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

No One’s Riding Trains So Spend More

Amtrak ridership is down more than 75 percent. Commuter-rail ridership is down more than 80 percent. So naturally Amtrak and commuter-rail agencies want more money to expand service.

Commuter train in Utah. Photo by Paul Kimo McGregor.

Amtrak wants to resume service on a route from New Orleans to Jacksonville, or possibly just to Mobile, that had been dropped after Hurricane Katrina. The renewed route would begin operating in 2022 with full federal funding of operating costs for the first year. The implication is that Amtrak is demanding that Alabama and other states provide some of the funding after that. Proponents claim a 15-to-1 benefit-cost ratio. It’s more like 1-to-15. Their legislatures should say no. Continue reading

Blaming the Messenger

Ridership on New York City subways is down by 67 percent from before the pandemic. Metropolitan Transportation Authority CEO Sarah Feinberg says it is all the media’s fault.

The MTA “was really ill-served by some of the early coverage of the pandemic,” she says. “People started thinking, ‘the last place I want to be is in a crowded subway car.'” She claims that “study after study” has found that transit was not “vectoring the virus.”

The New York Post article reporting on her statement snarks that she made it “without referencing specific studies.” But what do you expect? The Post, after all, is part of the media. Continue reading

The Dark Side of Japan’s Bullet Trains

In 1964, the Japanese National Railways (JNR) was on a roll. The state-owned but largely unsubsidized company had just finished seven years of uninterrupted profits. Moreover, in 1964 it opened the Shinkansen (meaning new main line) between Tokyo and Osaka in time for the Summer Olympics. This exposed an international audience to the latest in Japanese technology in the form of the fastest trains in the world with top speeds of 130 miles per hour and average speeds as high as 86 miles per hour. These quickly became the envy of other countries, leading even the United States Congress to pass a law promoting high-speed trains in 1965.

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

Today, salarymen and tourists ride shinkansen the full length of Japan’s main island of Honshu as well as on the outer islands of Hokkaido and Kyushu. However, there is a dark side to the shinkansen. Like Darth Vader, who started out as a nice little boy who loved speed but whose life was corrupted by a power-hungry politician, the shinkansen was warped by politicians and ended up doing more harm than good to Japan’s economy. Continue reading

Transit Wins Big in $1.9 Trillion Relief Bill

The $1.9 trillion COVID relief bill passed by the House of Representatives last week would give public transit more money than any other form of transportation: $30 billion. Airports and airlines, which before the pandemic moved 14 times as many passenger miles as transit, would receive $23 billion if the bill is approved by the Senate.

Amtrak, which is even more trivial than transit, would get $1.8 billion, some of which would be dedicated to restoring long-distance trains to daily service and some of which is to pay for state-supported trains under the probably fallacious assumption that the states can’t afford to do so during the pandemic. In 2019, Amtrak carried about 10 percent as many passenger-miles as transit.

If the last few months of 2020 are an indication of what will happen in 2021, then the airlines will carry 450 billion fewer passenger-miles than in 2019; transit 34 billion fewer; and Amtrak 4.5 billion fewer. The subsidies per each passenger-mile they won’t be carrying amount to 5 cents for the airlines, 40 cents for Amtrak, and 88 cents for transit. Of course, subsidizing someone for not doing something is ridiculous, but only typical for Congress. Continue reading