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Category Archives: Transportation

Qatar Supports the Washington Metro

By | | Transportation, Urban areas
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The Washington Capitals ice hockey team, which plays its home games in downtown Washington, is in the Stanley Cup Playoffs. The games go long enough that spectators can’t reliably take DC’s Metro rail transit home, as the trains stop running at 11:30 pm on Monday through Thursday.

This wasn’t a problem in the first two games of a best four-out-of-seven series against the Tampa Bay Lightning, as those games were played in Tampa. In the third game, Metro persuaded Exelon, which owns the local electric company, to donate $100,000 to keep the trains running for an extra hour.

For last night’s game 6, Metro somehow twisted Uber’s figurative arm into contributing $100,000 to keeping the trains running. It seems strange that Uber would give money to its competitor unless it hopes to get some political favors in exchange. Continue reading →

The Case for Neglecting Transit

By | | Transportation
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The American Public Transportation Association has just published a paper on the economic cost of failing to modernize transit. The paper claims that the roughly $100 billion maintenance backlog built up by U.S. transit agencies — mostly for rail transit — will reduce “business sales” by $57 billion a year and reduce gross national product by $30 billion a year over the next six years.

Reaching this conclusion requires APTA to make all sorts of wild claims about transit. For example, it claims that a recent New Orleans streetcar line stimulated $2.7 billion in new infrastructure. In fact, that new infrastructure (including a Hyatt Regency) received hundreds of millions of dollars of subsidies and low-interest loans from Louisiana and New Orleans. In any case, APTA fails to make clear how rehabilitation of existing infrastructure could generate the same economic development benefits as building new infrastructure. Continue reading →

Time to Pull the Plug on SW LRT

By | | Transportation, Urban areas
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As noted here before, a light-rail line from Minneapolis to the wealthy suburb of Eden Prairie was originally supposed to cost $1.2 billion for 15.8 route miles, or less than $80 million a mile. Now the projected cost has risen to more than $2 billion for just 14.5 route miles, or around $140 million a mile.

On top of this, the Metropolitan Council, which is planning the rail line, is in a dispute with a local railroad whose right-of-way Metro wants to use for the light rail. The railroad is concerned that light-rail construction will delay its trains. This dispute is being dealt with in a time-honored American fashion in which the railroad is suing the Met Council.

The Met Council is counting on getting $929 million from the Federal Transit Administration, but the FTA hasn’t signed a full-funding grant agreement and the Trump administration is resisting funding any projects without such agreements (though, as noted yesterday, it has made some exceptions). Local governments, however, would be responsible for covering all cost overruns including the recent $200 million increase in projected costs. Continue reading →

FTA Funds Tacoma Streetcar

By | | Transportation
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Sound Transit, which has tens of billions of dollars to build light rail in the Seattle area, announced this week that the Federal Transit Administration granted $75 million to an extension of the Tacoma streetcar line. This was a surprise since the administration’s policy has been not to fund any projects that don’t have signed grant agreements, and by that criteria the Tacoma streetcar doesn’t qualify.

The existing 1.6-mile Tacoma streetcar opened in 2003. Projected to cost $50 million, it ended up costing more than $80 million, or about $50 million per mile (about $66 million a mile in today’s dollars). The project is political pork: built to make Tacoma taxpayers feel like they are getting their fair share of the billions going to build light rail. This is why Sound Transit never calls it a streetcar, instead calling it “Link,” the same name it applies to light rail in Seattle. But the Tacoma line uses the same equipment and trundles along at the same slow speeds as the Portland streetcar.

The Tacoma streetcar has never collected a fare, yet in 2016 it carried fewer than 3,200 riders a day. That’s more than streetcars in Atlanta, Charlotte, Cincinnati, and the District of Columbia, but fewer than Seattle or Portland (which admittedly are longer lines). The new project will extend the existing line by 2.4 miles at a cost of $215 million or about $90 million a mile. Continue reading →

Amtrak in Turmoil

By | | Transportation
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The Antiplanner isn’t alone in suggesting that hiring an airline executive to run Amtrak is a bad idea (at least for Amtrak). Last week, a former Amtrak official (who wishes to remain anonymous) sent a letter to Maryland Senator Chris Van Hollen asking that former Delta CEO Richard Anderson be fired from his current job as CEO of Amtrak. Alternatively, suggested the letter, Anderson should be constrained “taking actions which will jeopardize the
existence of the Amtrak system.”

The letter cites some of the examples mentioned in the Antiplanner post: downgrading of food services and elimination or reduction of special trains and private car moves. But it also notes that Anderson proposes to replace the electric-powered trains between Washington and Boston with diesel trains even though the diesel trains would be slower and cause pollution problems in tunnels into and through New York.

