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Monthly Archives: November 2020

September Driving Exceeds 90% of 2019

By | | Transportation, Useful Data
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The number of miles Americans drove in September was just 8.6 percent less than in September, 2019, according to data released last Friday by the Federal Highway Administration. This is the first month since February of this year that driving rose above 90 percent of last year’s levels. This contrasts to transit ridership, which, as noted here last week, remains 62 percent below 2019 levels.

Driving remains lowest, relative to 2019, in Hawaii, which is still down 31.5 percent due to less tourism. The other states with double-digit drops are Illinois, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Nevada, New Jersey, Ohio, Oregon, Pennsylvania, O Rhode Island, Vermont, and Virginia, all of which are between 10 and 15 percent down. Driving in Montana is actually 2 percent greater than it was in 2019, and driving in Idaho and South Dakota are within 1 percent of 2019 levels.
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Urban driving is down by a little more than 10 percent while rural driving is down by only 5 percent. Rural driving is greater than in 2019 in Arizona, Idaho, Montana, and South Dakota and within 1 percent of 2019 in Arkansas, Florida, Michigan, Nevada, and Utah.

Taxing Success to Subsidize Failure

By | | Transportation
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Driving has bounced back. Transit has not, leaving many transit agencies in financial straits. The obvious solution it to tax drivers to keep transit systems running, or even to keep them not running.

Actually, that’s not obvious to me, but it is obvious to some transit executives who are willing to take advantage of the fact that people have been conditioned to believe that cars are evil and transit is good so drivers should be taxed to support transit bureaucracies.

Take, for example, Golden Gate Transit, which started as a way of relieving congestion on the Golden Gate Bridge. Bridge tolls were used to subsidize buses between Marin County and San Francisco, and the people who paid the tolls were supposed to be happy that their commutes were less congested. Continue reading →

Researchers: Logging Won’t Stop Fires

By | | Wildfire
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Despite rain in the valleys and snow in the mountains, wildfires are still smoldering in Oregon and people are still trying to blame those fires on the lack of government spending on logging or prescribed burning. Yet increased logging wouldn’t have stopped western wildfires this year, a number of researchers told reporters in an article jointly written by the Oregonian, Oregon Public Broadcasting, and Propublica.

“The belief people have is that somehow or another we can thin our way to low-intensity fire that will be easy to suppress, easy to contain, easy to control,” retired Forest Service researcher Jack Cohen told the reporters. “Nothing could be further from the truth.” Continue reading →

Biden Appoints Congestifiers

By | | Transportation
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Phillip Washington, the transit executive who thinks Los Angeles isn’t congested enough, has been named the leader of Biden’s transition team in charge of the Department of Transportation and Amtrak. Washington is the CEO of Los Angeles Metro, the main transit agency in Los Angeles County.

A year ago, as Los Angeles bus ridership was collapsing due to LA Metro’s insistence on building expensive light rail, Washington blamed the loss of bus riders instead on Los Angeles’ famously uncongested freeways. “It’s too easy to drive in this city,” he told the Wall Street Journal. To restore bus ridership, the city has to “make driving harder.”

“Sometimes you have to tell people what’s good for them,” Washington also told the Journal. He will clearly fit right in to Biden’s top-down view of how the world should work. Washington’s support for obsolete light-rail transit will go hand-in-hand with Biden’s support for obsolete intercity passenger trains. Continue reading →

Transit’s Diminishing Returns in 2019

By | | Policy brief, Useful Data
7 Comments

The nation’s transit industry carried 19 million more trips in 2019 than in 2018, representing a 0.2 percent increase in ridership, according to the 2019 National Transit Database that was posted by the Federal Transit Administration last week. To get that increase, transit agencies had to spend 5 percent more on operating costs and increased capital spending by more than 10 percent.

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

While even a 0.2 percent increase would have been welcome to a transit industry that had seen declines in each of the previous four years, the reality is that ridership declined in the vast majority of urban areas, and it took a 92-million trip increase in the New York urban area to overcome all of those declines. New York ridership had been depressed in 2018 due to delays caused by work being done on the city’s subway system, so the growth in 2019 was due more to the end of such work rather than any real recovery in transit ridership. Continue reading →

September Transit Ridership Down 62 Percent

By | | Transportation, Useful Data
1 Comment

Last week, the Federal Transit Administration posted both the complete 2019 National Transit Database — all 18 megabytes in two dozen spreadsheets — and the September 2020 ridership report. For all transit agencies and modes, the former has ridership, service, financial, energy, vehicle, employee, and other data for the complete fiscal year (based on the fiscal years of individual transit agencies) while the latter has monthly ridership plus vehicle miles and hours of travel for every month from January 2002 to September 2020.

