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Monthly Archives: January 2021

The $25 Billion Theft

By | | Transportation
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The states siphoned off 21 percent of gasoline taxes and other highway user fees to pay for mass transit and other non-highway activities in 2019, according to table SDF of the 2019 Highway Statistics, which was posted this week by the Federal Highway Administration. The table shows that $9.8 billion in highway user fees were spent on transit and $15.1 billion were spent on other non-highway activities for a total of nearly $25 billion out of the $120 billion collected by the states from highway users.

State diversions of highway user fees to non-highway programs grew rapidly after 1980.

In terms of total dollars, the worst offender was Texas, which spent more than half of the user fees it collected, nearly $6.5 billion, on education and other non-highway activities. Transit received an insignificant portion of Texas’ highway revenues. Continue reading →

Bicycle Safety Knowns & Unknowns

By | | Transportation
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Traffic fatalities between 2007 and 2019 declined by 13 percent, but bicycle fatalities increased by 21 percent. In response, many cities have installed or are planning to install bike lanes, often by taking away lanes from automobiles. However, no one really knows whether such practices actually improve bicycle safety.

Cyclists riding at night are five times more likely to be killed in accidents than those riding in the daytime, yet most cities aiming to improving cycling safety are focused on other issues. Photo by PxHere.

A 100-page report on bicycle safety released in 2019 by the National Transportation Safety Board was able to draw upon at least eight large databases on bicycle accidents. Yet it was unable to definitively show whether the safety measures being taken by many cities, including bike lanes, road diets, and complete streets, truly increase bicycle safety or merely create an illusion of safety. Continue reading →

Idaho Is Roaring

By | | Housing
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“Had someone asked me in March,” wrote economist Megan McArdle in September, “I would have predicted that after six months of pandemic, the housing market would be full of panicked people frozen in their homes, except for those who were being evicted. Instead, the housing market is roaring.”

It continues to roar today. As the Economist observes, those roars are fed by low interest rates, government cash handouts, and a desire of many to move to homes suitable for telecommuting.

Of course, some housing markets are roaring louder than others. As CNN notes, “home prices are rising faster in the middle of the U.S. as Covid drives people away from coasts.” CNN cites home price index data published by the Federal Housing Finance Administration. Continue reading →

Transit: Browner Than Ever

By | | Policy brief, Transportation
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With ridership stuck at around 37 percent of 2019 levels, transit advocates have stopped claiming that transit is energy-efficient and climate-friendly. Even in 2019, transit wasn’t particularly green, but the fall-off in ridership associated with the pandemic has completely destroyed any claim that transit agencies may have that they save energy by providing an alternative to the automobile.

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

In 2019, the transit industry as a whole used more energy per passenger-mile than the average light truck and emitted about the same amount of greenhouse gases per passenger mile as the average car. In October 2020, based on agencies for which data are available, transit used about twice as much energy per passenger mile as the average light truck and emitted twice as much carbon dioxide per passenger mile as the average car. Continue reading →

Dueling Databases

By | | Transportation
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Outside of New York City, rail transit construction costs in the United States aren’t any higher than the rest of the world, according to a preliminary report from the Eno Transportation Foundation. The report is based on a database of 171 projects in the U.S. and other parts of the world.

In a stark example of high-cost, low-capacity transit, Sound Transit spent well over $500 million per mile building an underground light-rail line from downtown Seattle to the University of Washington. Photo by Joe Goldberg.

Not so fast, says the Transit Costs Project (a part of New York University’s Marron Institute of Urban Management). This program has compiled a much larger database of 574 projects, and it shows that U.S. costs are twice almost everywhere else in the world. Continue reading →

November Ridership Down 63 Percent

By | | Transportation, Useful Data
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Transit ridership in November 2020 was 63.1 percent less than in 2019, according to data released yesterday by the Federal Transit Administration. That was down from October, which was 62.7 percent less than in 2019, and September, which was 62.0 percent less than in 2019. These numbers are preliminary as a few agencies may not have submitted their November ridership numbers in time for this report, but ridership has been stuck at around 37 percent of 2019 numbers since July.

