The Antiplanner » Transportation

Category Archives: Transportation

Transit Workers Overpaid

By | | Transportation
3 Comments

Transit workers in many cities get paid more than twice as much as private sector employees working in transportation, according to a new report from the Heritage Foundation. The report compared average pay by major transit agencies in Atlanta, Chicago, New York, Philadelphia, San Francisco, and Washington with the average pay for all workers and the pay for transport workers in those regions.

Transit Premium Over Other Workers in Same Region

CityAll WorkersTransport Workers
Atlanta11.7%58.8%
Chicago31.4%77.1%
New York50.1%27.1%
Philadelphia39.7%109.7%
San Francisco61.0%147.8%
Washington31.5%121.1%

As shown in the table, Heritage Foundation researcher David Ditch calculated that average transit pay is anywhere from 12 to 61 percent greater than average pay for all workers in these regions and 59 to 148 percent more than average pay for transport workers. There are a couple of caveats, however. Continue reading →

Electric Bus Dreams in Shambles

By | | Transportation
7 Comments

Philadelphia’s electric transit buses are in a “complete shambles” as a result of poor design and poor quality construction. The buses, which were proudly displayed at the 2016 National Democratic Convention, have broken frames, broken batteries, and other problems, and have been totally withdrawn from service.

Proterra electric buses similar to this one were withdrawn from service in Philadelphia as the weight of the batteries led to cracked frames and the battery range turned out to be significantly less than the manufacturer promised. Photo by SounderBruce.

Although transit advocates like to claim that transit is environmentally friendly, a dirty secret of the transit industry is that buses use 50 percent more energy and emitted 50 percent more greenhouse gases per passenger mile than the average car. That’s based on 2019 data; in 2020, the numbers will be much worse. Continue reading →

Dems Admit Highway Hostility

By | | Transportation
10 Comments

Democrats looking to the 2022 election must worry that some of their number are working so hard to alienate the vast majority of American voters. As noted in Politico, members of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, led by the Antiplanner’s own congressman, Peter DeFazio, are openly hostile to American’s favorite form of travel.

“You can’t pave over the whole country,” says DeFazio, whose INVEST Act, which recently passed the House, contains provisions that would severely restrict the ability of state to spend federal highway dollars on new highways. Yet highways occupy a vanishingly small share of the nation’s land area, and the idea that there is any danger to them paving over the whole country is just fear mongering.

Americans use highways for 87 percent of their personal travel while Amtrak and transit, which DeFazio and friends favor, provide just 1 percent of passenger-miles. There are good reasons for this: motor vehicles and highways are cheap, convenient, and fast relative to the Democrats’ alternatives. So it’s not surprising that 92 percent of American households own at least one car, 96 percent of American workers live in a household with at least one car, and at least a third of the 4 percent of American workers who live in households without cars nonetheless get to work by automobile. Continue reading →

The War on Cars and Delays to Emergency Response

By | | Policy brief, Transportation
11 Comments

By Kathleen St. Germain

Traffic calming. Road diets. Complete streets. Vision zero. All these terms refer to policies whose goal is to reduce automobile speeds by narrowing or removing vehicle lanes and increasing congestion. Cities say they are adopting these programs to increase safety for all users of the street, yet they have no evidence that the policies will actually reduce pedestrian, cyclist, and other traffic-related deaths.

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

When confronted with facts showing that many of the design changes in their plans may result or have resulted in increased accidents, they either turn a blind eye or address their concerns for potential liability by imposing more heavy-handed solutions for delay-inducing schemes. The answer to unraveling the confusion in the new designs of “traffic calming” is to create separate signalization for vehicles, pedestrians, and cyclists, delaying drivers even more, but for which, only drivers will be held accountable with fines. Continue reading →

$117 Billion to Save “Almost an Hour”: Who Cares?

By | | Transportation
4 Comments

Before the pandemic, two people commuted from Podunk, Michigan to Detroit, a drive of about one hour. If someone built them a high-speed rail line, they could save nearly half an hour, assuming they don’t decide to work at home. Of course, the fares they pay would never come close to covering the $6 billion cost of building the rail line, but who cares about the cost per rider?

