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Monthly Archives: August 2020

Post-Pandemic Propaganda for Rail Transit

By | | Transportation
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Writing in the September Trains magazine, which isn’t available on line, transit advocate Malcolm Kenton argues that rail transit agencies can thrive in a pandemic and post-pandemic world by shifting strategies. But he doesn’t mean shifting business strategies to attract more riders; he means shifting propaganda strategies to attract more tax dollars.

“Transit advocates will need to tell a different story that de-emphasizes ridership as the key measure of success and focuses less on attracting higher-income riders,” he says. “Instead, the pandemic reveals how dependent we all are on effective transit even if we never set foot on a train or bus, and even if trains or buses carry much less than their capacities.” Continue reading →

Highway Subsidies in 2018

By | | Transportation, Useful Data
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Highway subsidies in 2018 totaled to $47.1 billion, substantially less than the $54.3 billion in subsidies received by transit agencies. Considering that highways move about 100 times as many passenger miles (and infinitely more freight) than transit, this is a serious disparity.

Click image to download the table in Excel format.

I base the $47.1 billion on the latest issue of Highway Statistics, table HF-10, which was recently posted by the Federal Highway Administration. Although this table is dated April, 2020, it wasn’t available in June when I most recently calculated transportation subsidies. Continue reading →

A Project That’s No Longer Needed

By | | Transportation
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A proposed new 2-mile transit line connecting LaGuardia Airport with the New York subway system will cost $2 billion, make traffic congestion worse, dump 87,000 metric tons of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, and probably isn’t necessary due to the pandemic. The first three conclusions come from a draft environmental impact statement (DEIS) released last week by the Federal Aviation Administration, while the fourth is based on the huge changes in transportation habits that have already taken place as a result of the pandemic.

LaGuardia, the New York area’s smallest commercial airport. Photo by Patrick Handrigan.

According to the environmental impact statement, the new transit line, which would be an automated people mover, is needed primarily because of “increasing and unreliable travel times” to the airport as a result of traffic congestion. A survey of air travelers conducted by the Port Authority of New York & New Jersey (which runs the airport) found that slightly more than half of air travelers took taxis or ride-hailing services to the airport, another 36 percent took a car, and close to 6 percent took courtesy shuttles. Only 6.2 percent took mass transit. Continue reading →

Transit “Is Riddled with Inequities”

By | | Transportation
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The transit industry has developed two systems: one for “choice” riders and one for “dependent” riders, “that is to say white and Black,” says urban planner Christof Spieler. A former member of the Harris County (Houston) Metro board of directors, Spieler points out one place where Metro offers riders a choice between bus-rapid transit and a local bus. The BRT is three times faster than the local bus, has plusher seats, and costs $3.25 a ride compared with $1.25 for the local bus.

Spieler makes many good points and I am glad that an urban planner is finally taking this issue seriously. Unfortunately, his inevitable solution — that we should spend more money on transit — is wrong.

Spieler never mentions the Los Angeles Bus Riders’ Union case, in which the NAACP represented minorities whose bus service had declined so that Los Angeles Metro could pay for new rail transit lines to middle-class neighborhoods, but maybe he was unfamiliar with that case. As documented here, LA Metro was ordered by the court to restore bus service for ten years, which it did. Bus ridership recovered, but as soon as the ten years was up, it cut bus service and went back to building rail transit. Continue reading →

Should We Replace Rapid Transit with Buses?

By | | Policy brief
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Metro. Rapid transit. Subway. Elevated. Underground. U-bahn. All of these types of transit are included in what the Federal Transit Administration calls heavy rail. Unfortunately, none of these terms are very accurate.

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

Heavy-rail train cars weigh less than light-rail cars. Even the best metros can’t get you everywhere in a metropolitan area. Rapid transit isn’t very rapid, averaging around 20 miles per hour not counting the time it takes to get to or from a station or to wait for trains. Subways aren’t always under the ground and elevateds aren’t always above the ground. Continue reading →

Is Aerial Firefighting Cost-Effective?

By | | Wildfire
8 Comments

Last Wednesday afternoon, I watched four large airtankers drop tens of thousands of gallons of fire retardant on the Green Ridge Fire, which is burning within sight of my backyard. The airtankers included two twin-jet MD-87s, a DC-7, and a CV-580.

A DC-7 dumps 3,000 gallons of retardant on an area already painted red with the stuff to try to keep the fire on the left from to the right (south) overnight. Click image for a larger view.

Between them, the four planes were capable of dumping more than 11,000 gallons of retardant, and they each made several passes at the fire. A west wind was pushing most of the fire to the east, but there was also some push to the south. The tankers were painting a wide swath of forest red south of the burning area to try to slow or halt the southerly expansion of the fire. Continue reading →

June Driving Down 13 Percent

By | | Transportation
3 Comments

Americans drove 13 percent less in June 2020 than they did in the same month of 2019, according to data released yesterday by the Federal Highway Administration. This is an improvement from May, which was 25 percent less than in 2019, and April, which was 40 percent less.

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Will the Cities Come Back?

By | | Housing, News commentary
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“The Twilight of Great American Cities Is Here,” screams the headline of an article by my friend, Joel Kotkin. He argues that, between the pandemic and the riots following the George Floyd death, people are not going to return to the cities.

Certainly, rents are down and vacancy rates are up in New York City and San Francisco. But does that mean that the cities won’t bounce back after the pandemic is over?

A major pandemic does not “introduce something novel,” observes a historian named Stephen Davies. Instead, “it accelerates and magnifies trends and processes that were already under way.” It can also bring “a final stop to processes that were already exhausted.” Continue reading →

Green Ridge Fire

By | | Wildfire
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A thunderstorm Sunday afternoon ignited more than two dozen fires in Central Oregon. Most were quickly suppressed and the largest one still burning is within sight of my backyard, which means we have been treated to a noisy air show of helicopters and MD-87s dumping water or fire retardant on the hillside.

Looking like a tiny insect, a helicopter dumps water on the north side of the Green Ridge fire on Monday. Despite these efforts, the fire appeared to have spread north of this spot on Tuesday. Click image for a larger view.

Due to drought, many fire officials were predicting that wildfires this year would be “severe and complex,” particularly in the West. In fact, according to the National Interagency Coordination Center’s Tuesday morning situation report, only 53 percent as many acres have burned so far this year as the average of the last ten years. Fewer acres have burned so far this year than burned by this same date in 2014, which was the mildest fire year since 2010. Continue reading →

The Transit-Industrial Complex

By | | Policy brief
5 Comments

Everybody knows that transit saves energy and protects us from climate change. Everybody knows that transit helps the poor. Everybody knows that transit generates economic development. None of these things are true, but many people believe them because public transit is backed up by a powerful lobby.

Wikipedia has an entry on the highway lobby, but no entry on a transit lobby. In fact, the transit lobby is much bigger than the highway lobby even though highways move a hundred times as many passenger miles as transit, not to mention far more freight. The transit lobby is nonetheless bigger for good reason: most federal and state highway funds come from user fees, so the only thing the highway lobby has to do is protect those user fees from being diverted to other uses, whereas less than a quarter of transit costs come from user fees, so the industry has to scramble for every last transit dollar it can get. Continue reading →