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Category Archives: Transportation

The Perils of Bus-Rapid Transit

By | | Transportation
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Ten years ago, the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency (Muni) decided to build a two-mile long busway on Van Ness Avenue, dedicating two lanes of the six-lane street exclusively to buses. The project was supposed to cost $125.6 million and make transit more attractive by speeding up buses. The planners’ calculations indicated that, without the project, buses would carry 50,800 transit riders a day. With the project, it would carry 52,400 riders, a 3.15 percent increase.

Van Ness before the busway. Click on image to see the original photo in Google street view.

The busway opened for business last week after more than a decade of planning and six years of construction. The final cost turned out to be $345.9 million, a mere 175 percent cost overrun. Ridership on Muni buses is currently about half what it was before the pandemic, and it will be a long time before the Van Ness route recovers to 50,800 riders a day, much less 52,400. Continue reading →

Old Technologies for New Starts

By | | Policy brief, Transportation
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As part of the president’s proposed 2023 budget, the Federal Transit Administration plans to give out an unprecedented $4.45 billion on new transit capital projects, sometimes called New Starts and Small Starts. For comparison, in 2022 it gave away less than $2.5 billion. The difference, of course, is due to passage of the infrastructure law, which massively increased federal subsidies to transit.

Click image to download a five-page PDF of this policy brief.

This increase in spending and the projects that the FTA proposes to fund demonstrate that neither the transit industry nor the legislators funding it are responding to changes resulting from the recent pandemic. Transit was already declining before the pandemic, and the pandemic led to a much larger decline, much of which is likely to be permanent. Transit’s response to the decentralization of downtowns and cities should be to rely on smaller vehicles. Yet the New Starts proposals all presume that downtown job numbers and transit ridership will rapidly grow and thus more spending and larger vehicles are needed to accommodate that growth. Continue reading →

Equity Is a Complex Issue

By | | Transportation
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“Equity is a complex issue” and “there is a decided lack of agreement regarding” the meaning of equity, says a recent paper by Joshua Schank of the left-of-center Mineta Transportation Institute. This “leaves substantial vulnerabilities for the idea of equity to be hijacked for political purposes.”

Click image to download a copy of this paper.

As an example, Schank notes that Los Angeles voters approved funding for a bus-rapid transit line in the Vermont Avenue corridor, “one of the busiest transit corridors in the U.S.” But the LA Metro board held up the project based on the argument that it might be more “equitable” to build a subway in the corridor. Since subways take years to build, this “represents a very narrow view of equity that in practice postpones improvements for those who need them the most,” says Schank, adding that “the Board effectively delayed better transit service for the people in the corridor.” Continue reading →

Replacing One Bad Idea with Another

By | | Transportation
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Seattle-area residents have got themselves into a real fix. They voted to impose numerous taxes on themselves to spend tens of billions of dollars building new light-rail lines to downtown Seattle. Now, cost have increased, Seattle transit ridership is down by 54 percent, and Amazon is moving workers out of downtown Seattle.

Now a group called SkyLink has proposed a solution: replace light rail with aerial gondolas. These would supposedly be higher in capacity, less expensive, and would require less displacement of homes and businesses. Continue reading →

Free Transit Is Just More Oppression

By | | Transportation
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“The fight for free transit is about connecting people to opportunity,” proclaims Boston Mayor Michelle Wu. More realistically, the fight for free transit is about keeping poor people oppressed.

The Rosa Parks bus at the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, Michigan. Photo by Roderick Eime.

At one time, blacks in the South were expected to ride in the back of transit buses and to yield their seats to whites on demand. Whites at the time probably thought themselves generous that they allowed blacks to ride the buses at all. Today, well-off people such as Wu think they are generous in wishing to use other people’s money to give blacks and other poor people free transit rides. Continue reading →

The Myth of Rail Mobility

By | | Policy brief, Transportation
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Now that the war in Ukraine has revealed that Europe is even more dependent on foreign oil than the United States, Americans can smugly sit back and say, “If only those Europeans acted more like, you know, Europeans, they wouldn’t be in this fix.” Because, as everyone knows, Europeans travel mostly by electric public transit and high-speed trains, so they aren’t dependent on oil to get around by car or airplane.

