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Monthly Archives: February 2019

Cuomo & De Blasio Agree to Fix Subway

By | | Transportation
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New York governor Andrew Cuomo and mayor Bill de Blasio, who have been feuding over who was going to pay to fix the subway system, have finally agreed to impose the cost of fixing the subway on people who don’t ride it..

With great fanfare, they released what they call a “10-point plan,” but it really amounts to two points: first, they are going to impose more charges on auto drivers and spend them on the subways; and second, they are going to try to reduce fare evasion.

The other points involve things like redesigning the MTA bureaucracy, auditing the bureaucracy, creating new committees to oversee the bureaucracy, and giving the bureaucracy a mandate to do more planning, in other words, be more bureaucratic. Somehow they think this shuffling of deck chairs is going to make a difference to MTA’s sinking ship. Continue reading →

Durham: Forward into the Past

By | | Transportation
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Duke University has until tomorrow to agree to donate land to the Durham light-rail project, or the project may die. As a result, project supporters have been trotting out advocates who claim that light rail will benefit the community.

Interestingly, none of those benefits have anything to do with transportation. In particular, some leaders of the black community think that light rail will help revitalize their neighborhoods. In fact, at best it will do nothing for those neighborhoods; more likely, it will lead to subsidized gentrification pushing black residents out.

Ironically, the neighborhood they hope to benefit is one that was previously damaged by past urban-renewal projects. Somehow, it hasn’t occurred to the black leaders that the local government’s plan to tear down existing homes and building expensive transit-oriented developments will be more likely to harm than help the current residents of the neighborhood. Continue reading →

Take a Streetcar to Forest Park–If You’re Rich

By | | Transportation
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Portland’s streetcar is slow and expensive, ridership is stagnant, and fare recovery is negligible. So obviously the solution is to extend the streetcar line. At least, that’s what Portland’s Bureau of Transportation proposes.

Streetcar ridership peaked in 2016 at 4.86 million trips per year. In 2018 they had fallen slightly to 4.79 million. Although the fare is nominally $2, actual revenues amount to just 17 cents per trip. Of course, those revenues don’t come close to covering costs, which average $3.50 per rider. The city spends $39 per streetcar revenue mile running it, where TriMet buses cost only $12.50 per mile.

Despite these flaws, the report proudly announces that the city has received a $1 million grant from the Federal Transit Administration to study the possibility of extending the streetcar a little over a mile to Montgomery Park, which is not a park but a former Montgomery Wards warehouse. The terminus would be near Forest Park, which is a 5,100-acre park with hiking trails in Portland’s West Hills. Continue reading →

If You Can’t Beat Them, Outsubsidize Them

By | | Transportation
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Aiming to compete directly with Uber and Lyft, Oregon’s Lane County Transit District (LTD) has started an app-based bus service in Cottage Grove, which is 22 miles south of Eugene. LTD says that it is making transportation “affordable” because it charges only $1 for the door-to-door service, whereas Uber and Lyft would charge far more.

Called the Connector, the bus service costs riders just $1 to and from anywhere within the Cottage Grove city limits. LTD actually contracts out the service to South Lane Wheels, which is run by the city of Cottage Grove and which already was providing such a service for $3 a ride for up to three miles and roughly a dollar a mile beyond that. Cottage Grove is small enough that no trips within the city limits are three miles long, but South Lane Wheels, unlike the Connector, will go outside the city limits.

According to the city of Cottage Grove’s profile in the National Transit Database, fares collected by South Lane Wheels cover less than 6 percent of its costs. That means the average ride cost taxpayers more than $32 in 2017. Now LTD is adding its own subsidies to those rides. Continue reading →

Brightline Noise

By | | Transportation
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There’s lots of noise coming from Brightline, the company that is operating private passenger trains between Miami and West Palm Beach, with a goal of eventually reaching Orlando. Yet underneath the noise it appears nothing is really happening.

First, last September, Brightline bought XPressWest, a company that has gained permission, but not much funding, to build a high-speed rail line from Las Vegas to Victorville, California, because apparently a lot of people in Victorville (population: 121,000) have to get to Vegas really fast. Brightline supposedly paid $120 million for XPress, but it isn’t clear what it got for that money since XPress didn’t really have any assets other than building permits; most likely Brightline paid the $120 million in some sort of securities.

