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Will Spending More Money Save Transit?

By | | Transportation
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Speaking of simplistic solutions to complex problems, Streetsblog has an article on how to save transit. Based on ridership numbers from thirty-five urban ares, the pro-transit site says the two keys to transit success are, first, to spend lots of money, and second, to spend it in the right places.

I wonder why no one ever thought of that before.

The article points out that only three urban areas saw an increase in transit ridership from 2016 to 2017: Seattle, Phoenix, and Houston (where ridership grew just 0.1 percent). The numbers in the article are somewhat different from the numbers the Antiplanner calculated from the National Transit Database, but I agree that the only significant growth was in Seattle and Phoenix. (My numbers show a 0.1 percent decline in Houston.) Continue reading →

Tempe Crash Shows We Need Driverless Cars

By | | Transportation
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Shortly after the Uber driverless car killed Elaine Herzberg in Tempe, Arizona, the Tempe police announced that it wasn’t Uber’s fault. “It’s very clear it would have been difficult to avoid this collision in any kind of mode based on how she came from the shadows right into the roadway,” Tempe’s police chief told the San Francisco Chronicle. However, the Chronicle noted that “the police have not released the videos.”

Based on the police description of the accident, the Antiplanner’s analysis presumed that Herzberg had just stepped into the street from the left side (where people on the curb would be obscured by vegetation) and the car was in the left lane when it struck her. This would have given any driver almost no time to see and prevent the accident. But the release of the video above reveals that the car was in the right lane when it hit her, which has led to claims that the accident was in fact avoidable and the fault belongs to Uber’s technology. In particular, Waymo’s CEO, John Krafcik, stated, “We have a lot of confidence that our technology would be robust and would be able to handle situations like that one.” Continue reading →

A Monument to Optimism

By | | Transportation
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“When you build a high-speed rail line,” says Washington governor Jay Inslee, “you are building a monument to optimism.” He is 100 percent correct except that he thinks that’s a reason to build it when in fact it is a reason not to build.

Inslee made the statement at a joint press conference with British Columbia premier John Horgan announcing that B.C. would contribute to the costs of a study of building a line from Seattle to Vancouver. Governor Inslee no doubt meant that spending money on high-speed rail represented optimism for the future of the Northwest. But what his statement really meant is that he is clueless about the extensive planning literature associating optimism bias with strategic misrepresentation, that is, lying.

The other half of Inslee’s phrase — monument — accurately describes the real purpose of high-speed rail. It’s not meant to be a mode of transport. Instead, it is a monument to the egos of politicians who get it built. Continue reading →

Graphing the Transit Apocalypse

By | | Transportation, Useful Data
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The Washington Post has declared the continuing decline of urban transit ridership an emergency. The Post takes it for granted that the real purpose of cities is to maintain the transit industry and not the other way around. While it is clearly an emergency for those obsolete transit agencies, especially ones saddled with even more obsolete rail transit systems, it isn’t an emergency at all for cities and individual travelers who are finding faster, more convenient, and often less expensive ways of getting around.

And the decline continues. Nationwide transit ridership in January 2018 was 2.5 percent less than in January 2017, according to the latest National Transit Database numbers posted by the Federal Transit Administration (FTA). This drop was even more significant because January 2018 had one more work day in it than January 2017.

Supposedly, according to experts consulted by the Post, we have to maintain urban transit because it is more “space efficient” than other forms of travel. Yes, it is real space efficient to have 60-passenger buses that drive around with an average of 9 on board, or 150-passenger (some claim 200) light-rail cars that carry an average of fewer than 23 on board (the averages in 2016). If you drive alone in your six-passenger SUV, your car is carrying a higher percentage of its capacity than the average transit vehicle. Continue reading →

Charlotte Opens Light-Rail Extension

By | | Transportation
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Last week, the Charlotte Area Transit System (CATS) opened a 9.3-mile extension to its light-rail system. The extension cost $1.1 billion, or about twice as much as the city’s first light-rail line, which was about the same length.

Back in 2002, CATS did a major investment study that estimated the light-rail line would cost about $370 million (about $485 million in today’s dollars). The study found that rail would cost 80 percent more to build and slightly more to operate than bus rapid transit, yet buses would attract about 60 percent more riders than rail.

