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Category Archives: Transportation

Can Micromobility Reduce Congestion & GHGs?

By | | Transportation
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Media reports say that a study from Carnigie Mellon has found that micromobility — a fancy word for electric bikes — can relieve traffic congestion and reduce greenhouse gas emissions. However, this is largely based on wishful thinking.

Electric bicycles in California. Photo by waltarrrrr.

The study looked at 2014 travel data for Seattle and concluded that “18% of short trips in Seattle can be replaced by micromobility modes” based on the age of the people making the trip and their trip purpose. “If even 10 percent of short car trips during peak afternoon travel were replaced with micromobility,” reports say, it would reduce congestion and greenhouse gas emissions by 2.76 percent. Continue reading →

Traffic Fatalities Up 18% from 2019

By | | Transportation
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The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) says there were 31,720 traffic fatalities during the first nine months of 2021, which was 12 percent more than in the same months in 2020 and 18 percent more than 2019. The biggest increases in fatalities were in Idaho (36%), Nevada (30%), Oregon (29%), and Minnesota (26%). Fatalities declined in Nebraska (-18%), Maine (-14%), Maryland (-13%), Rhode Island (-8%), Wyoming (-6%), and six other states.

Blame the increase in traffic fatalities on Generation Y and Zers who are more likely to engage in risky behavior. Photo by Frans Van Heerden.

NHTSA doesn’t speculate on why fatalities have increased by such a large amount. However, a report from the American Automobile Association provides one answer: people who are more likely to take the risk of traveling during a pandemic are also more likely to engage in risky behavior while driving. Continue reading →

RTD Still Planning Longmont Boondoggle

By | | Transportation
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Denver’s Regional Transportation District (RTD) has hired HDR to “study the feasibility of implementing a ‘peak service’ rail schedule between Denver Union Station and downtown Longmont.” HDR has never seen a rail project it didn’t think was feasible. Among other things, it lied to Atlanta, Cincinnati, Salt Lake City and several other cities about the economic development benefits of streetcars in order to get them to hire it to help build new streetcar lines.

The green line is the existing bus-rapid transit line while the circuitous orange line is the proposed rail route to Longmont. The thick grey lines are other rail transit routes that are nearly all in service today. If Longmont were really a worthwhile destination, the logical thing for RTD to do is extend the bus-rapid transit line to Longmont. But Longmont officials were promised a train and they demand to have a train.

Now RTD wants it to study a commuter-rail line to Longmont, a city northwest of Denver. In 2004, RTD persuaded voters to approve FasTracks, a plan to build six new rail transit lines. One of those lines was to Longmont and RTD convinced Longmont officials to support the 2004 ballot measure by promising them a train. Continue reading →

Transit Crime Rates on the Rise

By | | Policy brief, Transportation
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After a woman died when she was shoved in front of a subway train in January, New York Mayor Eric Adams announced a major action plan aimed at reducing transit crimes. The weekend following his announcement, at least six people were stabbed on the subway system. A few days after that, a woman was robbed and her skull fractured after being struck with a hammer in a New York subway station. A few hours later, a man was stabbed in the neck at a Brooklyn subway station and someone set fire to a shopping cart in a station in the Bronx.

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

New York is not the only transit system to be suffering from violent crimes. Last month, a man was shot to death on the San Francisco BART system. BART had seen violent crimes more than double in the years before the pandemic, and crime numbers remained high after the pandemic began. Continue reading →

Honolulu Rail Has More Rail Problems

By | | Transportation
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Honolulu rail transit tracks, which as still under construction, are too close together in some spots, which could lead to derailments. This is different from last year’s problem, in which the wheels of the railcars were found to be too narrow for some of the tracks.

Honolulu’s high-cost, low-capacity rail line under construction. Click image for a larger view. Photo by Anthony Quintano.

No one yet knows how much it will cost and how long it will take to fix the new problem. But fixing last year’s issue significantly added to the delay and cost of the project, which is currently not expected to be finished until 2031, eleven years later and at more than twice the cost that was originally projected. Continue reading →

Portland Downtown Devastated by COVID

By | | Regional planning, Transportation
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The number of people working in downtown Portland dropped from more than 103,000 in mid-2019 to 13,000 in mid-2020, according to a State of the Economy report recently published by the Portland Business Alliance. The report doesn’t actually show numbers, but the chart below, which I took from the report, can be used to make pretty close estimates.

