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The Oddity of Public Transit

By | | Transportation
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“An oddity of American public transit,” says Strong Towns, a semi-New Urbanist organization dedicated to compact cities and transit, “is the prevalence of commuter rail lines designed to do one thing and one thing only: bring 9-5 office workers to and from downtown.” The Facebook post then links to an article in Governing magazine titled, Taking the Commuter out of Commuter Rail, which claims the huge decline in commuter-rail ridership is an “opportunity to reinvent the suburb-city service.”

CalTrain is a classic example of Type 1 commuter rail, having once been operated by Southern Pacific. In 2019 fares covered 75 percent of its operating costs and it used less energy per passenger mile than a Toyota Prius. But as of June its ridership was down 88 percent. Photo by Runner1928.

Before critiquing these ideas, it is important to point out that there are really two kinds of “commuter-rail” operations; call them Type 1 and Type 2. Type 1 is traditional big-city commuter trains, which were usually started by private railroads in the nineteenth century and were taken over by government agencies in the 1960s and 1970s. These brought suburban workers into downtown Boston, Chicago, New York, Philadelphia, and San Francisco. This is the commuter rail that Strong Towns and Governing are writing about. Continue reading →

Not a Good Time to Waste More Money

By | | Transportation
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Illinois has the highest pension debt of any state in the union; a phenomenal $317 billion as of 2020. Overall, the state’s financial health is second only to California for being the worst in the nation.

What better time could there be to start planning construction of a high-speed rail line from Chicago to St. Louis? Considering that high-speed rail is one of the reasons why California is in worth financial shape than Illinois, building a new high-speed rail system would be enough to make Illinois number one! Not that any state should aspire to be the worst fiscal condition.

The state has apparently forgotten that it has already spent nearly $2 billion on a project to increase frequencies and speeds on the existing Chicago-St. Louis route. It would be useful to know if those improvements made any difference to ridership before spending a lot more on the corridor. But there is no way to tell because, despite the fact that it began the project in 2010, the trains today are no faster nor more frequent than they were before. Continue reading →

How to Save Taxpayers’ Money

By | | Transportation
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Seattle taxpayers pay some of the highest taxes in the country so that Sound Transit can build $75 billion worth of light-rail and other transit facilities. Some of those taxpayers must have been overjoyed to read a Sound Transit press release saying, “Local taxpayers to save more than $500 million through USDOT financing assistance.”

Those same taxpayers, however, may be wondering: are they going to get that $500 million back in rebates on the taxes they have paid to date? Is Sound Transit going to reduce future taxes to take this savings into account? Or will Sound Transit just throw a big party with an open bar and invite Seattle taxpayers to attend? How about none of the above.

Early this year, Sound Transit admitted that the cost of two planned light-rail lines will be as much as 70 percent more — than originally projected. That’s $6.2 billion. The agency faces a $6.5 billion shortfall in funds, which plans to deal with by delaying completion of several promised light-rail lines to as late as 2041 — 44 years after taxpayers began paying for them. Continue reading →

Should Private HSR Have Eminent Domain?

By | | Transportation
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Eminent domain — the power to force people to sell their property — can significantly disrupt a society. People at risk of losing their land at any time will be reluctant to invest in improvements, which in turn will limit the nation’s productivity. For this reason, the Fifth Amendment says that eminent domain can only be exercised for “public use” and only with “just compensation.” Even then, people debate what is a “public use” and many who have been forced to sell their property don’t believe the amounts they are paid are “just” if they are significantly less than the unwilling sellers would have asked for in a free exchange.

Most states — no one is sure how many — have decided that railroads are a “public use” and have granted railroads the power of eminent domain. This raises questions like:

  • What is the definition of a “railroad”?
  • Can anyone call themselves a railroad and begin taking other peoples’ property?
  • Does a railroad have to be operating to exercise this power?
  • Does a railroad have to have rails to be a railroad?
  • Can a railroad take peoples’ property even if they don’t have money to pay for it or to finish building the rail line?

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These and similar questions are addressed in Maryland and Texas courts where private companies that have proposed to build high-speed rail lines have demanded the right of eminent domain even though they don’t actually operate any trains and don’t even have enough money to build the proposed lines. The issue is slightly more straightforward in Texas than it is in Maryland. Continue reading →

The Movement to Regulate Car Ads

By | | Transportation
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Automobile accidents can be horrible and tragic and we should take the most cost-effective steps we can to reduce or eliminate them. But anti-auto people aren’t interested in cost-effectiveness: they just want to do whatever feels good no matter how much it hurts society.

