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Category Archives: Transportation

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 →

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 →