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Transit: Browner Than Ever

By | | Policy brief, Transportation
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With ridership stuck at around 37 percent of 2019 levels, transit advocates have stopped claiming that transit is energy-efficient and climate-friendly. Even in 2019, transit wasn’t particularly green, but the fall-off in ridership associated with the pandemic has completely destroyed any claim that transit agencies may have that they save energy by providing an alternative to the automobile.

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

In 2019, the transit industry as a whole used more energy per passenger-mile than the average light truck and emitted about the same amount of greenhouse gases per passenger mile as the average car. In October 2020, based on agencies for which data are available, transit used about twice as much energy per passenger mile as the average light truck and emitted twice as much carbon dioxide per passenger mile as the average car. Continue reading →

Dueling Databases

By | | Transportation
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Outside of New York City, rail transit construction costs in the United States aren’t any higher than the rest of the world, according to a preliminary report from the Eno Transportation Foundation. The report is based on a database of 171 projects in the U.S. and other parts of the world.

In a stark example of high-cost, low-capacity transit, Sound Transit spent well over $500 million per mile building an underground light-rail line from downtown Seattle to the University of Washington. Photo by Joe Goldberg.

Not so fast, says the Transit Costs Project (a part of New York University’s Marron Institute of Urban Management). This program has compiled a much larger database of 574 projects, and it shows that U.S. costs are twice almost everywhere else in the world. Continue reading →

November Ridership Down 63 Percent

By | | Transportation, Useful Data
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Transit ridership in November 2020 was 63.1 percent less than in 2019, according to data released yesterday by the Federal Transit Administration. That was down from October, which was 62.7 percent less than in 2019, and September, which was 62.0 percent less than in 2019. These numbers are preliminary as a few agencies may not have submitted their November ridership numbers in time for this report, but ridership has been stuck at around 37 percent of 2019 numbers since July.

While private businesses have scrambled to cut costs in response to the pandemic, transit agencies continue to operate at 80 percent of 2019 levels. Agencies, of course, received a $25 billion bailout from Congress in April. Since total transit fares were only about $16 billion in 2019, most of this bailout was predicated on the assumption that the state and local taxes that transit agencies rely on would significantly drop due to the pandemic and associated shutdowns.

In fact, state and local tax revenues in the first nine months of 2020 were just 1 percent less than in the same period in 2019. While we don’t yet have exact data for transit systems, it seems likely that transit agencies were awash with cash in 2020 due to the huge federal bailout. This allowed them to maintain service at 80 percent of 2019 levels despite losing more than half of their riders over the year. Continue reading →

Transit Doesn’t Need to Respond to Reality

By | | News commentary, Transportation
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When the pandemic shut down brew pubs, many breweries went into the business of making hand sanitizer. Ford used one of its auto parts plants to make 50,000 ventilators. Various drugmakers were able to create vaccines in just nine months.

Transit agencies, meanwhile, continued to trundle their empty buses and trains around American cities. Those that were planning new construction projects have made little or no efforts to revise their plans in response to an almost certain downturn in business.

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Evidence on Post-Pandemic Telecommuting

By | | Regional planning, Transportation
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More studies have been published indicating that telecommuting is likely to be far more important after the pandemic than it was before. A University of Chicago study published early this month concluded that “22 percent of all full work days will be supplied from home after the pandemic ends, compared with just 5 percent before.”

The reasons are clear: “The pandemic drove a mass social experiment in which half of all paid hours were provided from home.” By most accounts, that experiment was successful.

A PricewaterhouseCoopers study found that 44 percent of employers believed that their employees were more productive working at home than in an office or other workplace, while only 31 percent believed they were less productive. Even where employees were a little less productive, the potential savings in office costs might encourage employers to allow people to work at home. Continue reading →

RTD Violated Stay-at-Home Orders

By | | Transportation
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Denver’s Regional Transit District lost 68 percent of its riders last April due to Colorado’s stay-at-home orders. Rather than obey the orders, some of RTD’s staffers visited some of the so-called transit-oriented developments along its rail lines and found — gasp! — 40 to 50 percent of the parking spaces were empty. They concluded that those parking spaces were a waste and should be taken away, perhaps filled with more mid-rise housing.

