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Category Archives: Transportation

Highway Subsidies in 2018

By | | Transportation, Useful Data
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Highway subsidies in 2018 totaled to $47.1 billion, substantially less than the $54.3 billion in subsidies received by transit agencies. Considering that highways move about 100 times as many passenger miles (and infinitely more freight) than transit, this is a serious disparity.

Click image to download the table in Excel format.

I base the $47.1 billion on the latest issue of Highway Statistics, table HF-10, which was recently posted by the Federal Highway Administration. Although this table is dated April, 2020, it wasn’t available in June when I most recently calculated transportation subsidies. Continue reading →

A Project That’s No Longer Needed

By | | Transportation
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A proposed new 2-mile transit line connecting LaGuardia Airport with the New York subway system will cost $2 billion, make traffic congestion worse, dump 87,000 metric tons of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, and probably isn’t necessary due to the pandemic. The first three conclusions come from a draft environmental impact statement (DEIS) released last week by the Federal Aviation Administration, while the fourth is based on the huge changes in transportation habits that have already taken place as a result of the pandemic.

LaGuardia, the New York area’s smallest commercial airport. Photo by Patrick Handrigan.

According to the environmental impact statement, the new transit line, which would be an automated people mover, is needed primarily because of “increasing and unreliable travel times” to the airport as a result of traffic congestion. A survey of air travelers conducted by the Port Authority of New York & New Jersey (which runs the airport) found that slightly more than half of air travelers took taxis or ride-hailing services to the airport, another 36 percent took a car, and close to 6 percent took courtesy shuttles. Only 6.2 percent took mass transit. Continue reading →

Transit “Is Riddled with Inequities”

By | | Transportation
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The transit industry has developed two systems: one for “choice” riders and one for “dependent” riders, “that is to say white and Black,” says urban planner Christof Spieler. A former member of the Harris County (Houston) Metro board of directors, Spieler points out one place where Metro offers riders a choice between bus-rapid transit and a local bus. The BRT is three times faster than the local bus, has plusher seats, and costs $3.25 a ride compared with $1.25 for the local bus.

Spieler makes many good points and I am glad that an urban planner is finally taking this issue seriously. Unfortunately, his inevitable solution — that we should spend more money on transit — is wrong.

Spieler never mentions the Los Angeles Bus Riders’ Union case, in which the NAACP represented minorities whose bus service had declined so that Los Angeles Metro could pay for new rail transit lines to middle-class neighborhoods, but maybe he was unfamiliar with that case. As documented here, LA Metro was ordered by the court to restore bus service for ten years, which it did. Bus ridership recovered, but as soon as the ten years was up, it cut bus service and went back to building rail transit. Continue reading →

June Driving Down 13 Percent

By | | Transportation
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Americans drove 13 percent less in June 2020 than they did in the same month of 2019, according to data released yesterday by the Federal Highway Administration. This is an improvement from May, which was 25 percent less than in 2019, and April, which was 40 percent less.

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Brightline’s Future Not Too Bright

By | | Transportation
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As decribed in the lates Trains magazine (not available on line), Brightline is currently building tracks so that it can privately operate high-speed trains from Miami to Orlando. A few weeks ago, the company’s effective parent, Fortress Investment Group, was headlined in Forbes for “betting $9 billion that America’s transportation future is passenger rail.”

But things aren’t looking too bright for Brightline since then. For one thing, it has completely shut down its existing passenger train operations due to the pandemic, and doesn’t know when it will be able to revive them. (That may be just as well, as it was losing money on those trains anyway.)

More recently, plans to rebrand the operation “Virgin,” presumably with a significant investment by Richard Branson’s Virgin group, have fallen through. Branson told reporters that he had not actually invested any money into Brightline and that the plan to rename Brightline after Virgin was just a “marketing agreement.” Continue reading →

Driving Bounces Back

By | | Transportation
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The mayor of San Diego wants to spend $177 billion expanding the region’s transit system in order to make San Diego like “Barcelona, Madrid, Paris.” Meanwhile, Barcelona, Madrid, and Paris are becoming more like U.S. cities, at least in terms of the transportation habits of their residents. Driving is the dominant form of travel in all European cities and is rebounding fast after pandemic lock-downs.

Of course, driving is rebounding even faster in the United States, according to INRIX estimates. Total driving at the end of June, the entire month of July, and the first week of August was more than it had been in the weeks before the pandemic. Of course, it was the middle of winter before the virus, but that’s still an impressive comeback.

