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Monthly Archives: March 2014

Interpreting the Data

By | | News commentary, Transportation
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At nearly 10.7 billion trips, transit ridership in 2013 reached its highest level in 57 years, says the American Public Transportation Association. This increase shows that people are “saying we want these (transit) investments made,” APTA’s president, Michael Melaniphy, told USA Today. Needless to say, by “investments” he means building new rail transit lines.


Any century now, transit is bound to overtake driving. Source: Transit data from APTA, urban driving from the Federal Highway Administration, and urban population from the Census Bureau. Click image for a larger view.

However, a close look at the data shows something entirely different. It turns out that New York City subways alone were responsible for more than 92 percent of the increase in transit ridership. Nationally, ridership grew by 115 million trips; New York City subway ridership grew by 106 million trips. According to the New York Times, the growth in subway ridership resulted from “falling unemployment.”

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Dead Again–This Time For Certain?

By | | Transportation, Urban areas
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The Columbia River Crossing, which was dead, then was alive, now is once more dead. This $3 billion to $4 billion project was going to replace the Interstate 5 bridge across the Columbia between Oregon and Washington, extend light rail into Vancouver, Washington, and rebuild several of the freeway interchanges north and south of the river.

Bridge supporters said it would relieve congestion, but it wasn’t clear how replacing a six-lane bridge with a twelve-lane bridge would relieve congestion when there were only six lanes approaching the bridge from the north and south. Instead, the real goal was to create lots of contracts for bridge builders, rail builders, highway contractors, and various other engineering and construction firms.

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Taxing Commuters Living Abroad

By | | News commentary
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Governing magazine has a great idea for cities that are hard up for cash: tax suburban commuters. After all, those leeches live outside the city but depend on the city to provide them with jobs. Thus, they should pay a tax for a privilege of working in the city.

Just to make sure they get people coming and going, cities like Detroit also want to tax reverse commuters. That is, they want suburban employers to deduct taxes from the pay of their employees who happen to live in Detroit.

These are both great ideas if the goal is to hasten the fiscal demise of the cities. After all, think how well the cities would be doing if all the employers in the cities moved to the suburbs. The cities wouldn’t have to pay to provide urban services to those employers, but they also wouldn’t collect any property or other taxes from the businesses. Would they be better or worse off? If you think they would be worse off losing those jobs, then a commuter tax is redundant since the city is better off having the jobs without the commuter tax. (The same rationale applies to a reverse commuter tax on city residents who work in the suburbs.)

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New-Car Fuel Economy Up 30% in 7 Years

By | | Transportation
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The University of Michigan Transportation Research Institute has kept track of the EPA mileage ratings of all new cars and light trucks (pick ups, SUVs, full-sized vans) sold in the United States since October, 2007. Between that month and February, 2014, the average fuel economy of autos sold grew from 20.1 mpg to 25.2 mpg. While your mileage may vary, this is an incredible record of improvement in fuel economy.

Though we are accustomed to measure fuel economy in miles per gallon, a more appropriate way to compare vehicles is the other way around: gallons (or some other unit of energy) per mile. As Green Car Reports observes, when asked, “Which saves more gasoline, going from 10 to 20 mpg, or going from 33 to 50 mpg?” most people answer the latter but in fact the former is true. In any case, when measured in gallons per mile, new-car fuel economy improved by 30 percent between October 2007 and February 2014.

The Department of Energy hasn’t posted data for 2012 or 2013, but its Transportation Energy Data Book, table 2.13, say that over the seven years from 2005 through 2011, the average BTUs per vehicle mile of all autos on the road declined by 7 percent, from 5,600 to 5,200. Since new cars replace the old fleet at the rate of around 6 percent per year, the 30 percent increase in new-car fuel economy is not immediately seen in the entire fleet, but it will be eventually.

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We Have the Technology

By | | Fish & wildlife
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A recent issue of the New York Times Magazine suggests that the technology for recreating species that have gone extinct in the last few thousand years will soon be available if it is not already. Scientists have already attempted to clone an extinct European wild goat known as a bucardo, and while the results were not successful they were clearly moving in the right direction.


Passenger pigeons in their native habitat, an Iowa woodland, from a diorama in the Denver Museum of Science and Nature. The background to this diorama was painted by Charles Waldo Love. The Flickr photo is by Jessica Lamirand; click image for a larger view.

Species that have been extinct for millions of years, such as dinosaurs, are beyond our reach. But the Times argues that recovery of such species as the passenger pigeon, which once numbered in the billions, and the woolly mammoth should both be possible in the very near future.

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Obama’s Transportation Plan

By | | News commentary, Transportation
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President Obama’s latest transportation “vision” is as unrealistic as Governor Brown’s plan to pay for high-speed rail with cap-and-trade revenues. Obama proposes that Congress spend $302 billion on surface transportation over the next four years, or $75.5 billion a year. This is nearly $25 billion more per year than Congress is spending today, which is already $10 billion more per year than federal surface transportation revenues.

In the 2012 round of transportation reauthorization, the debate was whether to limit spending to actual revenues of about $40 billion a year or continue spending at historic rates of about $50 billion a year. Senate Democrats prevailed at the $50 billion rate, but only by agreeing to limit the bill to just two years instead of the usual six. That compromise expires this year just before the Highway Trust Fund runs out of money due to overspending.

In 2012, revenues (mainly from fuel taxes but also excise taxes on truck tires, trucks, buses, and trailers) in 2012 were $40.2 billion. By law, $5.0 billion of this was dedicated to transit. Congress actually spent $8.2 billion on transit while $41.1 billion nominally went to highways (but in fact some of this also went for transit and other non-highway programs). Spending increased by more than revenues in 2013 and 2014.

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Do the Math, Governor

By | | Transportation
17 Comments

Jerry Brown proposes to use cap-and-trade revenues to help pay for the state’s high-speed rail boondoggle. It’s questionable whether this is legal, and even more questionable whether high-speed trains will actually reduce greenhouse gas emissions after their entire lifecycle emissions are considered.

What everyone seems to be missing, however, is that the cap-and-trade revenues won’t come close to covering the cost of a high-speed rail line. Brown proposes to dedicate $250 million of annual cap-and-trade revenues to the rail line, but even at an unrealistically low 2 percent rate of interest, that won’t even repay $6 billion worth of bonds, much less the $9 billion in bonds that voters approved in 2008 or the far greater amount it will actually take to complete the line.

The media keeps reporting the cost of the high-speed train as $68 billion, when everyone knows that’s only for a moderate-speed train. The most recent estimate of the true high-speed train envisioned by the 2008 ballot measure is $98 billion to $117 billion–and there’s no reason to think that estimate is any more realistic than the previous estimates which started at less than $10 billion.
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