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Category Archives: Transportation

How Do You Define “Viable”?

By | | Transportation, Urban areas
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Among the many wacky proposals for rail transit in this country is a plan to run commuter trains some 50 miles between Las Cruces, New Mexico (population about 100,000) to El Paso, Texas (population around 700,000). Such a project, if it did anything at all, would be most likely to drain jobs from Las Cruces to El Paso. So it is surprising that the main proponent of the project is a New Mexico transit agency, the South Central Regional Transit District (SCRTD).

SCRTD hired a consultant to do a feasibility study that — surprise! — concluded the train was feasible. Of course, to reach this conclusion, the study had to make some heroic assumptions:

  1. That the federal government would be willing to put up a large share of the capital costs, which it doesn’t want to do.
  2. That the state government would also be willing to contribute to the capital costs, which it doesn’t want to do.
  3. That BNSF would be willing to host commuter trains on its rail line, which it doesn’t want to do.
  4. That surveys of people who say they would be happy to ride the train (without telling them about the fares) really mean anything.
  5. That someone will be willing to subsidize most of the $15 to $20 cost per trip, when anyone who already owns a car could drive the distance for well under half that amount.

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Demonizing Ride Hailing

By | | Transportation
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Lyft and Uber are increasing traffic by 180 percent, claims an arithmetically challenged study of ride hailing. As a result, reports NPR, ride hailing is adding to congestion. Moreover, says the study itself, ride hailing is inequitable and less sustainable than transit.

The study does have some useful numbers, but it was written by Bruce Schaller, a long-time transit advocate who obviously has a bone to pick about ride hailing. In reality, the study offers no real evidence that ride hailing is increasing congestion or that it is otherwise a serious problem for anyone but taxi companies and transit agencies. For them, it is a serious problem.

Schaller calculates that ride hailing grew from 1.90 billion trips in 2016 to 2.61 billion in 2017, for a net growth of 710 million rides. In those same years, transit ridership declined by 255 million rides. So, if only 36 percent of ride-hailing users would otherwise have taken transit, then ride hailing is responsible for 100 percent of the decline in transit ridership. Continue reading →

Music City Star Still Falls Short

By | | Transportation, Urban areas
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The Middle Tennessee Regional Transportation Authority reported that ridership on its Music City Star commuter train showed a “substantial increase” in its latest fiscal year (which ended June 30, 2018). The agency claimed that the train carried 269,296 passengers in F.Y. 2018 vs. 258,360 in F.Y. 2017.

The Antiplanner isn’t sure why a 4 percent increase is considered “substantial,” especially since the population of Wilson County, which is served by the train, grew by 3 percent. At least it is bucking the trend of transit ridership decline, but that’s not necessarily a reason to celebrate either.

When the train was planned in 2004, it was projected to carry an average of 1,900 weekday riders in its first year and cost $3 million a year to operate (about $3.6 million in today’s dollars). In fact, more than a decade after it opened, it is still carrying less than 1,200 weekday riders, while its operating costs are at least $5.2 million a year (plus it cost about 40 percent more to start up than anticipated). High costs and low ridership mean the costs per rider are around 130 percent greater than expected. Fares, of course, are not, and covered only 17 percent of operating costs in 2016. Continue reading →

The Consultant Report on Why Seattle’s
Latest Streetcar Line Is Late Is Late

By | | Transportation
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Construction of Seattle’s latest streetcar line is late and over budget, so the mayor halted construction and hired a consultant to find out why. Now the consultant report itself is late.

The city knew that the problem had to do with the fact that construction turned out to be more complicated than the city anticipated. Now the consultant says that figuring out the problem turned out to be more complicated than the consultant anticipated.

Seattle shouldn’t have had to pay a consultant $146,000 to figure out the problem. The problem is simple: streetcars are stupid. They are obsolete technology. When invented in 1888, they averaged 8 mph. Now, after 130 of technological improvements, they average 8 mph. The tracks intrude into the streets, creating problems for other utilities and cyclists. When one breaks down, the others can’t go around it. Continue reading →

Peasant Stories

By | | Transportation
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News flash: A state-sponsored company in China has announced that has developed an electric typewriter that is faster than an IBM Selectric. HCN (whose motto is “we’re one step beyond IBM”) plans to sell an electric typewriter that allows typists to type more words per minute than any previous electric typewriter.

This demonstrates that the United States is falling behind in the critical electric typewriter race, just one more field in which other countries are demonstrating their technological superiority. IBM hasn’t even made a Selectric typewriter in the United States since the 1980s, which must be another example of manufacturing jobs being shipped overseas. Members of Congress have reacted by proposing to tax word processing software so that the federal government can raise the billions of dollars needed to restore American technological superiority in this vital field.

