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Monthly Archives: January 2019

Blowing Up the MTA

By | | Transportation
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New York governor Andrew Cuomo says he wants to “blow up the MTA.” He is angry because MTA had decided to shut down the L subway line, one of the most heavily used lines in Brooklyn, for 15 months for repairs without telling him that it could have done the repairs while still running the trains, albeit with some delays.

Cuomo claims he went along with the proposed shutdown, which some called “L-mageddon,” until an angry constituent asked him why he hadn’t considered the alternative of keeping the train going on a limited basis. He had replied that he was relying on the experts to tell him what could be done, but the constituent pointed out that the experts said the state couldn’t replace the Tappan Zee Bridge, but he found a way to do so.

So Cuomo went back to the MTA which said yes, it was possible to keep the trains going while doing the repairs. After adopting that plan, Cuomo told the New York Daily News that he wants to “blow up” the MTA for not being accountable to anyone. Continue reading →

Purple Line Will Be Late and Overbudget

By | | Transportation
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Local officials are “astounded,” astounded I tell you, that Maryland’s Purple Line will be nearly a year late and at least $215 million over budget. The line is being built under a public-private partnership contract, which transit officials claim saves money. But apparently they forgot to write into the contract that there could be no cost overruns. (In fact, public-private partnership contracts are mainly a way of avoiding legal debt limits, since private partner borrowings don’t count against the public partner’s debt even though the contract obligates the public to pay the private partner enough to repay the debt.)

Until recently, the state of Maryland, which is overseeing the project, has claimed that the line would open on time, that is, by March 2022. But now the private partners have informed the state that it cannot possibly open before February, 2023.

The 16-mile light-rail line was supposed to cost $2.0 billion, which was a condition of getting support for the project by Maryland Governor Hogan. But the Federal Transit Administration says it will really cost $2.4 billion, which includes some costs that the Maryland Transit Authority hid from the governor. That’s at least $500 million more than it was expected to cost back in 2011. The latest overrun will increase the total cost by nearly 10 percent. Continue reading →

The APTA Solution to Transit’s Decline

By | | Transportation
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The American Public Transportation Association issued a press release last week announcing that transit ridership in the third quarter of 2018 had declined, something that will not be news to Antiplanner readers. But APTA held out some glimmerings of hope.

Among other success stories cited by APTA, Grand Rapids transit rejuvenated ridership on its least-used bus route, increasing boardings from 50 rides a day to 1,100. Riverside Transit in California increased its ridership by 2 percent. How did they accomplish this? Grand Rapids quadrupled service and cut fares to zero. Riverside cut fares to 25 cents. Other transit agencies, such as Seattle’s Sound Transit, saw modest ridership gains after boosting service.

In short, the key to transit’s recovery is to increase costs and decrease revenues. This must be the reasoning behind the streetcar movement: streetcars have much higher capital, operating, and maintenance costs than buses and most streetcars are so poorly utilized that many cities give away rides for free. APTA data doesn’t separate streetcars from light rail, but FTA third-quarter data show that streetcar ridership has grown 18 percent in the last five years, mainly because so many new streetcar lines have opened. However, ridership fell between 2017 and 2018, so the transit industry needs to keep opening new high-cost, low-revenue lines to keep up the momentum. Continue reading →

Why Was the Tappan Zee Bridge So Costly?

By | | Transportation
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New York completed construction of a new Tappan Zee Bridge, allowing the state to implode the old one this past weekend. But a comparison of the two bridges raises the question: why is bridge construction so expensive?

The original bridge cost $81 million in 1950 dollars. Using a GDP deflator, that’s less than $700 million in today’s dollars. Yet the replacement bridge cost $4 billion, well over five times as much.

First, it should be noted that the bridge is in a stupid location where the Hudson River is three miles wide, while a few miles downstream it is just a mile wide. That significantly increased the cost of both bridges, but the location was selected due to politics: under an interstate compact, all bridge tolls across the Hudson within 25 miles of the Statue of Liberty go to the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. New York Governor Dewey wanted to keep the tolls to help pay for other roads, so he chose a location just two-tenths of a mile outside the 25-mile radius. Continue reading →

A $2 Billion Streetcar for St. Paul

By | | Transportation
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Milwaukee opened a new streetcar line at the beginning of last November, and it is attracting fewer than 2,300 trips a day. Since it makes 144 one-way trips a day, that’s an average of fewer than 16 people per trip.

Fares are currently zero, so if they ever start charging fares — they’re supposed to after a year, but some that were supposed to eventually charge are still free — ridership will fall even lower. Despite this, the city has already committed $20 million to extend the line (though the Federal Transit Administration rejected an application for matching funds).

Meanwhile, in St. Paul, momentum is growing to have a streetcar there as well. “I’ve never met anyone who is nostalgic for a bus,” says an official with the St. Paul Streetcar Museum. Of course, if you were nostalgic for buses, you wouldn’t go to a streetcar museum, would you? Instead, you might go to the Museum of Bus Transportation in Hershey, Pennsylvania. Or, closer to St. Paul, you might go to Hibbing, Minnesota, birthplace of Greyhound and home of the Greyhound Bus Museum. Continue reading →

What If We Free San Francisco?

