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Monthly Archives: August 2021

Charting Transit Values and Trends

By | | Policy brief, Transportation
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Is transit ridership growing or declining in your urban area? Do fare increases have anything to do with ridership trends? Are operating costs growing and are fares keeping up with costs? What is happening with transit speeds?

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

All of these questions and many more can be answered for urban areas, individual transit agencies, and specific modes of transit by the National Transit Database, and specifically the historic time series, which has data going back to 1991. Unfortunately, the database is hard to use. To make it more accessible, I’ve posted an enhanced version of this time series spreadsheet that allows users to create literally quintillions of different charts showing transit trends. Continue reading →

The Tide Celebrates Ten Years of Waste

By | | Transportation
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The Tide, Norfolk’s light-rail line, has been open to the public for ten years. As noted in this article in the Pilot, it opened 18 months late after a 60 percent cost overrun.

The Tide light rail in downtown Norfolk. Photo by Dean Covey, Virginia Department of Transportation.

The article claims the light-rail line carried its first million rides “five months ahead of original projections,” but that’s a transit agency lie. The original projections estimated that the rail line would carry 10,400 riders per weekday in its opening year. That would be about 1 million riders in less than four months. In fact, it carried less than half that, just 4,900 riders per weekday in its first year, and took eight months to reach 1 million riders. Continue reading →

The Failure of Dallas TOD

By | | Transportation
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The Dallas Area Rapid Transit (DART), the transit agency serving Dallas and a dozen other cities, is proud of the fact that it has built the longest light-rail system in the country. It is almost as proud of the many transit-oriented developments (TODs) built near light-rail stations. Of course, it never mentions that many if not most of those developments were subsidized through below-market land sales, tax-increment financing, and other government assistance.

Apartments and condos surround the Las Colinas light-rail station in Irving, Texas, yet that station attracted only 137 round-trip riders per weekday in 2019.

To transit advocates, such subsidies are justified because they boost ridership. But is there cause for such justification? How well have transit-oriented developments worked in promoting DART ridership? Continue reading →

A Solution in Search of a Problem

By | | Regional planning
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The Antiplanner remains a skeptic of climate change not because of the evidence for or against it but because so many of its adherents are eagerly using it to impose their preconceived prescriptions for how people should live. The latest is an article in the Guardian claiming that urban densification is “one of the most impactful ways to slash greenhouse gas emissions.” If it weren’t for evil NIMBYs, the article implies, the world would be well on its way to ending carbon emissions.

This is, of course, total and complete garbage, as I showed in a Cato paper nearly 12 years ago. Claims that denser lifestyles emit fewer greenhouse gases ignore the self-selection issue (people who want to drive less choose to live in denser areas); the congestion issue (people who live in dense cities may drive less, but they drive in greater congestion and therefore end up burning as much or more fuel as people living in low-density suburbs); and the construction issue (greenhouse gas emissions from building multi-story housing are much greater than one- and two-story housing).

Beyond that, the viability of a plan that depends on completely changing the lifestyles of hundreds of millions if not billions of people is highly questionable. Finally, consider the alternatives: for the same effort, we can save more emissions by making more fuel-efficient cars than by trying to get people to stop driving and by building more energy-efficient single-family homes than by trying to get people to live in multifamily housing. Continue reading →

The Oddity of Public Transit

By | | Transportation
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“An oddity of American public transit,” says Strong Towns, a semi-New Urbanist organization dedicated to compact cities and transit, “is the prevalence of commuter rail lines designed to do one thing and one thing only: bring 9-5 office workers to and from downtown.” The Facebook post then links to an article in Governing magazine titled, Taking the Commuter out of Commuter Rail, which claims the huge decline in commuter-rail ridership is an “opportunity to reinvent the suburb-city service.”

CalTrain is a classic example of Type 1 commuter rail, having once been operated by Southern Pacific. In 2019 fares covered 75 percent of its operating costs and it used less energy per passenger mile than a Toyota Prius. But as of June its ridership was down 88 percent. Photo by Runner1928.

Before critiquing these ideas, it is important to point out that there are really two kinds of “commuter-rail” operations; call them Type 1 and Type 2. Type 1 is traditional big-city commuter trains, which were usually started by private railroads in the nineteenth century and were taken over by government agencies in the 1960s and 1970s. These brought suburban workers into downtown Boston, Chicago, New York, Philadelphia, and San Francisco. This is the commuter rail that Strong Towns and Governing are writing about. Continue reading →

Moving the Overton Window

By | | Policy brief
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Twenty years ago, South Carolina had two citizens’ groups advocating for property rights. One of the groups was highly successful, having persuaded the state legislature to pass several important laws protecting property rights. The other group had the same aims but was completely unsuccessful, and could rarely get a meeting with important legislators, much less persuade them to pass a law.