While private businesses have scrambled to cut costs in response to the pandemic, transit agencies continue to operate at 80 percent of 2019 levels. Agencies, of course, received a $25 billion bailout from Congress in April. Since total transit fares were only about $16 billion in 2019, most of this bailout was predicated on the assumption that the state and local taxes that transit agencies rely on would significantly drop due to the pandemic and associated shutdowns.

In fact, state and local tax revenues in the first nine months of 2020 were just 1 percent less than in the same period in 2019. While we don’t yet have exact data for transit systems, it seems likely that transit agencies were awash with cash in 2020 due to the huge federal bailout. This allowed them to maintain service at 80 percent of 2019 levels despite losing more than half of their riders over the year. Continue reading →

Worries for My Country

By | | News commentary
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The events at the Capitol yesterday make me worry for my country. I don’t fear that there will be a revolution or coup, but I do worry that political discourse has become so polarized that everything from masks to the electoral college becomes the subject of violent debate that prevents any sensible policy from being implemented.

I worry that private companies like Google, Facebook, and Apple are threatened with government regulation or break up simply because they are big. I worry that some of those private companies, which claim to be offering the public an open platform for communication, take it upon themselves to censor their customers for expressing views they disagree with. I worry that the president says such insane things that those private companies feel they have to censor him.

I’ve supported President Trump’s transportation policies, but Trump himself seems to me to be a crazy man. That doesn’t mean his policies are crazy; like any president’s, some are good and some not so good. But by middle-class standards, which means my standards, his behavior has been insane, and never more so than in the last few days. Continue reading →

Transit Doesn’t Need to Respond to Reality

By | | News commentary, Transportation
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When the pandemic shut down brew pubs, many breweries went into the business of making hand sanitizer. Ford used one of its auto parts plants to make 50,000 ventilators. Various drugmakers were able to create vaccines in just nine months.

Transit agencies, meanwhile, continued to trundle their empty buses and trains around American cities. Those that were planning new construction projects have made little or no efforts to revise their plans in response to an almost certain downturn in business.

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Supercommuting and Marchetti’s Constant

By | | Policy brief
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The number of supercommuters–people who commute more than 90 minutes each way to and from work–has grown much faster than the total number of workers in the United States. In 2010, 2.4 percent of commuters spent more than 90 minutes en route; by 2019, it was 3.1 percent.

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

These supercommuters are not evenly distributed across the country. Instead, both the number and the rapid growth of supercommuters are concentrated in a few states, mainly California, Hawaii, Massachusetts, New York, and Washington. In particular, the Boston, New York, San Francisco, San Jose, Seattle, and Washington metropolitan areas all have large numbers and higher than average growth of supercommuters. These states and urban areas are all known for using some form of growth management to minimize sprawl. Continue reading →

Another Phony Housing Crisis

By | | Housing
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The Wall Street Journal recently published an op-ed piece about “the housing crisis that is plaguing rural America.” Using Orange County in southern Indiana as an example, the writer, Kerry Thompson, frets that “There simply isn’t enough housing for the people who want to live there,” which is “having a devastating effect on rural America’s economy.”

Evidence of a housing crisis? This 2,900-square-foot home in rural Orange County, Indiana is currently for sale for $265,000, or $91 per square foot. A Wall Street Journal op-ed somehow argues that this low price is evidence of a rural housing shortage. Note the Trump banner; I suspect this is really evidence of the divide between urban and rural areas, as the Journal writer doesn’t seem to understand rural areas despite running an organization that is supposedly devoted to rural problems.

This is a problem, Thompson claims, because the pandemic has led to “upticks in interest in rural areas, as more Americans determine to flee the cities for greener pastures.” If there is a rural housing crisis, there may not be any greener pastures for them to move to. Continue reading →