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Monthly Archives: August 2018

This Will Increase Transit Ridership–Not!

By | | Transportation
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A woman videotaped a man exposing himself on a Los Angeles light-rail train. Another woman was “savagely beaten” on a New York subway train. A third woman was stabbed to death and her sister hospitalized at a BART station in Oakland.

These attacks received a lot of publicity, but they are just the tip of the iceberg. Riders on the Los Angeles transit system suffer from several major crimes a day — “major” (“part 1” crimes) meaning homocide, rape, aggravated assault, robbery, or car theft — and a slightly smaller number of minor or “part 2” crimes, meaning simple assaults, vandalism, minor sex offenses, and drunk or disorderly conduct.

The good news is that, starting in July 2017, LA Metro increased the police presence on board its trains, which reduced the total number of crimes from about ten per day to about seven. But some serious crimes continued to increase in number. Continue reading →

Michigan Transit: Don’t Believe the Hype

By | | Transportation
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Michigan transportation officials are relearning the lessons that transit advocates overstate claims for transit improvements and then backpedal when those promises fail to happen. For example, a bus-rapid transit project in Grand Rapids was supposed to economically transform the corridor it serves and carry 7,400 riders per weekday in its first year.

In fact, it carried just 2,200 riders per weekday and the only transformation in the corridor is the empty park-and-ride station parking lots and increased congestion from dedicating traffic lanes to buses that were once open to all vehicles. The transit agency, meanwhile, revised its ridership projection downward to 5,000 trips per weekday and, when it didn’t meet that, claimed it is still “happy” with the results.

Similarly, ridership on Detroit’s streetcar line, called the QLine, was supposed to be 5,000 to 8,000 trips per weekday. In fact, it was just 4,300 trips when it was free, dropping to 2,700 trips after they began charging fares. Continue reading →

MTA Credit Rating Drops

By | | Transportation, Urban areas
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Standard & Poor’s has downgraded the credit rating for the New York Metropolitan Transportation Authority to A. It was two grades higher than that just five months ago. If it falls five more grades, it will be in junk bond territory.

S&P says that it based the downgrade on its assessment of MTA’s preliminary 2019 budget, which calls for spending $32.5 billion on rehabilitation efforts. Although $10 billion of that would come from bond sales, S&P says that MTA lacks the revenues to repay such bonds. If someone doesn’t find a new source of revenues, S&P warns, it will downgrade the agency’s credit rating still further. Lower credit ratings will mean that MTA will have to pay higher interest rates on future debt.

At the end of 2017, MTA’s long-term debt was $38.3 billion, most of which was incurred to address the last maintenance crisis. Since 2017 it has issued about half a billion dollars worth of additional bonds. This doesn’t count another $20 billion in unfunded health-care obligations. Add in $10 billion in planned bond issues for repair and the agency will owe nearly $70 billion. That’s a lot for a system that earns less than $7 billion in annual revenues and spends roughly twice that on operations. Continue reading →

Tampa Petition: Forward into the Past

By | | News commentary, Transportation
1 Comment

Anti-auto activists in Tampa say they have gathered enough signatures to put a measure on November’s ballot increasing sales taxes for Hillsborough County transportation. The news report about the measure claims that 55 percent will be used for roads while 45 percent will be used for transit, but that is only one of the major deceptions behind the measure.

The petition itself lists “improve roads and bridges” as the first goal of the sales tax. But in fact, only a small share of the money would be used to improve (which in transportation parlance means increase the capacity of) roads and none would be used to improve bridges. In fact, the petition specifically states that none of the money can be used to build new roads or bridges or add new lanes to existing roads or bridges. Some money — 14 percent — can be used to improve intersections, increasing their capacity, but that’s it.

The supposed 55-45 split is also wrong. First, it is really only a 54-45 split, as one percent of the money goes to the Hillsborough metropolitan planning organization to do all of its brilliant planning. The remaining 54 percent goes to Hillsborough County and cities within that county (proportional to population), but it won’t all be spent on roads either. In fact, the petition says it can be spent on “roads, bridges, sidewalks, intersections, and public transportation.” Continue reading →

New York Centrally Plans Ride Hailing

By | | Transportation
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Responding in part to the specious claims that ride hailing is increasing urban congestion, New York’s city council voted last week to limit the number of ride-hailing drivers. The council also voted to impose minimum-wage requirements on Uber, Lyft, and other companies even though they contend that their drivers are contractors, not employees.

The Antiplanner is sympathetic to taxi companies who feel their industry has a competitive disadvantage because it is more heavily regulated than Uber and Lyft. I’m not at all sympathetic to the transit industry that gets $50 billion a year in subsidies — that’s around $5 per trip.

Chiropractic for children is painless except when there is an advantage of taking my review here tadalafil india oral jelly. You can orden 50mg viagra even get generous cash for laptop even if it is not working at all. Some people want to indulge in sexual activities but this is a cialis super active completely wrong thinking a normal size of a grape with very little pulp and a big seed. Kamagra 100mg gives desirable results when sexually aroused in 15-30 minutes. best online viagra The solution for taxi drivers is to deregulate the taxis, not to more heavily regulate ride hailing. The minimum-wage requirement is particularly objectionable because, as near as I can tell, minimum-wage laws don’t apply to taxi drivers because they, too, are independent contractors. Continue reading →

Transit Update

By | | Transportation, Useful Data
3 Comments

The Antiplanner has corrected a few very minor errors and added some new calculations to the June 2018 ridership spreadsheet. If you downloaded the spreadsheet I posted Wednesday, you probably should redownload it now.