This chart is taken from page 3 of Portland Business Alliance’s State of the Economy report. Click image for a larger view.

By the end of 2021, the downtown area had recovered to about 34,000 workers, still less than a third of pre-pandemic numbers. The pandemic may not be the only factor depressing downtown employment: Black Lives Matter protests that began in May 2020 resulted in “numerous instances of arson, looting, vandalism, and injuries,” many of which affected downtown businesses and will probably continue to do so well into the future. Continue reading →

A New Level of Transit Incompetence

By | | Transportation
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It seems like we are getting more lessons about massive cost overruns for transit projects every couple of weeks. Last week, the Federal Transit Administration issued a “scathing report claiming that the Santa Clara Valley Transportation Authority (VTA) was being “overly optimistic” and “misleading” in its estimates of the costs of building a BART subway to San Jose.

Despite objections from critics, VTA decided to bore an 86-foot deep, 48-foot diameter tunnel rather than build two shallower and smaller tunnels using the cut-and-cover method, which would have been less expensive and saved passengers’ time.

The six-mile-long project was originally estimated to cost $5.6 billion (which is itself ridiculous) and be done in 2029, but the FTA now predicts it will cost as much as $9.1 billion and won’t be complete until 2034. This is $1.5 billion a mile for a transit line that is expected to carry so few riders that early estimates predicted it would cost more than $100 for each new transit rider carried. VTA’s response doesn’t refute anything the FTA said, but basically said it is too late to fix the problems so taxpayers would have to live with them (and pay for them). Continue reading →

Brightline Carnage Continues

By | | Transportation
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Brightline, the privately operated passenger train in Florida, had five accidents that killed three people last week.

  • On February 13, a man was killed when he drove his car around the lowered crossing gates and was hit by a train in Lake Worth Beach.
  • On February 15, a pedestrian was killed when he was struck by a Brightline train in Hallandale Beach.

Brightline posted this video taken from the train that struck a car last week to prove that the accident wasn’t its fault. What it shows is that a freight train had gone through the crossing and an impatient motorist drove around the gates unable to see that a passenger train was coming because his view was blocked by the freight. The accident would have been prevented if Brightline had installed full-width crossing gates instead of gates that covered only half the width of the street.

  • Also on February 15, a woman and her baby narrowly avoided injury when a Brightline train struck her car in Delray Beach.
  • On February 16, a man suffered “incapacitating injuries” when a Brightline train struck his car, also in Lake Worth Beach.
  • On February 19, a man walking on the tracks was killed when he was hit by a Brightline train in Delray Beach.

Continue reading →

State & Local Highway Subsidies in 2019 and 2020

By | | Policy brief, Transportation
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Americans drove 14 percent fewer miles in 2020 than in 2019, but state and local highway agencies continued to spend as much money on road improvements and maintenance. State and local highway subsidies increased only slightly, however, as the decline in miles of driving was partly offset by increases in fuel taxes and other user fees.

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

Two years ago, an Antiplanner policy brief looked at 2018 state and local highway subsidies. Today’s update compares 2020 data with 2019 results based on data published in the Federal Highway Administration’s annual Highway Statistics reports. In these reports, highway user fees, and how much of them are actually spent on highways as opposed to mass transit or other programs, are shown in tables SDF for the states and LDF for local governments. The sources of highway funds, including user fees, general funds, and other taxes, are shown in tables SF-3 and LGF-1. The actual amounts of money spent on roads are shown in SF-2 and LGF-2. Continue reading →

December Driving 2.7% Above 2019

By | | Transportation, Useful Data
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Americans drove 2.7 percent more miles in December 2021 than in December 2019, according to the latest traffic volume data published by the Federal Highway Administration last Friday. According to these data, December was the seventh month in a row that driving exceeded driving in the same month in 2019.

This is a revision from previous reports because the Federal Highway Administration revised the national miles-traveled for December 2019 (shown on page 2 of the report). The preliminary estimate in 2019 was that Americans drove 273.8 billion vehicle miles in December. In 2020, this was revised downwards to 272.2 billion. But this report, for 2021, revised the December 2019 miles downwards even more to 261.8 billion. Continue reading →