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Category Archives: Transportation

One Boondoggle Down, Hundreds to Go

By | | Transportation
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New York Governor Kathy Hochul has killed the LaGuardia AirTrain, a ridiculously expensive people mover that had been supported by her predecessor, Andrew Cuomo. “I don’t feel obligated to accept what I have inherited,” Hochul said, noting that there were lower-cost alternatives that had been ignored by Cuomo and rejected by the Port Authority.

This bridge has become a symbol of Portland, but it really should be read as a symbol of the Portland light-rail mafia‘s willingness to spend $1.5 billion on a new light-rail line that added no net new riders to the region’s transit system, which carried fewer riders the year after it opened than the year before. Photo by Steve Morgan.

Of course, those lower-cost alternatives are still going to cost a lot of money, and spending that money is problematic in an age when many people are no longer comfortable in crowded conditions. As noted here earlier this month, New York City offices have some of the highest vacancy rates in decades, and even offices that are still under lease may be nearly empty as the number of people entering those offices is down by more than 70 percent. Downtown groups have released similarly dire reports for Seattle and Washington, DC, among other cities. Continue reading →

EVs Not Cheap to Fuel

By | | Transportation
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Electric vehicles cost more to buy than gasoline-powered vehicles, but they supposedly make up for at least part of that cost by lower fuel costs. The Department of Energy estimates that (as of March 20) gasoline cost an average of $2.85 per gallon while the electricity required to produce the same amount of power cost only $1.16 per egallon.

Photo by Mr. Satterly.

Not so fast, says a consulting firm called the Anderson Economic Group, which points out there are other costs that have to be considered with an EV that are built in to the price of gasoline. These include:

  • The cost of buying and installing charging devices;
  • High registration fees charged by many states to make up for the lack of fuel taxes collected from owners of EVs;
  • The time spent refueling; and
  • The miles of driving to charging stations, which are less numerous than petroleum fuel stations.

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FlixBus Buys Greyhound

By | | Transportation
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In a move that is sure to shake up America’s fluid, intercity-bus market, one of the newest entries into that market, FlixBus, is buying one of the oldest, Greyhound. Greyhound was previously owned by FirstGroup, one of the two main British companies that emerged from Britain’s bus privatization in the 1990s.

The other British company was Stagecoach, which started Megabus, which revolutionized American intercity bus operations in 2006 by offering curbside bus service (saving the cost of bus stations) and internet ticket sales (saving the cost of ticket agents). FirstGroup responded by buying Greyhound in 2007. Continue reading →

Why Have a US Department of Transportation?

By | | News commentary, Transportation
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America’s freight delivery system is melting down and Congressional action on infrastructure is stalled. So what has Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg being doing about these problems?

Nothing, it turns out. For the past two months, he has been on paid leave due to having two new babies at home. The thing is, no one even noticed until Politico pointed it out last week. Now many people, particularly Republicans, are in a tizzy, wondering why Buttigieg should keep his job if he isn’t doing it.

Some are asking a more pertinent question, which is: why do we even have a Department of Transportation? Most of its budget, which was $87.5 billion in 2021 not counting various COVID relief funds, was simply passed through from the Treasury to the states according to formulas set by Congress. That could have been done by the Department of Commerce, which oversaw agencies such as the Bureau of Public Roads before the Department of Transportation was created. Continue reading →

More Rail Follies

By | | Transportation
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Speaking of faulty railcar wheels (which I wrote about in Monday’s post regarding the Hawaii rail debacle), Washington’s Metro has been forced to drastically reduce rail service due to wheel problems that are causing its trains to frequently derail. The National Transportation Safety Board discovered that Metrorail trains have suffered dozens of minor derailments since the 7000-series of cars were put into service in 2015.

A Blue Line train derailed last week, and investigators found that it had actually derailed twice before that same day. Many other trains were delayed as it took two hours to evacuate the 187 passengers on board. In a press conference early this week, National Transportation Safety Board officials said that the derailment could have been “catastrophic” if the wheels had hit the third rail that powers the trains.

