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Category Archives: Transportation

Hopes Dim for Brightline

By | | Transportation
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Ridership on Florida’s Brightline passenger trains has more than tripled since the company opened its extension to Orlando last September. However, that increase hasn’t been enough to cover costs, as the company reported losing $116 million in the first three months of 2024. This is more than double the $53 million it lost in the first quarter of 2023, indicating that expenses increased by nearly three times as much as revenues.

Brightline’s station at Orlando International Airport. Photo by elisfkc.

When the Orlando line opened, Brightline predicted that it would carry 7.0 million passengers in 2024. However, it has recently reduced that estimate to 5.5 million. One problem is that Brightline has had to turn away passengers in the “short-distance” Miami-West Palm Beach segment of its route in order to keep seats available for the “more profitable long-distance” travelers to or from Orlando. As of May, year-to-date revenue in the short-distance segment declined from $18.8 million in 2023 to $17.2 million in 2024. Continue reading →

BART: Give Us More $ So We Can Do Less

By | | Transportation
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Before the pandemic, the San Francisco Bay Area Rapid Transit District (BART) earned more than 70 percent of its operating costs out of fare revenues, more than any transit agency in the nation other than CalTrain. Ironically, this also made it most vulnerable to a ridership downturn, while agencies like San Jose’s Valley Transportation Authority, which covered only 9 percent of its operating costs out of fares (the fourth worst among the nation’s transit agencies), were relatively immune. Now BART is pleading for more money so it won’t have to dramatically reduce service as it exhausts federal COVID relief funds.

Click image to download a 12.6-MB PDF of this report.

As part of that plea, BART published a report on its role in the Bay Area earlier this week. The report admits that BART’s ridership has dropped — as of May, it carried less than 45 percent as many riders as before the pandemic — due to increases in remote work. “BART ridership is closely linked to office occupancy rates,” says the report, with an accompanying graphic showing that ridership has moved in almost exact parallel to San Francisco-Berkeley-Oakland office occupancies. Continue reading →

FRA Puts Price Tag on Overnight Amtrak Routes

By | | Transportation
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The Federal Railroad Administration (FRA) estimates that adding 15 new overnight routes to Amtrak’s system will cost taxpayers $46 billion to $59 billion (see pages 80 to 159 of this 18.8-MB file) plus increase Amtrak’s annual operating costs by $1.1 billion to $1.6 billion. The FRA did not estimate ridership or fare revenues, but it did estimate that adding these routes would reduce driving by 0.014 percent and the annual number of highway accidents by 0.016 percent.

Click image for a larger view.

Amtrak currently has 15 overnight train routes that carried just over 2.0 billion passenger-miles in 2023 (see page 7). These routes cost $1.3 billion to operate in that year (not counting depreciation) and earned just under $600 million in fare revenues. Amtrak admits all of them except the Virginia-Florida Auto Train lost money, and when depreciation is counted that train probably lost money as well. Continue reading →

Driving, Air Travel Surge Above Pre-COVID Levels

By | | Transportation, Useful Data
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Americans took 7.7 percent more airline trips in May 2024 than the same month in 2019, according to TSA passenger counts. While the release of airline passenger-mile data lags other data by a couple of months, March data indicate that domestic flying passenger-miles were 5.5 percent greater than in 2019 while international passenger-miles were 1.5 percent short of 2019. The number of international trips was 4.3 percent greater than in 2019, indicating that people who are traveling internationally are going to closer destinations.

Americans also drove 2.6 percent more miles in May 2024 than May 2019, according to data released last week by the Federal Highway Administration. Rural miles of driving were 8.8 percent greater than before the pandemic while urban miles were just 0.2 percent short of May 2019. Continue reading →

Is Bicycling Improving?

By | | Transportation
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One of my many beefs with government planning advocates is that they tend to judge success by measuring inputs rather than outputs. A case in point is a group that calls itself People for Bikes that issued a report last week that claims that Bicycling Is Improving in Cities Across the U.S.

