Category Archives: News commentary

The Bush administration is proposing to give $130 million in grants to cities that want to build electronic toll systems they can use to reduce congestion. Electronic tolling can help congestion by allowing road managers to charge more during busy periods and make sure the roads never get congestion.

Congestion pricing is an amazingly simple and low-cost solution to congestion. Everyone expects airline tickets to cost more at Christmas and Thanksgiving and hotel rooms to cost more in the summer (except in Florida where they cost more in the winter). So we are all used to the idea of congestion pricing.

Unfortunately, most of us are also used to the idea of driving on toll-free roads, so any proposal to turn an existing free road into a congestion-priced road is met with stiff resistance. The Wall Street Journal warns that some people are going to call such tolls a “tax” to build political opposition.

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Dave Barry’s column welcoming people to the Superbowl in Miami has some interesting comments on Miami’s rail transit system.

Miami’s rail system “does not go to many other places that many Miami residents would like to go, which is why most of them do not use it,” says Barry. “To them, the Metrorail train is a mysterious object that occasionally whizzes past over their heads, unrelated to their lives, kind of like a comet.”

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The San Jose Mercury News reports that the Santa Clara Valley Transportation Authority (VTA) has written a detailed 33-page request for bids for — wait for it — cake.

VTA needs the cakes for the three dozen or so retirement parties it holds each year (it should be a lot more). To submit a bid, a bakery must be willing to provide any of eleven flavors (do you want peach or marble?), sixteen fillings (pumpkin or mint cream?), five icings (butter cream or cream cheese?), and six toppings (jimmies or walnuts?). Plus the cakes have to be decorated with flowers, streamers, or other ornaments.

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The Wall Street Journal today has a lengthy article about the Siemens company bribing government officials to get contracts. Among other things, Siemens builds light-rail cars.

As far as I know, Siemens has never bribed an American public official to get a contract to for its rail cars — at least, not in the sense of paying people under the table. Instead, it routinely makes large contributions to political campaigns involving light rail.

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Yesterday’s New York Times features an article on Portland’s aerial tram. Portland is the “city that loves transit”? More like, the city whose officials love to spend money on transit.

Meanwhile, the Federal Highway Administration publicly expressed criticism of Portland’s transportation planning. “It is difficult to find a transportation focus” in the plan, says the agency. I guess they didn’t get the memo: in Portland, transportation spending is about real estate, not about moving people and goods.

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About twenty-five urban areas had rail transit in 2005. Transit systems in five of these lost market share to the automobile, they gained in eight, and in eleven they held their own (when measured to the nearest tenth of a percent). Data for the twenty-fifth, New Orleans, are not available.

“Holding their own” may sound good for transit systems in our auto-oriented society. But it is a disappointment when so much more has been promised for the expensive rail lines being built in so many cities. This is especially true when all but seven of these transit systems — rail and bus — carry under 2 percent of total passenger travel in the regions they serve.

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Now that the U.S. DOT has published 2005 data for transit (1.9 mb download) and Highway Statistics, we can expect to soon hear APTA crowing about how transit is capturing market share from the automobile. This, however, is just another lie your transit lobbyist is telling you.

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Rail transit continued to do poorly in many American cities in 2005, at least judging from transit data recently released by the FTA. The FTA publishes data in two different forms. The first has data in rather cryptic files that are easy to manipulate as spreadsheets. The second has almost identical data that are easier to read but harder to work on.

To simplify matters for you, I took the data I think are most important and put them in one downloadable spreadsheet. This file includes, for every transit agency and every mode of transit they operate: operating costs; capital costs; fares; trips; passenger miles; vehicle revenue miles; and vehicle revenue hours. The file also tells what urbanized area the agency operates in.

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