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Mythbusting or Mythmaking?

By | | Transportation
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The American Public Transportation Association (APTA) is circulating what claims to be a mythbusting report about recent declines in transit ridership. As it is based mostly on interviews with 35 transit CEOs, however, it does more mythmaking than mythbusting. Other than the interviews, its only real data analysis looks back at transit ridership since 1992.

Based on these ridership data, the report argues that the recent declines in ridership are merely some sort of natural cycle of declines and increases. Similar declines were seen after 1992, 2002, and 2007, all of which were followed by recoveries.

The interviews found that transit CEOs weren’t too worried about the declines. Of course, why should they be when most of their money comes from people other than transit riders? To the extent that they were worried, the CEOs blamed the declines mainly on low gas prices, while only three of the 35 CEOs considered ride sharing to be “a root cause of ridership decline.” In fact, the CEOs were more concerned about how the increased congestion caused by ride-sharing vehicles was slowing down transit buses and thereby indirectly discouraging ridership. Continue reading →

Dublin Learns the Joys of Streetcars

By | | Transportation, Urban areas
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It cost $433 million for 3.66 miles, or $118 million a mile. It’s slower than walking, at least for some trips. It significantly increased street congestion and has had an especially “negative impact on other forms of public transport,” namely buses. What is it? Dublin’s new Cross-City Tram.


Note that the videographer had to speed up some scenes so people wouldn’t lose patience with watching the slow-moving tram.

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Cycling Good and Bad

By | | Transportation
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Canadian environmentalist Lawrence Solomon believes that cities have gone too far in promoting cycling. Taking lanes from cars and giving them to bicycles may be good for cyclists, but are a waste of space because the lanes end up moving far fewer people per hour than they did when they were open to cars. Writing in the Financial Post, Solomon quotes a member of Parliament saying that London’s cycle superhighways that I found convenient when touring England last year have done more damage to the city than “almost anything since the Blitz.”

Solomon has a history of opposing “policies that discriminate against the bicycle.” But that is quite different from supporting policies that discriminate against cars and trucks. By increasing traffic congestion, converting auto lanes to bicycle lanes increases pollution, which is especially harmful to cyclists.

I’ve reached the same conclusions and it’s refreshing to see I’m not the only one. I’ve always contended that bicycles and automobiles were compatible and there was no need to favor one over the other. Like Solomon, I object when I find traffic signals that respond to cars but ignore bicycles and to bridges and tunnels designed for autos with no room for bicycles. But I don’t believe that major thoroughfares should be reconstructed to favor a few cyclists over the vastly more numerous automobiles. Continue reading →

$34.50 Toll for 10 Miles

By | | Transportation, Urban areas
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Virginia introduced tolls to high-occupancy lanes on Interstate 66 in suburban Washington DC, and the tolls the first day reached $34.50 for a ten-mile drive. Some people think this is excessive.

What the articles may not reveal is that the high-occupancy lanes offer toll-free travel for any vehicle with two or more people. Most high-occupancy/toll (HOT) lanes only give a free ride to vehicles with three or more people. So what has happened on I-66 is that the two-or-more vehicles are pretty much filling up the lane. With room for only a handful of single-occupancy vehicles, the tolls are set high to keep the lane from getting congested.

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The Continuing Transit Apocalypse

By | | Transportation
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The Utah Transit Authority (UTA) has come up with a creative explanation for why its ridership is dropping. It seems Salt Lake police have started something called Operation Rio Grande aimed at arresting drug dealers and other criminals near downtown Salt Lake. Many of those drug dealers were apparently regular light-rail users, so their incarceration has significantly reduced UTA ridership. Or so UTA says.

UTA hopes to gain new riders once the system appears to be safer. But it is forecasting “stagnant” ridership for the next year, which may actually be optimistic.

Meanwhile, reporters in Hawaii have noticed a drastic decline in ridership on Honolulu’s bus system, which on a per-capita basis is one of the most popular in the nation. Local transit officials profess to believe that bus ridership will recover when the city’s rail line opens. That’s pretty unlikely, however, both because they don’t even have funding to complete the rail line and because bus ridership has dropped when new rail lines opened in nearly every other city. Continue reading →

Another Nail in Transit’s Coffin

By | | Transportation
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A light-rail train in Minneapolis derailed last week, forcing Metro Transit to bus riders around the train for several hours. The Phoenix light rail is suffering from major problems due to homeless people, leading the agency to try to force people off the trains.

But the biggest hit against transit is the me-too movement that encourages women to speak out against sexual harassment and other sex crimes. “The me-too movement is a public transportation issue,” says Washington Post writer Martine Powers. “If you’re a woman who rides public transportation, you’re almost guaranteed to experience the kinds of demeaning or threatening encounters that fit squarely within the bounds of the #MeToo conversation.”

