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Monthly Archives: December 2021

Begger-Thy-Neighbor Shinkansen to Open in 2022

By | | Transportation
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The West Kyushu Shinkansen or high-speed rail line is nearing completion and will open in 2022, a few years late. Construction of the 41-mile (66-kilometer) line began way back in 2012 and is expected to cost $5.44 billion, or more than $130 million per mile. The line isn’t connected to any other high-speed rail line and offers some insights into rail politics.

The West Kyushu route is the tiny dotted line on the far left of this map.

Kyushu is the third largest Japanese island and is located less than a mile from Honshu, the main island. The two islands were connected by a conventional railroad tunnel under the Kanmon Straits in 1942, by a highway tunnel in 1958, a highway bridge in 1973, and a high-speed rail tunnel in 1975. For what it’s worth, I’ve been through both the conventional and high-speed rail tunnels but can’t say much about them because it was too dark to see. Continue reading →

Reducing Greenhouse Gases from Flying

By | | Transportation
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Rail advocates say we need to spend hundreds of billions of dollars on high-speed rail to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions from flying. But there is probably a more cost-effective way of reducing the greenhouse gas emissions from flying, such as using aviation fuel that emits fewer net greenhouse gases.

Of course, there’s no reason to think that high-speed rail would reduce greenhouse gas emissions anyway. The best study on the issue found that the huge amount of greenhouse gases emitted during construction would require 71 years of savings to balance out. But rail lines must be extensively rebuilt every 20 to 30 years, and I don’t see that the study factored the greenhouse gas emissions of such reconstruction into the analysis. Continue reading →

Costs Rise, But by How Much?

By | | Transportation
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The cost of electrifying commuter trains between San Francisco and San Jose has gone up to $2.44 billion, according to Caltrain, which runs the trains. What’s interesting is that Caltrain says this is an increase of $462 million over the “initial estimate.” That would make the initial estimate $1.98 billion.

A new Caltrain electric-powered passenger car being delivered to California. As part of electrification, the entire fleet of locomotives and passenger cars must be replaced. Photo by Martijn van Exel.

However, I have a 2015 document from the Federal Transit Administration that puts the cost at $1.758 billion, or $222 million less than the supposed “initial estimate.” This estimate is in “year-of-expenditure” dollars, meaning it is adjusted for inflation. It’s funny how initial estimates creep up over time to make it seem like the cost overruns aren’t as great as they really are. Continue reading →

Why U.S. Infrastructure Is So Expensive

By | | Policy brief, Transportation
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Now that Congress has passed an infrastructure bill, major media outlets are beginning to ask questions about how the money will be spent. Using the Honolulu rail project as an example, the New York Times wants to know why so many infrastructure projects suffer from such large cost overruns. Bloomberg asks similar questions using Boston’s Green Line extension as an example.

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

The Eno Transportation Foundation and Manhattan Institute wonder why projects cost more than in other countries even before the cost overruns. These are all good questions that should have been asked before the bill was passed. Continue reading →

Keeping Poor People In Their Place

By | | Transportation
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California Assemblywoman Cristina Garcia has introduced legislation forbidding the state department of transportation from building or expanding freeways in poor neighborhoods. She noted research showing that freeway expansions allowed more people to travel more, and apparently she doesn’t want to extend such mobility options to low-income people.

Another legislator, state Senator Sydney Kamlager, agreed that the state should focus on “alternative modes of transportation” such as public transit in poor neighborhoods. Transit can’t reach as many places as automobiles and only goes during certain hours of the day, so encouraging poor people to use transit allows more control over when and where they travel.

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Amtrak to Cut Service

By | | Transportation
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Amtrak Joe, meet Vaccination Joe. President Biden’s requirement that all federal workers must be vaccinated by January 4 has led Amtrak to announce that it will have to cut service on some of its routes in anticipation of employees quitting because they don’t want to be vaccinated.

Might not be a lot of vaccinated people eager to work for Amtrak out here.

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New York MTA Spends $1.1 Billion on Overtime

By | | Transportation
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New York’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) is proud to say that it has reduced the amount of overtime it pays its employees from nearly $1.4 billion in 2018 to a little more than $1.1 billion in 2020. That’s still way too much.

MTA spent $24 million installing finger-print ID time clocks such as this one to reduce overtime abuse, but many employees aren’t using them. Image from UKG.

Overtime is a big issue for transit agencies. Many transit employees, from bus drivers to train conductors to maintenance workers, significantly boost their incomes by working overtime. Agencies could save money by hiring more employees, but unions have successfully gone on strike to prevent agencies from doing so. Continue reading →

October Transit 53.5% of 2019 Ridership

By | | Transportation, Useful Data
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Transit ridership in October 2021 was 53.5 percent of October 2019, a slight drop from September’s 53.6 percent, according to data released yesterday by the Federal Transit Administration. Air travel increased from 76.3 percent to 79.7 percent and Amtrak increased from 67.1 percent to 72.2 percent, so transit continues to lag behind other modes.

Amtrak numbers are from Amtrak’s Monthly Performance Report; air travel numbers are from the Transportation Security Administration. Driving numbers should be available in about a week.

Transit agencies offered 80 percent as much service (measured in vehicle-revenue hours) in October 2021 as they did in the same month of 2019. Though this is down from 86 percent in September, this was mainly because October 2019 saw a large increase in service: October 2021 saw 99.6 percent as many vehicle hours as September 2021. Continue reading →

Sutton Mountain Wilderness Yes, Monument No

By | | Policy brief, Public lands
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In November, Oregon senators Jeff Merkley and Ron Wyden introduced legislation to turn Sutton Mountain into a national monument. If you’ve never heard of Sutton Mountain, don’t feel bad: I’ve lived in Oregon all my life and never heard of it until a few months ago. Briefly, Sutton Mountain is a undistinguished summit in eastern Oregon’s Wheeler County that is surrounded by land that is mostly managed by the Bureau of Land Management, which has studied it for potential wilderness status.

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

Sutton Mountain has some natural values that are deserving of wilderness status. But the Merkley-Wyden bill doesn’t protect natural resources: instead, it is an economic development bill. It proposes to create a national monument in the hope that it would attract tourism to the county that has the smallest population in Oregon. As a national monument, activities would be allowed that would be forbidden in a wilderness area, such as the destruction of juniper trees that some ranchers think reduce forage for their cattle. The bill would also transfer roughly more than 1,300 acres of federal land to a town of fewer than 130 people with the expectation that the town would use the land for economic development. Continue reading →

Americans Keep Moving to the Suburbs

By | | Housing, Useful Data
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Remember a few years ago when urban planners had convinced reporters that “the new American dream is living in a city, not owning a house in the suburbs”? That was from 2014, yet Americans have continued to move out of cities and into the suburbs or, increasingly, the exurbs.

In one trend that hasn’t been accelerated by the pandemic, more than two million Americans move from the cities to the suburbs each year. Photo by Wesley Fryer.

According to the latest Census Bureau estimates, since that claim was made in 2014, more than 13.5 million Americans moved out of the “principal cities” in metropolitan areas. Those metropolitan areas have nevertheless grown because 14.0 million Americans moved to the suburbs of those cities. This only includes Americans; the population decline of major cities has been partly mitigated by the 3.2 immigrants from other countries that have moved to those cities. Cities that actually lost population since 2010 were mostly in the rust belt: Baltimore, Buffalo, Chicago, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Milwaukee, Rochester, and Toledo, but also included Baton Rouge, Memphis, and several more. Continue reading →