Second, a couple of months later, Richard Branson’s Virgin Group purchased a “minority interest” in Brightline. Branson has a lot of nice things to say about Brightline and Wes Edens, the co-founder of Fortress Investment Group and the lead supporter of Brightline. Continue reading →

Build Out, Not Up, in Hawaii

By | | Housing
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A new report from the Grassroot Institute urges Hawaii to address housing affordability issues by building out, not up — that is, by allowing low-density development of rural areas rather than building higher densities in existing urban areas. The report notes that Hawaii’s 1961 land-use law has confined development to 35 percent of Oahu, and less than 6 percent of the other islands, which created an artificial scarcity of housing. Building denser housing won’t solve the problem because dense housing costs more than low-density housing.

Click image to download a copy of this report.
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The Antiplanner will be in Honolulu on Monday to talk about this issue at a Grassroot Institute luncheon. If you expect to be in Hawaii that day, you can register for the luncheon on Eventbrite. I hope to see you there.

Analyzing Transit’s Decline

By | | Transportation
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Ride-hailing services are not the principle cause of transit ridership decline, according to a new report from TransitCenter, a New York-based transit cheerleading group. This is based on a survey of 1,700 people in seven different urban areas.

Comparing the results with a similar survey from three years before, the group found a large increase in automobile ownership and that people who increased the number of trips they took by auto decreased the number of trips they took by transit. However, people surveyed who increased their use of ride-hailing services actually increased transit ridership, so TransitCenter concluded that increased auto ownership, not ride hailing, is the cause of transit’s problems.

A major problem with the study is that the people surveyed were not randomly selected — if they were, most of them wouldn’t have been transit riders. The amount of self-selection in the survey biases the results and says little about why the people who weren’t selected for the survey don’t ride transit — and their reasons may be completely different from those who were selected. Continue reading →

INRIX 2018 Congestion Scorecard

By | | Transportation
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INRIX has released its 2018 traffic congestion numbers for more than 200 urban areas around the world. Unfortunately, the company changed its methodology from previous years, so the numbers aren’t comparable. It also isn’t clear how INRIX ranks congestion.

For example, the INRIX web page notes that, “In 2018, Bogata drivers lost 272 hours due to congestion — more than any other city in the world.” Yet Bogata is ranked number three behind Moscow (where drivers lost 210 hours) and Istanbul (where drivers lost only 157 hours). The only other data offered for ranking congestion is the speed of driving in the inner city: in Bogata it was 7 mph compared with 11 in Moscow and 10 in Istanbul. So if Bogata is worse on both criteria, why is it ranked only number 3? Continue reading →

2018 Transit Ridership Down 2.0 Percent

By | | Transportation, Useful Data
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Transit ridership in 2018 was 2.0 percent less than in 2017, according to the December 2018 monthly data released by the Federal Transit Administration last Friday. Led by a 2.5 percent decline in heavy-rail ridership, total rail ridership actually declined by more than bus ridership: 2.1 percent vs. 2.0 percent.

The 2018 decline follows three straight years of previous losses, resulting in a total 8.5 percent fall since 2014. Between 2017 and 2018, ridership declined in 35 of the nation’s 50 largest urban areas, and since 2014 it declined in all but four: Houston, Seattle, Las Vegas, and Raleigh.

In November’s ridership report, the Antiplanner noted that commuter-rail numbers for Boston, New York, and a few other cities appeared to be incomplete, resulting in an apparent 15 percent decline in total commuter-rail ridership from November 2017. The December release corrects those data, revealing that total commuter-rail ridership in November didn’t fall at all, but it didn’t really increase either, gaining less than 0.05 percent. Commuter rail fell by 0.2 percent in December and was flat for the year as a whole. Continue reading →

Honolulu to Cover Up Overruns with PPP

By | | Transportation
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Oxford has added a new word to its English dictionary: hammajang, which means something is “all messed up.” The word comes from Hawaiian pidgin, which is appropriate considering how messed up Honolulu’s rail project has become. Originally expected to open this year at a cost of less than $3 billion, the current projected cost is more than $9 billion and, since they don’t have funds to complete it, it probably won’t open until 2026 at the earliest.

The latest news is that the FTA has subpoenaed the Honolulu Authority for Rapid Transit (HART) for inside documents to find out what is going on. Meanwhile, HART wants to form a public-private partnership to build the last four miles. The private partner would raise the funds for construction and, when it is completed, would operate the entire 20-mile rail line. In exchange, the city would pay the private partner hundreds of millions of dollars a year for 30 years.

No one thinks the private partner will be able to save taxpayers any money or operate the trains more efficiently than HART itself. Instead, this scheme will save HART from having to raise the funds to finish the line itself. The city can’t afford it; the state can’t afford it; the feds won’t pay any more than they have already promised. So get a private partner to borrow the money — a debt that won’t appear on HART’s books — and simply repay the private partner out of future tax revenues. Continue reading →