The good news is that women are more likely to report such assaults than they were a few years ago. Powers notes that reports of sexual harassment on the Washington Metro system are up 65 percent in 2017 over 2016. Similarly, reports of sex crimes on the New York City subway have gone up 50 percent in the last three years. We can hope that these increases are because women are more willing to speak out and not because harassment is actually increasing. Continue reading →

Death by Cell Phone App

By | | Transportation
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The Antiplanner has previously noted the frightening increase in highway fatalities in the last few years and suggested it might be related to growing traffic congestion. An alternative view is presented in a new paper by researchers at Purdue University titled “Death by Pokémon Go.” The paper found that the release of the Pokémon Go game led to a “disproportionate increase in vehicular crashes and . . . fatalities in the vicinity of locations, called Poke?Stops, where users can play the game while driving.”

After mysteriously collapsing by 25 percent between 2005 and 2010–the biggest five-year decline in 60 years–the number of fatalities remained roughly constant at around 32,500 for five years. But between 2014 and 2016, they grew by 15 percent, or nearly 4,800 deaths. While one computer game isn’t responsible for all 4,800 deaths, the study suggests that the growth of cell phone apps–from 800 iPhone apps in 2008 to more than 2 million today–and related distracted driving could be responsible for much of the increase.

Comparing 2016 fatalities with those from 2005 shows a 14 percent decline overall. However, the decline for occupants of motor vehicles is much larger, while non-occupant fatalities actually increased. Continue reading →

The Worst Reason for Subsidizing Amtrak

By | | Transportation
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There are a lot of bad reasons for subsidizing Amtrak: it provides a vital service to small towns (how vital can it be when only a handful of people get on or off the train in any of those towns each day?); it saves energy (extending the tax credit to the Prius and other low-mpg vehicles would save more energy for less money); it relieves congestion (how congestion is there between Wolf Point and Glasgow, Montana?). But the worst reason was laid out a couple of days ago in a New York Times op-ed: Amtrak’s dining car will heal our political divisions.

On a 9,000-mile trip on six Amtrak trains, songwriter Gabriel Kahane learned that, when you eat in the dining car, you are often seated with other riders. Where most of our digital world “finds us sorting ourselves neatly into cultural and ideological silos,” the dining car “acts, by some numinous, unseen force, as a kind of industrial-strength social lubricant.”

In other words, he met people whose politics were very different from his–“abhorrent, dangerous, and destructive”–and discovered they were still human beings. “That ability to connect across an ideological divide seemed predicated on the fact that we were quite literally breaking bread together.” This made him “wonder if the train might be a salve for our national wound, bringing us into intimate conversation with unlikely interlocutors, and allowing us to see each other as human rather than as mere containers for ideology.” Continue reading →

2016 Highway Statistics Posted

By | | Transportation, Useful Data
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The Federal Highway Administration has started publishing its 2016 Highway Statistics, including the latest data on highway miles, miles of driving, and road conditions. Most financial data are not yet available nor are driving data broken down by urban areas, but these should appear soon.

The data show that the number of bridges considered “structurally deficient” declined by nearly 5 percent from 58,791 in 2015 to 56,007 in 2016, continuing a trend that goes back to at least 1990, when 137,865 were considered deficient. The last American highway bridge to collapse due to a maintenance failure was Tennessee’s Hatchie River Bridge in 1989. I suspect that failure led the Federal Highway Administration to increase its monitoring of bridge conditions to encourage states to keep them maintained.

The new data also show that pavements in 2016 were slightly less rough than in 2015. The improvement was not uniform, however. The data indicate that pavements in Arkansas were much rougher in 2016 than in 2015, and the difference was so great that I suspect either a data error or someone in Arkansas was misreporting the data before 2016. Continue reading →

Tilting at Straw Men

By | | Transportation, Urban areas
6 Comments

So, your proposal to build light rail in Nashville has been slammed both locally and nationally. What do you do? Why, expand the proposal, increasing the expense from $5.2 to $5.6 billion.

You also defend your plan by setting up straw-men arguments against it and attacking those arguments rather than the valid criticisms of light rail. According to “transit skeptics,” says Nashville Mayor Megan Barry, “transit ridership has been declining for decades nationally, Nashville lacks the density for light rail and the rise autonomous vehicles is the answer for Nashville’s traffic.”

She responds that transit ridership has grown considerably since 1995. But, in fact, no one ever argued that transit ridership has been declining for decades. What they (or, in fact, I) argued was that per capita transit ridership has been declining for decades, which it has; that total transit ridership has been declining since 2014; and that the trends that are causing it to decline are not likely to change. Continue reading →