As a result, Metro is taking the 7000-series cars out of service for at least a week while it tries to determine what to do about the problem. Since those cars make up 60 percent of the system’s operable fleet, that means reducing service from as frequently as every five minutes to as infrequently as every half hour. Continue reading →

August Driving Dips to 95.6% of 2019 Levels

By | | Transportation, Useful Data
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Americans drove 8.3 percent more miles in August of 2021 than 2020, but 4.4 percent fewer miles than 2019, according to data released yesterday by the Federal Highway Administration. Meanwhile, Amtrak’s monthly performance report for August, which was released last week, shows that the railroad carried 67.0 percent as many passengers as in August 2019, down from 68.2 percent in July.

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More Honolulu Rail Follies

By | | Transportation, Urban areas
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You don’t hear much about Howard Hughes anymore, but he — or, more precisely, a real estate development company named after him — is helping to delay completion of the Honolulu rail line, the $12 billion project we love to ridicule. Hughes is the midst of developing a master-planned community called Ward Village that’s smack in the pathway of the rail line, and the Honolulu Authority for Rapid Transit (HART) says it wants two acres for the line.

Hughes is willing to sell the land to the Honolulu Authority for Rapid Transit (HART), but there is a teensy disagreement over the value of the land. HART offered Hughes $13.5 million; Hughes thought it was worth “about” $100 million more. HART is attempting to take the land by eminent domain, leading Hughes to counter sue, asking for $200 million in damages. HART has already approved $23 million to pay its legal fees in the eminent domain suit.

I wonder if HART is trying to pull the same fast one that Denver’s RTD tried, which was to claim that the rail line would increase the value of the remaining property so landowners should be willing (or forced) to sell the land needed for the train for less than market value. Hughes, however, will probably argue that the success of its development makes the remaining land in the development even more valuable. Continue reading →

Music City Sinkhole Disrupts Few Commuters

By | | Transportation
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Almost no one was affected when a sinkhole opened up under the tracks used by the Music City Star, one of the more pathetic commuter trains in the United States. The sinkhole prevented trains from reaching downtown Nashville, though trains continued to operate between the suburb of Lebanon, which has less than 40,000 residents, and the Nashville neighborhood of Donelson, which has about 30,000 residents.

This photo of the Music City Sinkhole is courtesy of Wego Public Transit.
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In 2019, the Music City Star, Nashville’s commuter train, carried just 1,115 riders or 558 roundtrips per weekday. As of August, 2021, ridership was down 84 percent from 2019 levels, so only about 90 people per day are affected by the sinkhole. Nashville should use the sinkhole as an excuse to replace the train with buses. Commuter buses in the region cost between a third and half as much to operate per vehicle-mile as the train and can easily carry the number of people riding the trains, which averaged just 23 people per railcar before the epidemic.

Mismanaged West Coast Ports

By | | Transportation
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Empty shelves in supermarkets and other stores are due in part to hundreds of thousands of shipping containers waiting to be unloaded at ports in Los Angeles, Long Beach, and other cities. According to market urbanist Scott Beyer, this backlog is due to a combination of labor unrest and NIMBYism.

More than 60 container ships are waiting outside the Port of Los Angeles for space to unload their cargo.

That’s certainly true in Portland, whose container port was completely shut down by labor disputes four years ago, and now is just beginning to function again. Moreover, trucks carrying containers out of Portland face some of the worst congestion in the country, partly due to anti-highway groups that oppose congestion relief on the grounds that it might lead people to drive more. Continue reading →

AmeriStarRail Responds

By | | Transportation
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Ten days ago, I published an open letter to AmeriStarRail, a company that proposes to take over Amtrak service in the Northeast Corridor. Below, without further comment, is AmeriStarRail’s response (with my questions in italics).

Dear Antiplanner,

Thanks for your detailed questions about AmeriStarRail’s proposal to improve Amtrak’s Northeast Corridor service and our bid protest. I saw your Open Letter to ASR on your blog and I wanted to provide these clarifications:

  • the 76 trainsets with at least 12 cars each would be a total of 912 cars
  • ASR did not propose to spend $5 billion improving NEC tracks. We will pay user fees for the tracks and stations. The $5 billion is for trainsets only.
  • AmeriStarRail submitted a proposal to an Amtrak RFP with a bid price of $1 for 76 trainsets and $1 for a Northeast Corridor Trainset Maintenance Center

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Here are our answers to your questions: Continue reading →