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Category Archives: Transportation

COVID-19 and Public Transit

By | | Transportation
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Two more studies published by the National Bureau of Economic Research associate increased cases of coronavirus with public transit. “A striking and robust relationship is found between death rates and public transit use,” according to a study by researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. People who worked at home were safest, the study found, but deaths correlated with people who drove to work only at the largest scale; the correlations weren’t statistically significant at the city or state level.

A second study by University of Virginia researcher John McLaren found that blacks and Native Americans were disproportionately likely to die from the virus. This was true even after controlling for income and education; the main factor that seemed to cause increased deaths in these groups was “the use of public transit.”
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My friend MSetty will remind us that there are places in the world that have lots of transit ridership but don’t seem to suffer high COVID-19 death rates, apparently because people in those countries are much more likely to wear masks. That may be true, but all things being equal, people are more likely to get sick if they use mass transportation than if they drive in their private automobiles. This will continue to be true after the current pandemic is over, so people who want to ride transit then will have a choice of continuing to wear masks or risk catching the flu or whatever is the disease of the week.

Five Reasons to Raise Subway Fares

By | | Transportation
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Some people at UC Berkeley published an article this week giving “five arguments for making subways free.” Yet it is more realistic to think that fares should be raised, not reduced.

The five arguments in the Berkeley article are:

  1. Marginal costs are low because capital costs have already been spent;
  2. Externalities are low especially if the subways get cars off the road;
  3. No more waiting in lines to pay;
  4. Subways help poor people and stimulate the economy;
  5. There are increasing returns to having more riders.

Some of these depend on the system, yet the Berkeley article makes no distinction between such extremes as the New York City subway, which is the heaviest-used transit system in the country, and the Baltimore subway, which is a joke. Other arguments are simply wrong. Continue reading →

What’s So Magic about $1 Trillion?

By | | Transportation
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News reports say that the Trump Administration is going to propose a $1 trillion infrastructure plan to “boost the economy.” One writer says it will not only promote recovery but also help the environment.

Since Trump promised a $1 trillion infrastructure plan when he was running for president in 2016, it may seem like it is about time that he kept that campaign promise. But those who thought he was crazy to make that promise in the first place may wonder just where he found enough infrastructure to spend $1 trillion. Part of the answer, it turns out, is a little bit of trickery in the proposal.

Infrastructure, of course, includes airports, highways, pipelines, ports, power plants, railroads, telecommunications, transit lines, water & sewage facilities, and more. A lot of this is private, including pipelines, railroads, and telecommunications. Most of the remainder, including highways, ports, transit, and water & sewage facilities, is owned by state or local governments. Really, aside from roads and other structures on federal lands, the only infrastructure facilities owned by the federal government are some hydroelectric dams. Continue reading →

HART Now Makes Video Games

By | | Transportation, Urban areas
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KHON News discovered that the Honolulu Authority for Rapid Transit (HART), which has yet to operate any transit (and will never operate truly rapid transit), has a link to a video game on its website called “Outrun Da Train.” HART apparently paid $190,000 to create this video game.

When asked why it spent so much on something that has so little to do with completing what is likely to be the most expensive above-ground rail line in the world, HART responded that the price was cost-effective since it was developed in Hawaii rather than on the mainland. Yes, but why a video game? Continue reading →

Cruise Trains for Amtrak

By | | Transportation
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Amtrak plans to reduce all but one of its overnight trains to three-day-a-week service starting October 1. Doing so, says Amtrak, will save “as much as $150 million” a year. Amtrak doesn’t say so, but three-day-a-week trains offer almost as much political benefit to the agency as daily trains.

I have a better idea. Amtrak should double the routes served by its overnight trains, but run most of them just once a week. Add more lounge space to each train so that passengers have more places to go and the trains become cruise trains, not trains for getting from point A to point B. Amtrak is a slow and expensive way to get from point A to point B, but it is an excellent way to see parts of the country that can’t be seen from an interstate freeway.

Some routes Amtrak could add are the former North Coast Limited route from the Twin Cities to Seattle/Portland; the former City of Portland/Pioneer route from Ogden to Portland; the former City of Los Angeles/Desert Wind route from Salt Lake City to Los Angeles; the Golden State route from Chicago to Los Angeles via El Paso; the Gulf Wind route from New Orleans to Florida, and the Floridian route from Chicago to Florida. Continue reading →

2018 Transport Subsidies and Costs

By | | Transportation
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Last year, I published a policy brief that calculated 2017 transportation subsidies and costs for airlines, Amtrak, highways, and transit. When 2018 data for Amtrak, highways, and transit became available, I included an updated chart in a policy brief on transportation after the pandemic. But that wasn’t exactly prominent — I had a hard time finding it when someone asked me about it recently — and it didn’t have many details so I’m going to expand on it here.

