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Category Archives: Transportation

Does New York MTA Have Enough Money?

By | | Transportation
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Conner Harris of the Manhattan Institute argues that New York’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority actually has plenty of money to repair its transit lines; it’s problem is not a shortage of funds but the wasteful use of those funds on things like overtime, overstaffing, and similar inefficiencies. While those problems are real, and fixing them should be a high priority, the Antiplanner isn’t convinced that this alone will solve MTA’s financial woes.

Harris, for example, points to the fact that MTA’s operating expenses grew by 58 percent in the last decade, while inflation was just 18 percent. But he claims this increase came “though it scarcely expanded service.” In fact, as measured by vehicle-revenue miles, New York City subway service grew by a coincidental 58 percent between 2007 and 2017. Update: Mr. Harris kindly pointed out that I am in error on this; in fact, subway service grew by only 3 percent.

Harris also points to lower costs in London and Paris, noting that New York subway operations cost about 60 percent more, per vehicle mile, than those in London or Paris. I’m not sure about Paris, but London subway cars are a lot smaller than those in New York, so you would expect costs to be lower. Continue reading →

Charting Transit’s Decline

By | | Transportation
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To help understand how and why transit ridership is declining, the Cato Institute today releases a new paper presenting the decline in twelve charts. Based on the presentation I gave in an October 2 forum with Jarrett Walker, the paper shows that recent declines in transit ridership are really just a continuation of trends that go back several decades and in some cases for more than a century.

These trends include:

  • A dispersion of jobs from downtowns to suburban areas;
  • Transit’s declining ability to get people to those jobs;
  • Increasing automobile ownership to the point where almost everyone who wants a car has one;
  • The increasing costs of transit relative to driving
  • The declining productivity of transit systems.

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September Transit Ridership Falls 4.3 Percent

By | | Transportation
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Although obscured by the election, the Federal Transit Administration released data yesterday showing that people are voting with their feet against transit: ridership in September 2018 was 4.3 percent lower than September 2017. Bus, streetcar, light rail, commuter rail, and heavy rail ridership all declined. Ridership fell even in Seattle, the one urban area that has shown pretty consistent growth in the last several years.

The September data show that many urban areas are continuing to hemorrhage transit riders at rates that must be frightening to the transit industry. Ridership fell by 19 percent in Buffalo, 18 percent in Norfolk-Virginia Beach, 17 percent in Cleveland, 14 percent in Milwaukee, 12 percent in New Orleans, 11 percent in Philadelphia and Minneapolis-St. Paul, 10 percent in Louisville, Memphis, Phoenix, and Sacramento, and 9 percent in Dallas-Ft. Worth. Ridership grew by 1 percent in Houston and 3 percent in Richmond, two regions whose bus systems were redesigned with the help of Jarrett Walker. Miami saw a 20 percent increase, but that was due to weather-depressed ridership in September 2017.
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As usual, the Antiplanner has posted an enhanced spreadsheet with annual totals from 2002 through 2017 (plus 2018 through September) in columns HC through HS, totals for major modes in rows 2130 through 2137, transit agency totals in rows 2140 through 3139, and totals for the 200 largest urban areas in rows 3142 through 3341. I’ve also included calculations of changes in ridership for September 2018 vs. 2017, January-September 2018 vs. 2017, and October-September 2017-18 vs. 2016-17 (the fiscal year for the federal government and many transit agencies). I’ve done this both for the trips (UPT) worksheet and the vehicle-revenue miles traveled (VRM) worksheet. The spreadsheet is about 10.0 megabytes.

Miami-Dade Transit Earns a D

By | | Transportation
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With as much ballyhoo as it could muster, TransitAlliance issued a “mobility scorecard” for Miami-Dade Transit, awarding it a D for its Metro rail and bus programs and an F for its free trolley services (“trolley” meaning buses built to look like vintage streetcars). The criteria for much of this scorecard is be pretty simple: is ridership increasing? (it’s not) and what is Miami-Dade County doing about it? (nothing).

Based on these criteria, the Antiplanner would have to agree with the D grades (though F is pretty harsh for a free bus service). The real question is what should be done about it. TransitAlliance suggests creating a dedicated transit agency (instead of one run by the Miami-Dade Department of Transportation) with its own dedicated source of funding. TransitAlliance also wants to expand the Metro rail system, build dedicated busways, buy lots of new vehicles, and run trains, buses, and trolleys more frequently.

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Passenger Rail Doesn’t Work in Europe

By | | Transportation
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Paying for New Jersey Transit

By | | Transportation
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Delays to commuters and Amtrak passengers caused by a bridge malfunction are putting pressure on the Trump Administration to fund the $20 billion Gateway project, which would reconstruct bridges and tunnels connecting New York’s Penn Station with north New Jersey. Although New York and New Jersey politicians claim that this project is vital to the region, none of them are willing to ask their constituents to put up a single cent towards its completion.

Instead, they want the federal government to pay half the cost up front, and to put up the other half in a federally guaranteed, low-interest loan. Considering that neither New Jersey Transit nor Amtrak have the revenues needed to repay that loan, there’s a good chance the federal government would end up paying for it all.

