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Category Archives: Transportation

Suffering from an Illusion of Safety

By | | Transportation
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The Antiplanner has previously questioned bicycle lanes because they create an illusion of safety from overtaking cars when in fact the real danger is cross-traffic. Unfortunately, I received a very physical demonstration of this while cycling in Maui last Friday when I was hit by a large van.

I was enjoying a tailwind in the bike lane shown on the right side of this photo. The auto lane had bumper-to-bumper traffic while I was traveling at least 20 mph and passing cars that were going much slower. The van was in the left-turn lane where the red car is located in the above photo. Someone was nice enough to leave a gap for the van to turn left, but their car also blocked my view of the van just as they blocked the van driver’s view of me. Continue reading →

Giving Back to the Community

By | | Transportation
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The Sacramento Regional Transit District is reducing its fares for the first time in its history. It says it is doing this to “give back to the community.” But the Antiplanner can’t help but think that fare reductions might have more to do with the 40 percent decline in ridership the district has experienced since 2008.

At least it isn’t responding to revenue declines by increasing fares. Oh, wait: it already did. Between 2008 and 2016, average bus fares grew by 38 percent and average light-rail fares grew by 17 percent, which probably contributed to but were not the primary cause of declining ridership.

The agency says it can decrease fares now because of the success it has had in controlling costs in the last couple of years, as evidenced by the fact that it has $10 million in the bank as a “reserve.” But why did it wait until the last couple of years to control its costs? Why hasn’t it been controlling its costs since it was created in 1973? Continue reading →

Sanity in the Valley of the Sun

By | | Transportation
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The Phoenix city council is considering delaying or even killing some planned light-rail lines because it is concerned that city streets are falling apart and too much money is being spent instead on an insignificant form of travel. The council considered but rejected a similar proposal a couple of months ago, but since then two councilors who opposed the proposal have been replaced and at least one of them is inclined to favor streets over rails.

As of 2016, light rail carries less than 0.2 percent of all travel in the Phoenix urban area. The 2016 American Community Survey says that the same tiny percentage of commuters take light rail to work, which is unusual as transit’s commuter share is usually much higher than its total share. Phoenix light-rail ridership in the twelve months ending in June, 2018 was down 4.4 percent from the previous twelve months. Transit ridership for Phoenix as a whole is down 5.6 percent for the same time period.

Phoenix is one of many Sunbelt urban areas in which rail transit makes no sense at all. Aside from the Antiplanner’s argument that buses can move more people than light rail, rail systems only make sense where there is a high concentration of downtown jobs that a hub-and-spoke transit system can serve. According to Wendell Cox’s calculations, downtown Phoenix has only about 26,000 jobs, which is just 1.4 percent of jobs in the metropolitan area. Continue reading →

A Matter of Trust

By | | Transportation
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Ford Motor Company issued a report last week explaining its self-driving car program and why it won’t kill pedestrians like the Uber car did in Arizona. Among other things, Ford has two people in its test cars at all times, one watching the road and the other monitoring the self-driving system (Uber’s car had only one person who was watching a video at the time of the accident).

Click image to download this 37.4-MB PDF.

The Antiplanner likes Ford and wishes it well, but I can’t help but think that this “go-slow-for-safety” approach is merely an excuse for being three years behind Waymo and two years behind General Motors in the race to put self-driving ride-hailing systems on the streets. Ford promises to mass produce self-driving cars by 2021, but GM says it will have them by 2019 and Waymo expects to put such cars in revenue service this year. Continue reading →

Do We Still Need an Economic Recovery Fund?

By | | Transportation
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Congress created the TIGER grant program in 2009 to help the economy recover: TIGER stands for “transportation investment generating economic recovery.” The economy has recovered — the United States is now enjoying what some call the “longest bull market in Wall Street history” — so President Trump called for ending TIGER.

The House agreed, but some in the Senate want to keep it going. Instead of killing it, Maine Senator Susan Collins, who claims to be a Republican, wants to expand it. Her justification is that the program received 585 applications from state and local governments last year but was able to fund just 44, which demonstrates “the need and popularity of this program.” I wonder if she knows of any programs that give away hundreds of millions of dollars a year that aren’t popular.

(She also opposes reform of the air traffic control system, which she calls “a solution in search of a problem.” Because airports aren’t congested in Maine, so she must imagine they aren’t congested anywhere else.) Continue reading →

Light Rail Is Criminogenic

By | | Transportation
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The Guardian reports that a movement has begun in Baltimore to shut down the city’s light-rail lines because of the crime they spread. The liberal Guardian makes this out to be a racial issue, but actually it is just a safety issue.

