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Proven to Be an Expensive Way to Reduce Ridership

By | | Transportation
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Light rail is a “proven technology,” claims Atlanta Beltline engineer Shaun Green, so there is no need to look at alternatives to spending a couple of billion dollars or so building a 22-mile light-rail and streetcar loop around the city. He was responding to some local residents who think that alternatives should be considered because “rail is the 20th century.”

Proposed route of Atlanta beltline transit system.

It is sad that even trained civil engineers have lost the simple analytical skills needed to handle questions like this. Let’s look and see where light rail has proven itself. Continue reading →

Driverless Buses in Abu Dhabi

By | | Transportation
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Abu Dhabi, the capital of United Arab Emirates, has begun operating a bus-rapid transit system with a couple of twists. First, the buses are gigantic: with two trailers (illegal in most U.S. cities), they can easily hold 200 passengers and squeeze in 240. Second, they will be completely automated despite using existing infrastructure. Some videos show a driver at the wheel, but I presume this was solely during a trail period.

The battery-powered buses operate over a 27-kilometer route with about one station per kilometer. The city of Abu Dhabi consists of several islands, and the buses connect Abu Dhabi island with Yas Island, a major tourist center. Because the buses are oriented around tourists, for now they only operate on Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays. Continue reading →

Fixing MBTA’s Financial Mess

By | | Transportation
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Boston’s transit agency, the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority (MBTA or T for short), appears to be on the verge of collapse. Eight years ago, it reported a $7.3 billion repair backlog, which has probably grown since then. As I read its 2022 financial statement, it also has $5.4 billion in unfunded pension and health care liabilities.

No one was particularly surprised when an Orange Line train caught fire last year. Photo by Marissa Babin.

State officials have known about the T’s serious maintenance and safety problems at least since 2009, when an outside report commissioned by the governor found that it had a $3 billion maintenance backlog and wasn’t even spending enough on maintenance to keep that backlog from growing further (which is why it grew to $7.3 billion six years later). This was creating serious safety problems, the report charged, finding that the agency’s maintenance program was addressing only about 10 percent of the system’s most serious safety issues. Continue reading →

Keep Highway User Fees

By | | Transportation
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The Tax Foundation notes that Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley has proposed to save consumers money by eliminating federal fuel taxes. That’s an extremely short-sighted idea that would actually cost consumers in the long run. As the foundation’s writers, Alex Muresianu and William McBride, observe, Haley could have proposed that the gas tax, an imperfect user fee, be replaced with a better user fee such as a mileage-based fee. But instead she proposed to simply eliminate the tax.

A sunset for gas taxes?

The most recent report indicates that, as of yesterday, the price of regular gasoline averaged about $3.64 nationwide. Eliminating the federal gas tax would reduce that to by 18¢ to $3.46 a gallon — less than 5 percent. Encouraging more domestic oil production could cut fuel prices by more than a dollar a gallon, down to what prices were in around 2015-2020. If Haley wants driving to be more affordable (which I think would be a good thing), that’s what she should promote. Continue reading →

Changing the Game for the Worse

By | | Transportation
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A 3/4-cent sales tax increase for transit is “seen as a game-changing model to fund transit service — and the envy of many cities nationwide,” reports the Minneapolis Star Tribune. What the article doesn’t say is how the tax will change the game for the worse for transit riders and transportation users in general.

Twin Cities transit ridership had been going downhill before the pandemic, declining nearly 10 percent between 2015 and 2019. Photo by Metro Transit.

What this means is that Metro Transit will no longer care about ridership numbers. Instead, it can freely spend hundreds of millions of dollars a year on projects that do little to generate ridership with no repercussions. Continue reading →

Amtrak’s Acela Is Redacted

By | | Transportation
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Delays and cost overruns are plaguing the new trains Amtrak is counting on to replacing its aging fleet of semi-high-speed Acela trains, according to a new report from Amtrak’s own inspector general. One of the reasons for the delays is that 34 cars that the manufacturer tried to deliver to Amtrak were returned as defective.

Click image to download a 3.0-MB PDF of this redacted.

How much are the cost overruns? We don’t know because the number was redacted from the report. How long are the delays? At least three years but we don’t know exactly because the number was redacted from the report. The report even redacts the name of the manufacturer, even though it is well known to be Alstom. “Certain information in this report has been redacted due to its sensitive nature,” says the report cover. Continue reading →

All Recovered but Transit

By | | Transportation, Useful Data
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Highways, airlines, and Amtrak all carried more travel in August 2023 than the same month before the pandemic, according to data recently released by the Department of Transportation. Urban transit, however, is languishing at less than 72 percent, and it would be even lower except that August had one more business day in 2023 than in 2019. Agencies such as the Regional Cleveland Transit Authority and San Jose’s Valley Metro that were behind on their data reporting have caught up, so can’t be used as an excuse for the industry’s overall poor performance.

Highway vehicle miles and transit ridership data were released yesterday. Amtrak issued its monthly performance report, including passenger-miles earlier in the week. Airline data are based on Transportation Security Administration counts, which are updated daily. Air passenger-miles are reported by the Bureau of Transportation Statistics but they are further behind, having issued data only up through June. Continue reading →

Amtrak Crossing: Watch Out for the Subsidies

By | | Transportation
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“Flush with cash” from the 2021 infrastructure bill, says the Wall Street Journal, Amtrak hopes to “double ridership by 2040.” That’s an ambitious goal, and yet one that is totally insignificant.

Amtrak’s logo looks like a pointless arrow, but the real point is to spend lots of money.

Amtrak carried 5.1 billion passenger-miles in 2022. Divide that among the 332 million Americans and Amtrak carried the average American 15 miles. That compares with 16,000 miles of per capita travel by automobile and more than 2,100 miles by domestic airline. The Census Bureau expects the nation’s population to rise to 373 million by 2040, so even if Amtrak could double ridership, which is unlikely, per-capita intercity rail travel would grow to only about 27 miles per year. In other words, Amtrak will still be irrelevant to most Americans. Continue reading →

A Polycentric Transit Plan for St. Louis

By | | Transportation
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St. Louis has more miles of light rail than any other Midwestern urban area, yet fewer people rode St. Louis transit in 2019 than in 1991, before the region opened its first mile of light rail. According to a new report from the Show-Me Institute, this is because Metro, the region’s transit agency, has planned its transit system for the 1910s, not the 2020s.


Click image to download a 4.3-MB PDF of this report.

That means that Metro has built a system that assumes that most people work downtown, live in dense residential neighborhoods close to light-rail stops, and don’t have access to automobiles. None of those conditions have been true for at least 50 years, and Metro’s system is especially unsuited to the post-pandemic world. Continue reading →

Let’s Spend More Money on Something We Have to Give Away to Get People to Use It!

By | | Transportation
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Kansas City voters sensibly rejected spending money on light rail at least seven times. But that common sense apparently didn’t extent to streetcars, which are an even dumber idea than light rail as streetcars are slower than buses, far more expensive, and can’t get out of their own way if one breaks down.

Photo by Jason Doss.

Despite these disadvantages, Kansas City opened a 2.2-mile streetcar line in 2016 that it declared to be a great success. It carried almost 4,800 weekday riders in its first full year of operation, which is about as many as a mediocre bus route but more than streetcar lines in Atlanta, Charlotte, Cincinnati, Dallas, Little Rock, Seattle, Tucson, and Washington. Continue reading →