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Category Archives: Transportation

Traffic Fatality Rate Highest Since 2004

By | | Transportation
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An estimated 38,680 people died in motor vehicle traffic accidents in 2020, a 7 percent increase from 2019, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA). This is despite the fact that Americans drove 13 percent fewer miles in 2020 than they did in 2019. One caveat: the 2020 numbers are only preliminary based on a “statistical projection.”

The reported increase in fatalities pushed fatality rates up to 13.7 deaths per billion vehicle-miles traveled in 2020 and 1.45 in the last nine months of 2020, the highest rate since 2004. Fatality rates had declined to just 10.8 per billion miles in 2014, then hovered between 11 and 12 for the next five years.

The 2008 financial crisis led to a 1 to 2 percent annual decline in driving in 2008 and 2009, which resulted in a nearly 10 percent annual decline in fatalities. The pandemic led to a 13 percent decline in driving, yet fatalities increased. What was the difference between these two events that one made highways safer and the other made them more dangerous? Continue reading →

House Dems Propose $547 Transport Bill

By | | Transportation
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Democrats on the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee are proposing to increase transportation spending from $305 billion over the last five years to $547 billion over the next five years. Although this is supposed to be a five-year bill, it will really be a six-year bill spending at least $656 billion, as Congress is never able to pass a major bill during an election year and will simply extend it a sixth year at the then-current rate of spending.

Many megaprojects, such as Boston’s Big Dig and Dulles MetroRail (shown here) are built not because they are needed but because politicians can get the federal government to pay for them with “free” money. The proposed transportation bill will encourage more such megaprojects. Photo by Tom Saunders, Virginia Department of Transportation.

The proposed bill would increase spending on highways by 54 percent, double spending on transit, and triple spending on Amtrak. Although transit and Amtrak together carried 1.0 percent of passenger miles before the pandemic and less than 0.6 percent of passenger miles in the last year, the bill would give them 37 percent of the federal funds. Moreover, while federal funding of roads would be hampered by a “fix-it-first” rule, federal spending on transit would have no such limit even though transit infrastructure is in much worse shape than highway infrastructure. Continue reading →

Transit & Amtrak Lag Behind Driving & Flying

By | | Transportation, Useful Data
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Transit carried 40.5 percent as many riders in April, 2021 as in April, 2019, according to data released by the Federal Transit Administration last Friday. This is a slight step backwards from March, in which transit carried 40.8 percent as many people as in March 2019.

As indicated by the dotted line, driving data are not yet available, but a future Antiplanner post will update this chart when they are published.

Amtrak was even worse, carrying 37.2 percent of its 2019 passenger-miles, according to the company’s monthly performance report. This, however, was a bigger improvement over March, when it carried 32.7 percent of 2019 passenger-miles. Continue reading →

A Lot of Blame to Go Around

By | | Transportation
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Three-and-one-half years ago, the first Amtrak train over a new, shorter route between Seattle and Portland crashed and killed three passengers. Now Steven Brown, the engineer who went 80 miles per hour around a 30-mph curve, wants to be reinstated, saying the accident was Amtrak’s fault, not his.

It was Amtrak’s fault because, he admits, he was inexperienced with the route (having made “only” three practice runs and seven to ten observational runs) and had never run that model of locomotive before. Given this lack of experience, he says, Amtrak never should have assigned him the train. Of course, as it was a brand-new route, all of Amtrak’s engineers were equally inexperienced with the terrain, and he was given the job because he had scored 100 percent on a written exam for the route. Continue reading →

No Light Rail for You, San Jose

By | | Transportation
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After last week’s shooting, restoring light-rail service to Silicon Valley will take “weeks or months, not days,” says a representative of the Santa Clara Valley Transportation Authority (VTA). In place of light rail, the agency was providing “bus bridges” to serve light-rail routes.

On Monday, however, VTA announced that it would discontinue such bus bridges. Instead, it “is directing all resources to the regular bus network that serves the majority of our riders who rely on public transit the most.” In other words, light rail serves mainly high-income workers who aren’t riding anyway because they are working at home. So those who were still riding light rail before last Wednesday must hustle to find alternate transportation such as riding buses that don’t necessarily parallel the light-rail lines.