Architect Oscar Newman discovered several decades ago that some designs are criminogenic, meaning they attract crime, while other designs deter crime. While criminals are more likely to be poor, Newman showed that poor people of all races were much less likely to engage in or be victimized by crime if they lived in areas that were non-criminogenic.

Newman had noted that poor people living in some neighborhoods suffered from lots of crime while the same class of people living in other neighborhoods experienced almost no crime. To find out why, Newman compared design features with crime reports on thousands of city blocks. His work was successfully replicated on a much larger scale by later researchers. Continue reading →

Portland Plots Its Next Light-Rail Line

By | | Transportation, Urban areas
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Transit ridership is declining and the Trump administration is refusing to giving away federal funds for new transit projects. But Portland’s TriMet transit agency is already buying properties for its new $3 billion light-rail line.

Metro’s Joint Policy Advisory Committee on Transportation — which is the real power at Metro, not the elected Metro council — has approved the route for the rail line that is supposed to go from downtown Portland to Bridgeport Village, a shopping mall on Interstate 5. The plan calls for bike paths, sidewalks, some new highway bridges (which aren’t included in the cost), as well as 12 miles of light-rail route.

The official projected cost for the project is $2.6 billion to $2.9 billion, but as an analysis by the Cascade Policy Institute shows, the final cost of previous light-rail projects all ended up being as much as 40 percent more than the estimates that had been made at the draft environmental impact statement stage. Metro issued a draft EIS for the project in June. Continue reading →

This Will Increase Transit Ridership–Not!

By | | Transportation
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A woman videotaped a man exposing himself on a Los Angeles light-rail train. Another woman was “savagely beaten” on a New York subway train. A third woman was stabbed to death and her sister hospitalized at a BART station in Oakland.

These attacks received a lot of publicity, but they are just the tip of the iceberg. Riders on the Los Angeles transit system suffer from several major crimes a day — “major” (“part 1” crimes) meaning homocide, rape, aggravated assault, robbery, or car theft — and a slightly smaller number of minor or “part 2” crimes, meaning simple assaults, vandalism, minor sex offenses, and drunk or disorderly conduct.

The good news is that, starting in July 2017, LA Metro increased the police presence on board its trains, which reduced the total number of crimes from about ten per day to about seven. But some serious crimes continued to increase in number. Continue reading →

Michigan Transit: Don’t Believe the Hype

By | | Transportation
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Michigan transportation officials are relearning the lessons that transit advocates overstate claims for transit improvements and then backpedal when those promises fail to happen. For example, a bus-rapid transit project in Grand Rapids was supposed to economically transform the corridor it serves and carry 7,400 riders per weekday in its first year.

In fact, it carried just 2,200 riders per weekday and the only transformation in the corridor is the empty park-and-ride station parking lots and increased congestion from dedicating traffic lanes to buses that were once open to all vehicles. The transit agency, meanwhile, revised its ridership projection downward to 5,000 trips per weekday and, when it didn’t meet that, claimed it is still “happy” with the results.

Similarly, ridership on Detroit’s streetcar line, called the QLine, was supposed to be 5,000 to 8,000 trips per weekday. In fact, it was just 4,300 trips when it was free, dropping to 2,700 trips after they began charging fares. Continue reading →

MTA Credit Rating Drops

By | | Transportation, Urban areas
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Standard & Poor’s has downgraded the credit rating for the New York Metropolitan Transportation Authority to A. It was two grades higher than that just five months ago. If it falls five more grades, it will be in junk bond territory.

S&P says that it based the downgrade on its assessment of MTA’s preliminary 2019 budget, which calls for spending $32.5 billion on rehabilitation efforts. Although $10 billion of that would come from bond sales, S&P says that MTA lacks the revenues to repay such bonds. If someone doesn’t find a new source of revenues, S&P warns, it will downgrade the agency’s credit rating still further. Lower credit ratings will mean that MTA will have to pay higher interest rates on future debt.

At the end of 2017, MTA’s long-term debt was $38.3 billion, most of which was incurred to address the last maintenance crisis. Since 2017 it has issued about half a billion dollars worth of additional bonds. This doesn’t count another $20 billion in unfunded health-care obligations. Add in $10 billion in planned bond issues for repair and the agency will owe nearly $70 billion. That’s a lot for a system that earns less than $7 billion in annual revenues and spends roughly twice that on operations. Continue reading →