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Category Archives: Transportation

SEPTA Tries the Washington Monument Strategy

By | | Transportation
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Compared with 2019, the Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority (SEPTA) is carrying 30 percent fewer riders and collecting 13 percent less revenue per rider. Yet it is spending 10 percent more on operations despite having cut service by 10 percent. It previously filled this funding gap with federal COVID relief funds, but now those have run out. In order to continue operating as if there had been no ridership decline, SEPTA has demanded that the state legislature supplement its existing funding — $1.5 billion per year — with an additional $300 million in F.Y. 2026.

SEPTA Silverliner train. Photo by Adam E. Moreira.

The legislature failed to comply, so SEPTA has petulantly adopted a budget that makes what it calls “devastating service cuts & fare increases.” “This budget will effectively dismantle SEPTA — leaving the City and region without the frequent, reliable transit service that has been an engine of economic growth, mobility, and opportunity,” says an agency press release. “Once this dismantlement begins, it will be almost impossible to reverse, and the economic and social impacts will be immediate and long-lasting for all Pennsylvanians — whether they ride SEPTA or not.” Continue reading →

Do Driverless Cars Hallucinate Electric Sheep?

By | | Transportation
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Waymo is operating driverless taxis in Los Angeles, Phoenix, and San Francisco, partnering with Uber in Atlanta and Austin, and expanding into Miami and Washington DC soon. Volkswagen is making a driverless ID Buzz available to ride-hailing and taxi companies anywhere. Tesla has begun offering robotaxis in Austin, with some opening glitches. Amazon is set to build 10,000 driverless taxis a year. A company called Aurora is testing driverless trucks between Dallas and Houston.

Volkswagen’s ID Buzz configured for driverless taxi service.

People have responded to the growth of driverless vehicle programs with predictable horror. Some worry that driverless cars will increase congestion and take people’s jobs. Others fear that they will be dangerous on the highway, especially if they begin “hallucinating.” Perhaps due to fears like these, ICE protesters set five Waymo cars on fire in Los Angeles. Continue reading →

Amtrak Will Not Be Profitable by 2028

By | | Transportation
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“With steady, sustained support from Congress and the administration, Amtrak’s passenger train service will become operationally profitable by FY 28,” says Amtrak in its latest request for subsidies from U.S. taxpayers. This is, at best, deceptive and at worst an outright lie.

A northbound Amtrak train on the California coastline. Photo by Circe Denyer.

Even as Amtrak promises to be profitable in three years, it admits that it is losing more money now than in 2019 despite carrying record numbers of passengers. It blames this on costs rising faster than revenues, reductions in state support for many trains, and increased costs “treated as operating costs” even though they are supposedly really capital investments. Unless Congress dramatically cuts Amtrak’s capital funding, it isn’t clear how any of these trends will be reversed in the next three years. Continue reading →

Texas Cancels Amtrak Funding

By | | Transportation
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The Texas legislature has declined to continue funding a train between Fort Worth and Oklahoma City. Amtrak calls the train a “vital transportation option,” but in fact few people ride it and it is a costly burden to Oklahoma and Texas taxpayers.

The Heartland Flyer stops in Norman, Oklahoma.

The train, Amtrak says, served “over 80,000 customers in FY24 and reach[ed] $2.2 million in ticket revenue,” which is supposed to somehow sound impressive. Amtrak’s press release fails to mention that the train cost $9.6 million to operate, not counting depreciation, which means it cost taxpayers at least $92 per rider, and probably much more. In short, taxpayers have to pay more than three quarters of the cost, much more than the average Amtrak train, for which taxpayers cover “only” about 59 percent of the cost (which is still too much). Continue reading →

April Transit Ridership 80.6% of April 2019

By | | Transportation, Useful Data
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America’s transit systems provided 96.3 percent as much service in April 2025 as they did in the same month of 2019, yet carried only 80.6 percent as many riders, according to data released late last week by the Federal Transit Administration. This is slightly less than the percentage of 2019 riders they carried in March.

Transit ridership as a share of pre-pandemic riders dipped slightly in April.

Rather than scale back service to meet reduced ridership demand, transit agencies complain that they are suffering “deficits” that need to be made up for by taxpayers. While I would define “deficits” as “fares minus costs,” transit agencies define them as “fares plus existing tax revenues minus costs.” Continue reading →

Amtrak & Flying Up, Driving Down in April

By | | Transportation, Useful Data
22 Comments

Amtrak carried 9.0 percent more passenger-miles in April 2025 than in the same month before the pandemic, according to the state-owned company’s monthly performance report. The airlines did almost as well, carrying 5.8 percent more riders in April than in 2019. However, Americans drove only 98.5 percent as many vehicle miles in April as in 2019.

April transit data are not yet available and will be posted here as soon as possible after the FTA releases them.

It’s hard to guess why driving dropped, at least as a percentage of 2019. The economy was slowing, rail freight was declining (though still more than 2019), but perhaps truck freight had fallen. Continue reading →

A Low-Cost High-Speed Rail Plan?

By | | Transportation
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New York University’s Transit Costs Project has been asking the question, “Why do U.S. transit projects cost so much more than similar projects in Europe, Asia, and South America?” A recent report from the project proposes to significantly speed up trains in Amtrak’s Northeast Corridor for only $12.5 billion (plus another $4.5 billion for new rolling stock), which is far less than Amtrak’s proposal to spend at least $110 billion in the same corridor.

Amtrak’s plan called for building a new line for the entire 457 miles between Boston and Washington. The Transit Cost Project’s plan instead proposes to fix specific bottlenecks on the current line. The result, says the project, would be trains that could travel between New York and either Boston or Washington in less than two hours, as opposed to 3 hours (New York-Washington) to 3-2/3 hours (New York-Boston) today. Continue reading →

Making Everyone Else Pay

By | | Transportation, Urban areas
33 Comments

Seattle is building the most expensive light-rail system in the world, yet Seattle Times writer Jon Talton defends it saying “the economic benefits are clear.” Those benefits, apparently, are that a handful of people are able to live without a car, yet it doesn’t occur to Talton that the came benefit could be obtained with a much lower-cost bus system.

Photo by wings777.

According to the American Community Survey, the Seattle urban area had 1.9 million workers in 2023 and fewer than 16,000 — that’s 0.8 percent — took light rail to work. The survey also found that only 28 percent of transit commuters didn’t have any motor vehicles in their households, and if that applies to light-rail riders, then fewer than 4,500 Seattleites live without cars due to light rail. Continue reading →

Highway Safety Is Improving

By | | Transportation
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A CBS Sunday Morning report promoted driverless cars as a way of improving highway safety. I’ve been saying the same thing for years, but I was surprised when the report opened with the statement, “Every year, 1.2 million people die in car accidents.” Technically, that’s true, but only 3.6 percent of them are in the United States.

According to Wikipedia (which is probably the source of the 1.2 million number), China sees 250,000 traffic fatalities per year. India is number two at more than 155,000. Despite the fact that all of Africa has only about 30 percent as many vehicles as the United States, Africa suffers 322,000 fatalities per year, with particularly high numbers in the Congo, Ethiopia, and Nigeria. Other counties with high fatalities include Brazil, Indonesia, Pakistan, Thailand, and Viet Nam. Continue reading →