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Category Archives: Transportation

Amtrak’s Real Problem

By | | Transportation
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Amtrak’s dream of restoring passenger service between New Orleans and Jacksonville — service disrupted by Hurricane Katrina — died, at least for the foreseeable future, when the governors of Alabama and Mississippi refused to provide funds to subsidize this train. Meanwhile, Amtrak CEO Richard Anderson incurred the wrath of his predecessors last week when he tried to explain to state legislators why Amtrak should end the Southwest Chief service between Newton, Kansas and Gallup, New Mexico.

“This is the first time that a management team has ever come out against continuing services Amtrak currently provides,” worried former Amtrak president David Gunn, as reported by Trains magazine (paywall). “It’s dishonorable and dishonest,” chided Joseph Boardman, another former Amtrak president.

Actually, Anderson was being perfectly honest. His presentation noted that only about 175 people a day ride that segment of the Chicago-Los Angeles train, which gets most of its ridership in the Chicago-Kansas City segment followed by the segment between Los Angeles and Albuquerque. Because BNSF, which owns the tracks, no longer runs freight trains on this route, it is the only private rail route in the country that sees only Amtrak trains, making all capital and maintenance costs the sole responsibility of Amtrak. Continue reading →

The Raleigh Transit Miracle

By | | Transportation
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While transit ridership declined in April 2018 vs. 2017 in the vast majority of urban areas, it grew in Raleigh. Not only did it grow there, it grew by a miraculous 20 percent, more than any other of the nation’s fifty largest urban areas. The first four months of 2018 saw a more modest but still trend-bucking 9 percent growth over the same months in 2017.

What is responsible for this rapid growth? According to the TransitCenter, it resulted from a boost to transit service that came after voters approved a half-cent sales tax for transit in November, 2016. This was a sales tax increase that opponents called a “transit plan to nowhere.”

FTA data show that GoRaleigh, Raleigh’s main transit agency, offered 10.0 percent more bus service in April 2018 than 2017, and carried 26.5 percent more riders. Bus service for the first four months of 2018 was 6.8 percent greater, and riders 11.7 percent more numerous, than in 2017. So it seems plausible that service increases are responsible for the growth in ridership. Continue reading →

A SORTA Dilemma

By | | Transportation
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Cincinnati’s transit agency, the Southwest Ohio Regional Transit Authority (SORTA), is facing a dilemma common to many other transit agencies. Transit ridership is dropping, and fare revenue is dropping even more. Should it raise fares, which will accelerate ridership declines, or ask voters to approve more taxes to cover a $6.4 million budget deficit in order to maintain transit service?

SORTA’s problems have been worsened by the city’s decision to build an idiotic streetcar line. The city claimed the streetcar was built under budget, but that’s a distortion of reality. It was supposed to cost $110 million for 4.5 miles and ended up costing $148 million for 3.6 miles. Of course, the last approved budget before completion was $149.5 million, but it still cost far more than was projected when the city decided to build the line.

In any case, that’s $148 million that could have been used to ease SORTA’s budgetary woes today. On top of that, operating the streetcar costs SORTA more than $2 million a year, and fares cover only 14 percent of that. Counting some capital costs, the streetcar added $2 million to SORTA’s expenses in 2016, and probably even more in 2017. In short, the operating expense plus 10 percent of the cost overrun for the streetcar would have been enough to make up SORTA’s projected deficit. Continue reading →

Are the Koch Brothers Killing Transit?

By | | Transportation
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Transit supporters have a new explanation for transit’s decline: the Koch brothers are killing new transit projects. At least, that’s what the New York Times says, and since that is the nation’s newspaper of record, it must be true.

According to the article published yesterday, Americans for Prosperity have combined with the Cato Institute to fight light rail all over the country. Since both of these groups were initially funded by the Koch brothers, it must be some sort of conspiracy.

Speaking for myself, I don’t mind being associated with the Koch brothers. After all, they support gay marriage, marijuana legalization, and ending Middle East military interventions. They oppose tax-increment financing, the use of eminent domain to take private property to give to other private developers, and NSA surveillance of American citizens. What’s not to love? Continue reading →

Transit Makes You Short

By | | Transportation
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The Antiplanner’s faithful ally and frequent commenter, C.P. Zilliacus, alerted me to a recent paper published in the Journal of Transport and Health that proves that transit makes people short. Or, at least, it proves this in the same way that other studies have proven that transit makes people healthier or less obese.