What time of day would you count spaces in an apartment parking lot to see how many were needed? RTD picked 10 am to 3 pm. Photo by Bearas.

According to RTD’s report, they did the parking lot counts between 10 am and 3 pm in the middle of a week in April. RTD’s reasoning seems to be that, since everyone was supposed to stay at home, any empty spaces meant that no one really needed those spaces. Continue reading →

Transportation & COVID-19

By | | Transportation
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How should state transportation policies change after the pandemic? What is the relative importance of Amtrak, urban transit, highways, and other modes of transport to the states? How can states respond most effectively to future transportation needs?

Click image to download a 5.2-MB PDF of this 25-page paper.

These questions are addressed in Transportation and COVID-19, a set of seven brief articles written by various free-market transportation experts. The guide is aimed at state legislators, state think tanks, and others who are interested in the transportation policies of their states. Continue reading →

One Leaves, Another Enters

By | | Transportation
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Early this month, Uber announced that it has given up on its efforts to make a driverless car to replace its human-driven mobility services. A few weeks later, Reuters reported that Apple plans to have its driverless car ready by 2024(though some say it likely won’t be ready for one to four years after that).

Too much can be made of either of these reports. Uber didn’t halt its driverless car program, it merely transferred it, along with $400 million, to another company, Aurora. If and when Aurora brings Uber’s technology to fruition, Uber will apply it to its various services. The New York Times called this transaction a “fire sale” since Uber actually paid Aurora to take the program off of the ride-hailing company’s hands, but another view is that Uber is investing in the work Aurora has already done.

Apple, meanwhile, is as tight-lipped as ever about the products it may or may not bring to the market. The Reuters report is apparently based on a few statements by current or (more likely) former Apple employees. The most important statement they made is that Apple plans to have an electric car using a new battery technology, but batteries are far from the most important part of an autonomous vehicle. The real earth-shaking news would have been any indication that Apple’s autonomous system has a chance of competing with Waymo, not to mention GM and Ford, in the marketplace.

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In the software business, the first is not always the winner. Google wasn’t the first internet search engine, Excel wasn’t the first spreadsheet, and Word wasn’t the first word processor. With nearly $200 billion in cash, Apple has both the opportunity and the means to become a player.

On the other hand, in the hardware business, sometimes first is best: look at iPod, iPhone, and iPad. If Apple really wants to sell cars, and not just software to carmakers, it will have to have something more than a better battery.

October 2020 Driving 91.2% of 2019

By | | Transportation, Useful Data
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Americans drove 91.2 percent as many miles in October 2020 as they did in October 2019, according to data released Monday by the Federal Highway Administration. This isn’t quite as good as the September release, which reported 91.4 percent as much driving. However, the FHwA has revised September numbers slightly so that both September and October driving were 91.2 percent as much as the same months in 2019.

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This allows me to update the chart tracking transportation use by various modes during the pandemic. The chart indicates that air travel is growing but other modes appear to have leveled off. We will find out next month whether these trends continue through November.

Transit Gets $14 Billion in Relief

By | | News commentary, Transportation
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The transit industry will get $14 billion of the $900 billion coronavirus relief package passed by Congress on Tuesday. That’s less than half of what transit agencies wanted but enough to tide them over for five months or so by which time (the agencies hope) the next Congress will have a chance to pass another and even bigger relief bill. The $14 billion is on top of the $13 billion that Congress gave to transit as a part of its normal annual funding bill.

For those who care, the TransitCenter has posted a spreadsheet showing its estimate of how the $14 billion in relief funds will be distributed among the nation’s major urban areas. The New York urban area will get $5.5 billion of which $3.9 billion goes to New York, $1.4 billion goes to New Jersey, and $0.2 billion to Connecticut.

Los Angeles gets nearly a billion, San Francisco-Oakland $800 million, and Chicago and Seattle around half a billion. Curiously, what regions get isn’t closely related to how many transit riders they carry: Seattle apparently will get 16 percent more than Chicago even though Chicago transit carries more than twice as many riders as Seattle’s. Continue reading →