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Rejoice in Transit’s Decline (plus new book)

By | | Transportation
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“Urban transit was developed for a kind of city that no longer exists,” says an op-ed in USA Today, “one in which most jobs were downtown and most residents lived near downtown.” For people who can’t or don’t want to drive, ride hailing makes much more sense than mass transit, so we should be happy to see transit (and the taxes we pay to subsidize it) decline.

The article also reveals the title of a new book that will be out this fall: Romance of the Rails: Why the Passenger Trains We Love Are Not the Transportation We Need. This book will provide the background needed to understand transit and intercity passenger trains today. Continue reading →

Home Price Data and Highway Update

By | | Housing, Transportation, Useful Data
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The Federal Housing Finance Agency (which oversees Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac) has published home price index data through the fourth quarter of 2017. These data go back as far as 1975 for the states and many urban areas.

The Antiplanner has posted enhanced spreadsheets that use the raw data from the state and metropolitan area files to create charts like the one above showing housing trends. The metropolitan area spreadsheet allows users to create charts showing price indices in nominal dollars or dollars adjusted for inflation. The state spreadsheet only creates charts for inflation-adjusted indices. Continue reading →

Voters Leaning Against Nashville Rail Plan

By | | Transportation
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An April 12 and 13 survey of likely Nashville voters found that 62 percent, plus or minus 4 percent, say that — if the election were held the day of the survey — they would vote against the $9 billion Nashville transit plan. Since early voting has already begun for the election that is officially scheduled on May 1, the plan’s proponents may not have a chance to turn that around.

Early polls showed that most people supported the plan. I’d like to think that a January conference I spoke at helped turn things around. But the sex scandal that forced the unexpected resignation of Nashville’s mayor, who was the plan’s biggest proponent, probably had more to do with it.

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MBTA’s Unsafety Culture

By | | Transportation
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In February, the Boston Globe revealed that an engineer for the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority (MBTA) had ten license suspensions and multiple stops for drunken driving on his record. If he wasn’t safe behind the wheel of an automobile, the newspaper asked, how could he be considered safe at the throttle of a commuter train carrying hundreds of people?

MBTA initially denied it was aware of the engineer’s record, something the Globe quickly disproved. The MBTA then said that this employee was a rare exception who somehow slipped through the cracks, possibly, no one said aloud, because his father was a judge.

Challenge accepted, said the Globe, which filed public records requests on the driving records of the agency’s other engineers. It turns out that a few more others also have poor driving records. Continue reading →

Uber/Lyft Find New Ways to Destroy Transit

By | | Transportation
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Lyft has a growing service called Line that could make the long-unfulfilled dreams of carpool advocates come true. Users who request a ride through Line are paired with drivers going to the same general destination — a true example of ride sharing instead of the ride hailing that describes most Uber/Lyft rides. Rides might take a little longer if the driver picks up other carpoolers, but the cost is only 40 percent of a regular Lyft ride. The service is available in 19 cities to date and has proven particularly successful in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, and Miami.

Uber has announced that it plans to expand its app to offer a comprehensive transportation service. Users say where they want to go and the Uber app will give them options of Uber rides, bike sharing, rental cars, or even mass transit. All rides would be paid for through the Uber app, so Uber would get a share of revenues from any public transit agencies that participated.

Even if public transit is one of Uber’s options, these kinds of innovations will continue to whittle away transit ridership. People who now ride transit will be tempted to use Uber to pay for their rides, thus saving the trouble of dealing with ticket machines or exact change. Once using the app, they will also be alerted to alternatives to transit, and some will select those alternatives in place of the transit they were using. Continue reading →

Urban Highway Data

By | | Transportation, Useful Data
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Last November, the Antiplanner noted that the Federal Highway Administration had posted many of the tables for the 2016 Highway Statistics. However, two tables that had not then been posted dealt with highways and driving by urban area. Table HM71 shows miles and daily vehicles miles driven by type of road. Table HM72 shows miles of roads, freeways, and freeway lane miles as well as other characteristics such as land area and population density for each urban area.

When I downloaded the data, the first thing I noted was that the numbers for Los Angeles are wrong. The tables say that Los Angeles, an urban area of 12.5 million people, has just 813 miles of roads, 8 of them being freeways. Alphabetizing the list revealed that most of the data (other than population and land area) for urban areas from Lee’s Summit to Los Lunas had been pushed up one urban area. So I moved them all down one urban area, and took the data for Los Lunas and put them in the row for Lee’s Summit. I’m pretty certain this is right for all of the areas except Lee’s Summit; the 2015 spreadsheet for that area was all zeros.