“Who cares?” seems to be the attitude of the Northeast Corridor Commission, which consists of Amtrak and the commuter rail agencies that run trains on part of the Boston-to-Washington rail system. Where its 2010 master plan called for spending $52 billion in the corridor, the 2021 plan demands $117 billion to keep running trains in the corridor. But who cares about the increased cost? Continue reading →

VTA to Resume Running Light Rail — Someday

By | | Transportation
1 Comment

The Santa Clara Valley Transportation Authority (VTA) announced that it is going to resume running its light-rail trains. It doesn’t know when it is going to do it, but it has a plan. The plan is pretty vague but it hints the trains might be accepting passengers again by the end of July, although the agency’s CEO admits that mid-August is more likely.

As Antiplanner readers will remember, on May 26, a disgruntled employee killed nine other VTA workers at the light-rail maintenance center and then shot himself. The shut-down of the maintenance center meant no light-rail trains could run while police were doing their investigation.

To make matters worse, VTA said it didn’t have enough bus drivers to replace light-rail service. What buses and drivers it had were dedicated to the “regular bus network that serves the majority of our riders who rely on public transit the most,” the agency said. Continue reading →

May Driving Reaches 96% of Pre-Pandemic Levels

By | | Transportation, Useful Data
2 Comments

Americans drove 95.6 percent as many miles in May 2021 as they did in May 2019, according to data released by the Federal Highway Administration yesterday. This is up from 91.9 percent in April but down from 97.2 percent in March. May’s record is pretty good considering that May had two fewer business days in 2021 than in 2019 while March had two more.

At 99.4 percent of pre-pandemic levels, rural driving is ahead of urban driving, which was just 93.9 percent in May. Drivers in 21 states drove more in rural areas in 2021 than in 2019; urban driving in May 2021 exceeded 2019 in just six states. Continue reading →

Reinventing Transit for a Post-COVID World

By | | Policy brief, Transportation
3 Comments

As society rebuilds after the pandemic, the transit industry at a crossroads. It could totally reinvent itself to truly serve the residents of modern cities. Alternatively, it could come up with new reasons for ever larger subsidies despite continuing to be ineffective and wasteful. Since President Biden and Democrats in Congress seem eager to give it subsidies with few to no questions asked, it is likely to choose the latter course.

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

Transit ridership has declined steadily since 2014, losing 7.7 percent nationally between 2014 and 2019. During that time, transit ridership declined in about 85 percent of the nation’s major urban areas. On a larger scale, it has been declining for the last century, with per capita ridership falling from nearly 290 trips per urban resident in 1920 to just 37 in 2019. As of April, 2021, ridership was 60 percent lower than it had been before the pandemic, and it isn’t clear that ridership will ever recover to 2019’s already low levels. Continue reading →

Do New Roads Boost the Economy?

By | | Transportation
3 Comments

“More highway spending won’t rev up the economy,” argues a recent article in the Wall Street Journal. However, the article’s writer, David Harrison, seems a little confused about how highway spending might help the economy.

“The U.S. already has an extensive system of roads, so building more wouldn’t add much to productivity, economists say,” writes Harrison. But this depends entirely on where roads are built. Continue reading →

Transit’s Post-COVID Recovery Is Slowest

By | | Transportation, Useful Data
1 Comment

Amtrak’s May ridership surged to 45.2 percent of pre-COVID levels (as compared with May 2019), surpassing public transit, which reached only 42.3 percent of 2019 levels. Transit’s recovery was partly hurt by the fact that May 2021 had two fewer business days than May 2019, but the slow growth makes transit the least-recovered of the various modes of travel.

Shown are transit trips from the National Transit Database, and airline trips from Transportation Safety Administration, and Amtrak passenger miles from the May performance report. Driving is in vehicle miles from the Federal Highway Administration’s Traffic Volume Trends; May highway data won’t be out for another week or so.

As usual, rail transit is doing worse than bus transit when compared with 2019, but rail has also recovered more since 2020. Most of rail’s recovery is in heavy rail and commuter rail; light rail’s recovery is only slightly faster than transit buses and hybrid rail (meaning Diesel-powered light rail) isn’t even recovering as fast as buses. Continue reading →