Patsies for Corporate Welfare

On April 7, our loyal opponents at the American Public Transportation Association are holding a virtual conference on high-speed rail. The conference is sponsored by several companies that expect to profit enormously if the United States builds high-speed rail, including:

  • Alstom, a French manufacturer of rail cars for French and Italian high-speed trains, as well as conventional and transit rail cars for, among others, Honolulu, Ottawa, and many other cities;
  • Systra, a government-owned French engineering firm that does the engineering for new TGV routes as well as for French transit lines;
  • HDR, an American engineering company that talked many cities into building streetcar lines by falsely claiming that the streetcars would lead to economic development; and
  • HNTB, another American engineering firm that has help build or rebuild rail transit lines in Boston, Chicago, Dallas, and other cities.

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The environmental impacts of high-speed rail: An 80-foot right-of-way times 8,600 miles is 130 square miles of land disrupted by rail construction; times 20,000 miles is 300 square miles of disrupted land. Photo from the California High-Speed Rail Authority. Continue reading

Reinventing the Jet Airliner

Suppose I told you that I have reinvented the jet airliners that carried Americans more than 750 billion passenger miles–about 10 percent of all passenger travel–in 2019. My reinvented jet will go less than half as fast as existing jets. It will cost six times as much to operate, per passenger mile, as existing jets. Unlike existing jets, which can go anywhere there is air, the reinvented jet will only be able to go on a limited number of fixed routes.

The reinvented jet airliner: less than half the speed, more than six times the cost, and doesn’t go where you want to go. Photo by Cobaltum.

This wondrous invention will become a reality if the federal government spends a mere one, two, or possibly three or four trillion dollars. Does that sound like a good deal? No? Yet that is exactly what high-speed rail advocates are proposing. Some proposals, such as the Green New Deal, even call for almost completely replacing low-cost, fast jet airliners with high-cost, relatively slow trains. Continue reading

January 2021 Driving Down by 11.7 Percent

Americans drove 88.7 percent as many miles in January 2021 as in the same month of 2020, according to data released yesterday by the Federal Highway Administration. That’s down slightly from 89.7 percent in December.

Looking at the above chart, it is amazing how stable everything has become. Driving has hovered within 2 percentage points of 89 percent since June. Transit has hovered within 2 percentage points of 36 percent since July. Flying has hovered within 4 percentage points of 36 percent since September. With the exception of September when it reached 31 percent, Amtrak has hovered within 4 percentage points of 26 percent since June. Continue reading

Ok, Zoomer

A 20-year-old woman named Cara sent out a tweet showing a map of a high-speed rail plan that someone with no sense made eight years ago with the comment, “I want her so fucking much.” She got 185,000 likes and 50,000 retweets, so Vox concluded that Generation Z (also known as zoomers) is sold on high-speed rail.

The high-speed rail map endorsed by Cara. Click image to read the Antiplanner’s comments on the map when it was released in 2013.

Of course, not everyone who liked or retweeted Cara’s tweet is necessarily a member of Gen Z, nor are zoomers (who number more than 60 million) necessarily accurately represented by 235,000 likes and retweets. But I remember when I was 20 years old and loved passenger trains and was convinced there was an evil conspiracy to kill them off, even though I personally hadn’t ridden on very many of them because they were too expensive. I suspect Cara is just as naive today. Continue reading

The Phony Infrastructure Crisis

“The most important thing to understand about the infrastructure crisis is that there is no infrastructure crisis,” says a commentary in Divided We Fall. “All of the talk about collapsing bridges and crumbling highways is simply a ruse to persuade Congress to spend hundreds of billions or trillions of dollars, most of it not on repairs but on new infrastructure we don’t need and mostly won’t use.”

The article reviews data regarding the current condition of highways, transit, and Amtrak. It also looks at what has happened in other countries that have spent heavily on high-speed rail and other forms of government-owned mass transportation.
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“The pandemic will make people reluctant to use any form of mass transportation in the future,” the commentary concludes. “It has also demonstrated the need for a resilient transportation system, and the most resilient system we have is motor vehicles and highways. Instead of trying to get people out of their cars, a policy that has never succeeded, Congress should adopt policies that make automobiles and highways cleaner, more efficient, and more resilient. Since highways can and should be paid for out of user fees, such policies will produce a better transportation system that will not add to the federal debt or impose more costs on state and local taxpayers.”

Applying Value Engineering to Transit Projects

In 1997, Tidewater Regional Transit—which served Norfolk and Virginia Beach, Virginia—proposed to build an 18-mile light-rail line between the two cities. Virginia Beach voters, however, rejected the plan. So, in 2000, the transit agency (which since 1999 had been known as Hampton Roads Transit) decided to build 7.4 miles from downtown Norfolk to the Norfolk-Virginia Beach city limit. In 2003, the project was estimated to cost less than $200 million and attract 10,500 riders a day.

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

Few places were less suited to rail transit, which is mainly designed to bring lots of commuters into job-rich downtowns. Although the Hampton Roads area has nearly 1.5 million people, it doesn’t have any large job-filled downtowns. According to Wendell Cox’s analysis of central business districts, downtown Norfolk had fewer than 25,000 jobs in the mid- to late-2000s, and fewer than 800 of them took transit to work. Continue reading

Zero-Based Transportation Policy

“The devastating effects of the COVID-19 pandemic and associated lockdowns on various forms of transportation create an opportunity to review the successes and failures of federal transport policies before Congress reauthorizes federal highway and transit programs,” says a report that will be released by the Cato Institute tomorrow. Antiplanner readers can get a preview copy today.

Back in the 1970s, the Carter administration imposed a zero-based budgeting process on first Georgia and later the federal government, requiring that every agency justify every dollar of its budget every year, as opposed to just justifying budget increases. This was probably a good idea once, or once every ten years, but not every year as it required too much bureaucratic overhead to implement. Continue reading

2020 Congestion Down 74% from 2019

The coronavirus and associated lockdowns have cost many their health or incomes, but one benefits is that the average American driver spent 74 percent less time sitting in traffic in 2020 than they did in 2019, according to INRIX’s latest Global Traffic Scorecard. People working at home, of course, saved even more time. People who continued to commute to work saved at least $51 billion, while people who worked at home saved billions more.

Curiously, the worst-congested city in the world, according to INRIX, was Bogota, Columbia in both 2019 and 2020. After that, however, the rankings completely changed, with New York, for example, climbing from 14 to 3. Continue reading

The Truth about Pelosi’s Subway

When the 2021 COVID-19 relief bill included funding for the BART expansion to San Jose, which didn’t have much to do with the coronavirus, Republicans labeled it Pelosi’s subway. Others disputed this description, saying that the BART line was 50 miles away from Speaker Pelosi’s district. Nevertheless, the earmark has apparently been removed from the bill.

$1.7 billion spent digging a hole and filling it up.

The bill still included $1.675 billion for transit capital improvement projects, which are not obviously vital considering that transit ridership is down by 65 percent. The American Public Transportation Association has created a list of 23 projects that are eligible for these funds. The San Jose BART line is not on the list. Continue reading

January Transit Ridership Down 65.7%

Transit agencies carried only 34.3 percent as many riders in January 2021 as in January 2020, according to data released by the Federal Transit Administration last Friday. This is a sharp drop from the previous four months, when ridership was 37 to 38 percent of 2019 numbers.

The latest Amtrak data show that its fortunes have improved slightly, as the passenger miles it carried (as a percent of the previous year) grew from 22.4 percent in December to 26.8 percent in January. That’s still pretty pitiful. Continue reading