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The Biggest Boondoggle?

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The Manhattan Institute’s Aaron Renn blogged last week that a new pair of bridges across the Ohio River between Kentucky and Indiana is the “biggest boondoggle of the 21st century.” Renn calls these $1.3 billion bridges a boondoggle because they doubled the capacity of the previous Interstate 65 bridge across the river, yet after they opened traffic declined by nearly 50 percent.

Traffic fell this much because the states decided to pay for the new bridges partly by tolling them. This pushed traffic to other nearby bridges that remain untolled. As a traffic survey makes clear — but Renn glosses over — overall cross-river traffic grew just as the states predicted when they decided new bridges were needed. So the problem is not that the bridges weren’t needed but that the other bridges remain unpriced.

The Manhattan Institute supports free markets, so it should also support tolling. It is possible that variable-priced tolling of all the Ohio River bridges near Louisville could have eliminated congestion without immediately adding to bridge capacity, but traffic would continue to grow and eventually the states might need to use the collected tolls to expand capacity. Continue reading →

Amtrak Ridership Declined in 2018

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Although Amtrak has posted its October, 2018 performance report, which includes the first month of FY 2019, it still has not released its September report, which would include year-end results for fiscal year 2018. However, data distributed by rail groups indicates that Amtrak passenger ridership was 0.1 percent lower in 2018 than in 2017.

All of the decline was among long-distance trains, which lost 3.9 percent of their riders. Amtrak’s Northeast Corridor saw a 0.8 percent ridership increase while state-subsidized short-distance trains gained 0.4 percent more riders.

Ridership fell for all but two long-distance trains, the exceptions being the Oakland-Chicago California Zephyr and the New York-New Orleans Crescent. The New York-Chicago Lake Shore Limited lost 13.1 percent of its riders, while the Chicago-Seattle Empire Builder lost 5.6 percent of its riders, while still managing to be Amtrak’s number one long-distance train. Continue reading →

Ride Hailing and Crime Depress Transit Numbers

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“Why have so many people quit taking public transit in St. Louis?” the St. Louis Post-Dispatch asks. “It’s not just crime,” the paper adds, but then it gives a long list of recent violent crimes, including a murder, beatings, gropings, and more.

It may not be “just crime,” but crime may be making it far worse in St. Louis than in some other cities. While the article points out that ridership is declining nationwide, the declines in St. Louis are much worse than average. St. Louis has lost 23 percent of its transit riders in the last four years and 36 percent in the last decade, compared with national declines of 8 percent in four years and 6 percent in 10 years. Among major urban areas, only Cleveland, Sacramento, Virginia Beach, Milwaukee, and Memphis are as bad as or worse off than St. Louis.

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The Grinch?

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The “New Normal”: Transit Is Off the Rails

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A wheel fell off one of the cars on a Boston commuter train Tuesday morning, leading to delays and frustrated commuters. The main injury was to the reputation of Keolis, the French company that has a $2.7 billion contract to operate Boston commuter trains for eight years.

Keolis may not be entirely at fault, however, as the Boston transit system has been neglected for years and has a multi-billion-dollar maintenance backlog. “It’s a really unfortunate situation that we inherited with this incredible dis-investment in the system,” says an MBTA official. “The good news is, we have tripled our expenditure to about $900 million a year.” The article quoting the official doesn’t say how they are spending $900 million a year, but given the context, he must mean maintenance and capital replacement. However, this is hard to verify considering MBTA hasn’t posted an annual budget since 2016.

Whatever they are spending on maintenance, it may be too little, too late. Boston transit ridership has been dropping, down 2 percent in the most recent quarter and 13 percent since 2014 (according to the most recent National Transit Database update). As an MBTA officials observes, “This type of ridership trend is in line with a national trend.” Continue reading →

Why Americans Prefer SUVs

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The news that General Motors is going to stop producing a lot of cars has created a lot of confusion, making it appear that GM is near failure. In fact, this announcement parallels a similar one from Ford earlier this year and one from Chrysler in 2016: all three companies are focusing on SUVs and other truck-like vehicles rather than cars. The main difference was that GM, unlike Ford and Chrysler, accompanied its announcement with a list of several factories that it planned to close.

