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Category Archives: Transportation

2017: Transit’s Disastrous Year

By | | Transportation, Useful Data
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Nationwide transit ridership in December 2017 was nearly 5 percent less than December 2016. Ridership for the calendar year was 2.6 percent less than in 2016 and 6.7 percent less than 2014, transit’s recent peak. These numbers are based on the latest National Transit Database spreadsheet posted by the Federal Transit Administration.

As usual, I’ve supplemented the FTA file by summing the years (2002 through 2017 in columns GU through HJ), transit agencies (rows 2101 through 3098), and the 200 largest urban areas (rows 3101 through 3300). The resulting spreadsheet is about 8 megabytes. While these numbers may be preliminary, they provide a pretty good indication of the health — or lack of it — of the transit industry.

The results show that 2017 ridership was lower than in 2016 in all but two of the fifty largest urban areas: Phoenix and Seattle. As of the posting of November data, it appeared that Houston would be a member of this tiny club, but Houston’s December ridership fell by 1.1 percent from December 2016, leading 2017 as a whole to be 0.1 percent less than 2016. While some of that decline may have been due to Hurricane Harvey, the December drop off does not bode well for 2018. Continue reading →

You Can Build Your Way out of Congestion

By | | Transportation, Urban areas
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Los Angeles is still the most congested urban area in the world, according to the latest INRIX traffic scorecard. However, what is more interesting is that congestion seems to be declining in several fast-growing cities in Texas, thanks to construction of new highways.

Dallas is twice as big as Seattle and Houston is three times as big. The Dallas and Houston urban areas are both growing nearly twice as fast as Seattle’s, but Seattle is concentrating its growth in the city while Dallas and Houston allow more people to settle in the suburbs. INRIX found that congestion was worse in Seattle than either Dallas or Houston, which was a direct result of Washington’s growth-management policies.

Moreover, while INRIX’s congestion index for Seattle — and most other cities — grew worse since last year’s scorecard, the congestion indices for Dallas, Houston, Austin, San Antonio, and El Paso all improved. That’s unusual in the United States, INRIX observes, but cities in Scotland and Germany have also managed to reduce congestion by building new facilities. Continue reading →

Who Will Get to Own Driverless Cars?

By | | Transportation
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Some people have predicted that, by 2030, 95 percent of all travel will be by shared driverless cars. The prediction is based on an estimate that the cost of using a shared car will be so much less than the cost of owning a car that hardly anyone will want to own a car.

Some environmental groups, including NRDC, ICLEI, and Transportation for America, want to make this a self-fulfilling prophecy. They have proposed that no one should be allowed to drive a private car in “dense urban areas”; instead, only vehicles in “shared fleets” should be allowed. Since it is also their joint goal to make all urban areas dense, effectively they want to ban car ownership except in rural areas.

Not surprisingly, the companies that want to operate those shared fleets, including Uber, Lyft, and Zipcar, are supporting the proposal. So far, however, no auto manufacturers have signed on; no doubt they will be happy to sell their cars to anyone who buys them. Continue reading →

Transit Losses From Poor People Buying Cars?

By | | Transportation, Urban areas
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A new report from the UCLA Institute of Transportation Studies finds that the main cause of declining ridership in southern California is poor people buying cars. Between 1990 and 2000, when ridership was growing, the Los Angeles region grew by 1.8 million people but only 456,000 cars, or about one car per four people. Between 2000 and 2010, when ridership was shrinking, the region grew by 2.3 million people and gained 2.1 million cars, or nearly one car per new person.

There is certainly something to this, but other factors are probably more important than the report estimates. The report says that neither ride sharing nor changes in transit service and fares have played an important role, and I suspect these conclusions are wrong.

The report shows that transit trips per capita peaked in 2007 and have declined in most years since then. Certainly the decline before around 2012 or 2013 was not due to ride sharing. But the decline steepened after 2014, and I suspect much of that decline is due to ride sharing. Continue reading →

State of the Union’s Infrastructure

By | | Transportation
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Remember America’s crumbling infrastructure that supposedly needs trillions of dollars for maintenance and rehabilitation? President Trump doesn’t. Instead, the seven sentences in his state of the union speech that focused on infrastructure talked about building “gleaming new” projects rather than fixing existing systems.

The only real news is that he is upping the ante from $1.0 trillion to “at least $1.5 trillion.” More disturbingly, other than mentioning an “infrastructure deficit” — which could just as easily be interpreted to mean a shortage of new infrastructure as a deficit in maintenance — Trump said nothing about fixing existing infrastructure. Instead, he wants to “build gleaming new roads, bridges, highways, railways, and waterways.”

