NY Subway “Major Disseminator” of COVID-19

“New York City’s multitentacled subway system was a major disseminator — if not the principal transmission vehicle — of coronavirus infection during the initial takeoff of the massive epidemic that became evident throughout the city during March 2020,” reports an MIT study published two days ago. “Maps of subway station turnstile entries, superimposed upon zip code-level maps of reported coronavirus incidence, are strongly consistent with subway-facilitated disease propagation.”

The study notes that MTA’s decision to reduce train service may have actually “accelerated the spread of coronavirus throughout the city” because it prevented social distancing aboard the subway cars. Buses don’t escape notice, as the study suggests that they “may have served as secondary transmission routes out to the periphery of the city.”

We offer a myriad of levitra canadian pharmacy http://greyandgrey.com/mywpcontent/uploads/2016/07/Waters-v.-City-of-New-York.pdf vehicles so that the entire group can travel together, and we emphasize comfort. Herbs control the desire to eat more and restrict fat absorption into the system. sildenafil pill Excretory System: Guduchi strengthens the urinary system and increases the resistance of inner layers of bladder and urethra to fight repeated purchase levitra in canada urinary tract infections. They’ve got established scary motion pictures, fringe levitra 100mg movement terror movies, scariest horror flicks along with like that. As of 9 pm on April 15, 12,999 coronavirus deaths had been reported in the New York urban area (New York City, Westchester, Nassau, and Suffolk counties NY, and Bergen, Essex, Hudson, Middlesex, Monmouth, and Union counties, NJ). That’s 45.5 percent of the nationwide total of 28,568. That’s very close to the New York urban area’s 44 percent share of nationwide transit ridership. Continue reading

What Were They Thinking?

If light rail was once viewed as an inexpensive alternative to true rapid transit, some cities saw commuter rail as an even less-expensive way of reintroducing rail transit into their regions. After all, most commuter-rail lines used tracks that already existed, so how much could it cost to run passenger trains on those tracks?

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

Beguiled by this reasoning, nearly twenty different transit agencies have built commuter rail in urban areas that didn’t have rail transit in 1980. Many of these proved to be absolute disasters, with fare revenues covering as little as 4 percent of operating costs despite having spent hundreds of millions of dollars on capital costs. This brief will look at various commuter-rail projects that have started since 1980 to see which proved total disasters and which were only partial disasters. Continue reading

One More Reason Not to Ride Transit

Isn’t it wonderful how urban transit gives people a sense of community as they are collectively yelled at and berated by self-officious transit employees? Case in point: On Thursday morning, April 9, the Southeast Pennsylvania Transportation Authority (SEPTA), Philadelphia’s main transit agency, announced that it “urged riders” to wear masks, but did not require them. (In fact, elsewhere SEPTA’s web site said that masks were prohibited.)

Sometime during the day, SEPTA changed its mind and, without any formal announcement, decided to require riders to wear masks. As a result, we have this video of a maskless SEPTA employee ordering riders (some of whom had masks, but apparently not good enough ones for SEPTA) off of a bus, and another video showing several white police officers dragging a black man off of a bus for not wearing a mask.

SEPTA was right to be worried even if it was wrong in its enforcement tactics. On Friday, New York’s MTA announced that 1,900 of its employees had tested positive for coronavirus (about three times the rate for New York City as a whole) and 50 had died (slightly higher than the New York City rate which itself is twelve times higher than the national rate). Ridership was down 93 percent on the subways, 95 percent on Metro-North commuter trains, and 97 percent on the Long Island Railroad–but bridge and tunnel auto traffic into Manhattan was down by “only” 66 percent. Continue reading

49. Romance of the Rails

Shortly before the Cato Institute published Gridlock, Knopf published a similar book called Traffic by a writer named Tom Vanderbilt. The two didn’t cover exactly the same ground: Traffic focused on the physics of congestion while Gridlock focused on the institutional issues around transportation. But I noticed that Traffic received far more reviews and mentions in major newspapers and magazines than Gridlock.

American Nightmare, my next book, got even less attention. Part of the problem, I was told, was that book reviewers didn’t take Cato seriously as a publisher. I wanted to change that, so I asked Cato’s book editor, John Samples, and Cato’s marketing director, Bob Garber, how I should write a book that would sell better.

“Tell stories,” they said. People like stories. Gridlock and American Nightmare both delved deep into history, the latter going back a thousand years to look at housing and property rights. But the stories these books told were impersonal. Continue reading

Transport Resiliency in a World of Black Swans

2001: Terrorists fly commercial airliners into the World Trade Center and Pentagon, leading to–among many other things–the shutdown of commercial air service in the United States for several days.

2005: Hurricanes Katrina and Rita slam into the Gulf Coast, leading some 4 million people to evacuate their homes and causing hundreds of deaths and severe hardships for thousands of people who were unable to evacuate.

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

2008: The deflation of the housing bubble leads to the second-worst financial crisis in American history and the largest decline in personal travel since World War II.

2020: The COVID-19 pandemic shuts down much of the American economy, resulting in, among other things, 80 percent reductions in travel by airlines, transit, Amtrak, and other modes. Continue reading

Accelerating Spread of COVID-19 Earns $25 Billion

Transit agencies, which are known to be “an effective way of accelerating the spread of infectious diseases” but are not effective at much else, received a $25 billion bailout in the $2.2 trillion Congressional coronavirus relief bill. That’s only a little more than 1 percent of the total, but why did the industry get any at all?

When transit agencies asked for the money, the Antiplanner wrote an op-ed arguing against it. Unfortunately, it didn’t reach print until after Congress passed the bill.

Yesterday, which happened to be the day after the op-ed was published, the Department of Transportation announced how the spoils would be distributed. The money is parceled out geographically, so agencies in regions with multiple transit providers will squabble over the funds at the MPO level. Continue reading