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Transit Death Watch
May Transit Ridership Down 3.3 Percent

By | | Transportation, Useful Data
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Nationwide transit ridership in May 2018 was 3.3 percent less than in the same month of 2017. May transit ridership fell in 36 of the nation’s 50 largest urban areas. Ridership in the first five months of 2018 was lower than the same months of 2017 in 41 of the 50 largest urban areas. Buses, light rail, heavy rail, and streetcars all lost riders. Commuter rail lost riders in most regions, but gains in New York and Philadelphia outnumbered losses in other urban areas.

These numbers are from the Federal Transit Administration’s monthly data report. As usual, the Antiplanner has posted an enhanced spreadsheet that has annual totals in columns GY through HO, mode totals for major modes in rows 2123 through 2129, agency totals in rows 2120 through 3129, and urban area totals for the nation’s 200 largest urban areas in rows 3131 through 3330.

Of the urban areas that saw ridership increase, ridership grew by 1.2 percent in Houston, 2.2 percent in Seattle, 2.4 percent in Denver, 1.2 percent in Portland, 5.0 percent in Indianapolis, 7.8 percent in Providence, 7.2 percent in Nashville, and an incredible 63.1 percent in Raleigh. Most of the growth in Raleigh was students carried by North Carolina State University’s bus system. Continue reading →

Greyhound Departs Western Canada

By | | Transportation
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If you’ve ever desired to take a bus trip across Canada, this summer may be your last chance. Greyhound announced Monday that, due to a 41 percent decline in ridership since 2010, after October 31 it will terminating all bus service in western Canada except buses between Vancouver and Seattle. Service in Quebec and Ontario will remain unchanged, for now, except for the routes west of Sudbury.

Some local companies offer bus services in western Canada, mostly within individual provinces. Unless some of these companies step in to fill the gap left by Greyhound, it won’t be possible to go from, say, Vancouver to Calgary or Calgary to Winnipeg by bus.

Where passenger train service is offered by the government-subsidized Via Rail, prices are roughly twice Greyhound’s fares. Currently, a Greyhound bus trip from Vancouver to Toronto is about US$217, compared with US$564 by train. Vancouver to Edmonton is around US$89 by Greyhound and US$230 by train. Continue reading →

When Congress Decides, Money Gets Wasted

By | | Transportation
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Nashville’s Music City Star is a ridiculously wasteful transit project that never should have happened. Now, Democrats in Congress are insisting that it waste even more money.

In 2016, the Star attracted an average of 1,055 daily riders, far less than the 1,900 that was projected when it opened in 2009. Fares of $877,500 covered less than 15 percent of the $6-million cost of operating and maintaining the train.

Congress has directed all passenger-carrying rail lines (and many freight lines) to use positive train control, a technology that is expensive to install and expensive to maintain. The Tennessee Regional Transportation Authority, which operates the Star, applied for and received an exemption from this requirement. Now, House Democrats have challenged that exemption, noting that, “Although the Music City Star is one of the smallest commuter rail operations in the United States, the size of a railroad does not negate the potential for an accident.” Continue reading →

Redesigned Bus Routes Won’t Save Transit

By | | Transportation
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Ever since Houston was recognized as one of the few urban areas whose transit ridership is still growing, thanks to a redesign of the region’s bus system, transit agencies around the country have been considering their own route reforms. Richmond implemented “the Great Richmond Reroute” a couple of weeks ago. New York City transit began planning a reroute in April. Washington Metro announced last week that it would spend $2.2 million studying its own rerouting.

A lot of the ideas behind rerouting bus systems come from Portland transit consultant Jarrett Walker. Walker’s basic ideas are sound: change from a hub-and-spoke to a grid system; increase frequencies; and reduce the number of stops. The goal is to create a system where people can get from any point in the city or region to any other point by a fairly direct route with minimal wait times and at most one transfer.

Bus routes in many cities today aren’t much different than they were when public agencies took over private transit service some 50 years ago, and they weren’t that much different then than the streetcar routes that buses had replaced, usually several decades before that. Agencies have been afraid to change their route structures because they know that any new reroute is going to make some people upset (as Walker says, “Beautiful people will come to you with their elderly parents and their babies and say the redesign will ruin their lives”) with no guarantee that it will attract enough new riders to offset those who quit riding because the old routes served their needs the best. Continue reading →

Miami Having Wrong Debate over Bus vs. Rail

By | | Transportation
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On July 19, Miami-Dade’s transportation planning organization will decide whether to spend $300 million on bus-rapid transit or $1.5 billion on rail. As noted by the Antiplanner a year ago, this continues a debate that has been going on for years.

It’s a stupid debate because buses can move far more people for far less money. It’s even stupider because the $300 million bus-rapid transit plan is also a waste of money as Miami can’t generate enough transit traffic to effectively use dedicated bus lanes. The heart of the debate has nothing to do with transportation and everything to do with politicians’ egos.

