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150th Anniversary of a Boondoggle

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Today is the 150th anniversary of the pounding of the gold spike that represented completion of the first transcontinental railroad. Union Pacific, which now owns the complete route, plans to bring its newly restored Big Boy steam locomotive to Ogden to recreate, with 4-8-4 locomotive 844, the joining of the UP and Central Pacific in 1869. Numerous museums and history societies are planning exhibits and meetings.

While it would be fascinating to watch the Big Boy operate, you’ll have to pardon the Antiplanner for otherwise being unenthused about this event. As I see it, the first transcontinental railroad was the biggest boondoggle in nineteenth-century America, and one that — as later railroads proved — we could have lived without. Unfortunately, it is still being cited as an example of why twenty-first century America should do even more foolish things like build high-speed rail. Continue reading →

First Quarter Transit Ridership Down 2.6%

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Nationwide transit ridership in March 2019 was 1.6 percent below March 2018, according to data released yesterday by the Federal Transit Administration. For what it’s worth, March 2019 had one fewer work day than March 2018. However, ridership for the first three months of 2019 was down 2.6 percent, so this year is not looking good for the transit industry.

March ridership grew in just eleven of the nation’s fifty largest urban areas, and first quarter ridership grew in fifteen. The biggest losers for the quarter were Milwaukee (-12.7%), Detroit (-11.9%), and Louisville (-11.0%). The biggest winners were Richmond (+16.5%), Dallas-Ft. Worth (+8.1%), and Tampa (+5.7%). Houston grew but by only 1.4 percent. Ridership in Seattle declined by 2.2 percent for the month of March and 2.4 percent for the first quarter.
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The Antiplanner will have a more detailed analysis of these data in next Tuesday’s policy brief. In the meantime, my enhanced version of the FTA’s spreadsheet can be downloaded by anyone wanting to look up their favorite transit agencies or urban areas. For information on how to use the spreadsheet, see the explanation with last month’s post, keeping in mind that the columns with the annual totals have been moved one to the right to make room for March, 2019 data.

Milwaukee Puts Ribbons Over Brooms

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Due to circumstances entirely within the city of Milwaukee’s control, it can’t afford to fix potholes in city streets and it certainly won’t pay to repair the damage to at least 45 cars caused by those potholes so far this year. The circumstances are that, instead of fixing streets, the city decided to blow $123 million on a 2.1-mile streetcar line.

The Milwaukee streetcar trundles through the city at an average speed of 7.4 miles per hour. Flickr photo by David Wilson.

Nor will it have money for fixing potholes in the future. That’s because the Democratic National Convention is going to be held in Milwaukee next summer, and the city plans to blow another $28 million building a 0.4-mile extension of the streetcar line beyond the convention center — a convention center, by the way, whose expansion is costing the city $247 million to $277 million. Continue reading →

Washington Transit Trips Up 90 Percent

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Bucking the national trend, Washington has managed to increase transit ridership by 90 percent in the first quarter of 2019 compared with the same quarter of 2018. It accomplished this by the simple expedient of offering the rides for free. Did I mention that this is Washington, Indiana?

Still, 90 percent sounds huge — but don’t get excited. For Washington, Indiana, increasing ridership by 90 percent meant going from 37 riders per day to 70. The city of Washington had about 12,000 residents in 2017 and Washington transit carried 10,353 rides — less than one per resident. Increasing ridership by 90 percent won’t even bring it up to two.

By offering free rides, “The city may be losing 75 cents per ride [which was the previous transit fare], but people will spend even more than that at area businesses,” claimed transit consultant Chuck Martindale. “It is something that is beneficial to the entire community.” Martindale offered no evidence that people getting free rides were spending more at area businesses before they got free rides, and he neglected to mention that, before offering free rides, Washington was losing nearly $10 per ride anyway. Continue reading →

A Trillion Here, a Trillion There . . .

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Even as California governor Gavin Newsome blames the state’s high-speed rail debacle on the consultants, President Trump and congressional Democrats have tenatively agreed to spend $2 trillion on infrastructure. Some have drawn the wrong lesson from California’s problems, suggesting that government should do everything itself, that privatization is wasteful, and government control is efficient.

In fact, it’s not the consultants, stupid! Nor is it the private sector in general, which has incentives to be efficient so long as it has to rely on market forces rather than a big-government sugar daddy. As the Cato Institute’s David Boaz points out, the real problem is the iron triangle of bureaucrats, elected officials, and private interests (including consultants, contractors, and unions) who benefit from big-government programs. All of them work together to get the programs approved and then have plausible deniability when things inevitably go wrong.

