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Category Archives: Transportation

The CTA Wants You

By | | Transportation
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No one expects transit agencies to work very hard to provide safe, efficient services taking people where they need to go. But sometimes urban residents need a reminder that it is their job to rearrange their lives and risk their health and safety to insure that transit has enough riders to justify the huge subsidies it receives.

At least, that’s the opinion of Chicago Sun-Time columnist Laura Washington, who urges Chicago residents to “get on the L or bus. Or both.” After all, she reasons, “If riders don’t return to the CTA [Chicago Transit Authority], Metra [commuter trains] and Pace [suburban buses], look for layoffs, service cuts and hefty fare hikes.” Her view is enthusiastically endorsed by Streetsblog Chicago.

The latest data — compiled several days after Washington wrote her article telling people they had to risk getting COVID in order to save transit — indicate that less than 20 percent of Illinois residents and less than 18 percent of Cook County (Chicago) residents have been fully vaccinated. But apparently that’s no reason to hesitate taking transit. Continue reading →

February Transit Ridership Down 66.2 Percent

By | | Transportation, Useful Data
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Light is visible at the end of the pandemic tunnel: millions of people are being vaccinated each day and many are going back to work. But that light isn’t shining on transit agencies, as ridership in February, 2021 was only 33.8 percent of the same month in 2020, according to data released Tuesday by the Federal Transit Administration. This is down from 34.3 percent in January.

Measured as a percent of 2020, Amtrak data show that rail passenger miles picked up slightly in February and airline passenger numbers from the Transportation Security Administration also increased, but transit ridership fell. Driving data won’t be out for another week or so.

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Maglev to Destroy Habitat & Climate

By | | Transportation
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A proposed maglev line between Washington and Baltimore will disrupt 1,000 acres of “parks, recreational facilities and wetlands,” according to a recently released draft environmental impact statement (DEIS) for the project. That’s a lot of land considering that all but nine miles of the project would be underground. While 180 acres are for a maintenance facility, the remaining acres represent a right-of-way that is an average of 750 feet wide.

This potential disruption has raised the ire of the local chapter of the Audubon Society, which is opposing the plan. As the Antiplanner recently noted, such land disruptions will be an issue for all high-speed rail lines, and in that analysis I was clearly being conservative in assuming a mere 80-foot right-of-way. By contrast, airlines don’t need any right-of-way once they leave the airports.

Bird watchers are not the only opponents of the maglev plan. NASA has facilities that “require minimal disturbances from vibration, artificial lighting and electromagnetic interference,” it says, and it opposes the location of the maglev because it will disturb those facilities. City of Washington planners warn that a proposed station near Mount Vernon Square would destroy the character of that neighborhood. Continue reading →

A Bus Driver’s Life Is Worth $16,200

By | | Transportation
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The state of California has fined the Santa Clara Valley Transportation Authority (VTA) $16,200 for health and safety violations that may have led to the death of a bus driver, Audrey Lopez, from coronavirus last October. The state claims VTA failed to “require or ensure the use of face coverings at all times by employees at the facility and while operating the buses.” It also didn’t provide effective training instruction to employees on how to prevent the spread of the virus.

Naturally, VTA claims that Lopez didn’t catch the virus while on the job. But union president John Courtney says that Lopez had not been anywhere where she would have been exposed to the virus, other than work, in the days before she called in sick.

The transit industry insists that transit is safe to ride during the pandemic. However, the Centers for Disease Control says that air filtration systems must have a minimum efficiency reporting value (MERV) rating of 13 to filter out the virus. The filters used in VTA buses are rated 4, good enough to filter out pollen but not good enough to stop the virus. Continue reading →

Amtrak’s Money-Losing Vision

By | | Transportation
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Amtrak responded to Biden’s “American Jobs Plan,” which would give Amtrak $80 billion (presumably over several years), with a “vision to grow rail service and connect new city pairs across America.” As shown in the map below, some of those city pairs might seem to make sense, such as Dallas-Houston and Los Angeles-Las Vegas.

Click image for a larger view.

But a lot of the terminal cities being added to the map are so small — places like Rockland, Maine (7,500 people), Christiansburg, Virginia (25,000), and Cheyenne, Wyoming (76,000) — that even Amtrak lovers are skeptical. Matthew Yglesias, for example, says “Amtrak’s big idea of what to do with extra funding is to create new low-performing extensions to places with very low demand.” Continue reading →

The National Academy of Wishful Thinking

By | | Transportation
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Democrats want to build more transit infrastructure in order to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The only problem is that transit emits as much or more greenhouse gases, per passenger mile, as the average car. In fact, transit is less climate friendly than driving in all but a handful of cities.

