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Monthly Archives: December 2016

2015 Transit Data

By | | Transportation, Useful Data
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As I promised yesterday, I’ve compiled what I consider to be the most important data in the 2015 National Transit Database into one spreadsheet. These data include trips, passenger miles, vehicle revenue miles & hours, weekday trips, fares, operating costs, maintenance costs, capital costs, BTUs of energy consumption, and grams of carbon dioxide emissions.

The 2015 database is expanded from previous years, which just included data from transit systems in major urban areas over 50,000 people. The 2015 data also include transit systems in minor urban areas of under 50,000 people, rural areas, and Indian reservations. The major urban area data fill the first 2,066 lines of the spreadsheet, while the rest fill the next 1,549 lines. The major urban areas accounted for 10.377 billion transit trips in 2015, while the smaller areas accounted for a mere 128 million trips.

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New Transit Data

By | | Transportation, Useful Data
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The Federal Transit Administration has posted 2015 transit data as part of the National Transit Database. However, the Department of Transportation’s new web sites have made downloading data fairly tedious.

To save you time, I’ve downloaded the data and then uploaded them in two zip files. First is the Historic Time Series showing data from 1991 through 2015. Second is a more detailed 2015 database, providing safety, energy, and other detailed data not found in the historic time series. Each of these files is between 10 and 11 megabytes in size.

For simple things such as capital costs, operating costs, fares, trips, and passenger miles, the historic time series is an excellent source of information. The most useful files are table 2.1, “operating expenses and services,” which has separate sheets for operating costs, fares, vehicle revenue miles and hours, trips, and passenger miles, and table 3.1, “uses of capital costs,” which has capital expenses. All of the sheets in these two tables break down data by transit agency and mode. Unfortunately, the capital expense sheet does not break down the difference between new projects and maintenance of existing projects.

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More Fake News from New York Times

By | | Transportation
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Americans are expected to buy a record number of cars in 2016. The American Community Survey says that the share of American workers taking cars to work grew from 86.3 percent in 2010 to 89.7 percent in 2015. So naturally, the New York Times says that America is “over the whole car thing.” The story is illustrated by a photo of riders on a rather empty Los Angeles subway, one of the least-used subways in America.

Despite the misleading illustration, the gist of the article is not that Americans are abandoning cars for transit but that they might abandon car ownership for car sharing. What the Times misses is that a car that is shared might travel 75,000 miles per year, compared with around 15,000 for a privately owned car. That means that shared cars will need to be replaced every three or four years instead of every 20 years.

In other words, car sharing doesn’t mean lower sales for automakers. It might give automakers that can rapidly introduce new products with new technologies a new advantage over manufacturers with longer product cycles. It will also reduce the demand for parking lots.

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Suffer the Auto Drivers

By | | Housekeeping, Transportation
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Jesus said, “Suffer little children to come unto me, and forbid them not: for of such is the kingdom of God.” Today, people use the word suffer in a very different way, as in, “Make automobile users suffer, and forbid them if you can, for of such is the work of the devil.” Some mental conditions like sans prescription viagra find out here stress, anxiety and depression could also lead to erection issues in males. This is an incredible drug that most of the men are the culprits and they face this issue. http://www.midwayfire.com/?product=6345 generic cialis usa Here are buy generic levitra some reasons why you should have sex with your partner every day. Many online pharmacies are viagra no prescription http://www.midwayfire.com/apparatus.asp claiming to provide version of the same drug at a lesser price. At least, that is the declared attitude of the Broward County Planning Council, as reported by the (Ft. Lauderdale) Sun-Sentinel.

The Antiplanner wishes everyone a happy holiday and hopes no one has to suffer this weekend no matter how they decide to travel. News will be slow next week so postings may be light.

To Depreciate or Not to Depreciate

By | | Transportation
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The Antiplanner has previously argued that Amtrak uses “accounting tricks” to make the Northeast Corridor appear profitable and the system as a whole appear to cover most of its operating expenses out of revenues. The most important of these tricks is that it appears to count maintenance as a capital cost. As a 2001 Congressional Research Service report noted, “Under generally accepted accounting principles, maintenance is considered an operating expense,” but Amtrak excludes it when it compares operating revenues and expenses.

Recently, I met with an Amtrak official who explained that the situation is a little more complicated than I described. Historically, he said, railroads had counted maintenance against revenues when calculating their bottom lines, but this led some railroads to defer maintenance in order to improve their apparent profitability. As I understood his explanation, the Interstate Commerce Commission corrected this several decades ago by changing the accounting rules so that maintenance would be included in capital costs. This eliminated any incentive to defer maintenance.

I sort of understood that, but I’m not an accountant, so I looked up the history of ICC accounting rules. The best explanation was in a 2007 paper in the Accounting Historians Journal called “The End of Betterment Accounting.”

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Light Rail Reduces Property Values

By | | Transportation
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Rail advocates love to claim that light rail and streetcars increase nearby property values even if hardly anyone rides them. According to their theory, the permanence of the rail line gives developers and potential buyers or tenants a sense of security that transit will be there when they need it.

