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Monthly Archives: March 2020

January Transit Ridership Up 5.1 Percent

By | | Transportation, Useful Data
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Transit ridership in January 2020 was 5.1 percent greater than the same month in 2019, according to data released last week by the Federal Transit Administration. Ridership actually grew in a slight majority of the nation’s largest urban areas — 28 out of 50.

Is this the first sign of a turnaround for the transit industry? Possibly. But it is more likely a reflection of the extremely mild winter that United States has enjoyed this year. Due to snow and ice storms, January normally has the lowest ridership of any month of the year except February.

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45. The Financial Crisis Wasn’t Pretty

By | | Iconoclast
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“This book should not be necessary,” were the opening words to my first book for the Cato Institute, Best-Laid Plans. It covered the same ground as many previous books, most notably Frederick Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom. It appears, however, that every generation has to learn for itself the reality that socialism doesn’t work.

Part of the problem is that socialism can mean several different things. One answer is worker ownership of the means of production, but the United States already has that: numerous firms are owned by their workers, and the biggest investors in major corporations are pension funds that exist for the benefit of workers. I suspect that most socialists don’t see this as any different from capitalism because it doesn’t include a role for government to step in to reduce inequality or protect the environment.

Another kind of socialism is a social democracy, which is capitalism with a safety net. The problem is just how big should the safety net be. At its most basic, it seems to include unemployment income for those who lose their jobs along with housing, food, and health care for the chronically unemployed. But where do you draw the line? It seems that all it takes is someone chanting “X is a human right” and sudden X becomes part of the safety net. In addition to free medical care for all, Bernie Sanders thinks the government should provide free higher education, free childcare, and build at least 10 million affordable homes. Lately free public transit has been added to the list of “human rights.” Continue reading →

Public Agencies Drag Their Wheels on PTC

By | | Transportation
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Positive-train control is an exercise in futility. Almost 900 people were killed in railroad accidents in 2018, and positive-train control wouldn’t have saved more than, perhaps, ten of them. Yet Congress imposed this multi-billion-dollar cost on the nation’s railroads.

Now the Federal Railroad Administration says that all but eight railroads are in compliance with the law. What does it say that five of those eight are government owned? The Alaska Railroad, New Jersey Transit, New Mexico’s Rail Runner, Chicago’s Metra, and TEXRail all “are at risk of not fully implementing a PTC system” by the latest deadline, which is the end of this year.

The passengers that railroads carry lots are exactly the people that the law was written to protect. Congress wrote the law in response to a 2008 collision between a Los Angeles Metrolink passenger train and a freight train that killed 25 people. Continue reading →

TriMet Compounding 40 Years of Bad Decisions

By | | Policy brief
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Portland’s transit agency, TriMet, has spent nearly $5 billion (in present-day dollars) building 59 miles of light-rail lines. Now the agency says it has to spend another $7 billion correcting the mistakes of its previous decisions. Meanwhile, the city of Portland is responding to urban congestion with a plan that will make congestion far worse.

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

The eagerness of Portland officials to build light rail—an eagerness not shared by Portland-area voters—has given the city the reputation of being some sort of transit mecca. The reality is that the urban area’s transit planners have made a series of bad decisions that continue to cost the region dearly. Continue reading →

The Market Urbanist vs. the Antiplanner

By | | Housing
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I like Scott Beyer, who calls himself “the Market Urbanist.” He and the Antiplanner see eye-to-eye on a lot of issues. But we also have some areas of fundamental disagreement, as shown in the Reason video below.

Some of them are simply factual. He thinks there is a large, pent-up demand for dense housing in the cities. To the extent that such demand exists, I think it is an artifact of restrictions that prevent low-density development at the periphery of many urban areas. Continue reading →