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Category Archives: Transportation

July Transit Ridership Up 0.2 Percent

By | | Transportation, Useful Data
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The beleaguered transit industry got a tiny bit of good news with the Federal Transit Administration’s release last Friday of July, 2018 ridership data: nationwide ridership was 0.2 percent greater than in July 2017. Ridership grew in 18 of the nation’s 50 largest urban areas, up from just 6 in June.

July 2018 had one more work day than July 2017, which helps explain the improvement in some of those urban areas. This was the first year-over-year improvement since October, 2017, which also had one more work day than October 2016.

However, the biggest reason for the nationwide increase was the 8.0 percent growth in New York City subway ridership and 6.6 percent growth in New York City bus ridership. July 2017 was the beginning of New York’s “summer of hell” as deteriorating conditions forced the partial closure of Penn Station, the city’s main transit hub, from July 10 to September 1. Many commuters who found alternate sources of transportation during that shutdown apparently returned to transit when the station fully re-opened. Continue reading →

APTA: Correlation Proves Causation

By | | Transportation
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A new report from the American Public Transportation Association (APTA) comes out firmly in support of the belief that correlation proves causation. The report observes that traffic fatality rates are lower in urban areas with high rates of transit ridership, and claims that this proves “that modest increases in public transit mode share can provide disproportionally larger traffic safety benefits.”


Here is one of the charts that APTA claims proves that modest increases in transit ridership will reduce traffic fatalities. Note that, in urban areas with fewer than 25 annual transit trips per capita — which is the vast majority of them — the relationship between transit and traffic fatalities is virtually nil. You can click the image for a larger view or go to APTA’s document from which this chart was taken.

In fact, APTA’s data show no such thing. New York has the nation’s highest per capita transit ridership and a low traffic fatality rate. But there are urban areas with very low ridership rates that had even lower fatality rates in 2012, while there are other urban areas with fairly high ridership rates that also had high fatality rates. APTA claims the correlation between transit and traffic fatalities is a high 0.71, but that’s only when you include New York and a few other large urban areas: among urban areas of 2 million people or less, APTA admits the correlation is a low 0.28. Continue reading →

Amtrak vs. Freight Trains

By | | Transportation
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Trains magazine columnist Fred Frailey is an unabashed lover of passenger trains. So when he suggests that Amtrak is unfair to the freight railroads whose tracks it uses, passenger train supporters should listen.

Railfans often blame the freight railroads for late Amtrak trains, saying that the railroads should always give passenger trains priority under a 1973 law that states, “Except in an emergency, intercity passenger trains operated by or on behalf of [Amtrak] shall be accorded preference over freight trains in the use of any given line of track, junction, or crossing.” But, as Frailey points out (paywall), that 1973 law may be effectively stealing from the railroads when they are running near or at capacity.

For example, the oil boom is generating huge business for BNSF in western North Dakota. BNSF’s east-west main line across North Dakota has a single track with sidings, which should be able to support around 48 trains a day. But Amtrak’s Empire Builder is scheduled to run at 79 miles per hour, while freight trains typically run at only about 59, and the difference in speed means that the Amtrak train effectively reduces the line’s capacity by two or more freight trains a day. Continue reading →

The Antiplanner’s Library:
Rethinking America’s Highways

By | | Book reviews, Transportation
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In 1985, Reason Foundation co-founder and then-president Robert Poole heard about a variable road pricing experiment in Hong Kong. In 1986, he learned that France and other European countries were offering private concessions to build tollroads. In 1987, he interviewed officials of Amtech, which had just invented electronic transponders that could be used for road tolling. He put these three ideas together in a pioneering 1988 paper suggesting that Los Angeles, the city with the worst congestion in America, could solve its traffic problems by adding private, variable-priced toll lanes to existing freeways.

Although Poole’s proposal has since been carried out successfully on a few freeways in southern California and elsewhere, it is nowhere near as ubiquitous as it ought to be given that thirty years have passed and congestion is worse today in dozens of urban areas than it was in Los Angeles in 1988. So Poole has written Rethinking America’s Highways, a 320-page review of his research on the subject since that time. Poole will speak about his book at a livestreamed Cato Institute event this Friday at noon, eastern time. Continue reading →

Why Is America Keeping Transit Alive?

By | | Transportation
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CityLab‘s article, How America Killed Transit, concludes that “service drives demand.” What the writer, an urban planner named Jonathan English, means is that more frequent service results in more riders, and he bemoans the fact that cities like Washington, Atlanta, Portland, and Dallas that built expensive rail systems failed to support those systems with frequent feeder buses.

Yet English (whose twitter handle is @englishrail) fails to realize that the reason why service is often poor is that rail construction is so expensive that transit agencies didn’t have enough money left over to provide decent bus service. That’s why transit’s share of commuting was growing in Houston and Phoenix before they built rail and declined afterwards, and why it grew in Las Vegas, which didn’t build rail, even as it declined in Denver and Salt Lake City, which did.