Why? We have plenty of railways. Though the railroads have trimmed the nation’s rail mileage by 45 percent since 1916, they move more freight than ever and seem to be quite capable of adding capacity where they need it without government help. High-speed trains, meanwhile, are pointless when we have planes that can go twice as fast and don’t require hundreds of billions of dollars of supporting infrastructure. Continue reading →

Paying People to Ride Transit

By | | Transportation
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Denver urban planner Drew Willsey has what he thinks is a great idea: relieve traffic congestion by paying people to ride transit. He accepts, reluctantly, that the billions of dollars Denver’s Regional Transit District (RTD) has spent on rail transit hasn’t worked: transit’s share of commuting has dropped from 4.9 percent in 2000 to 4.6 percent in 2016, and, considering ridership is dropping, probably lower in 2017.

Unfortunately, like many other planners, Willsey can’t get the idea that transit is the solution to everything out of his head. He implicitly assumes that transit is good, cars are bad, and the most cost-effective way of relieving congestion is always by increasing transit.

In Denver, at least, none of these assumptions are true. The Transportation Energy Data Book says that cars used about 3,000 BTUs and light trucks about 3,600 BTUs per passenger mile in 2015 (and probably slightly less in 2016). The National Transit Database says RTD used 3,800 BTUs per passenger mile in 2016. Cars emit about 212 grams of carbon dioxide per passenger mile, light trucks 268, and RTD 272. Certainly some cars and trucks are worse, but some are much better. Continue reading →

Amtrak 2017 Report

By | | Transportation, Useful Data
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Amtrak recently posted its September 2017 Monthly Performance Report, which includes cumulative data for F.Y. 2017 as a whole. Unfortunately, with the September report, Amtrak changed the format of its monthly reports, reducing the size from 90-some pages (such as this one for 2016) to five. What is Amtrak trying to hide?

Unlike an annual report (which Amtrak hasn’t yet published for 2016), the monthly performance reports have data for each of 46 Amtrak routes. This includes the Northeast Corridor (broken down into Acela and “regional” trains), 29 state-supported day trains, and fifteen overnight or long-distance trains. The abbreviated train-by-train data in the new-format reports includes gross revenues, operating expenses, fare revenues, seat miles, and passenger miles. Continue reading →

Leaked Trump Infrastructure Plan?

By | | Transportation
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Someone claims to have obtained a leaked document relating to the mythical Trump infrastructure plan. The document is sketchy and contains no hard dollar figures, but it gives an idea of what might be in a final plan.

The document proposes seven different initiatives or programs. The largest, called the Infrastructure Incentives program, would get half of any appropriations to pay for up to 20 percent of the cost of “core infrastructure projects” including transport, water, power, superfund, and flood control projects. The document doesn’t seem to distinguish between new projects and rehabilitation of existing ones, so the politicians who seek the funds would probably be biased in favor of new. Projects would be rated on a variety of criteria the most important of which would be the ability of the state or local government to sustain financing for the project.

Rural infrastructure is the second-largest program, getting 25 percent of funding for transport, water, power, and broadband. The funds would be distributed as block grants rather than matching funds, based on each state’s population and rural road miles. Continue reading →

Transportation Energy Costs

By | | Transportation, Useful Data
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The average car on the road consumed 4,700 British thermal units (BTUs) per vehicle mile in 2015, which is almost a 50 percent reduction from 1973, when Americans drove some of the gas-guzzliest cars in history. The average light truck (meaning pick ups, full-sized vans, and SUVs) used about 6,250 BTUs per vehicle mile in 2015, which is also about half what it was in the early 1970s.

Click on the above image to download a 10.2-MB PDF of the above report. Use links below to download spreadsheets or individual chapters from the report.

By comparison, the average transit bus used 15 percent more BTUs per vehicle mile in 2015 than transit buses did in 1970. Since bus occupancies have declined, BTUs per passenger mile have risen by 63 percent since 1970. While buses once used only about half as much energy per passenger mile as cars, they now use about a third more. Continue reading →

November 2017 Ridership Falls 1.9 Percent

By | | Transportation, Useful Data
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Nationwide transit ridership in November 2017 was 1.9 percent lower than the same month in 2016, while ridership for the first eleven months of 2017 was 2.5 percent lower than the same period in 2016. If similar numbers are posted for December, then total annual ridership will have fallen below 10 billion trips for the first time since 2010.

These numbers are from the Federal Transit Administration’s November update to its National Transit Database. The update includes passenger trips, vehicle revenue miles, and vehicle revenue hours by month from January 2002 through November 2017, broken down by transit agency and mode. These numbers may be preliminary and might change slightly in later updates. These numbers are also for calendar years so will differ from the final 2017 report, which is based on each agency’s fiscal year. Continue reading →