The above chart is useful because it shows the disparities. Amtrak spends almost four times as much to move someone a passenger mile as the airlines. Transit agencies spend almost five times as much to move someone a passenger mile as personal automobiles. Continue reading →

Traffic Congestion After the Pandemic

By | | Transportation
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Some researchers from Vanderbilt University (and one from Cornell) asked what will happen to traffic congestion after the pandemic. If people reduced the use of transit for commuting, they concluded, congestion will get a lot worse, which is “detrimental to everyone’s commute.” Though they never say so explicitly, the implication is that we need to spend a lot of money supporting transit agencies to prevent that congestion.

Yet their paper is greatly oversimplified and ignores many things. Most importantly, people working at home are going to make a bigger difference to congestion than transit riders. Before the pandemic, more people worked at home than rode transit to work. If after the pandemic the number of people working at home on any given day is double what it was before the pandemic, then there would be less traffic even if no one rode transit.

In fact, the number of people working home is likely to much more than double. More than 40 percent of workers are working at home due to the pandemic, and at least a quarter of those say they expect to continue working at home after than pandemic. That would triple what it was before the pandemic. Moreover, half of those who expect to continue working at home say they will move to a different location, generally a suburb or smaller city. Continue reading →

Kill the Purple Line

By | | Transportation
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Anyone who carefully read the environmental impact statement for Maryland’s Purple Line would know that the proposed light-rail trains would be slow, would make congestion in the region worse, and that buses could move as many riders for a lot less money. It wouldn’t have taken much more research to learn that Maryland had a history of badly overestimating ridership and underestimating costs of its rail transit lines and that the ridership projections for this line had been particularly overinflated in order to make it eligible for federal funding.

Of course, most people didn’t read those documents or do the research, and many chose instead to believe the hype. So Maryland gave a $5.8 billion contract to a consortium of companies to build and operate the line. When, predictably, the line ran into delays and cost overruns, the companies withdrew from the project.

This naturally led opponents to urge Maryland to take this opportunity to cancel the project. Even if you believed the unrealistically high ridership estimates made before the contract was signed, the pandemic has probably decimated the market for transit. Continue reading →

Spending Money We Don’t Have on Projects We Don’t Need

By | | News commentary, Transportation
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House Transportation & Infrastructure Committee Chair Peter DeFazio yesterday released a proposal to spend tens of billions of dollars the federal government doesn’t have on projects we don’t need. Congressional authorization for federal spending on highways and transit expires this year, and DeFazio proposes to renew this with a program that will increase spending by 62 percent without increasing the taxes that support it.

Whereas the previous law spent an average of $61 billion per year over the last five years, DeFazio’s proposal would spend almost $99 billion a year over five years. At one time, federal spending on highways and most transit came out of gas taxes and other highway user fees and Congress didn’t spend more than came in. Since the mid-2000s, however, Congress has ignored actual revenues and spent billions of dollars a year out of general funds. The 2015 law, for example, simply appropriated $51 billion of general funds into the Highway Trust Fund (which despite the name spends money on both highways and transit).

DeFazio’s bill would not only increase this deficit spending, it includes a poison pill for highways while it unleashes spending increases on transit. For highways, the bill would include a “fix it first” provisions that says that states cannot increase highway capacity until they get existing roads in a state of good repair. No similar provision is made for transit even though transit is in a much poorer state of repair. Continue reading →

Private Buses: The Forgotten Mode

By | | Transportation
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A couple of weeks ago, more than 600 motorcoaches — that special breed of buses with extra-comfortable seats and large luggage bays beneath the passenger area — held a rally in Washington DC to complain that their government-subsidized competitors received a bailout but they did not. Yesterday, California motorcoach operators held a similar rally in Sacramento asking the governor to re-open the state, but it was overshadowed by George Floyd protests.

A few years ago, the Antiplanner wrote a paper called Intercity Buses: The Forgotten Mode, but I guess it is still forgotten. When we think of intercity travel, we think of planes, cars, and Amtrak, but rarely think about buses. Congress seems to be the same way.

The American Bus Association‘s most recent motorcoach census estimates that buses carried 64 billion passenger miles in 2017. That’s 10 times as many as Amtrak. In fact, it’s more than Amtrak and urban transit combined. Continue reading →