Follow up, Transportation
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I should have waited a few days before posting my policy brief on pedestrian and cyclist safety. The day after I posted it, the Department of Transportation released its 2018 data as well as data for the first half of 2019.

As I expected, fatalities declined in 2018, and from the first half report it appears they will decline again in 2019. What I didn’t expect was that, despite the overall decline in traffic fatalities, pedestrian fatalities would increase by 3.4 percent and bicycle fatalities would increase by 6.3 percent.
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My previous analysis of the data found that a disproportionate number of pedestrian and cyclist fatalities took place at night and many involved pedestrians and cyclists who were impaired by alcohol. The 2018 report shows that most of the increase in fatalities took place at night and that cyclist fatalities involving alcohol (on the part of the cyclist) grew faster than the total. I’ll take a more detailed look at the data and post my findings soon.