New bike lanes, but are they really safe?

Does it measure that improvement by the number of people cycling in those cities? Or by a reduction in bicycle fatalities and injuries from traffic accidents? No, it instead measure the miles of bike lanes, the reallocations of street space to dedicated bicycle use, reductions in automobile speed limits, and changes to intersections favoring bicyclists. The fact that these “improvements” have been accompanied by increased bicycle fatalities and reductions in bicycle commuting aren’t considered. Continue reading →

Mid-Day Traffic Now Worse Than AM Rush Hour

By | | Transportation, Useful Data
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Morning and afternoon rush-hour traffic has returned to pre-pandemic levels in many U.S. urban areas, according to INRIX’s 2023 Global Traffic Scorecard. However, what INRIX finds most “astonishing” is that mid-day traffic has grown by an average of 23 percent and is now much greater than during the morning rush hour, and almost as great at around noon as the afternoon rush hour.

U.S. Trips by Start Hour in 2019 and 2023

This will only be astonishing to people who haven’t read the several research studies finding that people who work at home drive more miles per day than people commute who work. As the above chart indicates, morning rush-hour traffic in U.S. urban areas is down 12 percent while afternoon rush-hour traffic is down 9 percent; but total traffic is up because of the 23 percent increase in mid-day traffic. Continue reading →

April 2024 Transit Ridership 74.6% of 2019

By | | Transportation
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Transit systems carried less than 75 percent as many riders in April 2024 as in the same month before the pandemic, according to data released by the Federal Transit Administration last week. Transit ridership tends to be significantly greater on weekdays than weekends and holidays, but April had the same number of business days in both years. Ridership has been hovering between 73 to 76 percent for the last eight months and since March 2020 has never actually reached 76 percent of pre-pandemic levels.

Of the major modes, bus-rapid transit is doing best with 111 percent of 2019 riders, but that’s mainly because cities such as Houston, San Francisco, and Tampa opened BRT routes between 2019 and 2024. Conventional buses carried 80 percent of 2019 riders, light rail 74 percent, and heavy rail under 70 percent. Commuter trains carried 67 percent but commuter buses carried only 49 percent. Continue reading →

April 2024 Driving 6.3% Less Than April 2019

By | | Transportation, Useful Data
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Americans drove 6.3 percent fewer miles in April of 2024 than the same month of 2019, according to data released yesterday by the Federal Highway Administration. This is the first time in nine months that miles of driving have fallen below 99 percent of the same months in 2019.

April driving was also 4.2 percent less than in March 2024. In “normal” years, such as 2018 and 2019, Americans have driven more miles in April than March despite the former having one fewer day, probably because of better weather in April. Continue reading →

April Amtrak 101%, Air Travel 105% of 2019

By | | Transportation, Useful Data
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Amtrak carried 100.9 percent as many passenger-miles in April of 2024 as in the same month of 2019, according to the state-owned company’s most recent monthly performance report. Meanwhile, the Transportation Security Administration reports that airlines carried 105.3 percent as many passengers as in 2019.

April data for transit and highways will be posted here as soon as it becomes available.

A close look at Amtrak data reveals that the Northeast Corridor is carrying the system. While April NEC ridership was 10.2 percent greater than in 2019, ridership on state-supported day trains was more than 8 percent short of 2019 and ridership on long-distance trains was almost 8 percent below 2019. That’s been roughly the pattern for the year to date as well. Continue reading →

Who’s to Blame for Increase in Cycling Fatalities?

By | | Transportation
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The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) recently reported that more than 1,100 bicycle riders died in U.S. traffic accidents in 2022. That’s a 77 percent increase from 2010 and the most bicycle fatalities in recorded history (which goes back to 1932).

Do bike lanes make streets safer for bicycle riders? Photo by Missouri Bicycle Federation.

Bicycle advocates blame the increase on larger automobiles, particularly pickups. But the numbers don’t necessarily bear that out. In order to reduce fatalities, they want “safer street designs,” but the numbers don’t support that either. Continue reading →