To do this, I had to rearrange the spreadsheets. For some reason, the Federal Highway Administration breaks up the table into nine different worksheets, with about 70 urban areas per sheet. I find this annoying because it makes it difficult to find and compare many of the smaller urban areas. Continue reading →

Should Tolling Aim to Reduce Driving
or Increase Economic Opportunities?

By | | Transportation
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Seattle’s mayor has announced a vague proposal to toll downtown streets in order to relieve congestion. While the Antiplanner supports congestion pricing, I oppose cordon pricing, which is more of a revenue-raising scheme than a congestion-reduction program, and it isn’t yet clear which of these two the mayor is proposing.

Tolling has a bad reputation in Seattle because stiff penalties on people who failed to pay bridge tolls were so oppressive that they put some people into bankruptcy. At the same time, a well-designed tolling system can be good for low-income people, in the same way that they are better off paying market prices for groceries rather than having food allocated by the government, which generally results in little or no food available at all.

The downtown congestion that the mayor wants to fix is a problem of the city’s own making. Thanks to a variety of subsidies and incentives, the number of jobs in greater downtown Seattle — which covers a little more than 10 percent of the city — grew by 30 percent to 262,000 between 2010 and 2017. Although only a quarter of downtown employers drive to work, that’s more than the number who drive to work in downtown Portland, where more than half the employees commute by auto but has only around 100,000 jobs. Continue reading →

How Bad Is “That Bad”?

By | | Transportation
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The transit industry loses $50 billion a year. It’s customer base is dwindling. Business in many regions has declined by 20 to 40 percent. Yet Bloomberg, one of the nation’s leading business publications, says, “The outlook for public transit isn’t all that bad.”

Sheesh. Just how bad does it have to be to be “that bad”?

According to Bloomfield columnist Noah Smith, light-rail and commuter-rail ridership “are at all-time highs,” by which he means highs for 1990 to 2017, the time period used in his charts. In fact, his chart doesn’t show it, but according to the source of data in his chart (American Public Transportation Association (APTA) ridership reports), both light rail and commuter rail declined in 2017 and light rail (which APTA equates with streetcars) was much higher before 1955 than it is today. Continue reading →

Transit’s February Numbers

By | | Transportation, Useful Data
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Nine out of the top ten and forty out of the top fifty urban areas saw transit ridership decline in February, 2018 compared with the previous February, according to the latest data posted by the Federal Transit Administration. That’s slightly worse than in January: When compared with 2017, ridership in Buffalo, Denver, and Portland had grown slightly in the first month of 2018 but shrank in the second, which is slightly offset by Providence ridership growing in February after having declined in January.

The other regions seeing ridership grow are Los Angeles, San Francisco-Oakland, Seattle, San Diego, Riverside-San Bernardino, Las Vegas, San Jose, Hartford, and Raleigh. However, all of these regions except Seattle saw ridership decline in 2017, so the growth trend may be short-lived.

The declines are much more spectacular than the growth. While Los Angeles ridership grew by just 0.6 percent, Chicago lost 5.6 percent of its riders. San Francisco-Oakland did better with 6.9 percent growth, but Dallas-Ft. Worth lost 14.3 percent. Ridership in Seattle, which has been the only major urban area with consistent growth, grew by just 1.8 percent, but Portland ridership declined by the same percentage. Houston, which supposedly benefitted from a restructured bus system, saw ridership fall by 5.0 percent. Continue reading →

Does Light Rail Help the Working Class?

By | | Transportation
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“Weak transit hurts working class,” claims an article in the Portland Tribune. “Communities of color, lower-income communities and English language learners have moved farther from city centers due to rising rents, and into high-crash corridors,” reports the article. “These community members are injured and killed in pedestrian crashes at a higher rate than white, higher-income urbanites.”

What the article doesn’t say is that the reason why low-income people were pushed out of their rented, single-family homes near the city center is because Portland’s urban-growth boundary prevented the construction of affordable new single-family homes on the urban fringes. This forced middle-class families to buy single-family homes in the city, evicting the renters.

Those renters then moved into high-density transit-oriented developments built along Portland’s light-rail line. Since those developments tend to be built on busy streets, the streets are more dangerous to pedestrians than the local streets where their former single-family homes are located. Thus, Portland’s transit dreams are the cause, not the solution, to this problem. Continue reading →