Yet English’s larger premise, that “America killed transit,” is simply wrong-headed. America didn’t kill transit; new technologies did. When he claims we didn’t provide enough service, what he really means is we didn’t provide enough subsidies. But at some point there are diminishing returns to subsidies, and when you are already paying a dollar or more per passenger mile, you are beyond that point. Continue reading →

Suffering from an Illusion of Safety

By | | Transportation
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The Antiplanner has previously questioned bicycle lanes because they create an illusion of safety from overtaking cars when in fact the real danger is cross-traffic. Unfortunately, I received a very physical demonstration of this while cycling in Maui last Friday when I was hit by a large van.

I was enjoying a tailwind in the bike lane shown on the right side of this photo. The auto lane had bumper-to-bumper traffic while I was traveling at least 20 mph and passing cars that were going much slower. The van was in the left-turn lane where the red car is located in the above photo. Someone was nice enough to leave a gap for the van to turn left, but their car also blocked my view of the van just as they blocked the van driver’s view of me. Continue reading →

Giving Back to the Community

By | | Transportation
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The Sacramento Regional Transit District is reducing its fares for the first time in its history. It says it is doing this to “give back to the community.” But the Antiplanner can’t help but think that fare reductions might have more to do with the 40 percent decline in ridership the district has experienced since 2008.

At least it isn’t responding to revenue declines by increasing fares. Oh, wait: it already did. Between 2008 and 2016, average bus fares grew by 38 percent and average light-rail fares grew by 17 percent, which probably contributed to but were not the primary cause of declining ridership.

The agency says it can decrease fares now because of the success it has had in controlling costs in the last couple of years, as evidenced by the fact that it has $10 million in the bank as a “reserve.” But why did it wait until the last couple of years to control its costs? Why hasn’t it been controlling its costs since it was created in 1973? Continue reading →

Sanity in the Valley of the Sun

By | | Transportation
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The Phoenix city council is considering delaying or even killing some planned light-rail lines because it is concerned that city streets are falling apart and too much money is being spent instead on an insignificant form of travel. The council considered but rejected a similar proposal a couple of months ago, but since then two councilors who opposed the proposal have been replaced and at least one of them is inclined to favor streets over rails.

As of 2016, light rail carries less than 0.2 percent of all travel in the Phoenix urban area. The 2016 American Community Survey says that the same tiny percentage of commuters take light rail to work, which is unusual as transit’s commuter share is usually much higher than its total share. Phoenix light-rail ridership in the twelve months ending in June, 2018 was down 4.4 percent from the previous twelve months. Transit ridership for Phoenix as a whole is down 5.6 percent for the same time period.

Phoenix is one of many Sunbelt urban areas in which rail transit makes no sense at all. Aside from the Antiplanner’s argument that buses can move more people than light rail, rail systems only make sense where there is a high concentration of downtown jobs that a hub-and-spoke transit system can serve. According to Wendell Cox’s calculations, downtown Phoenix has only about 26,000 jobs, which is just 1.4 percent of jobs in the metropolitan area. Continue reading →

A Matter of Trust

By | | Transportation
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Ford Motor Company issued a report last week explaining its self-driving car program and why it won’t kill pedestrians like the Uber car did in Arizona. Among other things, Ford has two people in its test cars at all times, one watching the road and the other monitoring the self-driving system (Uber’s car had only one person who was watching a video at the time of the accident).

Click image to download this 37.4-MB PDF.

The Antiplanner likes Ford and wishes it well, but I can’t help but think that this “go-slow-for-safety” approach is merely an excuse for being three years behind Waymo and two years behind General Motors in the race to put self-driving ride-hailing systems on the streets. Ford promises to mass produce self-driving cars by 2021, but GM says it will have them by 2019 and Waymo expects to put such cars in revenue service this year. Continue reading →

Do We Still Need an Economic Recovery Fund?

By | | Transportation
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Congress created the TIGER grant program in 2009 to help the economy recover: TIGER stands for “transportation investment generating economic recovery.” The economy has recovered — the United States is now enjoying what some call the “longest bull market in Wall Street history” — so President Trump called for ending TIGER.

The House agreed, but some in the Senate want to keep it going. Instead of killing it, Maine Senator Susan Collins, who claims to be a Republican, wants to expand it. Her justification is that the program received 585 applications from state and local governments last year but was able to fund just 44, which demonstrates “the need and popularity of this program.” I wonder if she knows of any programs that give away hundreds of millions of dollars a year that aren’t popular.

(She also opposes reform of the air traffic control system, which she calls “a solution in search of a problem.” Because airports aren’t congested in Maine, so she must imagine they aren’t congested anywhere else.) Continue reading →