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Category Archives: Transportation

Subway Ridership Decline Is Accelerating

By | | Transportation
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New York’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority revealed that August weekend numbers were nearly 9 percent below weekend ridership in August 2017 while weekday ridership dropped 2.5 percent. Since much of New York’s Penn Station was closed in August 2017, leading many riders to find other travel methods to avoid significant delays, the fact that ridership in 2018 was below 2017 shows that the system is in deep trouble. Worse, MTA says that ridership declines appear to be accelerating.

The problem is so bad that 60 Minutes devoted a segment to it yesterday, asking “Why has the New York City subway gone off the rails?” There’s really two possible answers to this question: 1. They haven’t spent the money needed to keep it going; or 2. It simply costs too much to keep it going. The first assumes the money is around but has been squandered on the wrong things (as Republican candidate for governor Marc Molinaro says, “ribbon-cutting projects”) while the second assumes that it is simply impossible to expect taxpayers to pay all of the costs of rehabilitating and maintaining the system.

Everyone from subway riders to politicians would like to believe that the first answer is right. But it is increasingly likely that the second answer is the truth. Continue reading →

Deconstructing Commuter- & Light-Rail Data

By | | Transportation
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The American Public Transportation Association has posted its second quarter ridership report, showing a 2.0 percent decline in ridership in the second quarter and a 2.9 percent decline in the first half of the year. This isn’t really new information since the FTA issued its version of the data in early August. However, APTA’s numbers provide independent confirmation.

According to both APTA and the FTA, all major forms of transit are declining except commuter rail. So why is commuter rail increasing? A close look at the FTA data show that, between FY2014 and FY2018, commuter rail numbers declined in Boston, Chicago, Philadelphia, and Los Angeles, but increased in Seattle, New York, and Denver. The increases in New York and Denver, however, were more than offset by declines in bus ridership.

New York commuter trains (including New Jersey Transit) carried 10.4 million more trips in FY 2018 than 2014. However, New York MTA alone lost 72.6 million bus trips in the same time period. New Jersey Transit lost another 5.5 million. It is unlikely that people substituted commuter train trips for buses, so this suggests that ridership is dropping most in the urban core, which would be consistent with the idea that ride hailing is cutting into transit. Continue reading →

DC Metro’s Regressive Transit System

By | | Transportation, Urban areas
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The sales and other taxes recently imposed to help restore the DC Metro rail systems are highly regressive, according to an op-ed in the Washington Post written by scholars from the Maryland Public Policy Institute. The op-ed didn’t say so, but Metro’s ridership is equally regressive in that the riders are increasingly wealthy.

As can be found in Census Bureau data posted by the Antiplanner a month ago, Metro ridership has been growing fastest among people whose incomes are $65,000 and up. In 2010, the median income of DC transit commuters was 94 percent of the median income of the DC region as a whole. By 2017, it had increased to 112 percent of the region’s median income. So poor people are being forced to subsidize rides taken by high-income people.

The tilt towards high-incomes among transit commuters is celebrated by transit advocates as a good thing because it makes it easier to convince high-income people — who tend to have more political power than poor people — to support transit boondoggles. But anyone who thinks that government transit is anything but a way to swindle taxpayers out of their money for the benefits of a few well-off people simply hasn’t been paying attention. Continue reading →

Inputs vs. Outputs

By | | Transportation
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An article in CityLab purports to show “why public transit works better outside the U.S.” However, it never actually demonstrates that public transit does work better in other countries; it merely shows that governments have attempted to make it work better.

Many American visitors to major European cities come away thinking that transit works great in Europe. Travelers can reach most major tourist attractions by taking trains between cities and metros and trams within cities. But they are necessarily constricting themselves to a small slice of life on the continent, and the reality is that Europeans don’t use transit all that much more than Americans do.

The CityLab article by Jonathan English argues that, whereas Levittown and other American postwar suburbs were auto-centric, European governments required that suburbs there be built around rail stations. In other words, where the U.S. government gave people the freedom to live the way they wanted, European politicians felt it was their duty to socially engineer people’s lifestyles. Continue reading →

Transit Lies & Deceptions

By | | Transportation
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Recent panels with the Antiplanner and several transit advocates exposed some disagreements that are legitimately difficult to prove one way or the other. For example, Jarrett Walker thinks that there is a pent-up demand for dense urban living and I don’t, but government regulation has so screwed up housing markets that it is hard to prove who is correct.

These photos are a lie. (Click image for a larger view.)

