The Antiplanner » Transportation

Category Archives: Transportation

August Traffic Trends

By | | Transportation, Useful Data
1 Comment

Americans drove 251 billion vehicle-miles in August 2020, about 12 percent less than they drove in August 2019, according to data released on Saturday by the Federal Highway Administration. Rural driving was down 10 percent while urban driving was down 14 percent.

Hawaii saw the biggest decline in driving with a 33 percent drop from 2019. Delaware was a distant second at 24 percent, followed by Vermont (-20%) and Rhode Island (-19%). Around 95 percent of the residents of California live in urban areas, and driving in those urban areas dropped by a relatively modest 18 percent. Rural states saw the smallest declines: Wyoming (-2%), Montana (-3%), Arkansas, Idaho, and Arkansas (-5% each).
Lisa Marie described, “I considered Jackson didn’t do anything wrong and that he was wrongly accused and yes I began dropping for him. find now now generic cialis online viagra doctor Do you know men with larger neck circumference i.e. more than 16 inches are less likely to get sound sleep and low sexual desire. Though, the majority of buy cialis australia the comedies produced follow the same precautions. wikipedia reference cialis online mastercard Very common is the whole body acidity.
Interstate highways saw the biggest declines while the drops in driving on both urban and rural local roads were much smaller. The 12 percent drop in overall driving contrasts with August transit ridership, which was 63 percent less than in August 2019.

Waymo Is Back in Business

By | | Transportation
1 Comment

Last March, Waymo suspended its driverless taxi operations in Arizona due to the pandemic. Now, it has not only started up again, it has opened the service to all members of the public. Previously, it had been available only to about a thousand people who had signed up for and been accepted as “early riders.”

Waymo’s taxis are geofenced, meaning they can only operate in an area that has been carefully and precisely mapped. At the moment, that includes about 50 square miles of Chandler, Mesa, and Tempe, Arizona. Technically, autonomous cars that need maps to work are classed as level 4 vehicles. Level 5 vehicles should be able to drive themselves anywhere without maps.

In response to a tweet about Waymo’s progress, Elon Musk tweeted that level 4 “gives a false sense of victory being close” and that Tesla is aiming for level 5; he claims its “new system is capable of driving in locations we never seen even once.” Continue reading →

Joe Biden’s Tired Old Infrastructure Plan

By | | Transportation
15 Comments

The infrastructure plan recently released by the Biden campaign is a collection of tired ideas that have consistently failed in the past. Too much of the plan is based on last year’s groupthink and not enough of the plan recognizes the new realities that have emerged from the pandemic.

A large part of the plan is based on getting people out of their cars and onto transit and bicycles. American cities have been trying to do this for the last fifty years, spending $1.5 trillion subsidizing transit, and it hasn’t worked anywhere. The plan calls for connecting low-income workers to jobs by building more transit, yet people can reach far more jobs by automobile than by transit while auto ownership, not transit subsidies, are the key to getting people out of poverty.

The plan is based on assumptions about transportation dollar and environmental costs that are fundamentally wrong. Transit, the plan says, saves money while cars impose a burden on low-income people and produce too many greenhouse gas emissions. In fact, when subsidies are included, American transit systems spend five times as much moving a passenger one mile than the average automobile. Ignoring subsidies, average transit fares are still more than the average cost of driving per passenger mile. Transit also uses more energy and emits more greenhouse gases per passenger mile. Continue reading →

Electrification Cost Shocks Caltrain

By | | Transportation
3 Comments

Electrifying the commuter trains between San Francisco and San Jose not only cost $2 billion, it will increase the cost of operating those trains by 33 percent. When seeking federal funding for part of the capital cost, local officials called the route “overburdened” and said that electrification would increase capacity. Today, the route is carrying just 6 percent as many riders as it did before the pandemic, and since it is likely that many of those passengers will never return, the new capacity probably isn’t needed.

