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Category Archives: Transportation

Re-Imagining Public Transit

By | | Transportation
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A recent op-ed in the Baltimore Sun written by several elected officials proposes to “re-imagine public transit” in the Baltimore area. In particular, they want to revive the Red Line, a light-rail line that was cancelled in 2015. Among the strikes against it were that it would increase congestion and would carry so few passengers that, under FTA rules at the time, it wasn’t cost-effective and therefore wasn’t eligible for federal funding. (The rules have since been changed, but that doesn’t make it any more cost effective.)

Imagining the Baltimore Red Line.

The fact that Maryland’s governor approved the DC-area Purple Line at the same time as he cancelled the Red Line has stuck in the craw of Baltimore transit officials. Since then, the Purple Line has suffered numerous delays and cost overruns, but that doesn’t worry Baltimore’s mayor and the county executives who wrote this op-ed. Heck, they probably see cost overruns as a good thing as they would bring more money into their communities. Continue reading →

Failing to See the Forest for the Trees

By | | Transportation
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New York University’s Transit Costs Project has issued its final report on why it costs so much to build transit infrastructure in the United States. While some of the answers appear reasonable at first glance, the report suffers from the researchers not asking the right questions.

Click image to download a 26.4-MB PDF of this report.

In its review of Boston’s Green Line, the report notes that “Understaffed agencies lacking experience with large capital construction projects struggle to manage consultants.” One result is less than half the costs of the project went into construction; the rest went to pay consultants. We’ve seen that happen with Honolulu and other rail projects as well. Continue reading →

The Value of VMT

By | | Transportation
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Before the pandemic, there was a mindset among urban planners that driving was bad and the ultimate goal of all of their policies was to reduce vehicle-miles traveled (VMT). That’s why they wanted to build obsolete urban transit systems like light rail and streetcars instead of freeways. That’s why they wanted more people to live in high-density housing projects instead of low-density suburbs. That’s why they wanted to reduce the amount of parking available to residents, shoppers, and others.

Photograph by B137.

So far, the pandemic has not awakened them to the folly of this mindset. Driving has fully recovered and in much of the country people are driving more miles than ever, while transit is little more than half what it was. Instead of acknowledging these changes, cities and regions are writing plans that never mention the pandemic and relying on pre-pandemic data to justify their policies. Continue reading →

Vision Zero Accomplishes Zero

By | | Transportation
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Cities across the country have passed Vision Zero plans that resolve to reduce accident fatalities to zero by 2030. Planners seem to think that if we resolve strongly enough, and maybe cross our fingers, these plans will work.

Photo by Alextredz.

To be fair, the plans do more than resolve. Most of them focus on slowing down traffic, either by reducing speed limits or by narrowing lanes, installing traffic circles, or taking other steps to force drivers to slow down. This is based on the obvious proposition that someone hit by a car going 20 miles per hour is less likely to die than someone hit by a car going 50 miles per hour. Continue reading →

You Get What You Pay For

By | | Transportation
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Addis Ababa, the capital of Ethiopia, has a 19.6-mile light-rail system that consists of a north-south line intersecting an east-west line. It cost $475 million, or less than $25 million per mile. That sounds like a good deal compared with U.S. lines now under construction or in planning, the least expensive of which is more than $135 million a mile and the average cost is more than $275 million a mile.

Addis Ababa’s light-rail line. Photo by A.Savin.

There’s just one little problem. Although the light-rail system is just seven years old, it is already suffering serious maintenance problems. Only eight of the city’s 41 light-rail trains are functional, and the city has resorted to operating just every other day in order to do track maintenance. The city estimates it needs $60 million to restore the system to full capacity, which it doesn’t have. Continue reading →

2022 Transit 62.0% of 2019

By | | Transportation, Useful Data
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Urban transit carried just over half a billion trips in the United States in December, and just under 6 billion in 2022 as a whole, according to December 2022 transit data released Monday by the Federal Transit Administration. December’s ridership was 66.0 percent of December 2019 while the calendar year’s was 62.0 percent.

Transit trips are from the National Transit Database; Amtrak passenger-miles are from Monthly Performance Reports; airline passenger data are from the Transportation Security Administration; and highway vehicle-mile data are from the Traffic Volume Trends. December highway data will be available in a week or so.

Meanwhile, after reaching above 90 percent of 2019 numbers in November for the first time since the pandemic, Amtrak numbers fell to 80 percent in December, its lowest, measured as a percentage of 2019, since May. Airline passenger numbers fell a little bit as well, but only from 94.3 to 93.3 percent of 2019. December highway numbers should be available soon. Continue reading →

Transportation After COVID-19

By | | Transportation, Urban areas
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Minnesota transportation agencies need to reinvent themselves if they are to survive after the pandemic, according to a new report published yesterday by the Center of the American Experiment, Minnesota’s free-market think tank. Off the Rails: Minnesota Transportation After COVID-19 says that the world has changed so much that any transportation plans written before 2020 will no longer make sense (if they ever did).

Click image to download a 3.1-MB PDF of this 48-page report.

In case you can’t read the fine print on the image above, the report was written by yours truly and so all of its themes — increased numbers of telecommuters, the follies of light rail, the importance of funding transport out of user fees, not to mention more than a dozen brightly colored charts — will be familiar to Antiplanner readers. But in some respects, the Twin Cities’ post-pandemic experiences have been more extreme than most. Continue reading →

$5.15 Billion a Mile for Caltrains

By | | Transportation
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Caltrains announced last week that the cost of the last 1.3 miles of its commuter-rail line into San Francisco would cost $6.7 billion, a 34-percent increase from an estimate made in 2015. The only rail construction that has cost more per mile is New York City’s Eastside Access project.

The planners of San Francisco’s Transbay Transit Center had taxpayer money to burn so they put a huge city park on top of the station. Photo by Fullmetal2887.

The city is constructing this based on the ridiculous notion that all rail lines should connect together. Currently, the Caltrain commuter trains from San Jose terminate near the site of the historic Southern Pacific train station in San Francisco, while the BART line from Oakland goes to what was once called the Transbay Terminal but now (after a $2 billion upgrade) is called the Salesforce Transit Center after the cloud computing company that paid $110 million for naming rights. Continue reading →

Saving the World from Lithium Mines

By | | Transportation
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We can’t replace petroleum-fueled motor vehicles with ones powered by electricity, according to a new report, because mining enough lithium to power the batteries for those electric vehicles will destroy the world. Or part of it, anyway. The only solution, says the report, is for countries like the United States to replace private vehicles with public transit.

The only way to prevent this, according to a group called the Climate and Community Project, is to ban cars.

Why is it that, no matter what the problem, leftists think the only solution is to ban cars and spend more money on mass transit? According to a sociologist I once knew named John Finley Scott — who is better known for having created one of the first mountain bikes than his sociological research — most auto opponents are people who didn’t learn to drive until their late 20s or later, by which time they knew they were mortal and found driving to be terrifying. They can’t imagine anyone actually liking cars or driving, so they see nothing wrong with ridding the earth of such an evil invention. Continue reading →

No More Car Ownership?

By | | Transportation
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When I heard that the World Economic Forum proposed to ban car ownership, I dismissed it as left-wing nonsense that would never get far with elected officials. But earlier this week the Scottish government announced it planned to ban car ownership as a part of its campaign to reduce per-capita driving by 20 percent by 2030.

Of course, they say such actions are needed to reduce climate change, but the truth is that a lot of people have hated automobiles for decades and are just using climate change as an excuse to carry out their vendetta against personal mobility. They also claim to care about income inequality, but the automobile did more to reduce income inequality in the 20th century than just about anything else. Continue reading →