The Antiplanner » Transportation

Category Archives: Transportation

Transit Continues to Lag Behind Driving

By | | Transportation, Useful Data
3 Comments

Americans drove more miles in May 2023 than the same month of 2019, according to data released by the Federal Highway Administration earlier this week. Transit ridership, however, was still less than 70 percent of 2019 levels, according to the Federal Transit Administration’s latest data.

At 69.9 percent of pre-pandemic levels, transit ridership was very close to 70 percent, a threshold it has breached only once since March 2020. To be fair, Cleveland’s regional transit agency is late in reporting ridership numbers. Though the agency carries only 0.3 percent of the nation’s transit riders, when its numbers are added, the national total for May will slightly exceed 70 percent of 2019. Continue reading →

Transit Ridership Down? Build More Rail!

By | | Transportation
3 Comments

Like San Francisco BART, the DC Metro rail system is facing a fiscal cliff, with a $750 million projected shortfall in operating funds in 2025. So why is the agency considering spending tens of billions of dollars on a new rail extension that will increase annual operating costs by $200 million?

For a mere $40 billion or so, DC Metro Rail can go from this. . .

Like BART, DC’s rail system historically has covered a high percentage of its operating costs with fares. Though that has declined from 68 percent in 2011 to 48 percent in 2019, the agency was still more vulnerable to ridership declines than agencies such as San Jose’s VTA, which before the pandemic covered less than 10 percent of its operating costs out of fares. Continue reading →

$10 Billion Boondoggle Opens

By | | Transportation
10 Comments

Honolulu officials worried that their new train would be “overwhelmed” with riders when it opened at 2 pm on June 30. They needn’t have worried; a local news station reported that “scores of people” lined up to ride the trains, which were free the first five days of operation.

Most trains are running nearly empty. Photo by Honolulu Authority for Rapid Transportation.

In fact, about 9,000 people rode the train the first afternoon. Considering that each train can hold 800 passengers and they ran six times an hour until 6:30 pm, they were operating at about 40 percent of their capacity on opening day. Continue reading →

Transit Fatalities Set Record in 2022

By | | Transportation
3 Comments

Urban transit killed more people in 2022 than any year in recent history, according to data released last week by the Bureau of Transportation Statistics. The numbers show that 340 people were killed in 2022, up from 268 in 2019 and 237 in 1990. No data are available from before 1990, but it is likely that transit fatalities were less than 300 per year going back to at least 1960.

This figure shows 2022 transit fatality rates and the urban road fatality rate for 2021, as 2022 data aren’t yet available.

This rise in fatalities is particularly concerning considering that transit agencies operated only about 86 percent as many vehicle-miles of service in 2022 than they did in 2019. Despite a 14 percent reduction in service, fatalities rose by 27 percent. Continue reading →

Highway Safety Results Are Mixed

By | | Transportation
4 Comments

Highway fatalities declined slightly in 2022 despite an increase in the miles of driving, and they declined again in the first three months of 2023. However, the changes are small and it’s too soon to say whether this is a trend or just a short-term quirk in the data.

Photo by Ragesoss.

Short-term changes in fatalities and fatality rates are something of a mystery. In the long run, safer roads and safer cars have pushed down fatalities from a peak of 55,600 in 1972, for a rate of 44.1 deaths per billion vehicle-miles of travel, to a low of under 32,500 in 2011, for a rate of only 11.0 deaths per billion vehicle-miles. The rate fell even lower to 10.8 per billion in 2014. Continue reading →

Transit’s Insatiable Appetite

By | | Transportation
6 Comments

A few weeks ago, the Antiplanner reported that transit advocates were holding up rush hour traffic in San Francisco in order to blackmail the legislature into giving billions of dollars to transit systems that few people are riding anymore in order to prevent a fiscal cliff. I also noted that the blackmail worked as the state gave transit $2 billion including $1.1 billion for BART.

Is there a fiscal cliff ahead? Photo by Cary Lee.

Fiscal cliff averted! Except state senator Scott Weiner wants to “temporarily” raise Bay Area bridge tolls by $1.50 (from the current $7) for five years in order to provide more subsidies to transit. The increase will only be needed for five years, Weiner says, because by then he hopes Bay Area voters will have passed another tax increase to support transit systems they are no longer using. Continue reading →

Three Questions about EVs

By | | Transportation
7 Comments

Judging from the headlines, the electric vehicle market is booming. Tesla is now the second-highest selling auto in California. General Motors, Ford, VW, and other companies claim to have set targets to largely transition from petroleum-powered vehicles in a few years. Each week, it seems, new models are being introduced, including everything from subcompacts to giant SUVs and pickups.

Will electric vehicles free us or tie us down?

Still, the closer I look the more questions I have. In particular, are auto manufacturers (other than Tesla) really serious about making EVs? Will electric vehicles ever be more than a niche product? And are they really a cost-effective way of reducing greenhouse gas emissions? Continue reading →

Interstate 95 and Induced Demand

By | | Transportation
3 Comments

Kudos to the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation for constructing a temporary replacement for a collapsed overpass in just 12 days, something that many predicted would take months. The replacement is just six lanes wide rather than the eight on the original overpass, but that leaves room for the department to construct a permanent replacement.

Some people are drawing the wrong lessons from the response to the highway collapse, however. According to Joe Cortright, the fact that there was no “carmageddon” during the 12 days the highway was closed proves that we don’t need highways at all. According to what Cortright calls the “science of ‘induced demand,'” building new roads simply leads to more driving and, conversely, closing roads leads to “traffic evaporation.” Continue reading →

A Home for Orphan Roads

By | | Transportation
4 Comments

North Carolina is one of a handful of states — others include Alaska, Delaware, Virginia, and West Virginia — where counties don’t have their own road departments. This means most roads outside of cities are either owned by the states or are private. However, some roads don’t have any clear owners and are effectively abandoned, leading them to be called orphan roads.

Click image to download a 1.1-MB PDF of this report.

This becomes a problem when people buy a home not realizing that the road that the home is on is orphaned. Eventually, the road wears out and homeowners face thousands of dollars of maintenance costs. They then typically demand that the state take over maintenance, which would force other taxpayers to subsidize the homeowners. North Carolina’s John Locke Foundation asked the Antiplanner to take a look at this issue. Continue reading →