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Monthly Archives: May 2018

FTA Funds Tacoma Streetcar

By | | Transportation
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Sound Transit, which has tens of billions of dollars to build light rail in the Seattle area, announced this week that the Federal Transit Administration granted $75 million to an extension of the Tacoma streetcar line. This was a surprise since the administration’s policy has been not to fund any projects that don’t have signed grant agreements, and by that criteria the Tacoma streetcar doesn’t qualify.

The existing 1.6-mile Tacoma streetcar opened in 2003. Projected to cost $50 million, it ended up costing more than $80 million, or about $50 million per mile (about $66 million a mile in today’s dollars). The project is political pork: built to make Tacoma taxpayers feel like they are getting their fair share of the billions going to build light rail. This is why Sound Transit never calls it a streetcar, instead calling it “Link,” the same name it applies to light rail in Seattle. But the Tacoma line uses the same equipment and trundles along at the same slow speeds as the Portland streetcar.

The Tacoma streetcar has never collected a fare, yet in 2016 it carried fewer than 3,200 riders a day. That’s more than streetcars in Atlanta, Charlotte, Cincinnati, and the District of Columbia, but fewer than Seattle or Portland (which admittedly are longer lines). The new project will extend the existing line by 2.4 miles at a cost of $215 million or about $90 million a mile. Continue reading →

Amtrak in Turmoil

By | | Transportation
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The Antiplanner isn’t alone in suggesting that hiring an airline executive to run Amtrak is a bad idea (at least for Amtrak). Last week, a former Amtrak official (who wishes to remain anonymous) sent a letter to Maryland Senator Chris Van Hollen asking that former Delta CEO Richard Anderson be fired from his current job as CEO of Amtrak. Alternatively, suggested the letter, Anderson should be constrained “taking actions which will jeopardize the
existence of the Amtrak system.”

The letter cites some of the examples mentioned in the Antiplanner post: downgrading of food services and elimination or reduction of special trains and private car moves. But it also notes that Anderson proposes to replace the electric-powered trains between Washington and Boston with diesel trains even though the diesel trains would be slower and cause pollution problems in tunnels into and through New York.

Even more significantly, former Amtrak CEO Joseph Boardman wrote a letter defending long-distance trains and specifically the Chicago-Los Angeles Southwest Chief. One of Anderson’s controversial policies is to demand that railroads install positive-train control by the end of this year. The train most threatened by this may be the Southwest Chief, as the Kansas-Colorado-New Mexico portion of that route that goes over Ratón Pass is on tracks that BNSF doesn’t even want to maintain for freight, much less spend hundreds of millions for passenger trains that it earns little profit from. Continue reading →

Atlanta’s Transit Future

By | | Transportation
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“Mass transit is collapsing everywhere,” argues an op-ed in The Hlll. One such collapse is taking place in Atlanta, where ridership has fallen more than 20 percent since 2008.

In 1980, transit carried more than 9 percent of Atlanta-area commuters to work, and ridership peaked in 1985 at 155.7 million trips. Since then, the Metropolitan Atlanta Regional Transit Agency has added 28 miles of rail lines, more than doubling the length of its heavy-rail system. The region’s population has grown from less than 1.9 million to 5.0 million people, an increase of 166 percent.

So how many rides did transit carry in 2017? About 131.3 million, a 15 percent decline from 1985. Worse, transit trips per capita crashed from 82 in 1985 to just 26 in 2017, a 68 percent decline, while transit carried just 3.8 percent of commuters to work in 2016. Continue reading →

The Utah Transit Authority Is No More

By | | Transportation, Urban areas
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The Utah Transit Authority is dead. Long live the Transit District of Utah! Actually, it would be better for taxpayers and most travelers if it didn’t live very long.

“Lavish” is a word that applied to the Utah Transit Authority (UTA), which until last week served Ogden, Salt Lake City, Provo, and Orem. As of 2016, the agency had spent $1.4 billion in capital costs on commuter trains that carried an average of 8,100 round trips per day. That alone is enough to buy a new Toyota Prius for every round-trip rider every three years for the next 20 years. On top of that, fares cover just 15 percent of operating costs.

The people who run the agency are also lavishly paid. A 2014 legislative audit revealed that the agency’s general manager was paid $350,000 a year, including benefits. He wasn’t even the highest-paid person in the agency: the rail service manager was paid more than $450,000. At least one other executive was paid more than $300,000 a year. For comparison, Utah’s governor is paid around $150,000 a year and the head of the state department of transportation receives around $221,000 a year. Continue reading →

Auto Fatalities Declined in 2017

By | | Transportation
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Motor vehicle fatalities declined slightly in 2017, says a new release from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA). Where 37,461 people were killed in traffic accidents in 2016, the number fell to 37,150 in 2017 — not a big decrease, but it is going in the right direction. Since miles of driving grew by 1.2 percent, the fatality rate per billion miles declined even more.

NHTSA doesn’t have the data broken down by kinds of accidents yet, but that didn’t stop the Detroit Free Press from simultaneously publishing a scare-piece claiming that “pedestrian fatalities skyrocket in U.S.” I’m not sure what the news is in this article since it is based on data reported here a full seven months ago.