Interestingly, that driving hasn’t brought congestion back to its pre-COVID levels. Morning rush-hour driving in most urban areas was only only around 70 to 80 percent of pre-shutdown levels while afternoon rush-hour driving was 80 to 90 percent, with afternoon levels exceeding 100 percent in just a couple of urban areas. As a result, rush-hour speeds are significantly higher than they were before the pandemic. Continue reading →

June Ridership Down Nearly 70 Percent

By | | Transportation, Useful Data
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America’s public transit systems carried 69.3 percent fewer riders in June 2020 than in June 2019, according to data released by the Federal Transit Administration last Friday. Rail ridership was down 83 percent while bus ridership was down only 56 percent.

That’s an improvement from May, when total ridership was down 81 percent from the previous May. But it’s still a disastrous drop that is leading transit agencies to demand another $32 billion in federal subsidies on top of the $25 billion it received in March, which is on top of the $13 billion it received for 2020 before the pandemic. If Congress provides the $32 billion, the transit industry will have received more money in 2020 from the federal government alone than all of its funding from all sources, including fares, in 2018.

We’ll have June driving data in a few days, but in the meantime June’s gasoline consumption was only 14 percent below June of 2019, suggesting that driving has nearly recovered to its pre-pandemic levels. Unfortunately, this doesn’t discourage anti-auto groups who are using the pandemic to justify closing streets and lanes to auto traffic. Continue reading →

Taking the Rapid Out of Bus-Rapid Transit

By | | Transportation
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International Boulevard is a major northwest-southeast arterial that connects Oakland, California with its suburb of San Leandro. Until recently, it served businesses along the route with four lanes of through traffic, a center left-turn lane, and a parking strip on one and in some places both sides of the street.

Here’s a Google streetview of part of International Boulevard before AC Transit began turning it into a BRT route.

That’s changed as AC (for Alameda-Contra Costa) Transit has claimed most of the street for a bus-rapid transit route that is scheduled to start operating next week. Built at a cost of $232 million, the route reduces much of International Boulevard to a two-lane street with only a few left-turn lanes and few or no parking strips. Continue reading →

The Future of Driving

By | | Transportation
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A new study from accounting firm KPMG predicts that auto travel in the United States will be 9 to 10 percent less after the pandemic than it was before. Telecommuting, says the report, will lead to a 10 to 20 percent reduction in commuting by car while on-line shopping will lead to a 10 to 30 percent reduction in shopping trips.

This is good news to the transit-loving, auto-hating folks at Streetsblog, who celebrate “14 million cars off the road forever” but warn that “if we don’t act fast, they’ll come back” (which makes “forever” somewhat dubious). The “actions” they advocate call for giving the transit industry another $32 billion right away so it can keep its empty transit vehicles clean and even more money after that so it can increase the frequencies of those empty buses and trains.

If you believe the KPMG report, however, that’s not going to work. The report also found that 43 percent of former transit riders don’t plan to go back to riding transit after the pandemic, and most of them will substitute autos for transit. If true, that will increase driving by about 5 billion vehicle miles. KPMG admitted that transit’s loss would somewhat offset the decrease in auto travel, but did not include that in its calculations. Continue reading →

Second-Class Transportation

By | | Transportation
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Is transit second-class transportation, as I argued in an op-ed in the San Antonio News-Express, or are the people who ride transit second-class citizens, as a response from urban planner named Bill Barker implies that I said? Like this question, most of his response focuses on semantics, not reality.

For example, he claims that the billions of dollars that taxpayers are forced to pay to transit agencies aren’t subsidies because he says he found a dictionary that defines subsidies as “a grant to a private company.” Transit agencies aren’t private companies, he notes, so therefore they aren’t subsidized. (No dictionaries I’ve looked at specifies that money has to go to a private company to be considered a subsidy.)

In response to clear evidence that taxpayers pay more than 90 percent of the cost of running San Antonio transit, he alleges that “billions of dollars in transportation subsidies are going to Boeing, General Motors, Ford Motor Co.” Say what? I’m not sure why Boeing is relevant, but I don’t know of any subsidies going to General Motors or Ford. As near as I can determine, neither received funding from the CARES Act, and while the federal government “saved” General Motors from bankruptcy in 2008 by forcing it into bankruptcy, Ford didn’t receive any federal subsidies at that time. (Ford did receive some loans but repaid them, and by Barker’s definition only grants, not loans, are subsidies.) Continue reading →