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March 2021 Transit Ridership Down 59%

By | | Transportation, Useful Data
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Public transit carried 33 percent fewer riders in March 2021 than in March 2020 and 59 percent fewer than in March 2019, according to data published yesterday by the Federal Transit Administration. Since the pandemic started having an effect on transit in March 2020, we have to go back to 2019 to compare with pre-pandemic levels.

All forms of transport are recovering but some have recovered more than others. March driving data are approximate; actual numbers should be released in a week or so.

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The Columbia River Crossing Rises Again

By | | Transportation
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After being declared dead seven years ago, the proposal to replace the bridge over the Columbia River between Portland and Vancouver has been revived. Proponents of a new bridge have a web site that must be designed for Generation Z, as I find it pretty incomprehensible.

The original Pacific Highway bridge, now known as the Interstate Bridge, had two lanes of traffic including room for trolley cars.

Part of the existing structure opened as a two-lane bridge in 1917, and its capacity was doubled by building a duplicate bridge in 1958. Later the bridges were re-striped for three lanes to match the Interstate 5 freeway lanes north and south of the river. Continue reading →

50th Anniversary of a Loser

By | | Transportation
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Fifty years ago today, Amtrak operated its first passenger trains, a fact that President Biden celebrated a day early yesterday. Biden wants people to think that Amtrak is enough of a success that it deserves $80 billion in additional funding. But the reality is it is just a big loser.

Rail fans remember May 1, 1971, as the day America lost more than half of its passenger trains. On April 30, ten trains left the Midwest for the West Coast: the Empire Builder, Western Star, North Coast Limited, and Mainstreeter (all of which went to Seattle with sections to Portland), City of Portland, Portland Rose, City of San Francisco, San Francisco Chief, City of Los Angeles, and Super Chief. The next day, Amtrak killed all of them except the Empire Builder (and it killed the leg to Portland), Super Chief, and City of San Francisco (which was cut to three days a week). That’s a loss that’s hard to forgive.

Business analysts remember that the idea of a national passenger railroad was sold to Congress as a profitable enterprise. Rather than a normal government agency, Amtrak was created as a for-profit corporation with stockholders and, potentially, investors. The railroads were supposed to give it seed money based on the amount of money they claimed they had lost in the previous three years. After spending that to get started, as I noted six months ago, Amtrak was supposed to make money. Continue reading →

If You Can’t Beat ’Em, Ban ’Em

By | | Transportation
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Rail advocates like to claim that the introduction of high-speed trains has led to a cessation of airline service, apparently to show that high-speed trains can compete against faster planes. While this may have happened on a few routes, European air travel before the pandemic was growing far faster than rail travel. For example, in France, Germany, Italy, and Spain — the main European countries with high-speed rail — rail travel between 2011 and 2019 grew by 14 percent while air travel grew by 34 percent. No European country saw rail travel grow faster than air travel.

The government of France has found a solution to for-profit airlines outcompeting government-subsidized trains: ban the competing air travel. Under a law passed earlier this month, airlines will not be allowed to operate on routes that trains can serve in less than two-and-a-half hours. If high-speed trains were able to compete on their own, they wouldn’t need such a law.

Of course, French politicians justified this law based on the supposed savings in carbon emissions. But conventional trains are only a little more energy efficient than planes, and high-speed trains require well over 50 percent more energy, per train-car-mile, than conventional trains. Passenger occupancies also tend to be much higher on planes than trains — typically 85 percent vs. 50 percent — because planes usually operate in non-stop service while trains make many stops, so the size of planes can be set to demand while trains must be sized to fit the portion of the journey where demand is highest. Continue reading →

Did Ride Hailing Increase Congestion?

By | | Transportation
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“A new MIT study found that not only do rideshares increase congestion, but they also made traffic jams longer, led to a significant decline in people taking public transit, and haven’t really impacted car ownership,” reports Gizmodo. As noted here previously, transit advocates blame ride hailing for all sorts of problems in order to justify taxes and other restrictions to limit competition.

The new study from MIT is frankly unpersuasive. First of all, it says very little about the methodology used to come up with its results: page 1 of the study is an introduction and page 2 immediately begins to present the results. It appears the writers compared data in 44 urban areas before and after the introduction of ride hailing into those areas between 2012 and 2016.

Second, the writers appear to have made no effort to correct for or even consider any other variables. Although Uber began operating in San Francisco in 2010, ride hailing didn’t really begin growing until 2014. But the other thing that happened in 2014 was a huge drop in gasoline prices — prices fell by 50 percent in some areas. This isn’t even mentioned in the paper even though that drop could have most of the same effects the paper attributes to ride hailing. Continue reading →

Can U.S. Power Plants Support Electric Cars?

