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Category Archives: Transportation

Why Not to Take the Bus

By | | Transportation
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To commemorate Earth Day, Memphis television meteorologist John Bryant decided to try riding the bus to work. Normally, his home-to-work journey takes about 15 to 20 minutes. His effort to protect the environment ended up taking 2-1/2 hours. Part of the problem was his unfamiliarity with the bus system, but the fastest he might have been able to make it was at least 90 minutes, partly because he had to walk a half mile from his home to the nearest bus stop and another mile to work from the nearest bus stop to his office. The few other passengers riding the bus with him were mostly too poor to own an automobile.

Despite this, he concluded more people should ride the bus. “These are the kind of sacrifices right now that we need to think about doing, even if you only do it one time,” he said, both for “reducing our carbon footprint” and for “connecting on an emotional level with citizens [who couldn’t afford cars] in the city I grew up in.” Continue reading →

Free Transit Boosts Ridership by 16 Percent, Maybe

By | | Transportation
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Bloomberg reports that, when Utah Transit (UTA) eliminated transit fares on a trial basis in February, weekday ridership grew by 16 percent. Overall, the latest data show, average daily ridership was only 18 percent greater than it had been in January. That compares with 25 percent for the nation’s transit systems as a whole, suggesting that free transit may not have been the reason why ridership increased.

Utah Transit buses have an average of 36 seats but carried an average of just 5 passengers (that is, they carried 5.0 passenger-miles per vehicle mile) in 2019 and just 3.6 in 2020. Photo by Paul Kimo McGregor.

Considering that passenger fares brought more than $48 million into UTA’s budget in 2019, such a small boost in ridership hardly seems worth the loss of that revenue. Transit agencies, however, desperately need reasons to justify their heavily-subsidized existence. Offering free fares may boost ridership, if only by a small amount, but more important it insulates agencies from ridership fluctuations. If the agencies are solely dependent on taxpayers to keep their buses and trains running, then all they have to do is convince taxpayers or appropriators that transit is somehow vital to cities even if hardly anyone uses it. Continue reading →

It Takes Money to Lose Money

By | | Transportation
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Just before the pandemic, Amtrak proudly announced that it lost only $29.5 million operating passenger trains in 2019 and expected to make an operating profit in 2020. Of course, that didn’t happen thanks to the pandemic, and what’s more, it was lying about losing only $29.5 million; its actual losses were closer to $1.4 billion, a mere 46 times more than it claimed.

Amtrak spent $2.5 billion on new trainsets for its high-speed Acela. These were supposed to go into service in 2021 but are now expected to begin service no sooner than 2023. Photo by Fan Railer.

Now that Congress has flooded Amtrak with money in the infrastructure bill, however, the agency no longer even cares about whether its passenger trains come close to covering their costs. Like any good soviet agency, it recently released its five-year plan, and it projects it will lose more than a billion dollars a year for almost every year in the future. Continue reading →

February Driving 97.1% of Pre-Pandemic Miles

By | | Transportation, Useful Data
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Americans drove almost 236 billion miles in February 2022, according to data released yesterday by the Federal Highway Administration. This was 97.1 percent as many miles as they drove in February 2020, the last month before the pandemic began to affect travel. February 2020 had one more day than February 2022, so if they both had the same number of days, February 2022 probably would have seen more miles driven than in February 2020.

Driving remains well ahead of other modes of travel while transit is furthest behind in its recovery from the pandemic.

The published numbers indicate that February driving in Delaware almost doubled from February 2020 levels, which may be due to an entry error. Otherwise, the largest increases in driving were in Louisiana (18%), Rhode Island (17%), Kentucky (16%), Arkansas, Hawaii, and South Carolina (all 13%), Florida and Indiana (both 12%), and Connecticut (11%). The largest decreases, relative to February 2020, were in Washington state (-21%), Kansas and North Dakota (both -18%), Minnesota (-17%), and Illinois (-12%).

Twelve Ways to Destroy Cities

By | | City planning, Transportation
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Kimberly Nicholas, an associate professor of sustainability at Sweden’s Lund University, says that automobiles are killers and offers twelve ways to get them out of our cities. Typically for sustainability advocates, she completely ignores the benefits provided by automobiles as well as ways in which the costs of automobiles could be reduced without reducing driving.