Sounds ridiculous? Of course. Yet how is this different from saying that, because China, Japan, France, and Spain are losing money on new high-speed rail lines, we need to lose money building high-speed rail lines as well? Perhaps we should tax airlines to subsidize high-speed rail in the same way that some cities and states are taxing ride hailing to subsidize public transit. Continue reading →

Can Transit Save Itself by Going Driverless?

By | | Transportation
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With ridership declining, fare revenues are also declining, and these revenues provide an average of one-third of transit agency operating funds. One way transit agencies can save money is to go driverless. While driverless buses are several years away, driverless rail lines have been around for quite some time.

The International Public Transport Association defines three levels of automated transit: level 4 requires no human operators; level 3 requires a human operator just for emergency situations; and level 2 requires a human operator for emergencies and to close the doors. Level 1 is unautomated.

Most airport trains in the United States are level 4. While BART and Washington Metro could have been level four, unions demanded at least “one employee per train,” so they were operated as level 2. Since the 2009 crash, which was caused by failure to maintain the computer system, most DC Metro lines have been operated as level 1. Honolulu’s rail line is supposed to be fully automated, but it isn’t certain it will ever be finished as its cost is proving to be far greater than expected. Continue reading →

Can Transit Survive Driverless Ride Hailing?

By | | Transportation
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Should cities be building new transit infrastructure when driverless cars may be just around the corner? That’s the question asked by a New York Times article last Friday. The answers provided by a range of experts were far more balanced than a previous Times article about transit, which took for granted that transit was good and anyone skeptical of it was bad.

Last Friday’s report was far more broad minded. “Don’t build a light rail system now,” it quoted a venture capitalist as saying. “Please, please, please, please don’t” until we see how driverless cars “plays out.”

The article also quoted driverless car supporter Brad Templeton, who has promoted “robocars” for years, arguing that driverless cars can move people far more efficiently than forms of transit. Templeton claims that transit supporters are people who “just believe there is something pure and good about riding together, that it must be the right answer.” Continue reading →

Florida Influencers Are Ignorant Idiots

By | | Transportation
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More than 9.1 million people worked in Florida in 2016. Of those, 8 million of them drove to work. More than half a million worked at home. Only 187,000, just 2 percent, took transit to work. More Floridians walked or bicycled to work than took transit.

Yet a survey of 50 people who the Miami Herald dubs “the Influencers” — supposedly the state’s leading figures — found that 80 percent of them believe that increasing funding for transit should be the state’s top infrastructure priority. This only proves that these so-called influencers don’t know what they are talking about and shouldn’t be allowed to influence anything.

Miami-Ft. Lauderdale-West Palm Beach has already spent $1.2 billion on a commuter-rail line that carries fewer than 7,000 commuters to work each day. Miami also spent well over a billion dollars on a so-called rapid-transit line whose revenues cover only 20 percent of its operating costs. As if that’s not bad enough, Miami spent $153 million on a people-mover system that costs another $40 million a year to operate and maintain yet earns no fare revenues. Continue reading →

Light Rail Average Cost Is $202 Million/Mile

By | | Transportation
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Here’s a fun question to think about: what will be the last rail transit project built in America? Will it be one of the projects currently on the Federal Transit Administration’s current list of grant projects? Or will some other city come up with a doofus proposal after all of the projects on the current list are either done or, better, cancelled?

For fiscal year 2019, the FTA proposed to fund just ten projects, including eight new construction projects and two improvements to existing transit lines. One of the eight new projects, Portland-Milwaukie light rail, is actually already finished and many of the others are partly finished.

While the Trump administration’s official policy is that it will not give out any new construction grants, the process has several stages before projects reach the construction phase, including project development and engineering. The administration has added at least ten new projects to the development or engineering phases. The current list has a total of 66 projects. Continue reading →

Can New York City Afford Its Subways?

By | | Transportation, Urban areas
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This is a question the Antiplanner asked almost exactly one year ago, but it comes up again because New York governor Andrew Cuomo and mayor Bill de Blasio are still arguing who should pay to repair the subways. Those subways are contained entirely within New York City. They were built by New York City. They are owned by New York City. Yet New York City mayor Bill de Blasio argues that all of the projected $37 billion cost of restoring the subways to a state of good repair should be paid by the state, not the city.

de Blasio’s reasoning apparently is that, although the city owns the subways, it has leased them to the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, a state agency that also manages commuter trains and other transit lines that connect New York City with suburbs in Connecticut and New York. de Blasio claims to fear that, if the city gives any money at all to the MTA, it will spend some of that money on transit outside of the city.

New York governor Andrew Cuomo is willing to meet de Blasio halfway, agreeing that the state will pay for half the cost if the city picks up the other half. “We’ve lost a year because the city wouldn’t pay” its share, he says. Comments on the Gothamist article reporting Cuomo’s statement show that New York City residents don’t think much of this argument. Continue reading →