By | | Housing, Regional planning, Urban areas
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Someone recently alerted me to a 2017 article in Forbes in which my friend Scott Beyer, who considers himself a market urbanist, asks, “How would San Francisco develop under an open market?” His incorrect answer is that it would be even denser than today.

He bases that on the fact that in parts of the Bay Area where housing prices are highest, population growth is low. The latter, he says, is due to NIMBYism preventing construction of new housing. Get rid of NIMBYism (by getting rid of zoning), and new housing would spring up denser than ever before.

Beyers is correct that NIMBYism is a real problem. But it is not the main reason why Bay Area housing is expensive. As Bay Area developer Nicolas Arenson pointed out in a presentation to the Metropolitan Transportation Commission in May, 2015, high-density housing costs more to build per square foot than low-density housing — up to 650 percent more depending on the density. Land also costs more in areas that are already developed. As if that’s not enough, Arenson adds that dense housing “sells at a discount” to single-family homes. Continue reading →

Chicago-St. Louis HSR Is a Dud

By | | Transportation
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When President Obama announced that high-speed rail would be a part of the 2009 economic stimulus program, Illinois immediately applied for federal funding for a high- (really moderate-) speed rail route from Chicago to St. Louis. According to the application (54 megabytes), the state would double track the existing line, owned mostly by Union Pacific, and run trains at up to 110 miles per hour. It would also increase the frequency of those trains from five to eight per day.

The state predicted that ridership would more than double from 521,000 trips year in 2008 to 1,210,000 trips in 2014, the first full year of operation. By 2018, the fifth full year, ridership would further increase to 1,339,000. (The application is actually inconsistent about how many riders were carried in 2008; page 33 says 521,000 while page 59 says 881,000. According to Amtrak, it was 476,000.)

So how well has that worked out? According to Amtrak’s FY 2018 performance report, ridership on the Chicago-St. Louis trains had grown to 586,200 trips in 2018. That’s 23 percent more than Amtrak’s number for 2008, but 56 percent short of the projected ridership. Continue reading →

November Transit Ridership Down 5.3%

By | | Transportation, Useful Data
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Transit ridership in November 2018 was 5.3 percent lower than in the same month of 2017, according to data (7.4-MB Excel spreadsheet) released by the Federal Transit Administration yesterday. Both buses and rail lost more than 5 percent of their riders. These declines are in spite of November having the same number of work days in both years.

The first eleven months of 2018 saw 2.6 percent fewer riders than the same months in 2017. Contrary to claims that bus ridership is declining but rail is not, rail ridership actually declined more in 2018 than bus ridership.

However, it is worth noting that some of the commuter rail numbers are preliminary estimates that don’t look right. Though commuter rail has been doing better than most other modes in previous months, the November report indicates a 15 percent decline from November 2017. Supposedly, Boston commuter ridership fell by 45%, New York’s Metro North, Philadelphia DOT, and commuter lines in Connecticut, south Florida, and San Diego all lost 33 to 35%, and Los Angeles lost 25%. Yet other commuter-rail lines seem unaffected. If these numbers turn out to be in error, I’ll post an update here as soon as possible. Even without commuter rail, heavy rail and light rail both declined, though not by quite as much as bus. Continue reading →

Is There an Urban-Rural Divide?

By | | News commentary
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Political commentators have observed that Americans have increasingly sorted themselves into Red and Blue areas, with blue dominating the cities, red dominating rural areas, and the suburbs still being a mix sometimes referred to as purple. A new study takes a close look at this sort in Oregon.

As an Associated Press article notes in discussing this study, in 1966, the Democratic Party had a majority of voters in every region of Oregon, yet the state elected a Republican governor who won 33 out of 36 counties. By contrast, in 2018 ruralites were 30 percent more likely to be Republican than urbanites, and the winner of the governorship won only seven counties, namely those that were the most urbanized.

The study itself says changes resulted partly from the decline in federal land timber cutting. This left rural areas with high unemployment and resentment against the urban areas that supported the reduced cutting. Continue reading →

Can High-Speed Rail Make Housing Affordable?

By | | Housing, Transportation
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UCLA management professor Jerry Nickerson thinks he has found a solution to California’s housing affordability problems: high-speed rail. Based on years of data, he has concluded that some Japanese who work in Tokyo and other expensive cities make long commutes on high-speed trains to more affordable cities elsewhere in the country.

What a fantastically dumb idea. There are hundreds of thousands of acres of undeveloped private land right next to the Los Angeles and San Francisco-Oakland urban areas. Most of these acres have little agricultural value and those around San Francisco are currently being used as pasture or range land, meaning they support a few head of cattle, while many of the undeveloped acres around Los Angeles probably don’t even support livestock.

So, to protect these lands from development, California should spend $77 billion to $100 billion or more building a high-speed rail line to the Central Valley, which has some of the most productive farm land in the nation, so that houses can be built on that farm land rather than on the range lands around Los Angeles and the Bay Area. Continue reading →