If these light-rail lines were so important to the region that they had to be built, it seems like they would be important enough to keep running buses serving their customers while the rail system is out of commission. VTA is tacitly admitting that it was a mistake to build them in the first place. Continue reading →

San Jose Discovers Light Rail Is Not Resilient

By | | Transportation, Urban areas
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As of this writing, light-rail service in San Jose remains cancelled more than 24 hours after the mass shooting that left 10 people dead. This was a terrible event, and I join Governor Gavin Newsom in wondering “what the hell is going on in the United States?” Beyond that, I don’t feel qualified to write about gun control, mental illness, or other factors that may have played a role in this tragedy.

However, it does point out one more problem with light rail or any rail transit: such systems require central control that can easily be disrupted by accidents, terrorists, or other criminals. Buses, which the Valley Transportation Authority is using in place of light rail in the aftermath of the shooting, don’t need such central control and are less vulnerable to natural or human-caused disasters.

Light rail has been a thorn in the side of Silicon Valley transportation since the 1980s. San Jose’s bus-only system carried 38.5 million trips in 1984, or 29 trips per resident of the San Jose urbanized area, also known as Silicon Valley. Continue reading →

How Many Trillions to Waste?

By | | News commentary, Transportation
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President Biden wanted to spend $2.25 trillion we don’t have on projects we don’t need. Republicans countered by saying they weren’t willing to spend more than $568 billion we don’t have on projects we don’t need. President Biden, desiring to show he was willing to compromise, offered to spend $1.7 trillion we don’t have on projects we don’t need.

Now the latest is that Republicans have agreed to spend “close to $1 trillion” we don’t have on projects we don’t need. Whereas Biden hinted that he would agree to raising taxes on corporations and people who earn more than $400,000 a year to pay for part of his plan, a key provision of the Republican proposal is that taxes won’t be raised on anyone to pay for it, thus absolutely ensuring we won’t have the money to pay for their infrastructure projects we don’t need.

It is easy to say that this is just politics, but I can’t help but feeling that everyone inside the Beltway has gone nuts. As I noted earlier this week, Democrats have successfully moved the goal posts so far out that Republicans think that spending nearly $1 trillion in funny money is a fiscally conservative proposal. Continue reading →

Republicans Support Deficit Spending

By | | Transportation
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Democrats and Republicans on the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee announced agreement on a bill to increase highway spending by 32 percent. The 2015 transportation bill included $225 billion for highways over five years. The announced agreement is to increase this to $303 billion for the next five years. The agreement said nothing about transit spending.

From 2015 to 2019, revenues into the highway portion of the Highway Trust Fund were about $37 billion a year, so at least $40 billion of the $225 billion allocated in 2015 was deficit spending. Due to the pandemic, revenues are not likely to significantly increase in the next five years, so increasing spending to $303 billion would nearly triple deficit spending.

This is a bad precedent to set considering that Republicans are trying to reduce deficit spending on transit, Amtrak, and other infrastructure. When Senate Republicans responded to President Biden’s proposal for a $2.3 trillion infrastructure plan with a plan that would spend only $568 billion, Biden came back with a $1.7 trillion bill. But the White House and Congressional Democrats won’t take Republicans seriously if Republicans agree to triple deficit spending on roads. Continue reading →

$85 Billion for Empty Buses and Railcars

By | | Policy brief, Transportation
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The future of public transit is nearly empty buses and railcars. Yet President Biden’s American Jobs Plan calls for spending $85 billion on transit. Although transit carries less than 1 percent of passenger travel in the United States, and no freight, this represents 28 percent of the funds Biden proposes to spend on transportation.

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

Considering that the pandemic has cut transit ridership by more than half, while driving has recovered to 97 percent of pre-pandemic levels, this a poor, and poorly timed, use of public funds. Biden’s plan claims that spending more on transit “will ultimately reduce traffic congestion for everyone.” Other transit advocates claim that it will help low-income people as well as reduce greenhouse gas emissions. But none of these claims are true. Continue reading →

Safe, Cost-Effective, and Equitable Transport

By | | Transportation
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The North Carolina Department of Transportation (NCDOT) is not the worst state transportation department in the country, but neither is it the best. In 1921, North Carolina was one of the first states to impose a tax on gasoline and dedicate it to roads. It held to the user-pay principle for more than 60 years, but in 1984 it began diverting some of those fuel taxes to transit.

Click image to download an 11.5-MB PDF of this 108-page report.

Today, about 6 percent of NCDOT’s budget, which nearly all comes from highway user fees, gets spent subsidizing transit, Amtrak trains, and state-owned non-commercial airports. That doesn’t sound like very much, but the state is under pressure to increase that percentage. Continue reading →