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Monthly Archives: November 2019

Transit Ridership Up in September

By | | Transportation, Useful Data
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America’s transit systems carried 2.9 percent more riders in September 2019 than September 2018, according to data released by the Federal Transit Administration yesterday. After deducting New York, ridership still grew by half a percent. Moreover, ridership grew in 27 of the nation’s 50 largest urban areas, though one of those was Dallas-Ft. Worth, where the apparent ridership growth is really just due to a change in the method of counting bus riders.

September 2019 had one more work day than September 2018, which accounts for some of the increase. A recovery from some of the maintenance delays experienced in New York and Washington explains some of the rest of it. Every major mode of transit saw an increase in riders except light rail, which experienced a 5.4 percent decline.

Year-to-date ridership is not so positive, as it fell by 0.1 percent nationwide, 1.4 percent outside of New York, 4.0 percent for light rail, and 0.8 percent for buses. Continue reading →

Planning for an Unattainable Fantasy

By | | Policy brief
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Austin is one of the fastest-growing cities in America, and the city of Austin and Austin’s transit agency, Capital Metro, have a plan for dealing with all of the traffic that will be generated by that growth: assume that a third of the people who now drive alone to work will switch to transit, bicycling, walking, or telecommuting by 2039. That’s right up there with planning for dinner by assuming that food will magically appear on the table the same way it does in Hogwarts.


Click image to download a 4-page PDF of this policy brief.

Austin planners say that 74 percent of Austin workers drive alone to their jobs. In this, they are already behind the times, as the 2018 American Community Survey found that 75.4 percent of Austin workers drove alone (that’s for the city of Austin; the drive-alone share in the the Austin urban area was 77.0 percent). The 2018 survey was released only a month before Austin’s latest planning document, but even the 2017 survey found that 75 percent of Austin workers drove alone. You have to go back to the 2016 survey to find 74 percent drive-alones. So while Austin planners are assuming they can reduce driving alone from 74 to 50 percent, it is actually moving in the other direction. Continue reading →

27. Clinton Takes Over

By | | Iconoclast
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Forest Planning/Watch had many excellent editors over the years, and I can’t really rank them. But a case could be made that the best editors were people who were writers themselves. One of those was Jeff St. Clair, who had led the group that brought me to Indiana to review the Hoosier Forest plan (his group was called Forest Watch, after which we named the magazine) and then decided to move to Oregon City at about the same time I was moving from Eugene to Oak Grove. He took over as editor in August, 1990.

Soon after that, the CHEC staff was joined by Karen Knudsen, a Colorado native who said she had climbed all of Colorado’s 14,000-foot peaks by the time she was 21, a claim I found fully believable after trying to keep up with her cycling in the mountains of Utah. She had a degree in economics from Colorado College, which forever endeared me to that school as I have always felt she was the smartest person I’ve ever had the privilege of working with.

I could tell her to work on a particular topic and soon she would have a full report. She wrote reports on such topics as the Knutson-Vandenberg Act. I cried a little when she told me she was moving to Montana because its snow was better for skiing than Oregon’s. After she moved there, I received a phone call from the Clark Fork Coalition asking for a job reference. I told them if they didn’t hire her they should shoot themselves. She now is the group’s executive director. Continue reading →