Now, a new report from the Transit Cooperative Research Program of the National Academy of Sciences attempts to quantify how much greenhouse gas emissions transit can save. Using data from the American Public Transportation Association, the report observes that each passenger mile carried by transit represents a reduction of just 0.329 vehicle miles of automobile travel (page 14). Apparently, about 60 percent of those transit trips would, in the absence of transit, otherwise be walking or cycling trips or would not take place at all.

That means that transit is a huge net generator of greenhouse gases. In 2018, the average car emitted 202 grams of carbon dioxide per passenger mile. In 2019, transit did better than that only in the New York, Philadelphia, San Francisco, and Portland urban areas. The average light truck emitted about 241 grams; transit did better than that only in the above urban areas plus Atlanta, Boston, and San Jose. Continue reading →

Mileage-Based User Fees for Highway Finance

By | | Policy brief, Transportation
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Six years ago, the Oregon Department of Transportation (ODOT) announced that it was inviting up to 5,000 people to voluntarily join its mileage-based user fee program. The Antiplanner rushed to be among the first to apply, which turned out to be unnecessary as, after two years, only 745 vehicles were participating in the program.

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

That number is likely to increase soon, as the state has imposed a stiff vehicle-registration fee on electric and other fuel-efficient cars, a fee people can waive if they add their car to the mileage-based fee program. Annual fees for electric cars will go from $20 to $153; fees for cars rated to get better than 40 miles per gallon jump from $20 to $76 per year. Continue reading →

A Stagecoach-Age Monorail for Los Angeles

By | | Transportation
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Nearly a year ago, an Antiplanner policy brief made fun of the many science fiction stories that portrayed monorails as the transportation of the future. The Antiplanner pointed out that monorails date back to the nineteenth century and are an ugly, slow, and often noisy form of transit.

An artist’s impression of what a monorail over LA’s I-405 freeway would look like. Note that the image accurately shows that the monorail has failed to relieve congestion on the freeway. Image from LA Skyrail Express.

So naturally Los Angeles is planning a monorail, which Forbes magazine gushes is “space-age” travel. More like stagecoach-age travel, as a monorail was used at the 1876 American centennial celebration in Philadelphia. Continue reading →

What’s the Point of Transit Subsidies?

By | | Transportation
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Rather than figure out how they can best serve the public in a post-COVID world, many transit agencies have not yet “grasped the significance of the challenges facing public transportation and many have focused attention on asking for federal resources to ‘carry them through’ the impacts of COVID-19,” writes transit expert Steven Polzin in a report released yesterday by the Reason Foundation. “Others are busy redefining the performance metrics and expectations of public transportation to justify unconditional federal funding,” he adds in the report, Public Transportation Must Change after COVID-19.

For example, he cites Bloomberg CityLab writer David Zipper, who says that since transit ridership is likely to remain low for years, “public transportation leaders should focus on a different metric for usefulness: transit access.” In other words, transit agencies should ask funders to accept the performance standards that make transit look good, not the standards that actually make sense.

Polzin is not as negative about transit as the Antiplanner. “The core goals of public transportation — providing mobility particularly for those without alternative means and capturing the economy of mass movement of people in markets where those conditions exist — remain important,” he argues. But do they? With transit costing five times as much, per passenger mile, as auto driving before the pandemic, it certainly hasn’t captured any economies of mass movement. Continue reading →

What Would Billions for Rail Buy Us?

By | | Transportation
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Last year’s Moving Forward Act, which was passed by the House but not the Senate, would have included $29 billion for Amtrak over six years, about triple what Amtrak has been getting. As the Moving Forward Act proposed to spend about $1.5 trillion and Biden’s vague infrastructure plan is supposed to cost $3.0 trillion, some people assume that plan will include about $60 billion for Amtrak and high-speed rail.

That wouldn’t be enough to complete the California high-speed rail project, must less build a real national high-speed rail network. As I’ve noted before, the cost of such a network would be in the trillions. High-speed rail supporters hope to get projects going in a couple of states that will make members of Congress from other states demand high-speed rail money for their states or districts.

What will travelers get out of all this spending? The 328 million Americans in 2019 traveled almost 15,000 miles by automobile, 2,300 miles by commercial airliner, 164 miles by public transit (of which 50 miles is by bus), and 19 miles by Amtrak. The official number for all bus, including transit, intercity, charter, school, and so forth, is 1,100 miles per capita, but I suspect the real number is 400 (350 for non-transit buses). Walking and cycling are officially 100 and 26 miles, but this only includes trips that have destination such as work or shops; when recreation and exercise trips are included, they are probably at least double that. That brings total per capita travel to about 18,000 miles. Continue reading →