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Monthly Archives: July 2020

Transit Industry Demands $32 Billion More

By | | Transportation
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The American Public Transportation Association (APTA) wants Congress to have the federal government “invest” — meaning pour down a rathole give away — another $32 billion to keep transit systems running. This is after Congress had already given transit systems $25 billion in March.

Taken together, $57 billion is more than all federal, state, and local transit subsidies in 2018, which were $54 billion. “Fare revenues are down 90 percent and our state and local funders face a financial crisis of their own,” says Paul Weidefield, the CEO of Washington Metro. “How are we going to provide the essential service” if they don’t get more subsidies?

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It’s Essential to Say “Transit Is Essential”

By | | Transportation
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The coronavirus has made it essential that every transit supporter use the word “essential” in their discussions, as in how essential it is that transit carry essential workers to their essential jobs. Ridership may be down by more than 80 percent, but the remaining 19 percent of riders are really essential, so that makes it essential that we keep giving more subsidies to essential transit agencies.

Transit Is Essential is, in fact, the name of a new paper from the California Transit Association. The paper skips over the whole messy part about why transit is so essential and instead goes immediately to demanding more subsidies. “Another round of emergency funding is critical to preventing significant and permanent reductions in transit services.” In other words, subsidies aren’t just essential, they are critical.

According to the New York-based TransitCenter, “an estimated 2.8 million American workers in essential industries commute[d] to work on transit” in 2018. That doesn’t say how they are commuting to work now, in the midst of the pandemic. But let’s say it is still 2.8 million: for less than the cost of the annual subsidy to transit in a normal year ($54 billion in 2018), we could give every one of those people a brand-new car, which the CDC says is safer than transit during the pandemic. So, tell me again, why is transit so essential? Continue reading →

SunFail: Orlando’s Commuter-Rail Disaster

By | | Policy brief
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Central Florida politicians face difficult choices about the future of SunRail, a commuter-rail line out of Orlando. One question is whether to finish the originally conceived project by improving 12 miles of tracks and building a new station for a cost of about $100 million, which is expected to add 200 riders per day. A second question is whether to build a new extension to the Orlando Airport, which is expected to cost about $200 million.

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

Beyond new construction, a major problem is how to get anyone to ride the trains, as ridership is well below expectations and 2018 fare revenues only covered 5 percent of operating costs. A final question is how to pay to continue operating the trains, which lost more than $40 per passenger in 2018. The state has been subsidizing operations but wants four county governments to take over. Continue reading →

Don’t Trap the Poor in Second-Class

By | | Transportation
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Some have argued that subsidies to transit are “socially just” because they help poor people, and some have even gone so far as to say that social justice requires that transit be free. But an opinion piece in Friday’s San Antonio News Express responds that transit is second-class transportation. Those who want to help low-income people should instead focus on helping them acquire first-class transportation, namely automobiles.

Automobiles are so much superior to transit that, except in New York City, it is overly generous to call second class. Steerage is more like it, since transit is so much slower, inconvenient, and less comfortable than traveling in your own private automobile. (I would have used the word steerage in the headline, but I was told that many people wouldn’t know what it was, at least out of context. I guess it’s been a long time since Titanic came out.)
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San Antonio is the largest urban area in the United States that hasn’t succumbed to the fad of building nineteenth-century rail transit. Some people would like to change that. Maybe this op-ed will help dissuade them.

Rebuild the Interstate Highway System?

By | | Transportation
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A new report from The Road Information Project (TRIP) estimates that rebuilding and expanding the Interstate Highway System to meet twenty-first century needs will require increasing annual expenditures on the system from $23 billion to $57 billion per year. The report says that the highways “are wearing out and showing signs of their advanced age, often heavily congested, and in need of significant reconstruction, modernization and expansion.”

However, the numbers in the report don’t necessarily support this. The report admits that only 3 percent of interstate highway pavements are in poor condition, while another 8 percent is considered mediocre and 9 percent fair. That leaves the vast majority of the system, 79 percent, in good condition. Similarly, only 3 percent of interstate highway bridges are in poor condition or considered structurally deficient.

