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Category Archives: Transportation

Portland Has Too Many Loose Screws

By | | Transportation
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A loose screw caused the Portland streetcar crash that took place a couple of weeks ago, reports TriMet. The screw jammed up the streetcar throttle, making it difficult to impossible to slow the streetcar down.

Of course, this invites all sorts of invidious jokes that the Antiplanner can’t resist making, mainly because it’s nearly midnight and I’ve been working on too many other projects to have written a more incisive blog post for Thursday.

Anyone who watches Portlandia, which some consider to be more of a documentary than a comedy, knows there are a lot of loose screws in Portland. One of the first real examples of loose screws was the decision to build the streetcar line that opened in 2001. There was some plausible justification for light rail, at least at first glance, but streetcars made no sense at all when buses were better at everything streetcars could do except spending lots of money. Continue reading →

Hoverboards in Subways

By | | Transportation
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Someone suggested that New York City subways be replaced with hoverboards, and the internet went nuts. Or at least some people on the internet went nuts.

The normally pro-transit Atlantic Monthly published an article by Peter Wayner — author of Future Ride: 80 Ways the Self-Driving Car Will Change Everything — suggesting that the projected $19 billion cost of fixing the New York City subway was too much. Instead, he proposed something “radically different”: to tear out the rails and open up the subways to private operators of shared, autonomous vehicles. Instead of full-sized cars, he predicted that the market would lead private companies to use what he called “hoverboards,” by which I think he meant electric scooters and Segway-like vehicles.

“This is the stupidest thing I’ve ever read about the NYC Subway,” responded my friend (frenemy?) Charles Marohn. “Makes Randal O’Toole’s idea to just run buses in the tunnels look reasonable.” Continue reading →

Calthorpe: Driverless Cars Will Kill Cities

By | | Regional planning, Transportation
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New urbanist architect Peter Calthorpe predicts that “autonomous vehicles will mean death for cities.” To which the Antiplanner responds, “good,” as in “good bye and good riddance.”

But wait — Calthorpe seems to think this is a bad thing. “AVs will only increase sprawl as private vehicles travel farther,” he warns. The reason why people will be able to drive further is because autonomous vehicles will reduce congestion. They will reduce congestion so much, he fears, that “vehicle miles traveled will double and roads will become impassable.” So which is it: will driverless cars promote sprawl by reducing congestion or will they gridlock roads? (The answer is that driverless cars will double road capacities.)

Cities are a means to an end: a place for people to meet, to bring resources together for manufacturing or transshipments, to reduce living costs. But new means of transportation and communication have steadily reduced the need for dense cities to achieve those ends. Continue reading →

Broward County Fails to Learn from History

By | | Transportation
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The Broward County commission voted six to one to put a measure on the ballot to raise sales taxes by a penny to pay for transportation improvements. This tax, which is expected to raise about $350 million a year, will do such things as “enhance traffic signal synchronization, develop safe sidewalks and bicycle pathways, expand and operate bus and special needs transportation, [and] implement rail along approved corridors.”

That all sounds so reasonable until you get to the last one. Then it becomes clear that nearly all of the money is going to be soaked up planning and building a east-west light-rail line to complement the north-south TriRail commuter rail line. Never mind that light rail was obsolete ninety years ago.

This is the same county commission that spent fourteen years and millions of dollars planning a Fort Lauderdale streetcar project that was finally abandoned when construction bids proved to be far higher than the county had expected. Clearly, most of the commissioners haven’t learned the most important lessons about rail transit: that it takes too long to plan and build, costs too much, and always costs more than planners claim. Continue reading →

Transit Death Watch: 2.3% Decline in April

By | | Transportation, Useful Data
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Nationwide transit ridership in April 2018 was 2.3 percent lower than the same month in 2017, according to data released yesterday by the Federal Transit Administration. Commuter-rail ridership grew by 3.5 percent, but light-rail, heavy-rail, hybrid rail, streetcar, and bus ridership all declined. The biggest decline was light rail at 5.5 percent.

April’s drop was smaller than the 5.9 percent year-over-year decline experienced in March because April 2018 had one more work day (21 vs. 20) than April 2017, while March 2018 had one less work day. As a result, 16 of the fifty largest urban areas saw transit ridership grow in April 2018, compared with just four in March. Considering that most transit ridership takes place on work days, anything less than a 5 percent growth is not something to be proud of. Only Pittsburgh, Providence, Nashville, and Raleigh saw ridership grow by more than 5 percent.