By | | Policy brief, Transportation
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Will electric cars completely replace internal-combustion vehicles anytime soon? Are electric vehicles, whether rail or highway vehicles, truly cleaner, especially in states where most electric power comes from burning fossil fuels? Does the United States electric grid have the capacity to power the nation’s automotive fleet? A detailed look at America’s energy budgets and electrical power supply systems will help answer questions like these.

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

Today’s Electrical Grid

The Department of Energy’s Monthly Energy Review shows that the leading source of electricity in the United States is natural gas, which produced 40 percent of the nation’s electricity in 2020, while coal produced 19 percent. This is a turnaround from just 15 years ago, when coal produced half of our electricity and natural gas just 19 percent. Some people blame coal’s decline on the Obama administration’s hostility to fossil fuels, but much of the credit is due to the development and widespread use of hydraulic fracturing and the low-cost natural gases it produced. Continue reading →

Post-COVID: More Driving, Less AM Congestion

By | | Transportation
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A recent survey from PriceWaterhouseCooper found that the majority of office workers want to continue working at home at least three days a week after the pandemic, and most employers are likely to let them do so. In fact, a higher percentage of employers — 83 percent vs. only 71 percent of workers — think that remote working during the pandemic has proven successful.

Data collected by Streetlight, which tracks people’s cell phones, reveals that the large numbers of people working at home has nearly eliminated the morning rush hour. However, the afternoon rush hour remains and is in many places worse than before. Before the pandemic, San Francisco had an afternoon peak that lasted from 4 to 6 pm. By June, 2020, the peak began around noon and lasted until 5.

Notice that these graphs show the percentage of daily travel, not total travel. Since total travel in June 2020 was less than June 2019, the afternoon peak period was not as severe in 2020 as it had been before the pandemic. But that could change as the economy recovers if total miles of travel return to close to 100 percent of what they were in 2019. Continue reading →

Forum on Competing Infrastructure Plans

By | | Transportation
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On Monday, April 26, the Antiplanner will join the Reason Foundation’s Bob Poole and Cato Institute’s Chris Edwards in a forum discussing infrastructure plans now before Congress. The forum will start at noon, Eastern Time, and last one hour. To register, click here.

Biden’s Infrastructure Plan and Alternatives from Cato Institute on Vimeo.

Yesterday, just in time for the forum, Republicans introduced their own infrastructure plan. This plan would spend almost 40 percent more money on transportation than Biden’s, but the funds are distributed differently. Except for broadband and water, the plan leaves out all of the non-transportation-related things that are in Biden’s plan, allowing for its total cost to be only about a quarter of Biden’s. Continue reading →

February Driving Down 12.1 Percent

By | | Transportation, Useful Data
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When compared with the previous year, vehicle-miles of driving in February 2021 dropped by 12.1 percent, a slight dip from January which was only 11.3 percent lower than in 2020. Data released yesterday by the Federal Highway Administration indicate that changes by state ranged from -2.4 percent in Wyoming to -20.4 percent in Delaware. Driving in Texas and Oklahoma both were around 19 percent below 2020 levels while driving in California was down only 7 percent.

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Both driving and transit declined slightly in February while both air travel and Amtrak grew slightly. This could be coincidence or it could mean that intercity travel is growing while local travel is still inhibited by the pandemic. This is affirmed by TSA data showing that air travel in March had recovered to 53 percent of 2019 levels, a major gain considering February air travel was only 40 percent of 2020 and 43 percent of 2019 numbers. Amtrak is not likely to see similar gains.

Transit Is Not Resilient

By | | Transportation
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“Transit is resilient,” claims transit industry consultant Paul Comfort, who is also executive director of the North American Transit Alliance, an association of private companies that earn money providing service to transit agencies. Comfort made this claim after visiting several transit agencies to see how they were spending the billions of dollars Congress gave them to compensate for the loss of ridership during the pandemic.

I don’t think that word means what Comfort wants us to think it means. The dictionary defines “resilient” as tending to recover from or adjust easily to misfortune or change. The panicky press releases sent out a year ago by transit agencies and advocates do not suggest that an industry that adjusts easily to change. Comfort’s examples of agency “resilience” are mostly about how they are spending the money Congress gave them on masks, sanitizers, and, for some reason, complete streets. He says nothing about actual ridership or other real performance measures. Here are a few tests that can be used to tell if an industry or institution is resilient.

1. Does the industry need a big bailout every time there is a downturn in the economy? Continue reading →