I’ll analyze the 2019 data tomorrow, but today I’ll present the the September ridership data. Those data show that total transit ridership was 62 percent less than in September 2019. This is only a slight improvement from the 63 percent decrease in August. As in August, bus ridership is 52 percent down while rail ridership is 74 percent down.
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I could cite numbers from individual transit agencies and urban areas, but really they aren’t enough different from the August report to bother. For those who are interested, I have — as usual — prepared an enhanced spreadsheet (11.7-MB Excel file). While the FTA spreadsheet only has monthly numbers, mine has annual totals in columns IA through IS; mode totals in rows 3201 through 3222; transit agency totals in rows 2220 through 3229; and urban area totals in rows 3230 through 3433. Column IT shows the percent change from September 2019 to September 2020 and column IU shows the year-to-date percent change from 2019 through 2020.

Tesla’s Self-Driving Beta Test

By | | Transportation
1 Comment

Tesla released what it calls “full self-drive beta” software to selected Tesla owners last week, and while it does not really make a Tesla into a true driverless car, it works pretty well under most conditions and provides a glimpse of what driverless cars will be like in the near future.

Tesla has taken a different approach to autonomy from other manufacturers. While Waymo, Ford, and GM driverless cars rely heavily on extremely precise maps, which means they can only be used within “geofenced” (i.e., mapped) areas, Elon Musk has criticized this approach. In technical terms, an autonomous car that relies on maps is called a level 4 vehicle while Tesla wants to go straight to level 5, meaning a vehicle that can go anywhere based on the geography that it detects with on-board sensors. Continue reading →

An Incentive for Fraud

By | | News commentary
5 Comments

Since the 2016 election, the Antiplanner has been dismayed by the number of people whose opinion I otherwise respect who have argued in favor of retaining the electoral college. Their argument is mainly that, with the college, everyone’s vote counts because without it presidential candidates would only bother to campaign in a few large cities that house most of the voting population.

The problem with that argument is that most people’s votes don’t count today because most people live in either a red state or a blue state where presidential candidates don’t bother to campaign. The only states that receive attention are the battleground states, of which there are as few as six or at most a dozen.

The lack of any chance that someone’s vote in the other states will influence the outcome depresses voter turnout. Why bother to vote if you know your state is going to always go for one party in the election that you care about the most? The result is that fewer people bother to learn about other elections such as state legislature or city council races because they don’t feel their vote counts. Continue reading →

Portland Wises Up

By | | News commentary
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Austin voters apparently approved the cities foolish $7 billion light-rail plan. San Francisco Bay Area voters apparently approved a regressive tax-increase to support high-income riders of the Caltrain commuter train. But Portland voters have apparently rejected a $5 billion transportation measure that was mainly aimed at building the region’s most-expensive light-rail line yet.

Portland’s rejection of light rail is not too surprising as the region has rejected every transit tax measure that’s been on the ballot since 1996 because voters have learned that light rail costs too much and does too little. Too bad Austin couldn’t have learned from Portland’s experience.

Portland voters also appear to have returned centrist Ted Wheeler to the mayor’s office even though polls showed he was running well behind leftist challenger Sarah Iannarone. Wheeler had earned the ire of Black Lives Matter protesters when he didn’t try to stop police from stopping property destruction in downtown Portland. Iannarone, meanwhile, openly supported antifa violence and wore clothing celebrating Chairman Mao. Continue reading →

10 Reasons Not to Build High-Speed Rail

By | | Policy brief
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Did you know that a single gallon of fuel is enough to power an entire high-speed train to go from New York to Los Angeles and back? Neither did I, but the U.S. High-Speed Rail Association (US HSR) made this preposterous claim on its web site last week. Someone there apparently figured out that it is ridiculous and took it down, but below is the graphic that accompanied the claim.

US HSR’s claim that high-speed trains can go 6,600 miles on one gallon of fuel is absurd, and its claim that airliners can only go 400 feet on one gallon is also wrong.

Like the claim that one rail line can move as many people as an eight-lane freeway, this claim for energy efficiency is startling enough that we are likely to hear it again as Democrats attempt to spend a few trillion dollars building a high-speed rail system across the country. In preparation for that debate, here are ten reasons why the United States should not build high-speed rail. Continue reading →