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Category Archives: Transportation

Accelerating Spread of COVID-19 Earns $25 Billion

By | | Transportation
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Transit agencies, which are known to be “an effective way of accelerating the spread of infectious diseases” but are not effective at much else, received a $25 billion bailout in the $2.2 trillion Congressional coronavirus relief bill. That’s only a little more than 1 percent of the total, but why did the industry get any at all?

When transit agencies asked for the money, the Antiplanner wrote an op-ed arguing against it. Unfortunately, it didn’t reach print until after Congress passed the bill.

Yesterday, which happened to be the day after the op-ed was published, the Department of Transportation announced how the spoils would be distributed. The money is parceled out geographically, so agencies in regions with multiple transit providers will squabble over the funds at the MPO level. Continue reading →

March Madness

By | | Transportation
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Transit agencies are now demanding that Congress give them at least $25 billion so they can continue infecting people with COVID-19. Restaurants, bars, shopping malls, amusement parks, and barber shops are all supposed to shut down, but let’s keep transit running even though one study has found that “mass transportation systems offer an effective way of accelerating the spread of infectious diseases within communities.”

At least one transit agency, Portland’s TriMet, is now admitting that it’s too dangerous for people to ride transit and that they should stay at home (or drive) instead. But it is still running its buses and trains. Why? For “medical staff, first responders and other essential workers.” So we’re encouraging health care and other “essential” people to use the form of transportation whose riders are nearly six times more likely to suffer from upper respiratory infections. That’s smart!

Speaking of smart (as in smart growth), the New York Times is blaming the high incidence of coronavirus in New York City on the city’s dense population. The newspaper-of-record noted that the nation’s largest and densest major city has 26 times as many cases and 18 times as many fatalities as the nation’s second-largest city, Los Angeles. Continue reading →

We Were Warned Not to Bunch Up

By | | Housing, Regional planning, Transportation
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We were warned. After September 11, 2001, historian Stephen Ambrose told us what to do.

“One of the first things you learn in the Army is that, when you and your fellow soldiers are within range of enemy artillery, rifle fire, or bombs, don’t bunch up,” wrote Ambrose in the Wall Street Journal. Now that the U.S. was under attack from terrorists, Ambrose urged the nation as a whole to learn the same lesson: “don’t bunch up.” “In this age of electronic revolution,” he noted, “it is no longer necessary to pack so many people and office into such small space as lower Manhattan.”

Ambrose’s advice was ignored. Manhattan’s population has grown by at least 100,000 people since 2001. Fitting 1.6 million people on a 23-square-mile island is only possible because of transit systems that force people to pack themselves into buses and railcars. Continue reading →

Transit Agencies: Don’t Worry, Be Happy

By | | Transportation
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Entire universities are shutting down and telling their students to go home. The governor of Washington has banned all gatherings of 250 people or more. Entire countries are shutting down. Numerous airlines have offered worried travelers flexible cancellation policies.

So how is America’s transit industry responding to coronavirus? Denver’s RTD says it is “wiping down its handrails” once a day. That’s reassuring, so long as each bus and rail vehicle only carries one passenger a day.

Seattle’s Sound Transit’s trains presumably sometimes carry more than 250 people at a time, but Governor Inslee has exempted them from the 250 limit (of course; transit gets exemptions from all the rules everyone else has to follow). The agency is firmly responding to the crisis by “putting posters on vehicles reminding everyone to follow critical health guidelines.” That’ll stop the epidemic in its tracks! Continue reading →

January Transit Ridership Up 5.1 Percent

By | | Transportation, Useful Data
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Transit ridership in January 2020 was 5.1 percent greater than the same month in 2019, according to data released last week by the Federal Transit Administration. Ridership actually grew in a slight majority of the nation’s largest urban areas — 28 out of 50.

Is this the first sign of a turnaround for the transit industry? Possibly. But it is more likely a reflection of the extremely mild winter that United States has enjoyed this year. Due to snow and ice storms, January normally has the lowest ridership of any month of the year except February.

