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Category Archives: Transportation

Seven to Become Six

By | | News commentary, Transportation
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There was a time when every region and almost every major city in the country was served by at least three major railroads. The Northeast had Erie, Lackawanna, New York Central, and Pennsylvania, among others. The Southeast had Atlantic Coast Line, Seaboard, and Southern. The Midwest had the Burlington, Chicago & North Western, Milwaukee, and Rock Island. The Northwest had the Great Northern, Milwaukee Road, and Northern Pacific. The Southwest had Santa Fe, Southern Pacific, and Union Pacific.

Canadian Pacific and Kansas City Southern meet at only one point, so a merger between them preserves competition. Kansas City Southern photo.

Then came the merger movements of the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, and now we are down to just seven class 1 railroads: two in the East, two in the West, two in Canada making various incursions into the United States, and Kansas City Southern, which connects Missouri with Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Mexico. Continue reading →

End Planners’ Obsession with Ending Driving

By | | Transportation
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Planners and planning advocates are obsessed with manipulating people’s behavior, and in particular with reducing the amount of driving we do. One dictionary defines “obsess” as “Preoccupy or fill the mind of (someone) continually, intrusively, and to a troubling extent,” and it is certainly troubling that so many planners believe their goal is to destroy one of the major engines of our economy and spend much of the effort towards achieving that goal.

One simple trick improves the fuel economy of this minivan by almost 50 percent, but planners ignore such improvements in favor of simply demonizing auto driving. Photo by Kevauto.

A case in point is an article in Vox titled, “How to end the American obsession with driving.” The article was written by journalism student Gabrielle Birenbaum, who believes that driving is destroying the planet. Wildfires and hurricanes (which seems to think never happened before) prove that global warming is happening; transportation is “the biggest sector of pollution”; and automobiles produce 58 percent of that pollution. Therefore, she reasons, we must reduce driving. Continue reading →

National Obsolete Transportation Month

By | | Policy brief, Transportation
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From San Francisco to North Carolina, transit agencies have declared September to be “Transit Month.” “This month is all about celebrating the vital role of public transit for our communities,” says one transit agency, which means “getting elected leaders to make transit a priority issue.”

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

From a transportation viewpoint, agencies don’t have much to celebrate this year. Cities have proven they can get along quite well without transit. With more than half of all American employees working at home at the beginning of this year, roads are less congested so people who continue to work outside of their homes can more easily drive to work. While driving recovered to 100 percent of pre-pandemic levels by June 2021, transit remained stuck at 50 percent in June and July. Continue reading →

Mag-Lev May Be Dead; TX HSR on Life Support

By | | Follow up, Transportation
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A Maryland circuit court judge ruled last week that the Baltimore-Washington Rapid Rail Company did not have the power of eminent domain and could not stop a development on land that the maglev promoter needed to use for its proposed line. The judge rejected the company’s argument that its purchase of a franchise previously granted to the long-defunct Washington, Baltimore and Annapolis Electric Railway gave it the power to condemn other people’s land.

The maglev promoter didn’t actually have the money to buy the land in question, but it wanted to halt a developer from building a mixed-use development on the property, which would have made condemnation a lot more expensive when and if it has the power and money to do so. The judge said that the company’s argument contained “a lot of factual inaccuracies.”

The prospects for building a maglev in the corridor have been further hurt by announcements from local officials such as Baltimore Mayor Brandon Scott and Prince George’s County executive Angela Alsobrooks that they oppose the project. The mayor’s office suggested that, since the Senate just authorized $2.4 billion to improve the Northeast Corridor, it would be foolish to back a project that threatened to take customers away from Amtrak. Continue reading →

Biden to STB: Screw the Environment

By | | Transportation
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President Biden and Democrats in Congress want to spend trillions of dollars on a green new deal. But their true colors are revealed when it comes to railroad re-regulation: the needs of the environment are less important than the needs of labor unions and shippers who want the federal government to exercise more control over the railroads.

This container train is saving thousands of tons of greenhouse gas emissions, savings that will be lost if regulation allows trucks to capture some or all of this traffic. Photo by David Jordan.