So naturally, they chose to build rail. As near as I can tell, bus rapid transit was not given any further consideration despite its clear advantages. Continue reading →

Driverless Car Fatality in Arizona

By | | Transportation
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A woman crossing a street in Tempe was struck and killed by an Uber autonomous car at 10 pm Sunday night. Although it is too soon to tell for certain, it appears that the accident could not have been prevented no matter who was in control of the car.

Scene of the accident. Scroll left to see the poorly designed pedestrian path that the woman was apparently using before crossing the street.

According to police, a woman pushing a bicycle laden with shopping bags stepped from the roadway median into 35-mile-per-hour traffic. The Uber vehicle, which had a back-up human driver behind the wheel, did not have time to even brake before it hit her. Continue reading →

Seattle Fails the Streetcar Intelligence Test

By | | Transportation, Urban areas
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Streetcars are supposed to be the least-expensive form of rail transit, yet Seattle is spending $177 million building a 1.2-mile streetcar line. At $147.5 million a mile, that’s more expensive than many light-rail lines.

The 1.2-mile City Center Connector will connect the 1.3-mile South Lake Union Trolley and the 2.5-mile First Hill streetcar.

Moreover, the plan of the city (which is building the streetcar) appears to be overly optimistic about both ridership and operating costs. The city already has two streetcar lines, and the new one will connect the two. But since the two existing lines parallel each other, connecting them — creating a U-shaped route — doesn’t necessarily make them a lot more useful to riders. As shown in the map above, the connecting line will give riders more access to downtown, but no one except a few streetcar enthusiasts is going to want to ride from one end of the South Lake Union line to the other end of the First Hill line. Continue reading →

What’s Causing New York Subway Delays?

By | | Transportation
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The Antiplanner was in Portland Wednesday to talk about light rail, which is why there was no post yesterday. I’ll be in Seattle tomorrow to again talk about rail transit. As of 2016, Sound Transit has spend $335 million (in 2016 dollars) on commuter buses that carry 64,000 weekday riders and $2.1 billion on commuter trains that carry just 16,600 weekday riders. Another example of poor planning.

Meanwhile, New York’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority has blamed increasing subway delays on overcrowding, an explanation that raised the Antiplanner’s skepticism, partly because the city’s subway system carried far more riders during and after World War II and didn’t suffer similar delays.

Village Voice writer Aaron Gordon is also skeptical, noting that ridership has declined for the last two years but delays continue to increase. Instead, he blames the delays on a deliberate effort by MTA to slow trains down. For safety reasons, MTA has reduced speed limits in many parts of the system and imposed penalties on train operators when they exceed the limits. While the trains can theoretically meet the schedules at the reduced speeds, a tiny delay can cascade into serious problems. Continue reading →

More Evidence of Government Failure

By | | Housing, Transportation
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The Antiplanner is fully aware that government doesn’t work, but I wish that politicians would stop trying to prove it. First, the Portland city council has decided to make permanent a temporary rule that requires landlords to pay moving costs of up to $4,500 for any tenants they evict without cause or whose rents they raise by more than 10 percent. Portland housing costs have been rising at faster than 10 percent per year for the past several years. this is supposed to control that rise.

Instead, what it will do will discourage anyone from renting a house or building apartments for rent. This will only make costs rise faster than before.

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One More Reason to Kill the TIGER

By | | Transportation
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The Department of Transportation announced half a billion dollars worth of TIGER grants last week. While some of these projects may be worthwhile, others are clearly wasted.

TIGER, which stands for Transportation Investment Generating Economic Recovery, was created by Congress in 2009 to help the nation recover from the Great Recession. Since that recession is supposed to be long over, the Trump administration wants to abolish the program. But members of Congress want to keep it because they see it as a form of pork barrel.

The good news is that none of this year’s TIGER grants are going for streetcars. One is supporting a bus-rapid transit project in Atlanta and a couple more are supporting transit centers in Eau Claire, Wisconsin and Immokalee, Florida. Such infrastructure improvements are wasteful, especially when the money could be spent on repairing existing transit infrastructure (in Atlanta) or operating more frequent service (in the other two cities). The Atlanta BRT project is particularly questionable because it wasn’t on either the city’s or the transit agency’s lists of funding priorities; as one local web site says, the $12.6 million for this project is “a lot of money for a route that no one has heard of before and that never saw any public engagement.” Continue reading →