The reality is that Americans have good reasons to prefer SUVs over cars, and GM, Ford, and Chrysler are simply responding to market demand. One of the most important advantages SUVs have is comfort: because they are taller, they have a higher hip point or H-point, meaning riders are sitting upright with their feet well below their hips instead of sticking out in front of them.

Before World War II, most cars had a high hip point, and it wasn’t until after the war that low-hip-point popular vehicles (as opposed to sports cars) were pioneered by Studebaker and Kaiser. Curiously, the vehicle regarded as the first SUV, the Willys Jeep station wagon, was also made by Kaiser for many years. Continue reading →

Dumb Trains

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Economist Mike Arnold argues that the Sonoma-Marin “SMART” commuter train is “falling short of its promises,” and those who say it is doing well are using “alternative facts” (or, as Colbert would say, “truthiness”). Among other things, he says that, of 26 commuter rail operations in the U.S., SMART’s ridership ranks only number 23.

That might not be fair considering that many commuter rail systems operate over far greater distances than SMART, whose line is 43 miles long. For a better idea of how the SMART train stacks up, I compiled data for other new commuter-rail operations below. I left out legacy operations in New York, Chicago, Boston, Philadelphia, and CalTrains in San Francisco as these are all going to do far better than most of the new ones. I also left out Amtrak’s Downeaster, which is an intercity (Boston-Portland) train that the FTA includes in its database as it has received from FTA funding. I included lines the FTA calls “hybrid rail” such as trains in Austin and Portland as the local transit agencies often call these commuter rail. All of the data are from the 2017 National Transit Database except for the SMART train, which didn’t begin operating until FY 2018; for this I took data from Arnold’s article.

TrainWeekday
Trips		Route
Miles		Trips/
Mile		PM/VRM
(Occupancy)
LA Metrolink51,27634015132
FL TriRail13,9997618434
DFW Trinity7,4132827025
DC-Virginia19,0029121059
DC-Maryland34,09723614542
Seattle Sounder17,2178021758
SD Coaster4,970519828
MSP North Star2,819358235
Denver A Line20,9562874836
Orlando SunRail3,4131621320
SCL FrontRunner17,5846029323
Nashville Star1,082176623
NM Rail Runner2,825575028
Altamont4,985717051
NJ River Line8,6332830531
SD Sprinter8,2671650932
Portland WES1,7981512223
Austin MetroRail2,904329043
DFW A-Train1,841218814
SMART2,4004356~15

Continue reading →

Why San Antonio Shouldn’t Spend More on Transit

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“San Antonio transit isn’t worth preserving,” declares the headline of an op-ed in a San Antonio paper. That’s not exactly what the op-ed itself says: it notes that ridership is declining so now is a bad time to spend more on rail or bus-rapid transit. Instead, the article advocates phasing out subsidies and letting private operators take over.

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Amtrak and Securities Fraud

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Amtrak claims that its FY 2018 operating losses were the “lowest in decades” at a mere $168 million. However, there is no way to verify this because Amtrak has not yet published its FY 2018 financial reports.

Private companies are not allowed to drop hints about their financial health before the official results are released to the public. Elon Musk and Tesla got fined $40 million for securities fraud after sending out tweets before the release of Tesla’s annual report. But Amtrak gets away with the same sort of fraud that it commits in a blatant effort to boost its political standing.

Here are the numbers in Amtrak’s press release: total revenues were $3.38 billion; capital investments were $1.46 billion; and operating losses were $168 million. An AP story adds that Amtrak received $1.9 billion in federal subsidies. But what do these numbers mean? Continue reading →

Rotaries Gone Wild

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Are roundabouts, also known as rotaries or traffic circles, a safe and efficient way of getting vehicles through intersections or a dastardly plot to force people to stop driving by so increasing congestion that other modes will seem more attractive? The answer could go either way depending on the specific roundabout. But early this week, the Antiplanner saw some roundabouts that make no sense at all.

Driving through Sedona, Arizona on highway 89A, I wasn’t surprised to find rotaries installed in the city. Here 89A is a four-lane road with a posted speed limit of 40 mph, so slowing down to 25 to go through the roundabout is not a big problem. Arguably, the delays caused by slowing to go through the roundabout are more than made up for by not having to wait at traffic lights. Continue reading →