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Public Agencies Drag Their Wheels on PTC

By | | Transportation
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Positive-train control is an exercise in futility. Almost 900 people were killed in railroad accidents in 2018, and positive-train control wouldn’t have saved more than, perhaps, ten of them. Yet Congress imposed this multi-billion-dollar cost on the nation’s railroads.

Now the Federal Railroad Administration says that all but eight railroads are in compliance with the law. What does it say that five of those eight are government owned? The Alaska Railroad, New Jersey Transit, New Mexico’s Rail Runner, Chicago’s Metra, and TEXRail all “are at risk of not fully implementing a PTC system” by the latest deadline, which is the end of this year.

The passengers that railroads carry lots are exactly the people that the law was written to protect. Congress wrote the law in response to a 2008 collision between a Los Angeles Metrolink passenger train and a freight train that killed 25 people. Continue reading →

St. Louis Streetcar Dies a Noisy Death

By | | Transportation
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Built at a cost of $51 million, St. Louis’ streetcar line made its last run in December, 2019 when the organization operating it ran out of funds. Fittingly, it broke down on its very last run and its passengers had to walk the last few blocks of the route.

Built at a cost of $51 million, the trolley opened in November, 2018 after a decade of planning and construction. Proponents predicted it would carry 400,000 riders in its first year. In fact, it carried only about 20,000 and fare revenues didn’t come close to covering operating costs.

Streetcar lovers hoped that St. Louis’ regional transit agency, which can’t seem to decide whether to call itself Metro (the name used by numerous other transit agencies) or Bi-State (which is boring but at least original), would take over the streetcar. Last week, Bi-State’s CEO said he was prepared to take it over provided he could require every business along the line to buy a monthly pass for all of their employees. Continue reading →

November Ridership Down 0.3 Percent

By | | Transportation, Useful Data
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Transit ridership in November 2019 was 0.3 percent lower than the same month in 2018, according to data released last week by the Federal Transit Administration. Ridership in January through November 2019 was 0.1 percent below the same period in 2018.

The downward trend in ridership was in spite of a slight increase in the New York urban area, which sees 44 percent of all transit riders in the country. Without New York, year-to-date ridership was 1.5 percent lower in 2019 than 2018. Thirty-two out of the nation’s top fifty urban areas lost transit riders in 2019 to date.

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New York MTA Challenges Artist over Map

By | | Transportation
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New York’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority is in a heap of financial trouble. It is more than $40 billion in debt; it has a $60 billion maintenance backlog; plus it has more than $20 billion in unfunded health care obligations.

Instead of addressing these problems, the MTA is going after an artist named Jake Berman for violating the MTA’s copyright by making and selling a map of MTA’s subway network.

The MTA says that Berman’s map looks like the official MTA map, which is to be expected since they are both mapping the same thing. Berman’s map looks like an abstract version of the subway system known as the Vignelli map, which MTA wasn’t even using until two years after Berman started distributing his map on the web. Continue reading →

October Transit Ridership Down 1.6%

By | | Transportation, Useful Data
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The nation’s transit industry carried 1.6 percent fewer riders in October 2019 than it did in the same month in 2018, according to the latest monthly data release from the Federal Transit Administration. Ridership fell for light rail, hybrid rail, and most kinds of buses, but grew for commuter rail and heavy rail. October had the same number of work days in 2018 and 2019, so the decline in ridership can’t be blamed on a difference in work days.

Ridership declined in 31 of the nation’s 50 largest urban areas. The numbers show an increase for Dallas-Ft. Worth, but that’s due to a change in the method of counting bus riders in Dallas, so in reality ridership probably declined in 32 of the nation’s 50 largest regions.

In terms of percent, the biggest drops were in New Orleans (-17.1%), Louisville (-12.6%), Phoenix (-11.8%), Boston (-10.3%), and Virginia Beach-Norfolk (-9.9%). In actual numbers, the biggest declines were in Boston (-3.6 million riders), Chicago (-2.8 million or -5.2%), Los Angeles (-2.3 million or -4.7%), Philadelphia (-1.4 million or -4.3%), and Atlanta (-1.0 million or -7.9%). Phoenix, San Francisco Oakland, Minneapolis-St. Paul, San Juan, and Cleveland all lost more than 200,000 riders. Continue reading →