“People in the south understand that if they settle for a bus, they’ll never get a rail,” said one politician. “Nobody wants buses.” Let me give you a clue: nobody except contractors and politicians really wants rail either. More than 90 percent of Miami-Dade commuters drive to work and less than 6 percent take transit (less than 1 percent of which uses existing rail). Continue reading →

Transit: It’s for High-Income People Now

By | | Transportation
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Remember when transit agencies guilt-tripped voters into supporting transit because it helped poor people who couldn’t afford their own cars? Nearly all poor people today have cars, so the number of low-income people who take transit to work is declining. Meanwhile, the fastest growth in transit commuting by far has been among people who earn more than $75,000 a year.

The Census Bureau divides workers into eight income classes. I don’t know how they decided on the division points, but in 2010, five of those classes had about 20 million people, while the $10,000 to $15,000 per year class had about 11 million and the $50,000 to $65,000 plus $65,000 to $75,000 together had about 20 million. The above chart, which is from table B08119 of the 2016 American Community Survey, shows that the income class most likely to take transit was the over $75,000 per year category. This was also true in 2010. Continue reading →

Charlotte’s Transit Disaster

By | | Transportation
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Ridership on Charlotte’s new $1.1 billion (actually closer to $1.2 billion) light-rail line is well below expectations. But that’s okay, says the Charlotte Area Transit System (CATS), because they expected it to be below expectations.

The line was projected to carry an average of 18,900 weekday trips in its opening year. When combined with the existing light-rail line, which carried about 15,750 weekday trips in 2016, the total should have been more than 33,500. In fact, it carried just 24,544 weekday trips in May, two months after its March opening.

According to CATS, the shortfall is entirely due to the University of North Carolina at Charlotte ending its Spring semester. “You go from a 28,000- or 29,000-student campus down to 4,000,” said CATS spokesman Olaf Kinard. “For us to have over 24,500 riders [in May] — that’s strong.” Students get free transit passes, so CATS is essentially depending on free riders to justify its expenditure of more than a billion dollars. Continue reading →

Europe’s High-Speed Rail Not Sustainable

By | | Transportation
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France opened two new high-speed rail lines last year, but they may be the last for awhile because the country is running out of cash to pay for them. A recent review by the European Court of Auditors seems to question whether any more high-speed rail lines should be built anywhere in Europe.

The audit reviewed 30 high-speed rail lines and found:

  • Construction costs averaged 25 million euros per kilometer (about $46 million per mile);
  • Much of this money was wasted because trains run at an average of just 45 percent of the design speed of the lines;
  • Cost overruns and delays are the norm rather than the exception: overruns averaged 78 percent and several lines have been delayed by more than a decade;
  • Benefits in many cases are negligible: many of the lines cost more than 100 million euros ($116 million) per minute of train time saved.

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The auditors cite an academic study that concluded that high-speed rail was a “success” if it carried 6 million passengers its first year rising soon to 9 million passengers. But this study wasn’t based on the profitability of the lines; instead, nearly all of the benefits it calculated went to business travelers who saved time by riding the trains. The study assumed that time to those travelers was worth 40 euros ($46 dollars) per hour. But if it is really worth that much, why aren’t the trains priced that high? Continue reading →

VTA’s Transit-Superiority Complex

By | | Transportation
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San Jose light-rail ridership is declining, so the Santa Clara Valley Transportation Authority (VTA) wants to speed up light-rail trains to make them more attractive to riders. To do this, the agency wants to give light rail the priority over cars, bicycles, and pedestrians at all intersections.

Having to “slow down to avoid hitting somebody that may be crossing the tracks,” says a VTA board member, “slows [the light-rail trains] down quite a bit.” Light-rail trains in downtown San Jose are “possibly some of the slowest in the country,” says a news report. “People are beating transit on their e-scooters,” frets San Jose’s mayor, who also happens to chair VTA’s board. “We’ve got to speed up the light rail trains, so that way, folks will be motivated to use them.”

San Jose light rail is far from the slowest in the country. According to the National Transit Database, it averaged 15.9 miles per hour in 2016, slightly better than the national average of 15.3. While they (along with all other light-rail lines) are slower in downtown, it’s the average speed that counts for attracting riders. Continue reading →

Brightline Prospects May Not Be So Bright

By | | Transportation
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The last time we looked at Brightline, Florida’s private moderate-speed rail line from Miami to West Palm Beach, it had killed three people before even opening for business. Since then it has killed five more. While you might think that people will learn not to cross the tracks in front of fast passenger trains, it turns out that freight trains on the Florida East Coast Railway (which owns Brightline) have consistently killed about two people per month for the last several years.

This helps explain why some Florida residents are vehemently opposed to Brightline’s plans to extend service to Orlando. So far, opponents have been unable to stop the train in the courts.

They appear to be doing better, however, in the court of financial opinion. Brightline hoped to fund the extension to Orlando (which will require the construction of new tracks between Cocoa and Orlando) with $1.15 billion worth of tax-exempt private activity bonds. The tax exemption would allow Brightline to pay lower interest rates. But Brightline was unable to convince investors to buy the bonds by its deadline of May 31. The U.S. Department of Transportation generously extended the deadline to the end of the year, but Brightline still has to find buyers. Continue reading →