Though this seems ridiculous, transit advocates have tried to make it appear that Trump is the bad guy here. In fact, the bad guys are the local politicos who want someone else to pay for their pork-barrel projects. Continue reading →

Paying for New York’s Transit System

By | | Transportation
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Last week, the Antiplanner observed that the New York City subway system has a $40 billion maintenance backlog, a $40 billion debt, and a $20 billion shortfall in pension and health care funds. On top of this, CBS News reports that the Metro North and Long Island Railroad commuter-rail systems have a $20 billion maintenance backlog. As I read MTA’s budgets, it is paying off its debt at the rate of about $2.8 billion a year ($1.5 blllion of which is interest).

If the debt service is funded, MTA still needs another $80 billion as soon as possible; call it $4 billion a year. As noted in the CBS News story above, New York politicians are diligently looking for the funds using the time-honored principle of taxing the powerless. The problem with that is that the powerless usually have little money to tax. Continue reading →

Turning Off Life Support

By | | Transportation
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“Degradation of the U.S. passenger railroad system was not a natural development — it was a result of national transportation policies that invested billions of dollars into highways and air transportation,” argued Vukan Vuchic in his advocacy piece for high-speed rail. “Meanwhile, Amtrak is supported at the survival level.”

There is some truth to that. The billions of dollars spent on interstate highways virtually all came from highway user fees, so can’t really be considered an unfair competition with passenger rail. However, in the 1940s and 1950s, Congress spent about half a billion dollars — several billion in today’s dollars — on airport construction. Subsidies to airports continued on a large scale until 1970, when Congress allowed local airports to fund themselves out of ticket fees.

At the same time, the airlines were throttled by regulation. In 1960, domestic airlines carried only about 31 billion passenger miles. Today, when they have been deregulated but receive relatively minimal subsidies, they carry more than twenty times that many. There is little reason to think passenger railroads could have competed with deregulated and unsubsidized airlines. Continue reading →

What We Know About High-Speed Rail

By | | Transportation
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In early 2016, the Transportation Research Board (TRB) published a 187-page report on interregional travel, which it defined as trips between 100 and 500 miles. To help publicize the report, the federally funded TRB placed a five-page summary in the May-June, 2016 TR News.

In response, rail advocate Vukan Vuchic, who is an emeritus professor of urban planning at the University of Pennsylvania, wrote a lengthy diatribe, published as a letter to the editor in the September-October 2018 TR News, complaining that the TRB report had a “negative tone” about high-speed rail. Vuchic’s case is weakened by the fact that he appears to have only read the five-page summary, not the entire 187-page report. Yet even that summary had plenty to say about high-speed rail, and much of it in the Antiplanner’s opinion was far too optimistic.

Vuchic charges that the report makes an “incorrect claim that HSR might only be feasible for the Boston-Washington.D.C., corridor.” In fact, neither the summary nor the full report made that claim, but the report did conclude, after many pages of lengthy analysis, that “In the United States, the NEC is unique in having many of the geographic, demographic, and demand conditions that European and Japanese experience suggests are favorable to public investments in intercity rail” and thus “presents far less uncertainty [than other corridors] with regard to the potential for passenger rail investments, including investments in high-speed service.” “Uncertainty” and “feasibility” are two completely different things.

Contrary to Vuchic’s heated letter, the Antiplanner would argue that the interregional transportation report spends far more pages on high-speed rail than makes sense for the United States. By the modern definition of high-speed rail — trains with top speeds faster than 150 mph — high-speed rail has zero market share in this country. Based on what we know about high-speed rail in other countries, it is fair to say that it will never be relevant here outside of the Boston-Washington corridor, and even there it is only “feasible” if we ignore capital and maintenance costs. Continue reading →

$1 Billion for What?

By | | Transportation
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In anticipation of a Democratic takeover of Congress opening the floodgates of spending on rail boondoggles, the state of Oregon has written a draft environmental impact statement (DEIS) for more passenger trains between Portland and Eugene. The DEIS considered three alternatives in detail:

  • No action, which means continuing to run three trains a day (two of which are state-subsidized) taking 2 hours and 35 minutes (48 mph) between Eugene and Portland, all of which go on to Seattle;
  • Alternative 1, which would triple the frequency of state-subsidized trains and reduce travel times to 2 hours and 20 minutes (53 mph, the same time currently used by Bolt Bus);
  • Alternative 2, which would offer the same number of trains as alternative 1 but reduce travel times to 2 hours even.

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The DEIS briefly considered a true high-speed rail option of running trains as fast as 180 miles per hour on an entirely new rail line. This was rejected not because of its high cost but because it would require “substantial regulatory hurdles.” If I were a high-speed rail advocate, I would consider this a specious excuse, but at least the state isn’t currently contemplating a project that (given California’s experience in similar terrain) would cost at least $10 billion.

Yet alternatives 1 and 2 aren’t cheap. The state estimates alternative 1 would cost around $1 billion and alternative 2 would cost around $4 billion. The reason high-speed rail advocates should be upset is that none of the money spent on alternative 1, which is the state’s preference, would contribute to the cost of a true high-speed rail line, which would require all-new construction. Thus, a decision to go for alternative 1 effectively commits the state to not build a true high-speed rail line for a couple of decades at least. Continue reading →