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

The difference was that the unsuccessful group repeatedly claimed that Agenda 21 was a threat to property rights. This totally undermined their credibility. Few members of the state legislature had ever met a United Nation’s official, and certainly didn’t see any connection between state or local policies and an accord written in Rio de Janeiro in 1992. Continue reading →

Not a Good Time to Waste More Money

By | | Transportation
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Illinois has the highest pension debt of any state in the union; a phenomenal $317 billion as of 2020. Overall, the state’s financial health is second only to California for being the worst in the nation.

What better time could there be to start planning construction of a high-speed rail line from Chicago to St. Louis? Considering that high-speed rail is one of the reasons why California is in worth financial shape than Illinois, building a new high-speed rail system would be enough to make Illinois number one! Not that any state should aspire to be the worst fiscal condition.

The state has apparently forgotten that it has already spent nearly $2 billion on a project to increase frequencies and speeds on the existing Chicago-St. Louis route. It would be useful to know if those improvements made any difference to ridership before spending a lot more on the corridor. But there is no way to tell because, despite the fact that it began the project in 2010, the trains today are no faster nor more frequent than they were before. Continue reading →

How to Save Taxpayers’ Money

By | | Transportation
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Seattle taxpayers pay some of the highest taxes in the country so that Sound Transit can build $75 billion worth of light-rail and other transit facilities. Some of those taxpayers must have been overjoyed to read a Sound Transit press release saying, “Local taxpayers to save more than $500 million through USDOT financing assistance.”

Those same taxpayers, however, may be wondering: are they going to get that $500 million back in rebates on the taxes they have paid to date? Is Sound Transit going to reduce future taxes to take this savings into account? Or will Sound Transit just throw a big party with an open bar and invite Seattle taxpayers to attend? How about none of the above.

Early this year, Sound Transit admitted that the cost of two planned light-rail lines will be as much as 70 percent more — than originally projected. That’s $6.2 billion. The agency faces a $6.5 billion shortfall in funds, which plans to deal with by delaying completion of several promised light-rail lines to as late as 2041 — 44 years after taxpayers began paying for them. Continue reading →

Should Private HSR Have Eminent Domain?

By | | Transportation
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Eminent domain — the power to force people to sell their property — can significantly disrupt a society. People at risk of losing their land at any time will be reluctant to invest in improvements, which in turn will limit the nation’s productivity. For this reason, the Fifth Amendment says that eminent domain can only be exercised for “public use” and only with “just compensation.” Even then, people debate what is a “public use” and many who have been forced to sell their property don’t believe the amounts they are paid are “just” if they are significantly less than the unwilling sellers would have asked for in a free exchange.

Most states — no one is sure how many — have decided that railroads are a “public use” and have granted railroads the power of eminent domain. This raises questions like:

  • What is the definition of a “railroad”?
  • Can anyone call themselves a railroad and begin taking other peoples’ property?
  • Does a railroad have to be operating to exercise this power?
  • Does a railroad have to have rails to be a railroad?
  • Can a railroad take peoples’ property even if they don’t have money to pay for it or to finish building the rail line?

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These and similar questions are addressed in Maryland and Texas courts where private companies that have proposed to build high-speed rail lines have demanded the right of eminent domain even though they don’t actually operate any trains and don’t even have enough money to build the proposed lines. The issue is slightly more straightforward in Texas than it is in Maryland. Continue reading →

The Movement to Regulate Car Ads

By | | Transportation
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Automobile accidents can be horrible and tragic and we should take the most cost-effective steps we can to reduce or eliminate them. But anti-auto people aren’t interested in cost-effectiveness: they just want to do whatever feels good no matter how much it hurts society.

“Out on the highways there was such a sense of freedom — I thought I would explode from sheer happiness,” wrote the photographer. Yet others look at this picture and all they see is costs and externalities. Photo by Gayle Nicholson.

Case in point: a recent article in Bloomberg’s CityLab argues that automobile advertising promotes dangerous behavior and should be strictly regulated. Apparently, one brand of cars saying that their vehicles are “tough” and another brand saying that their vehicles will “thrill you” encourage people to drive too fast or too recklessly. Continue reading →