Even more significantly, former Amtrak CEO Joseph Boardman wrote a letter defending long-distance trains and specifically the Chicago-Los Angeles Southwest Chief. One of Anderson’s controversial policies is to demand that railroads install positive-train control by the end of this year. The train most threatened by this may be the Southwest Chief, as the Kansas-Colorado-New Mexico portion of that route that goes over Ratón Pass is on tracks that BNSF doesn’t even want to maintain for freight, much less spend hundreds of millions for passenger trains that it earns little profit from. Continue reading →

Atlanta’s Transit Future

By | | Transportation
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“Mass transit is collapsing everywhere,” argues an op-ed in The Hlll. One such collapse is taking place in Atlanta, where ridership has fallen more than 20 percent since 2008.

In 1980, transit carried more than 9 percent of Atlanta-area commuters to work, and ridership peaked in 1985 at 155.7 million trips. Since then, the Metropolitan Atlanta Regional Transit Agency has added 28 miles of rail lines, more than doubling the length of its heavy-rail system. The region’s population has grown from less than 1.9 million to 5.0 million people, an increase of 166 percent.

So how many rides did transit carry in 2017? About 131.3 million, a 15 percent decline from 1985. Worse, transit trips per capita crashed from 82 in 1985 to just 26 in 2017, a 68 percent decline, while transit carried just 3.8 percent of commuters to work in 2016. Continue reading →

The Utah Transit Authority Is No More

By | | Transportation, Urban areas
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The Utah Transit Authority is dead. Long live the Transit District of Utah! Actually, it would be better for taxpayers and most travelers if it didn’t live very long.

“Lavish” is a word that applied to the Utah Transit Authority (UTA), which until last week served Ogden, Salt Lake City, Provo, and Orem. As of 2016, the agency had spent $1.4 billion in capital costs on commuter trains that carried an average of 8,100 round trips per day. That alone is enough to buy a new Toyota Prius for every round-trip rider every three years for the next 20 years. On top of that, fares cover just 15 percent of operating costs.

The people who run the agency are also lavishly paid. A 2014 legislative audit revealed that the agency’s general manager was paid $350,000 a year, including benefits. He wasn’t even the highest-paid person in the agency: the rail service manager was paid more than $450,000. At least one other executive was paid more than $300,000 a year. For comparison, Utah’s governor is paid around $150,000 a year and the head of the state department of transportation receives around $221,000 a year. Continue reading →

Auto Fatalities Declined in 2017

By | | Transportation
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Motor vehicle fatalities declined slightly in 2017, says a new release from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA). Where 37,461 people were killed in traffic accidents in 2016, the number fell to 37,150 in 2017 — not a big decrease, but it is going in the right direction. Since miles of driving grew by 1.2 percent, the fatality rate per billion miles declined even more.

NHTSA doesn’t have the data broken down by kinds of accidents yet, but that didn’t stop the Detroit Free Press from simultaneously publishing a scare-piece claiming that “pedestrian fatalities skyrocket in U.S.” I’m not sure what the news is in this article since it is based on data reported here a full seven months ago.

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Nashville Light-Rail Post Mortem

By | | Transportation
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It’s been a little over a week since Nashville voters rejected that city’s light-rail plan, and the pundits are wringing their hands in despair. Many of them have a common set of assumptions:

  • Rail transit is the only real transit — buses don’t count — so voters who reject rail are rejecting transit itself;
  • Transit relieves congestion, so it is surprising that voters in a congested city would reject spending more on transit;
  • Transit is morally superior to driving and both are subsidized, so the fact that subsidies to transit passenger miles are roughly 100 times greater than to highway passenger miles is irrelevant.

Nashville is “gridlocked,” says Wired magazine, so voters should have supported the plan. But no one except out-of-town reporters really believed that spending at least $5.4 billion building 29 miles of light rail would do anything to relieve congestion. Continue reading →

More on March Transit Ridership

By | | Transportation, Useful Data
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Transit is “obsolete and costs taxpayers billions, yet its ridership and productivity continue to decline,” observes an op-ed in Governing magazine, concluding that, “we should stop subsidizing it, saving taxpayers’ tens of billions of dollars a year.” More data supporting this position can be gleaned from the March ridership data recently published by the Federal Transit Administration.

In addition to ridership numbers, the FTA spreadsheet also includes revenue-vehicle miles. I’ve now enhanced that worksheet to include annual, agency, and urban area totals and have uploaded the result. (If you downloaded yesterday’s file after about noon Pacific Time, it already includes this update.)

Previous data have shown that, as some cities build light rail, they cut bus service, thus losing more bus passengers than they gain in rail riders. That may influence March numbers, but it is not the only factor. For example, Los Angeles Metro increased light-rail service by 3.7 percent while it cut bus service by 2.7 percent. Yet both bus and light rail lost riders: light rail declining 7.5 percent and bus 9.6 percent. Continue reading →