The new calculations include fiscal year ridership totals for 2012 through 2016. Nationally, ridership peaked in 2014, and has declined in every fiscal year since then. Although the nationwide decline since 2014 was just 7.5 percent, declines in many urban areas were much larger: 29% in Memphis; 27% in Charlotte; 26% in Miami; 25% in Albuquerque; 24% in Cleveland; 22% in St. Louis; 21% in Milwaukee, Sacramento, and Virginia Beach; 20% in Los Angeles.

Transit began falling in some of these urban areas, such as Sacramento and Memphis, much earlier than 2014. With the additional fiscal year data, you can track this decline back to 2012. The calendar year data go back to 2002. Continue reading →

Austin Wants High-Dollar Transit

By | | Transportation, Urban areas
4 Comments

Austin voters have twice rejected light rail at the polls, so naturally the region’s transit agency, Capital Metro, is eager to try again. Earlier this week, it presented a plan to the Austin city council for eleven transit corridors that could cost $6 billion to $8 billion. As if to underscore the agency’s inability to learn from history, it is calling this plan “Project Connect,” the same name it used for the plan that voters defeated by 57 to 43 in 2014.

While Cap Metro deceptively calls light rail “high-capacity transit,” the Austin American-Statesman more accurately calls it “high-dollar” transit. Light rail was rendered obsolete in 1927 when a company called Twin Coach started producing buses that could move more people for far less money than streetcars or light rail.

Bus or rail, now is not the time for Austin to spend a lot of money on transit. Capital Metro lost 20 percent of its riders between 2012 and 2016, and is down another 2.2 percent in the first six months of 2018. Continue reading →

Transit Death Spiral Continues: June Report

By | | Transportation, Useful Data
1 Comment

Nationwide transit ridership was 3.1 percent less in June 2018 than it had been in June 2017. Ridership fell for all major modes of transit, including commuter rail (-2.6%), heavy rail (-2.5%), light rail (-3.3%), and buses (-3.8%). These numbers are from the Federal Transit Administration’s June update to the National Transit Database, which was posted on line yesterday.

June 2018 had one fewer work day than June 2017, which may account for part of the ridership decline. But ridership in the first six months of 2018 was 3.0 percent less than the same months of 2017, and again ridership declined for all major modes of transit.

As usual, the Antiplanner has posted an enhanced spreadsheet that has all of the raw data from the FTA spreadsheet but includes annual totals from 2002 through 2018 in columns GZ through HP, modal totals in rows 2125 through 2131, transit agency totals in rows 2140 through 3139, and urban area totals for the nation’s 200 largest urban areas in rows 3141 through 3340. The same enhancements are included on the “VRM” or vehicle-revenue miles worksheet. Continue reading →

Tracking Housing Affordability

By | | Housing, Useful Data
1 Comment

Zillow reports that “home values grew the most in markets with the strictest land-use regulations.” That’s not exactly news to Antiplanner readers, but it’s nice to hear others confirm it.

Unfortunately, Zillow bases its measure of who has strict land-use regulations on the Wharton Land-Use Regulation Index. This is the best index available but it still has a few problems. First, it is more than ten years old. Second, it only measures the strictness of city zoning, not the strictness of rural zoning near the cities (i.e., growth management). Third, it doesn’t measure how easy it is to get variances or zone changes.

As an example of the problems, Zillow concludes from the Wharton index that Houston and Dallas have “medium strict” regulations, while the least-strict rules are found in places such as Indianapolis and Kansas City. Of course, Houston has no zoning, though it does regulate heights and setbacks. The unincorporated areas around both Dallas and Houston also have no zoning and don’t regulate anything except development in riparian areas. Continue reading →

How Do You Define “Viable”?

By | | Transportation, Urban areas
7 Comments

Among the many wacky proposals for rail transit in this country is a plan to run commuter trains some 50 miles between Las Cruces, New Mexico (population about 100,000) to El Paso, Texas (population around 700,000). Such a project, if it did anything at all, would be most likely to drain jobs from Las Cruces to El Paso. So it is surprising that the main proponent of the project is a New Mexico transit agency, the South Central Regional Transit District (SCRTD).

SCRTD hired a consultant to do a feasibility study that — surprise! — concluded the train was feasible. Of course, to reach this conclusion, the study had to make some heroic assumptions:

  1. That the federal government would be willing to put up a large share of the capital costs, which it doesn’t want to do.
  2. That the state government would also be willing to contribute to the capital costs, which it doesn’t want to do.
  3. That BNSF would be willing to host commuter trains on its rail line, which it doesn’t want to do.
  4. That surveys of people who say they would be happy to ride the train (without telling them about the fares) really mean anything.
  5. That someone will be willing to subsidize most of the $15 to $20 cost per trip, when anyone who already owns a car could drive the distance for well under half that amount.

Continue reading →