As I’ve previously noted, the real reason California wanted to electrify the train was as a hidden subsidy to the San Francisco-Los Angeles high-speed trains. Those trains needed to be electrified and if the cost of doing so could be counted against the commuter trains it would make the high-speed rail project look less expensive than it really was.

The problem with that was that the state had promised to run trains between San Francisco and Los Angeles in two-and-two-thirds hours, which would require faster trains than the commuter trains. Since 220-mph trains can’t safely run on the same tracks as 50-mph trains, the original plan was to build brand-new high-speed rail tracks between San Jose and San Francisco. Cost overruns and revenue shortfalls made that impossible, so California officials came up with the idea of running the high-speed trains on the same tracks as the commuter trains, which would make it impossible to run them fast enough to keep the promise of SF-LA run times of 2:40. Continue reading →

Ideologues or Experts?

By | | Transportation
4 Comments

The goal of the original Progressive movement, which started in the 1890s and peaked in the 1910s, was to put experts in charge of government bureaucracies. That meant doctors should head health-care agencies, foresters should head forestry agencies, and engineers should head transportation agencies. The system actually worked fairly well, especially for agencies such as state forestry and highway departments that were funded mainly if not entirely out of user fees. The feedback from the user fees combined with the expertise to know what to do with that feedback led the production of tremendous resource values.

Today’s Progressives aren’t interested in experts. In fact, they often would rather have anyone but an expert head a government agency because they view the experts as people who have bought in to some world view that the Progressives don’t like.

Case in point: the director of the Colorado Department of Transportation (CDOT) is not an engineer, nor even a transportation planner, but a historian. Shoshana Lew, who has been in charge of CDOT since February, 2019, has a bachelor’s degree in history from Harvard and a master’s degree in history from Northwestern. Prior to working for CDOT, she spent two years as chief operating officer for the Rhode Island Department of Transportation. Continue reading →

Rail Supporters Can’t Tell the Truth from Fiction

By | | Transportation, Urban areas
4 Comments

Portland’s regional planning agency, Metro, has put a measure on this November’s ballot to tax all firms with 25 or more employees in order to pay for the region’s latest light-rail scheme. Fortunately, or unfortunately depending on your point of view, the scheme appears to be foundering on the weight of lies told by Metro and the measure’s supporters.

To start, Metro wanted to call the tax a “business tax” even though it would be actually a 0.75 percent tax on payrolls. In other words, it would be an income tax on employees, but it would be invisible because it wouldn’t show on paystubs as a withholding like most income taxes. Portland’s transit agency, TriMet, has used this kind of a tax to pay for its operations and always called it a “payroll tax.” But Metro wanted to call it a “business tax” on the ballot title because it believed Portlanders would be more likely to support taxes evil businesses than poor downtrodden employees.

When challenged, a judge ordered Metro to take “business tax” out of the title but didn’t order it to use the term “payroll tax.” Despite not getting the ballot title they wanted, opponents have raised hundreds of thousands of dollars to fight the measure. This includes large contributions from major employers including Nike, Daimler Trucks, Comcast, and Tillamook Creamery.

As of September 28, opponents had actually outraised supporters. Contributions to the pro-rail campaign came from rail contractor Stacy & Witbeck, the International Union of Electrical Workers, and engineering consulting firm David Evans & Associates. The Evans firm is the company that got the contract to write the environmental impact statement for building a light-rail bridge over the Columbia River and then spent the money lobbying the Oregon and Washington legislatures to build the bridge. Continue reading →

August Transit Ridership Down 63 Percent

By | | Transportation, Useful Data
Leave a comment

August transit ridership was 63.2 percent lower than in August, 2019, according to data released yesterday by the Federal Transit Administration. This is not much of an improvement over July, when ridership was 64.9 percent below July 2019.

