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Monthly Archives: August 2021

The World’s Finest Railroads

By | | Policy brief, Transportation
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The United States has the most efficient and productive railroads in the world. Not coincidentally, the United States also has the most private railroads in the world. Other than Canada, almost every other country that has railroads has nationalized them.

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

Private railroads operate with very different goals from those that are owned by the government. Private railroads seek to maximize profits, and to do so they must be as efficient and productive as possible. Government-owned railroads seek to maximize political popularity, and to do so they must favor actions that are highly visible and often are highly inefficient and unproductive because economic costs translate into political benefits. Continue reading →

National Per-Mile User Fee in Infrastructure Bill

By | | Transportation
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Section 13002 of the infrastructure bill that the senate passed last week calls for the secretaries of transportation and the treasury to create a pilot mileage-based user fee program. The last transportation bill, which was passed in 2015, offered states grants to create their own pilot programs, but only six states did so, and some of them are not currently active.

The proposed infrastructure bill extends the state program (in section 13001), but also creates a national pilot program. If passed, the Secretary of Transportation would first create an advisory board that would take up to a year to design the program. Then the Secretary of the Treasury would set fees, which could differ by size of motor vehicle. Then the two secretaries would do a “public awareness campaign” to try to find geographically and economically distributed volunteers to participate in the program.

Fees could be charged via smart-phone apps, third-party GPS devices plugged into the diagnostic ports of cars (which is one way Oregon does it), data collected by automakers (such as GM’s OneStar system, which keeps track of vehicle locations in case of an accident), data collected by insurance companies (which can charge people by the mile using a similar GPS device in at least eight states), or “any other method that the Secretary considers appropriate.” Continue reading →

Sex Scandal Reveals Opposition to AirTrain

By | | Transportation
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In 2004, a sex scandal led the Portland media to reveal to people that the city was run by a light-rail mafia. Since then, I’ve told people in other cities that, if their region builds rail transit, they better hope for a sex scandal so they can find out where their money went.

Artist’s conception of proposed LaGuardia AirTrain provided courtesy of the office of the soon-to-be ex-governor.

New York City residents are lucky: a sex scandal there may derail a wasteful 2-mile-long “people mover” (automated guideway) project that the Antiplanner critiqued a year ago, noting that it “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 project was supported by Governor Andrew Cuomo, who this week agreed to resign due to sexual harassment claims. Continue reading →

June Driving Exceeds Pre-Pandemic Levels

By | | Transportation, Useful Data
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Americans drove more miles in June 2021 than June 2019, the first time since the pandemic began that driving exceeded pre-pandemic levels, according to data published yesterday by the Federal Highway Administration. We drove 282.5 billion vehicle miles in June 2021, almost half a percent more than the 281.2 billion driven in June 2019.

When compared with pre-pandemic levels, driving has effectively recovered from the pandemic, while other forms of travel have not.

To be fair, June 2021 had more business days than June 2019, which helped boost miles of driving. July 2021 had fewer business days that July 2019, so we’ll see next month how much of a difference this makes. Continue reading →

The Fix Was In

By | | News commentary
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It cannot have escaped everyone’s notice that 17 Republican senators had agreed to support the infrastructure bill that the senate passed yesterday — enough to prevent a filibuster. A former senate staffer once told me that the fix was always in for senate votes: the leadership would decide what to do and then twist enough arms to make it happen.

So what was in it for the Republican leadership to support this bill? The bill included billions of dollars for projects we don’t need, like rural broadband, urban transit, and new Amtrak trains. Some Republicans may benefit from the pork, but I wonder if the leadership thought that going along with this bill will help them to fend off the $3.5 trillion bill the Democrats want to pass next.

That bill includes money for clean energy, preschool, and affordable housing, among other things. As with the infrastructure bill, these things are arguably not necessary or, to the extent they are, the top-down approach taken by the bill will do more harm than good. For example, we know the reason housing is unaffordable in many states is because state and local land-use rules of restricted the supply of land for new housing, but the bill will do nothing about those rules. Continue reading →

The Failure of Transit in the Post-COVID Era

By | | Policy brief, Transportation, Useful Data
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Nationwide transit ridership in June was 50.3 percent of June 2019, making this the first month since the onset of COVID-19 that ridership recovered to half of pre-pandemic levels. Yet transit remains well behind Amtrak, which carried 63 percent of pre-pandemic passenger-miles in June; flying, which was at 74 percent; and driving. June data are not yet available for driving but May driving was 96 percent of pre-pandemic miles.