At the same time, the transit advocates made some claims that are easy to prove wrong. For example, one said that a two-track rail line can move as many people as a sixteen-lane freeway. Another used the above photos to show that a bus uses far less space to move people than cars. Both of these claims are highly deceptive. Continue reading →

Putting Transit Over People

By | | Transportation, Urban areas
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A southern California elected official is challenging the notion that the region can solve its congestion problems by putting more money into transit. Richard Bailey, the mayor of Coronado, has written an op ed titled “It’s time to put roads over transit.” Bailey argues that it is wasteful to put more than 50 percent of the San Diego region’s transportation dollars into transit when transit carries just 3.5 percent of the region’s commuters. He hopes to influence the urban area’s next regional transportation plan.

Bailey’s article caught the attention of a local news station that also interviewed transit advocate Colin Parent (starting at 1:05). Parent noted that there are 64,000 households in San Diego County that don’t have a car and cutting transit would hurt those people who use it as “their primary means of transportation.” Continue reading →

High-Speed No

By | | Transportation
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It seems like every article about a ridiculous high-speed rail proposal starts out with something like, “Imagine stepping on a train in Portland at noon and stepping off about two hours later in Vancouver, British Columbia.” What a great imagination you have, Andrew Theen of the Oregonian!

How about this: imagine stepping aboard a plane at Portland International Airport at 10 am and landing in Vancouver a little more than an hour later. You don’t have to imagine it because you can do it! One-way fares are under $150, which is a lot less than it would cost to build a high-speed rail line between the two cities.

Of course, someone is going to say that the downtown-to-downtown time of the train will be competitive with flying. But most people don’t live downtown anymore, so that is really irrelevant. Those who do can take light rail to the Portland Airport and the Skytrain to downtown Vancouver. Driving would be quicker, but no one who lives in Portland ever drives anywhere, do they? Continue reading →

Watch Romance of the Rails Live

By | | Transportation
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Today, the Cato Institute releases Romance of the Rails with a forum that starts at 11:30 am Eastern and continues to 1:30 pm. The Antiplanner will introduce the book, followed by comments on the book from Art Guzzetti of the American Public Transportation Association; Jim Mathews, of the Rail Passengers Association; and Marc Scribner, of the Competitive Enterprise Institute. If you can’t be in Washington DC this midday, watch it live here.

I don’t know if this is my best book yet, but it was the most fun to research and write. With so many railroad history books out there, I didn’t think I would be able to write something that hadn’t already been written a hundred times. In fact, I think a lot of the history in the book — and the book is more than half history, less than half policy analysis — will be new to even many ardent rail fans. Continue reading →

August Transit Ridership Drops 1.7%

By | | Transportation, Useful Data
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Nationwide transit ridership in August 2018 was 1.7 percent below the same month in 2017. Heavy rail dropped by 1.5 percent; light rail by 2.3 percent; buses by 1.9 percent; and streetcars by 11.2 percent, according to monthly data released last Friday by the Federal Transit Administration. Commuter rail gained 0.5 percent and hybrid rail gained 34.1 percent, mainly due to the opening of a new line of that type in Oakland.

Transit ridership had grown slightly in July, mainly because of depressed 2017 ridership due to New York City’s “summer of Hell” (meaning the partial closure of New York City’s Penn Station) and Washington DC’s “SafeTrack” program, both of which caused many transit delays. Although the Penn Station closures continued through August, 2017, the improved conditions in August 2018 weren’t enough to prevent New York urban area August ridership from declining by 0.5 percent.

August ridership declined in 36 of the nation’s top 50 urban areas. Ridership grew 27 percent in Houston, mainly because it had been depressed in August 2017 by Hurricane Harvey, which pretty much shut down the city for the last week of the month. It grew by a paltry 0.4 percent in Washington due to being depressed by the SafeTrack program in 2017. Continue reading →

How Many Really Commute by Transit?

By | | Transportation
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According to the 2017 American Community Survey, about 7.6 million Americans, or 5.3 percent of commuters, take transit to work. However, the actual question on the survey asks, how do you “usually get to work last week.” If someone took transit three days and drove two, then transit gets checked. So how many really use transit on any given day?

Fortunately, table 26 in the 2017 Summary of Travel Trends from the National Household Travel Survey helps answer this question. This survey asked both how people usually got to work and how they actually got to work on a particular day. The above table is a crosswalk showing that people who say they usually drove to work actually drove about 98 percent of the time, but people who say the usually take transit actually took transit only about 71 percent of the time. Carpooling was the big winner because people who say they usually took another mode most often carpooled when they didn’t use that other mode. Continue reading →