A typical street in sustainable Stockholm. Photo by European Institute for Sustainable Transport.

Her twelve ways include reducing the amount of parking, charging more for parking, closing parts of cities to automobiles, and charge a fee to drive automobiles into city centers. All revenues from such fees, parking, fines, etc., should, in her opinion, go to fund “sustainable transport,” which means any kind of transportation other than automobiles. Continue reading →

70% of Seattle Light-Rail Riders Don’t Pay

By | | Transportation
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Sound Transit, Seattle’s light-rail agency, has a goal of collecting enough fares to cover 40 percent of operating costs, yet it is collecting just 5 percent. That’s partly because of COVID-depressed ridership, but mainly because the agency makes almost no effort to collect fares. As a result, the agency estimates that 70 percent of its passengers are riding without paying.

Not getting much use: a Sound Transit ticket machine. Photo by Evan Didier.

Like other light-rail systems, Seattle’s operates on an “honor system,” meaning people are expected to pay before they board, but there are no turnstiles to keep them from boarding if they don’t pay. Like other light-rail systems, Seattle’s used to have “fare inspectors” who would hand out tickets to people who didn’t have proof of payment. But then someone pointed out that minorities were getting most of the tickets (maybe because they were most likely to not pay?), so this was deemed inequitable. Continue reading →

Study Shows Transit Spread COVID

By | | Transportation
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A comparison of transit usage and COVID cases early in the pandemic in 52 urban areas found that heavy transit use was strongly correlated with greater numbers of COVID infections. “Increasing weekly bus transit usage in metropolitan statistical areas by one scaled unit was associated with a 1.38 times increase in incidence rate of COVID-19; a one scaled unit increase in weekly train transit usage was associated with an increase in incidence rate of 1.54,” said the researchers.

Plan to wear a mask for the rest of your life. Photo by Jacques Paquier.

The correlation was strong even if New York City was eliminated from the dataset. As I’ve often noted, New York is such a big transit market that it often biases any analysis of transportation across American cities. Continue reading →

Lie Rail Supporters Keep On Lying

By | | Transportation
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The Antiplanner has previously written that light rail should be called lie rail because everything its advocates say about it is a lie. The latest proof comes from Capital Metro, Austin’s transit agency, which now admits that light-rail projects voters approved in 2020 are going to cost at least 78 percent more than originally projected.

Capital Metro persuaded voters to support light rail by claiming it would reduce congestion when in fact it will make it worse by taking lanes away from autos and dedicating them to empty tracks carrying empty light-rail trains.

The original projection, of course, was one of many lies told about the project. Almost every light-rail project ever built has cost far more than the original projections, overruns so systematic that Oxford researcher Bent Flyvbjerg says they are “best explained by strategic misrepresentation, that is, lying.” Other lies included overestimated ridership numbers and the claim that light rail is “high-capacity transit.” Continue reading →

Transit Ridership 53.8% of Pre-Pandemic Levels

By | | Transportation
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Transit agencies carried 53.8 percent as many riders in February 2022 as in February 2020, according to data issued last week by the Federal Transit Administration. Thanks to generous federal subsidies, transit agencies were able to offer 83 percent of pre-pandemic service (measured in vehicle-revenue miles) despite reduced fare revenues.

Transit’s February performance was an improvement over January, but still below Amtrak, which carried 59.3 percent of pre-pandemic passenger-miles; and airlines, which carried 80.3 percent as many passengers as in February 2020. As usual, miles of driving won’t be available for a week or so. Continue reading →

Obsolete Technology Now Also Antique

By | | Transportation
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Monorails have been the transportation of the future for more than two centuries, as a British engineer named Henry Robinson Palmer filed a patent for a monorail in 1821. A monorail was displayed at the 1876 Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia.

Two forms of obsolete transportation in one photo: the Seattle monorail and Seattle streetcar. Photo by Oran Viriyincy.

The Wuppertal monorail was more than 60 years old when Seattle helds its Century 21 World’s Fair in 1962. But people still thought monorails were the transportation of the future, so one was built to connect downtown Seattle with the fair. Continue reading →