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Nashville Light-Rail Post Mortem

By | | Transportation
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It’s been a little over a week since Nashville voters rejected that city’s light-rail plan, and the pundits are wringing their hands in despair. Many of them have a common set of assumptions:

  • Rail transit is the only real transit — buses don’t count — so voters who reject rail are rejecting transit itself;
  • Transit relieves congestion, so it is surprising that voters in a congested city would reject spending more on transit;
  • Transit is morally superior to driving and both are subsidized, so the fact that subsidies to transit passenger miles are roughly 100 times greater than to highway passenger miles is irrelevant.

Nashville is “gridlocked,” says Wired magazine, so voters should have supported the plan. But no one except out-of-town reporters really believed that spending at least $5.4 billion building 29 miles of light rail would do anything to relieve congestion. Continue reading →

Seattle About to Implode

By | | City planning, News commentary, Urban areas
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As the Antiplanner noted last week, Seattle is the only major city whose transit ridership grew in 2017 because the city has concentrated nearly 300,000 jobs in its downtown area. Yet, as noted earlier this week, Seattle transit ridership is starting to decline. That decline may may rapidly accelerate if the city council approves a proposed so-called “head tax” on all businesses that earn more than $20 million a year, which basically means Amazon and a few other companies.

The proposed tax would charge employers 26 cents per hour that each employee works in the city, or about $500 per full-time employee per year. For Amazon, which has something like 40,000 jobs in Seattle, the tax would amount to around $20 million a year — more than a quarter of total head-tax revenues — for the first couple of years, then go up to $30 million a year. The revenues from the tax would be used to provide affordable housing for homeless people.

Amazon was so perturbed by this that it halted construction on a new office tower it was building in downtown Seattle and threatened to pull all of its employees out of another existing building. When Seattle city councillor Kshama Sawant held an outdoor press conference, laid-off construction workers disrupted the meeting with shouts of “no head tax.” Despite this, members of the city council insist they will approve the tax. Continue reading →

More on March Transit Ridership

By | | Transportation, Useful Data
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Transit is “obsolete and costs taxpayers billions, yet its ridership and productivity continue to decline,” observes an op-ed in Governing magazine, concluding that, “we should stop subsidizing it, saving taxpayers’ tens of billions of dollars a year.” More data supporting this position can be gleaned from the March ridership data recently published by the Federal Transit Administration.

In addition to ridership numbers, the FTA spreadsheet also includes revenue-vehicle miles. I’ve now enhanced that worksheet to include annual, agency, and urban area totals and have uploaded the result. (If you downloaded yesterday’s file after about noon Pacific Time, it already includes this update.)

Previous data have shown that, as some cities build light rail, they cut bus service, thus losing more bus passengers than they gain in rail riders. That may influence March numbers, but it is not the only factor. For example, Los Angeles Metro increased light-rail service by 3.7 percent while it cut bus service by 2.7 percent. Yet both bus and light rail lost riders: light rail declining 7.5 percent and bus 9.6 percent. Continue reading →

March Transit Ridership Drops 5.9%

By | | Transportation, Useful Data
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Some have blamed declining transit ridership on low gas prices, but gasoline was about 10 percent more expensive in March 2018 than March 2017, yet March transit ridership was 5.9 percent less than in the same month in 2017. To be fair, March had one fewer work day in 2018 than in 2017, which could account for some of the decline, but January had one more work day in 2018 than 2017, and ridership still declined.

The Federal Transit Administration released March ridership numbers over the weekend. As usual, the Antiplanner has supplemented the raw numbers with a spreadsheet that totals ridership by years (2002-2018) in columns GW through HM; by major modes in rows 2116 through 2122; by transit agency in rows 2131-3129; and by the 200 largest urbanized areas in rows 3131 through 3330.

Previous releases showed that transit has been declining in nearly all major urban areas except Seattle and, in some recent months, Houston. March’s numbers are even more dire, as ridership declined in all of the top 38 urbanized areas including Houston and Seattle. Of the top 50 urban areas, ridership grew only in Providence (by a mere 0.1 percent), Nashville (by a respectable 8.2 percent), Hartford (8.1 percent), and Raleigh (by 3.5 percent). Continue reading →

The Latest Non-Crisis

By | | Transportation
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Transit ridership is declining almost everywhere in the United States, partly because there are increasing alternatives to transit that are more convenient, including increased auto ownership and ride sharing. The Journal of Public Transportation has devoted a whole issue to the future of transit, as if to reassure the industry that it has one (most of the writers were optimistic, but at least one was more skeptical).

So naturally, transit advocates have come up with a new reason to spend more taxpayer dollars on a dying industry: transit deserts. According to someone’s painstaking but questionable analysis, the “demand for transportation exceeds supply” in large portions of major cities, including San Francisco (13.5% of which is supposed to be a transit desert), Philadelphia (8.5%), New York City (7.0%), and Chicago (6.8%).

Supposedly, they used the American Community Survey to count the number of “transit-dependent people” (people over the age of 12 who can’t drive) in each neighborhood and compared it with the transit services to that neighborhood. But the American Community Survey doesn’t ask about transit-dependency, so they had to use proxies that probably miss a lot of things. For example, people who can’t drive may have other people in their households who drive for them, or they may have ready access to taxis or ride-hailing services. Even if transit served their neighborhood, they might not use it. Continue reading →