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Monthly Archives: March 2021

Blaming the Messenger

By | | Transportation
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Ridership on New York City subways is down by 67 percent from before the pandemic. Metropolitan Transportation Authority CEO Sarah Feinberg says it is all the media’s fault.

The MTA “was really ill-served by some of the early coverage of the pandemic,” she says. “People started thinking, ‘the last place I want to be is in a crowded subway car.'” She claims that “study after study” has found that transit was not “vectoring the virus.”

The New York Post article reporting on her statement snarks that she made it “without referencing specific studies.” But what do you expect? The Post, after all, is part of the media. Continue reading →

The Dark Side of Japan’s Bullet Trains

By | | Policy brief, Transportation
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In 1964, the Japanese National Railways (JNR) was on a roll. The state-owned but largely unsubsidized company had just finished seven years of uninterrupted profits. Moreover, in 1964 it opened the Shinkansen (meaning new main line) between Tokyo and Osaka in time for the Summer Olympics. This exposed an international audience to the latest in Japanese technology in the form of the fastest trains in the world with top speeds of 130 miles per hour and average speeds as high as 86 miles per hour. These quickly became the envy of other countries, leading even the United States Congress to pass a law promoting high-speed trains in 1965.

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

Today, salarymen and tourists ride shinkansen the full length of Japan’s main island of Honshu as well as on the outer islands of Hokkaido and Kyushu. However, there is a dark side to the shinkansen. Like Darth Vader, who started out as a nice little boy who loved speed but whose life was corrupted by a power-hungry politician, the shinkansen was warped by politicians and ended up doing more harm than good to Japan’s economy. Continue reading →

Transit Wins Big in $1.9 Trillion Relief Bill

By | | Transportation
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The $1.9 trillion COVID relief bill passed by the House of Representatives last week would give public transit more money than any other form of transportation: $30 billion. Airports and airlines, which before the pandemic moved 14 times as many passenger miles as transit, would receive $23 billion if the bill is approved by the Senate.

Amtrak, which is even more trivial than transit, would get $1.8 billion, some of which would be dedicated to restoring long-distance trains to daily service and some of which is to pay for state-supported trains under the probably fallacious assumption that the states can’t afford to do so during the pandemic. In 2019, Amtrak carried about 10 percent as many passenger-miles as transit.

If the last few months of 2020 are an indication of what will happen in 2021, then the airlines will carry 450 billion fewer passenger-miles than in 2019; transit 34 billion fewer; and Amtrak 4.5 billion fewer. The subsidies per each passenger-mile they won’t be carrying amount to 5 cents for the airlines, 40 cents for Amtrak, and 88 cents for transit. Of course, subsidizing someone for not doing something is ridiculous, but only typical for Congress. Continue reading →