Click image to download a four-page PDF of this policy brief.

The myth that rail transit and intercity passenger trains are dominant forms of transportation in Europe is one that I’ve addressed before, but it is repeated so often that it is worth examining again using the latest data. These data show that passenger trains are not an important source of mobility in most developed and developing nations, where rail travel is heavily outweighed by highway travel and, in most countries, air travel. Continue reading →

Don’t Build High-Speed Rail in Earthquake Zones

By | | Transportation
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The recent earthquake off the coast of Japan derailed a high-speed train and forced East Japan Railway to shut down the rail line. Fixing the line, the company admitted, may take “a considerable amount of time.”

Highways are generally more resilient than trains. They usually provide alternate routes if one route is damaged and roads are easier to fix than railroads, especially high-speed rail lines that must be built to high-precision standards. Fortunately, no one in the United States would build a high-speed rail line in an earthquake zone, right?

Transit’s Dim Future

By | | Transportation
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Transit agencies that have been gobbling up billions of dollars of subsidies each year are now facing the prospect that hardly anyone wants to ride transit even with the subsidies. A Wall Street Journal story focuses on commuter-rail lines, which in January carried less than 35 percent of pre-pandemic riders. However, commuter-bus lines are even worse, carrying only 27 percent of pre-pandemic riders.

Loudoun County commuter buses carried less than 6 percent as many passengers to DC in January 2022 as they did in January 2020. Photo by Virginia Department of Transportation.

Individually, the worst-performing rail line is the Minneapolis North Star commuter train, which carried only 7 percent of pre-pandemic riders in January. Maryland and Virginia commuter trains serving DC, the Altamont and CalTrains commuter trains in the Bay Area, and commuter trains in Chicago and Seattle all carried less than 20 percent of pre-pandemic numbers, while trains in Los Angeles, Nashville, Philadelphia, and Connecticut were just over 20 percent. Meanwhile, commuter-bus lines in Atlanta, Milwaukee, Boston, Washington, San Francisco, Charlotte, Austin, and Sacramento all carried less than 10 percent of pre-pandemic numbers. Continue reading →

January Driving 7.8% below Pre-Pandemic Miles

By | | Transportation, Useful Data
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Americans drove more than 240 billion vehicle-miles in January 2022, according to preliminary data released yesterday by the Federal Highway Administration. This was a 7.8 percent decrease from the nearly 261 billion vehicle-miles driving in January 2020. This was the first month in half a year that driving was less than the same month before the pandemic.

Driving thus follows the same pattern as other modes of travel, declining in January after several months of increases relative to before the pandemic. When compared with December, miles of driving fell by 10.4 percent, compared with 21.9 percent for air travel, 14.0 percent for transit, and 37.8 percent for Amtrak. These declines must have been due to concerns about the omicron variant of the coronavirus. Continue reading →

Airlines: Our #2 Source of Mobility

By | | Policy brief, Transportation
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Airlines carried Americans 77 percent as many miles of domestic travel in 2021 as they did in 2019, according to data recently released by the Bureau of Transportation Statistics. International air travel was still far short of pre-pandemic levels, being just 29 percent of 2019 numbers. The 578 billion miles of domestic air travel was about the same as in 2013, while the 1,743 miles per capita was slightly more than in 2003.

Click image to download a four-page PDF of this policy brief.

U.S. airlines are, or should be, the envy of the world. They carry Americans far more miles per capita than airlines (or, for that matter, railroads) of almost any other country. Airport infrastructure is in excellent condition: as of 2020, 85 percent of commercial airport runways were in good condition, 13 percent in fair condition, and only 1 percent in poor condition. U.S. airlines’ safety record is second to none, experiencing just 14 fatalities while carrying more than 7 trillion passenger-miles since 2010. And airlines do all this at a profit: while some companies have lost money in some years, the domestic airline industry as a whole earned a profit in every year since 2010. Continue reading →