No one should have been surprised that the California project cost far more than originally projected. Wendell Cox and Joseph Vranich predicted it months before voters went to the polls in 2008 (and even their high estimate of $61 billion — $71 billion in today’s dollars — turned out to be low). As the Antiplanner has shown, almost every passenger rail project built by government in the last half century has had a large cost overrun. Continue reading →

An Abundance of Caution

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Illinois contractors and unions are lobbying hard for a gas tax increase, claiming that highway infrastructure is crumbling and killing people. Last week, the Antiplanner told Illinois that its highway infrastructure is actually doing fine, but the infrastructure that was in trouble was rail transit. Increasing gas taxes to repair Chicago transit would unfairly take money from low-income downstate auto commuters to subsidize higher-income Chicago transit commuters.

The day after I returned from Chicago, two local commuters woke up to discover a bridge had shed some concrete that crushed their cars in the night. Does that mean the unions were right about crumbling highway infrastructure?

No, the concrete, it turns out, came from a Chicago Transit Authority Red Line elevated line. CTA didn’t even seem too concerned about it, finding no evidence of “larger deterioration issues.” However, a spokesperson said, “out of an abundance of caution crews are performing a complete inspection of the area.” Continue reading →

Has the Day Come for Electric Vehicles?

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“Electric vehicles’ day will come,” argues Bloomberg, “and it might come suddenly.” California is pushing for electric vehicles, the article notes, and it projects that there will come an inflection point at which electric cars will suddenly become dominant.

Tiny electric cars gather around free recharging stations in Norway. Photo by Fiona Bradley.

As an example of such an inflection, it points to Norway, where electric cars grew from 1 percent of new car sales in 2011 to 47 percent by 2018. The article suggests such “explosive growth” of electric vehicles might happen in California. Continue reading →

Transit Commuters Up But Ridership Down

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Here’s a puzzle: between 2014 and 2017, the number of people who said they took transit to work in the San Jose urban area grew by 25 percent. Yet actual San Jose transit ridership fell by 15 percent. What accounts for this apparent discrepancy?

Similar but smaller discrepancies exist in a few other large urban areas. New York transit commuting is up 4% but ridership down 3%; Chicago commuting up 6% but ridership down 7%; Atlanta commuting up 12% but ridership down 8%. In some smaller urban areas, the discrepancies can be much larger: Cape Coral, Florida transit commuting is up 77% but ridership down 20%; Wichita commuting up 79% but ridership down 37%. In a few urban areas, the trends are reversed: Houston transit commuting is down 8% but ridership is up 4%; Greenville, SC commuting down 35% but ridership up 152%.

Of course, not all transit riders are commuters, so commuting can increase even as ridership drops if transit ridership for other purposes declines by more than the increase in commuting. This seems a likely explanation in many cases as most ride-hailing trips that substitute for transit are not commuter trips. Continue reading →

Ridership Is Down, But APTA Still Wants to Spend $232 Billion on Transit Infrastructure

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The American Public Transportation Association released its fourth quarter 2018 ridership report showing what Antiplanner readers already know: transit lost 2 percent of its riders last year. While admitting the decline, the accompanying press release focused on the few places where ridership grew, such as Columbus, the Long Island Railroad, and West Covina, California. You know they’re desperate when they have to go to West Covina — population 108,000 — to find good news.

Although APTA did issue a press release, it isn’t visible on the lobby group’s home page. Instead, the top “news update” is a March 18 press release demanding that taxpayers pony up $232 billion for transit infrastructure. As previously noted here, this is just a wish-list of transit project, most of which are new and don’t fix the $100 billion maintenance backlog with existing infrastructure.

The ridership press release barely hints at the really bad news, such as the 24 percent decline in Baltimore heavy-rail riders, the 20 percent decline in Boston light-rail riders, or the 12 percent decline in Atlanta bus riders. Unlike the few positive results APTA reported, these aren’t rare exceptions; more likely they are bellwethers of things to come for the few transit agencies that have seen ridership gains. Continue reading →

China’s Motorways

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We often hear about how China has the world’s longest high-speed rail network. But we hardly ever hear about how China has the world’s longest and fastest-growing freeway network. Jeremy Clarkson is changing that, noting that China has built 84,000 miles of motorways (the Britishism for limited-access highways), and the network is expanding by 6,000 miles a year — about six times the growth of its high-speed rail lines.

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In contrast, the United States had about 67,000 miles of freeways in 2017, an amount that has grown by less than 1,000 miles a year since 2010. To be fair, we built most of our freeways in the 1950s and 1960, so our freeway network shouldn’t expand as fast as China’s. But since the United States has far more motor vehicles than China (about 272 million vs. 240 million), we should have at least as many miles of freeways. So, next time you hear someone ask, “Why can’t we have high-speed trains like China?” ask back, “Why can’t we have freeways like China?”