Congestion is a problem, but it is confined mainly to urban roads. Only 18 percent of interstate highway miles are considered congested, says the report. Continue reading →

Trump Promises to Kill AFFH

By | | Housing
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On Monday, President Trump announced that he plans to kill the Obama-era Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing (AFFH) rule, which could have required suburbs to change single-family zoning to allow multifamily housing. This rule had been written by housing activists to make housing more affordable even though there was no evidence that single-family zoning made housing less affordable or that abolishing it would fix the problem.

“Far-left Washington bureaucrats,” Trump said, “are absolutely determined to eliminate single-family zoning, destroy the value of houses and communities already built, just as they have in Minneapolis and other locations. , , , Not going to happen, not while I’m here.”

The truth is that supporters of the rule have a hidden agenda: to stop urban sprawl, even though measures to stop sprawl are the real cause of housing affordability issues. This can be seen in the housing plank of Biden’s campaign platform, which calls for “eliminat[ing] exclusionary zoning policies and other local regulations that contribute to sprawl.” In fact, it is sprawl that keeps housing affordable, and it is only in urban areas that have tried to stop sprawl that housing has become unaffordable. Continue reading →

High-Speed Rail: Yesterday’s Tech Tomorrow

By | | Policy brief
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One of the candidates for president in this November’s election is known by the nickname, “Amtrak Joe.” The Democratic-controlled House wants to triple federal funding for intercity passenger trains. A member of Congress from Massachusetts has proposed spending $205 billion on high-speed rail.


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

Given the growing momentum behind these ideas, it is instructive to take a look at how well the last frenzied spending on intercity passenger trains worked. In 2009 and 2010, President Obama persuaded Congress to dedicate $10.1 billion to high-speed rail projects around the country. To this was added at least $1.4 billion in other federal funds and at least $7 billion in state and local funds. After ten years, some of those projects must be working, right? Continue reading →

We Have No Customers So Give Us Money

By | | Transportation
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Transit agencies are stepping up their campaigns for more subsidies to make up for their lack of riders during the coronavirus pandemic. The New York Times reports that, unless Congress forks over billions more than it has already given the agencies, transit systems could experience a death spiral.

Technically, a death spiral takes place if cuts in service cause a loss of customers leading to more cuts in service. But if they don’t have any customers, they can’t spiral much further downward.

Out in California, Caltrain, which operates commuter trains between San Francisco and San Jose, has lost 95 percent of its customers. Before the pandemic, Caltrain riders earned an average of $120,000 per year, which means most of them are probably now working from home and many will probably never return to commuting. The logical thing for Caltrain to do would be to reduce service for the duration and start up again when riders return. Continue reading →

Happy Highways

By | | Mission
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I try to deal mainly in facts while many who disagree with me seem to deal mainly with emotions, such fear of global warming or compassion for the poor. Of course, your emotions on these subjects are only legitimate so long as you agree with their prescriptions.

One thing they are good at is coming up with appealing terms that are, in fact, meaningless. Complete streets, for example. Who would want an incomplete street? Or how about smart growth, a term that says nothing about what it means, but that was specifically picked so they could accuse anyone who disagreed with them of being for dumb growth.

When we come up with terms, we try to make them as accurately descriptive as possible, but the results aren’t very appealing. Mileage-based user fees, for example. Are you for embuff? Or how about road user charges, or RUCs. That doesn’t sound appealing at all. In fact, it rhymes with some potentially unappealing things. “RUCs sucks; don’t get f**ked by RUCs.” Continue reading →

Freeways: The Egalitarian Transportation

By | | Transportation
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In the past month or so, we’ve seen the destruction or defacement of statues of Confederate generals, the Father of our Country who was also a slaveowner, the Great Emancipationist, the Great Reconstructionist, and an Abolitionist. So it’s not exactly surprising that someone has proposed to bulldoze urban freeways because of the myth that they were located by racists through black neighborhoods.

There are a lot of institutions associated with American racism that I would abolish long before worrying about freeways. Start with public schools, many of which used to be segregated by law and many of which are still segregated, even in (perhaps especially in) the North.

Second would be public transit. Remember Rosa Parks and the Montgomery bus boycott? Many state laws used to require that people of color sit only in the back of the bus and give up their seats if a white person wanted them. Many transit systems, including those in Atlanta, Dallas, Los Angeles, and San Francisco-Oakland, are still semi-segregated today, with rail lines built to serve white neighborhoods while buses serving black and Hispanic neighborhoods are cut back to pay for the trains. Continue reading →