The authors of the recent article, University of Minnesota engineers Alireza Ermagun and David Levinson (now at the University of Sydney) review data that “indicate transit use and accessibility by transit are significantly associated with general health.” However, “they are practically insignificant.” In other words, just because something is statistically significant doesn’t mean it is important.

To show this, they compared heights with transit use and show “that transit use and transit accessibility to jobs are negatively correlated with height.” In other words, transit riders are shorter than other people. “We could further engage in data-mining and test other seemingly unrelated phenomenon, and then cherry pick results,” they say. “We prefer not to do that.” Continue reading →

The Future of San Antonio Transit

By | | Transportation, Urban areas
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Someone asked the Antiplanner to briefly review the prospects for public transit in San Antonio. Much of my answer would apply to many other urban areas as well.

1. Transit Is About Downtown

A century ago, most urban jobs were downtown and people walked or rode transit to those jobs from dense residential areas. Today, only about 7.5 percent of urban jobs are located downtown; in San Antonio it’s about 6.2 percent.

Source: Wendell Cox, United States Central Business Districts for downtown jobs; 2010 American Community Survey table B08301 for percent of transit commuters. Continue reading →

Portland Has Too Many Loose Screws

By | | Transportation
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A loose screw caused the Portland streetcar crash that took place a couple of weeks ago, reports TriMet. The screw jammed up the streetcar throttle, making it difficult to impossible to slow the streetcar down.

Of course, this invites all sorts of invidious jokes that the Antiplanner can’t resist making, mainly because it’s nearly midnight and I’ve been working on too many other projects to have written a more incisive blog post for Thursday.

Anyone who watches Portlandia, which some consider to be more of a documentary than a comedy, knows there are a lot of loose screws in Portland. One of the first real examples of loose screws was the decision to build the streetcar line that opened in 2001. There was some plausible justification for light rail, at least at first glance, but streetcars made no sense at all when buses were better at everything streetcars could do except spending lots of money. Continue reading →

Hoverboards in Subways

By | | Transportation
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Someone suggested that New York City subways be replaced with hoverboards, and the internet went nuts. Or at least some people on the internet went nuts.

The normally pro-transit Atlantic Monthly published an article by Peter Wayner — author of Future Ride: 80 Ways the Self-Driving Car Will Change Everything — suggesting that the projected $19 billion cost of fixing the New York City subway was too much. Instead, he proposed something “radically different”: to tear out the rails and open up the subways to private operators of shared, autonomous vehicles. Instead of full-sized cars, he predicted that the market would lead private companies to use what he called “hoverboards,” by which I think he meant electric scooters and Segway-like vehicles.

“This is the stupidest thing I’ve ever read about the NYC Subway,” responded my friend (frenemy?) Charles Marohn. “Makes Randal O’Toole’s idea to just run buses in the tunnels look reasonable.” Continue reading →

Calthorpe: Driverless Cars Will Kill Cities

By | | Regional planning, Transportation
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New urbanist architect Peter Calthorpe predicts that “autonomous vehicles will mean death for cities.” To which the Antiplanner responds, “good,” as in “good bye and good riddance.”

But wait — Calthorpe seems to think this is a bad thing. “AVs will only increase sprawl as private vehicles travel farther,” he warns. The reason why people will be able to drive further is because autonomous vehicles will reduce congestion. They will reduce congestion so much, he fears, that “vehicle miles traveled will double and roads will become impassable.” So which is it: will driverless cars promote sprawl by reducing congestion or will they gridlock roads? (The answer is that driverless cars will double road capacities.)

Cities are a means to an end: a place for people to meet, to bring resources together for manufacturing or transshipments, to reduce living costs. But new means of transportation and communication have steadily reduced the need for dense cities to achieve those ends. Continue reading →

Broward County Fails to Learn from History

By | | Transportation
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The Broward County commission voted six to one to put a measure on the ballot to raise sales taxes by a penny to pay for transportation improvements. This tax, which is expected to raise about $350 million a year, will do such things as “enhance traffic signal synchronization, develop safe sidewalks and bicycle pathways, expand and operate bus and special needs transportation, [and] implement rail along approved corridors.”

That all sounds so reasonable until you get to the last one. Then it becomes clear that nearly all of the money is going to be soaked up planning and building a east-west light-rail line to complement the north-south TriRail commuter rail line. Never mind that light rail was obsolete ninety years ago.

This is the same county commission that spent fourteen years and millions of dollars planning a Fort Lauderdale streetcar project that was finally abandoned when construction bids proved to be far higher than the county had expected. Clearly, most of the commissioners haven’t learned the most important lessons about rail transit: that it takes too long to plan and build, costs too much, and always costs more than planners claim. Continue reading →