The most catastrophic losses were in Boston (24.4%), Cleveland (14.4%), and Milwaukee (10.8%). Ridership fell by more than 5 percent in Miami-Ft. Lauderdale, Dallas-Ft. Worth, Atlanta, Tampa-St. Petersburg, St. Louis, Orlando, Charlotte, and Richmond. These losses follow steady declines since 2014 and, in some urban areas, as far back as 2009. Continue reading →

Waymo Gearing Up

By | | Transportation
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Waymo will order up to 62,000 plug-in hybrid minivans from Chrysler for its driverless ride-hailing service. Waymo already has 600 such minivans that it is testing in Austin, Phoenix, and the San Francisco Bay Area.

The 62,000 Chryslers are on top of the 20,000 electric cars that Waymo announced in March that it was planning to buy from Jaguar. Waymo says it expects to have all of these vehicles fully deployed by 2022 at the latest. Continue reading →

Taking the Not-Stupid Option

By | | Transportation
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The Puget Sound Transit board of directors considers themselves to be between a rock and a hard place. The projected cost of the eight-mile Northgate-Lynnwood light-rail line has risen from a low of $1.2 billion to $3.2 billion. The agency is counting on getting more than a billion of that from the Federal Transit Administration, but the Trump administration has been stingy about funding new projects.

So should the board commence construction now even if it means foregoing federal support? Or should it wait until federal support is assured and take the risk that costs will rise even more?

How about a third option: Don’t build it at all. It would have been a stupid idea if it cost just $200 million. It was a really stupid idea at $1.2 billion. It is an extremely stupid idea at $3.2 billion. It’s stupid because buses can do everything light rail can do, but do it more safely and at a much lower cost. Continue reading →

FLiXBUS: A New Alternative Way to Vegas

By | | Transportation
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A new competitor is entering the American intercity transportation market: Flixbus, a German company that is just five years old, is offering rides from Los Angeles to Las Vegas for as little as $2.99. While the company adds a $2 service fee per reservation, that means a round-trip ticket is less than $8. The lowest one-way fare on Greyhound is $13.

A Flixbus in France. Flickr photo by Semvatac.

Germany deregulated its bus market in 2013, and Flixbus quickly emerged as the dominant player, with around 80 percent of the German bus market and a growing share in other European countries as well. The company works by contracting out its operations to local bus companies. Flixbus does the marketing, sells the tickets, and coordinate schedules, while the local operators provide the buses, drivers, and maintenance. Continue reading →

Transit Fatality Rates on the Rise

By | | Transportation
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Transit fatality rates have risen from 4.6 per billion passenger miles carried in 2002 to 5.8 per billion in 2016. Among major forms of transit, hybrid rail (diesel-powered rail cars that often run on light-rail schedules) is the most dangerous, killing 29 people per billion passenger miles. Light rail is next at 13, while buses and heavy rail are both less than 5.

These numbers are from the Federal Transit Administration’s safety and security time series, which counts fatalities and injuries by mode. The FTA’s spreadsheet also includes fatality numbers for 2017 and January of 2018, but does not have passenger miles for those years, so we can’t calculate rates. I’ve summarized the data in a spreadsheet showing fatalities and passenger miles by mode and year.

Commuter rail is not included on the FTA spreadsheet as that is governed by the Federal Railroad Administration. You can find commuter rail fatality numbers in table 2-34 of National Transportation Statistics. Comparing these fatalities with passenger miles reported by the National Transit Database historic time series indicates an average commuter-rail fatality rate of about 8.8 per billion passenger miles. Continue reading →

Want to Reduce Pollution? Don’t Buy a Tesla

By | | Transportation
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“Broadbased adoption of ZEVs [electric vehicles] will increase air pollution and associated environmental costs relative to new internal combustion vehicles,” concludes a new study from the Manhattan Institute. Electric cars “will increase overall emissions of sulfur dioxide, oxides of nitrogen, and particulates, compared with the same number of new internal combustion vehicles, even after accounting for emissions from petroleum refineries.”

This appears to contradict Department of Energy claims that, “In general, EVs produce fewer emissions that contribute to climate change and smog than conventional vehicles.” However, “in general” does not mean “in particular.”

A study by several economists found that, in some parts of the country that rely mainly on hydroelectricity and other non-polluting electricity, electric cars are indeed cleaner than internal combustion cars. But, as reported by City Lab, in most of the country electric cars are dirtier than gasoline-powered cars, and in much of the rest of the country they are about the same (scroll down to “What They Found” in the City Lab article or to page 35 of the paper itself). Only in certain parts of the West are electric cars significantly cleaner than gasoline. Continue reading →