This is made clear in a report that was released yesterday by the Reason Foundation. Written by the Antiplanner’s faithful ally, Marc Scribner, Pathways and Policy for 21st Century Freight Rail points out that railroads produce less than 10 percent as much carbon dioxide per ton-mile as trucks. As the Antiplanner observed a few weeks ago, the railroads have become more competitive with trucks since deregulation took place in 1980. Continue reading →

Transit Loses Steam in July

By | | Transportation, Useful Data
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When measured as a percentage of pre-pandemic (2019) levels, Amtrak ridership grew from 63 percent in June to 68 percent in July while air travel grew from 74 percent to 80 percent. Transit ridership, however, fell slightly from 50.3 percent in June to 49.1 percent in July, according to data released yesterday by the Federal Transit Administration.

Airline numbers from the Transportation Security Administration; Amtrak numbers from July, 2021 and July, 2020 monthly performance reports; transit numbers from the National Transit Database; highway numbers for July are estimated but will be published soon by the Federal Highway Administration.

Part of the decline of transit can be attributed to the fact that June had more business days in 2021 than in 2019 while July had fewer, which will probably also make driving’s percentage slightly lower in July than the 100.5 percent it experienced in June. But transit’s stunted recovery from the pandemic also reveals its lack of resiliency and its declining utility to urban residents. Continue reading →

San Jose Light-Rail Service Resumes

By | | Follow up, Transportation
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Last week, the Santa Clara Valley Transportation Authority (VTA) resumed “limited” light-rail service for the first time since the May 26 shooting at VTA’s maintenance center. Service began on the Orange Line and part of the Green Line. A week later, part of the Blue Line opened along with another segment of the Green Line. VTA has to test tracks on each segment before it can open; some lines were lower priorities, said the agency, because they carried few riders, providing further support for the Antiplanner’s belief that light rail was the wrong technology for San Jose in the first place.

VTA closed its light-rail system for more than three months and part of the system will be closed for even longer. Photo by Minh Nguyen.

VTA claims it closed down the light-rail operations “to give employees time to heal from the traumatic experience” of the May 26 shooting. But transit advocate Eugene Bradley pointed out “that other major cities that experienced violent disruptions of transit, such as New York and London, managed to restore service within hours.” Not only did VTA not run light-rail trains for three months, for much of that time it didn’t provide light-rail riders with alternative bus services. “VTA is showing the world how to not recover from a tragedy,” said Bradley. Continue reading →

Charting Transit Values and Trends

By | | Policy brief, Transportation
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Is transit ridership growing or declining in your urban area? Do fare increases have anything to do with ridership trends? Are operating costs growing and are fares keeping up with costs? What is happening with transit speeds?

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

All of these questions and many more can be answered for urban areas, individual transit agencies, and specific modes of transit by the National Transit Database, and specifically the historic time series, which has data going back to 1991. Unfortunately, the database is hard to use. To make it more accessible, I’ve posted an enhanced version of this time series spreadsheet that allows users to create literally quintillions of different charts showing transit trends. Continue reading →

The Tide Celebrates Ten Years of Waste

By | | Transportation
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The Tide, Norfolk’s light-rail line, has been open to the public for ten years. As noted in this article in the Pilot, it opened 18 months late after a 60 percent cost overrun.

The Tide light rail in downtown Norfolk. Photo by Dean Covey, Virginia Department of Transportation.

The article claims the light-rail line carried its first million rides “five months ahead of original projections,” but that’s a transit agency lie. The original projections estimated that the rail line would carry 10,400 riders per weekday in its opening year. That would be about 1 million riders in less than four months. In fact, it carried less than half that, just 4,900 riders per weekday in its first year, and took eight months to reach 1 million riders. Continue reading →

The Failure of Dallas TOD

By | | Transportation
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The Dallas Area Rapid Transit (DART), the transit agency serving Dallas and a dozen other cities, is proud of the fact that it has built the longest light-rail system in the country. It is almost as proud of the many transit-oriented developments (TODs) built near light-rail stations. Of course, it never mentions that many if not most of those developments were subsidized through below-market land sales, tax-increment financing, and other government assistance.

Apartments and condos surround the Las Colinas light-rail station in Irving, Texas, yet that station attracted only 137 round-trip riders per weekday in 2019.

To transit advocates, such subsidies are justified because they boost ridership. But is there cause for such justification? How well have transit-oriented developments worked in promoting DART ridership? Continue reading →