“Out on the highways there was such a sense of freedom — I thought I would explode from sheer happiness,” wrote the photographer. Yet others look at this picture and all they see is costs and externalities. Photo by Gayle Nicholson.

Case in point: a recent article in Bloomberg’s CityLab argues that automobile advertising promotes dangerous behavior and should be strictly regulated. Apparently, one brand of cars saying that their vehicles are “tough” and another brand saying that their vehicles will “thrill you” encourage people to drive too fast or too recklessly. Continue reading →

The World’s Finest Railroads

By | | Policy brief, Transportation
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The United States has the most efficient and productive railroads in the world. Not coincidentally, the United States also has the most private railroads in the world. Other than Canada, almost every other country that has railroads has nationalized them.

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

Private railroads operate with very different goals from those that are owned by the government. Private railroads seek to maximize profits, and to do so they must be as efficient and productive as possible. Government-owned railroads seek to maximize political popularity, and to do so they must favor actions that are highly visible and often are highly inefficient and unproductive because economic costs translate into political benefits. Continue reading →

National Per-Mile User Fee in Infrastructure Bill

By | | Transportation
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Section 13002 of the infrastructure bill that the senate passed last week calls for the secretaries of transportation and the treasury to create a pilot mileage-based user fee program. The last transportation bill, which was passed in 2015, offered states grants to create their own pilot programs, but only six states did so, and some of them are not currently active.

The proposed infrastructure bill extends the state program (in section 13001), but also creates a national pilot program. If passed, the Secretary of Transportation would first create an advisory board that would take up to a year to design the program. Then the Secretary of the Treasury would set fees, which could differ by size of motor vehicle. Then the two secretaries would do a “public awareness campaign” to try to find geographically and economically distributed volunteers to participate in the program.

Fees could be charged via smart-phone apps, third-party GPS devices plugged into the diagnostic ports of cars (which is one way Oregon does it), data collected by automakers (such as GM’s OneStar system, which keeps track of vehicle locations in case of an accident), data collected by insurance companies (which can charge people by the mile using a similar GPS device in at least eight states), or “any other method that the Secretary considers appropriate.” Continue reading →

Sex Scandal Reveals Opposition to AirTrain

By | | Transportation
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In 2004, a sex scandal led the Portland media to reveal to people that the city was run by a light-rail mafia. Since then, I’ve told people in other cities that, if their region builds rail transit, they better hope for a sex scandal so they can find out where their money went.

Artist’s conception of proposed LaGuardia AirTrain provided courtesy of the office of the soon-to-be ex-governor.

New York City residents are lucky: a sex scandal there may derail a wasteful 2-mile-long “people mover” (automated guideway) project that the Antiplanner critiqued a year ago, noting that it “will cost $2 billion, make traffic congestion worse, dump 87,000 metric tons of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, and probably isn’t necessary due to the pandemic.” The project was supported by Governor Andrew Cuomo, who this week agreed to resign due to sexual harassment claims. Continue reading →

June Driving Exceeds Pre-Pandemic Levels

By | | Transportation, Useful Data
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Americans drove more miles in June 2021 than June 2019, the first time since the pandemic began that driving exceeded pre-pandemic levels, according to data published yesterday by the Federal Highway Administration. We drove 282.5 billion vehicle miles in June 2021, almost half a percent more than the 281.2 billion driven in June 2019.

When compared with pre-pandemic levels, driving has effectively recovered from the pandemic, while other forms of travel have not.

To be fair, June 2021 had more business days than June 2019, which helped boost miles of driving. July 2021 had fewer business days that July 2019, so we’ll see next month how much of a difference this makes. Continue reading →

The Failure of Transit in the Post-COVID Era

By | | Policy brief, Transportation, Useful Data
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Nationwide transit ridership in June was 50.3 percent of June 2019, making this the first month since the onset of COVID-19 that ridership recovered to half of pre-pandemic levels. Yet transit remains well behind Amtrak, which carried 63 percent of pre-pandemic passenger-miles in June; flying, which was at 74 percent; and driving. June data are not yet available for driving but May driving was 96 percent of pre-pandemic miles.

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

Transit is doing poorly compared with Amtrak and driving because it is most heavily dependent on commuters. The 2017 National Household Travel Survey found that commuting and work-related travel make up less than 20 percent of personal driving but are 40 percent of transit ridership. With many people working at home during the pandemic, transit has lost a large share of its market. Continue reading →