This isn’t true in the case of the Norfolk light rail, a.k.a., the Tide. According to a study by economists at the Cleveland Federal Reserve Bank, Norfolk’s light rail actually reduced property values.

Rail transit, notes the study, could increase values because “homeowners could benefit from increased accessibility and transit related economic development.” On the other hand, “homes in a close proximity to rail transit could experience disamenity effects from crime, noise and parking issues.” Whatever the cause, the study found that “properties within 1,500 meters experienced a decline in sales price of nearly 8 percent.” At least in this case, the study concluded, “accessibility benefits do not outweigh apparent local costs.”

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Aussie Housing Bubble

By | | Housing
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That sound you hear the next time you go to the beach (at least on the West Coast) may be the Australian housing bubble popping. After Hong Kong, Sydney is rated the second-least affordable housing market in the world (see page 12), with median home prices more than twelve times median household incomes–and that’s based on 2014 data. Prices since then have gone up much faster than incomes.

As of September, prices in the country as a whole are 7.2 times incomes; that’s more than all but a handful of urban areas in the United States. Home prices and price-to-income ratios have both risen sharply since 2000. The country’s housing stock is worth nearly US$4.5 trillion, or roughly 20 percent of the U.S. housing market, which is pretty high for a country that only has 7.5 percent of the U.S. population.

Economists have been expecting Australian home prices to collapse for some time, and it hasn’t happened yet. But the UBS Housing Bubble Index ranks Sydney as the fourth-riskiest housing market in the world, after Vancouver, London, and Stockholm.

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Should We Be Paranoid About Connected Vehicles?

By | | Transportation
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Last week, the National Highway Traffic Safety Commission (NHTSC) formally proposed to mandate that all new cars be equipped with “vehicle-to-vehicle” (V2V) communications, also known as connected-vehicle technology. This would allow vehicles stuck in traffic to let other vehicles know to take alternate routes. It would also allow the governments–or hackers–to take control of your car anytime they want.

The good news is that the Trump Administration will take office before NHTSC has a chance to put this rule into effect, and there is a good chance that Trump will kill it. The bad news is that this rule will feed the paranoia some people have over self-driving cars.

This article, for example, considers self-driving cars to be a part of the “war on the automobile” because they offer an “easy way to track the movements of individuals in society.” In fact, the writer of the article is confusing self-driving cars with connected vehicles. As the Antiplanner noted as recently as last week, none of the at least 20 companies working on self-driving cars or software, as far as I can tell, are making V2V an integral part of their systems. This is mainly because they don’t trust the government to install or maintain the infrastructure needed to make it work but also because self-driving cars don’t need that technology.

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DC Metro Rail Far from Fixed

By | | Transportation
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Washington Metro has been interrupting service for various “safety surges” (they call them “surges” because it sounds better than “slowdowns”), but according to the Federal Transit Administration it has a lot more work to do. The FTA says that the rail system’s power supply is “in a deteriorated condition” and the tunnels and tracks have numerous defects that haven’t even all been identified, much less put on the schedule to be fixed.

Not surprisingly, the American Public Transportation Association’s latest ridership report reveals that Metro ridership in the second quarter of 2016 was 11.5 percent less than the same quarter the year before. As the Antiplanner has previously noted, this decline took place before the delays caused by the maintenance work, so most of it is because people have found other means of transportation due to Metro Rail’s low reliability.

Washington is not alone. Rail rapid transit systems in Boston, Chicago, and Philadelphia are just as bad off, and New York’s and San Francisco’s aren’t far behind. APTA’s president even issued a rather desperate-sounding op-ed begging for money to repair obsolete and dying forms of transportation.

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Is Waymo Way More than Google Cars?

By | | Transportation
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Google has spun off its self-driving car programs into a subsidiary called Waymo (which is apparently short for “a new WAY forward for MObility”), and Forbes celebrates by claiming that this is “waymo” than just a car. In fact, the real significance is that, by moving self-driving cars out of the company’s X Lab research division, Google is signaling that its technology is sophisticated enough that it is ready to start working on sales and not just research.

Uber has gotten headlines by starting a self-driving car-sharing service in San Francisco without getting permission from the state. This was supposed to be similar to the service it has going in Pittsburgh, where it is legal. The state of California immediately ordered Uber to shut down its service. (When someone documented Uber vehicles running red lights, the company blamed it on the drivers, not the self-driving technology.)

This is ironic because California’s self-driving car law was passed at Google’s instigation to allow for experiments like this. But the state passed regulations that were stricter than Google expected, so now even Google is doing most of its experimentation in places like Texas, which hasn’t passed a self-driving car law. Legal scholars say that operating a self-driving car is legal in most states so long as a licensed driver is behind the wheel ready to take over if necessary (which is how Uber is running its trial in Pittsburgh and planned to do it in San Francisco). But the California law is much more stringent.

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