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Amtrak Inspector General Clueless

By | | Transportation
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Amtrak’s inspector general issued a report last week that reveals an utter cluelessness about Amtrak and how it works. The report argues that late trains are costing Amtrak revenues and that, instead of trying to run the trains on time, Amtrak should spend some of its precious resources building a computer model to estimate how many riders it loses for each late train.

The report, titled Better Estimates Needed of the Financial Impacts of Poor On-Time Performance, devotes many of its pages to building such a model itself and concludes that improving on-time performance by 5 percent could increase revenues by $12 million. Since Amtrak’s 2018 operating losses are $171 million, says the report, such an improvement could significantly reduce those losses. Continue reading →

A Little Victory

By | | Transportation
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According to both the 2009 and 2017 National Household Travel Survey, automobiles in the United States carry an average of 1.67 people (see page 58). Yet for table VM-1 of the Federal Highway Administration’s Highway Statistics annual reports, the Obama administration arbitrarily reduced this number to 1.38.

When this first appeared in the 2009 Highway Statistics report, I contacted the Federal Highway Administration to find out why they made the change. I was told that the lower number was based on then-latest 2009 National Household Travel Survey. When I pointed out that the survey found 1.67 people per vehicle, they said this number was “miles-weighted,” and if it were weighted by trips, it would be lower. When I expressed doubts that the difference would be that great, the person who I was communicating with insisted that he had a spreadsheet proving that the lower number was correct. When I asked him for a copy of that spreadsheet, he refused to give it to me, saying it was proprietary.

Since I used this number to calculate passenger miles, the mile-weighted method made more sense anyway. This meant that, whenever I wanted to quote passenger miles data, I would have to recalculate the numbers instead of relying on table VM-1, and then provide a justification for my recalculation. Continue reading →

August Ridership Drops in 40 of Top 50 Regions

By | | Transportation, Useful Data
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August 2019 transit ridership in the New York urban area grew a massive 5.1 percent above the same month in 2018, according to National Transit data released last Thursday by the Federal Transit Administration. That was enough to push nationwide transit ridership up, but only by 0.3 percent. Not counting New York, transit ridership fell by 3.2 percent.

August ridership fell in Phoenix by 16.2 percent, which may have been due to the weather: temperatures rose about 105 degrees for 21 days in August 2019, vs. just nine days in August 2018. Ridership also fell by 16.6 percent in Louisville, 14.1 percent in New Orleans, and 11.2 percent in Virginia Beach-Norfolk.

While these were the extremes, few major urban areas were exempt from the decline. Ridership dropped in Seattle (-2.6%) and Houston (-1.1%), both regions that had been once claimed to be exempt from the malaise that is affecting the nation’s transit industry. Ridership grew in only 10 of the nation’s 50 largest urban areas, and one of those — Dallas-Ft. Worth — is suspect as nearly all of the growth is in Dallas buses, which installed a new way of counting riders last fall that reports much higher numbers than before. Continue reading →

And the Winner Is . . .

By | | Transportation
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Asking what American city has the best transit is like asking which one has the best lutefisk. It may sound like an interesting question, but unless you are in the one urban area where it really matters (New York in the case of transit, Minneapolis-St. Paul in the case of lutefisk), or are a real die-hard fan, the answer is pretty much irrelevant to most Americans.

Nevertheless, WalletHub.com took the time to consider which of the nation’s top 100 cities has the best and worst transit systems. To answer the question, they used 17 different criteria, including such things as airport accessibility, the presence of dedicated bus or rail lines, and fatalities per passenger mile.

They concluded that Seattle has the best transit system, with a score of 77.97 out of a possible 100, followed closely by Boston, which scored 77.84. New York, which scored a measly 68.87, was only the seventh-best. The worst was Indianapolis, with only 21.13 points, slightly bettered by Tampa and St. Petersburg, which each scored about 24 points. Continue reading →

July Transit Ridership Up 1.9 Percent

By | | Transportation, Useful Data
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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
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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
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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.
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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
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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
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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
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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 →