As in previous months, rail ridership was down by more than bus ridership: 74.2 percent vs. 51.8 percent, reflecting the fact that rail riders tend to have higher incomes and are more likely to be able to work at home than bus riders. Similarly, the worst-performing transit systems tended to be in urban areas with large numbers of people who can work at home: San Francisco-Oakland ridership was down 79.4 percent while Washington DC-area ridership was down 79.1 percent. In contrast, ridership in San Antonio, which has no rail transit and whose riders are mainly working class, was down by 49.2 percent.

Despite staggering losses in ridership, many transit agencies have made only modest reductions in service thanks to the credulity of Congress and other funders. Congress gave the transit industry a $25 billion bailout as a part of the CARES Act, and while most transit agencies will soon have burned through those funds, they are counting on another bailout before they run out. Continue reading →

NYC Auto Traffic Back to 85-95% of Normal

By | | Transportation
Leave a comment

Auto traffic in New York City is back to 85 to 85 percent of pre-pandemic levels, and truck traffic is up to 100 percent or more, according to “Gridlock” Sam Schwartz. Schwartz is the traffic engineer who popularized and possibly coined the term “gridlock.”

As the Antiplanner noted a couple of weeks ago, nationwide driving in July had returned to 89 percent of July, 2019 levels. But how can traffic be that high if everyone is working at home?

According to the National Household Transportation Survey, less than 19 percent of personal auto travel is for commuting. When trucks and other commercial traffic are added, the percentage of motor vehicle trips that are made by commuters is much smaller. Thus, traffic could rise to 85 or even 90 percent of normal even if almost none of the increase was for commuting. Continue reading →

Congress Extends Pork Another Year

By | | News commentary, Transportation
Leave a comment

In a move that will surprise no one at all, Congress has extended federal funding for highways and public transit until September 30, 2021. Such federal funding was set to end on September 30, 2020, and rather than revise the law to take into account the latest trends and events, Congress simply extended the existing law for another year.

It’s not like there was any new information, such as a pandemic, widespread forest fires, or the acceleration of urban decentralization, that might lead Congress to change its funding priorities anyway. Or, to be more accurate, it’s not like any new information would actually persuade Congress to change its funding priorities, as those priorities are driven by ideology more than actual facts.
PDE5 InhibitorsThe prescription PDE5 inhibitors sildenafil ( price tadalafil tablets), vardenafil (viagra) and tadalafil (discount viagra) are prescription drugs which are visual disturbances, including blurred vision and seeing different shades than before. This statement coming buy cialis usa from them isn’t completely wrong since a lot of individuals who discontinued using Propecia recovered from the severe adverse reactions. Bodily health:- Numerous viagra without prescription free health difficulties can even have an impact on sexual performance. Depression is another common issue that causes penile viagra online mastercard weakness due to imbalance in the production of brain chemicals.
The current law, known as the Fixing America’s Surface Transportation or FAST Act, was passed in 2015 and included five years of funding. It didn’t make sense to make the law last five years because Congress is so dysfunctional that it can’t pass any major legislation in even-numbered years, so it should have made it a six-year law anyway.

NYC Transit Is Not Vital to the Nation

By | | Transportation
2 Comments

According to “experts,” saving New York City’s transit is “vital to the U.S. economy,” reports an article in Business Insider. These “experts” include the usual gang of transit advocates, including the chair of New York City’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA), an urban planning professor at New York University, and the Manhattan Institute’s Nicole Gelinas, all of whom fervently believe that New York financial workers are, if not the masters of the universe, still critical to making the earth successfully rotate around the sun.

New York is “the only place where you have an abundance of face-to-face contact,” says Gelinas, which is supposedly is why its economic productivity was so high. Because Manhattan is so compact, “you can have many, many meetings every day with your potential vendors, your customers, your competitors,” something that supposedly isn’t possible in the suburbs.

I skeptical that maximizing the number of boring meetings per day somehow makes people more productive. Besides, what good are face-to-face meetings when everyone is wearing a mask? If they need to, people can have more meetings per day over Zoom, Skype, or FaceTime without masks and without having to travel from one meeting to the next. Continue reading →