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

Transit is doing poorly compared with Amtrak and driving because it is most heavily dependent on commuters. The 2017 National Household Travel Survey found that commuting and work-related travel make up less than 20 percent of personal driving but are 40 percent of transit ridership. With many people working at home during the pandemic, transit has lost a large share of its market. Continue reading →

June Transit 50% of Pre-Pandemic Ridership

By | | Transportation, Useful Data
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Transit ridership reached 50 percent of pre-pandemic levels in June, according to data released late last week by the Federal Transit Administration. This leaves transit well behind Amtrak, which carried 63 percent as many passenger miles; the airlines, which carried 74 percent as many passengers; and highways. Highway data for June are not yet available but in May they carried 96 percent of pre-pandemic miles of driving.

Amtrak numbers are from the company’s June Monthly Performance Report; airline data from the Transportation Security Administration; and highway data are from the Federal Highway Administration. Final June highway numbers should be available next week.

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Transit Would Get 62% Boost in Federal Funding

By | | Transportation
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Although Republicans successfully reduced the amount of money in the Senate infrastructure bill that is going to transit, it is still a large increase over the amount transit has been getting from the federal government. Transit agencies received about $14.4 billion from the federal government in 2019. Under the Senate infrastructure bill, this will increase to about $23.3 billion a year, or roughly a 62 percent gain.

Under the bill, transit is guaranteed $14 billion a year from the Highway Trust Fund alone. This is more than 20 percent of total spending out of the trust fund compared with 18 percent in the 2015 FAST Act. Since the trust fund isn’t collecting enough money out of fuel taxes and other federal highway user fees to even pay for the highway share, transit’s share of the fund will all be deficit spending.

Transit will also get $1.6 billion a year for “fixed guideway capital investments,” which doesn’t come from the Highway Trust Fund. Also known as New Starts, the vast majority of this money will be wasted on obsolete rail transit projects such as light rail and streetcars. The rest will be wasted on dedicated bus lanes for bus-rapid transit. Continue reading →

Amtrak Infrastructure Boondoggle

By | | Transportation
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If Congress passes the infrastructure compromise reached by the White House and 17 Republican senators, Amtrak will get $66 billion. Amtrak won’t have complete freedom to spend this money however it likes: instead, according to Senator Charles Schumer, $30 billion is for Northeast Corridor backlog and modernization; $16 billion is for other backlog needs; and $12 billion is for new services outside of the Northeast Corridor, “including high speed rail,” as if $12 billion could buy any significant amount of high-speed rail.

Last month, Amtrak revealed that it needs $117 billion to bring the Northeast Corridor up to a state of good repair, so the $30 billion in the infrastructure bill is little more than a down payment. Thus, Congress is continuing its usual pattern of short-funding needed maintenance so that it can fund new projects. After all, if all of the money in the bill went to the Northeast Corridor, senators and representatives in the rest of the country would have little reason to support it.

One of the Northeast Corridor projects funded in the bill is new tunnels under the Hudson River, which are expected to cost $3 billion a mile, more than just about any other tunnels in history. When Slate writer Henry Grabar asked Amtrak CEO William Flynn how he could justify such a high cost, Flynn responded that he didn’t think it was that expensive. Grabar concluded that Amtrak didn’t care about the cost. Continue reading →

Poison Pills in the Senate Infrastructure Bill

By | | Transportation
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The House-approved INVEST Act included a provision requiring states to insure that all existing roads were in a state-of-good-repair before building new roads. I called that a “poison pill” because it poisoned the idea of using federal funds to promote mobility. This is especially true because Amtrak and transit have far more severe maintenance backlogs than highways, yet the bill included no similar provisions for those modes.

Click image to download a 4.0-MB PDF of this bill.

I’ve read through the 2,702-page Senate infrastructure bill and the good news is that it doesn’t include the same fix-it-first provision for highways as the House bill. However, it does have several mobility poisons of its own. Continue reading →