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Monthly Archives: February 2022

Honolulu Rail Has More Rail Problems

By | | Transportation
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Honolulu rail transit tracks, which as still under construction, are too close together in some spots, which could lead to derailments. This is different from last year’s problem, in which the wheels of the railcars were found to be too narrow for some of the tracks.

Honolulu’s high-cost, low-capacity rail line under construction. Click image for a larger view. Photo by Anthony Quintano.

No one yet knows how much it will cost and how long it will take to fix the new problem. But fixing last year’s issue significantly added to the delay and cost of the project, which is currently not expected to be finished until 2031, eleven years later and at more than twice the cost that was originally projected. Continue reading →

Portland Downtown Devastated by COVID

By | | Regional planning, Transportation
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The number of people working in downtown Portland dropped from more than 103,000 in mid-2019 to 13,000 in mid-2020, according to a State of the Economy report recently published by the Portland Business Alliance. The report doesn’t actually show numbers, but the chart below, which I took from the report, can be used to make pretty close estimates.

This chart is taken from page 3 of Portland Business Alliance’s State of the Economy report. Click image for a larger view.

By the end of 2021, the downtown area had recovered to about 34,000 workers, still less than a third of pre-pandemic numbers. The pandemic may not be the only factor depressing downtown employment: Black Lives Matter protests that began in May 2020 resulted in “numerous instances of arson, looting, vandalism, and injuries,” many of which affected downtown businesses and will probably continue to do so well into the future. Continue reading →

A New Level of Transit Incompetence

By | | Transportation
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It seems like we are getting more lessons about massive cost overruns for transit projects every couple of weeks. Last week, the Federal Transit Administration issued a “scathing report claiming that the Santa Clara Valley Transportation Authority (VTA) was being “overly optimistic” and “misleading” in its estimates of the costs of building a BART subway to San Jose.

Despite objections from critics, VTA decided to bore an 86-foot deep, 48-foot diameter tunnel rather than build two shallower and smaller tunnels using the cut-and-cover method, which would have been less expensive and saved passengers’ time.

The six-mile-long project was originally estimated to cost $5.6 billion (which is itself ridiculous) and be done in 2029, but the FTA now predicts it will cost as much as $9.1 billion and won’t be complete until 2034. This is $1.5 billion a mile for a transit line that is expected to carry so few riders that early estimates predicted it would cost more than $100 for each new transit rider carried. VTA’s response doesn’t refute anything the FTA said, but basically said it is too late to fix the problems so taxpayers would have to live with them (and pay for them). Continue reading →

Brightline Carnage Continues

By | | Transportation
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Brightline, the privately operated passenger train in Florida, had five accidents that killed three people last week.

  • On February 13, a man was killed when he drove his car around the lowered crossing gates and was hit by a train in Lake Worth Beach.
  • On February 15, a pedestrian was killed when he was struck by a Brightline train in Hallandale Beach.

Brightline posted this video taken from the train that struck a car last week to prove that the accident wasn’t its fault. What it shows is that a freight train had gone through the crossing and an impatient motorist drove around the gates unable to see that a passenger train was coming because his view was blocked by the freight. The accident would have been prevented if Brightline had installed full-width crossing gates instead of gates that covered only half the width of the street.

  • Also on February 15, a woman and her baby narrowly avoided injury when a Brightline train struck her car in Delray Beach.
  • On February 16, a man suffered “incapacitating injuries” when a Brightline train struck his car, also in Lake Worth Beach.
  • On February 19, a man walking on the tracks was killed when he was hit by a Brightline train in Delray Beach.

Continue reading →

State & Local Highway Subsidies in 2019 and 2020

By | | Policy brief, Transportation
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Americans drove 14 percent fewer miles in 2020 than in 2019, but state and local highway agencies continued to spend as much money on road improvements and maintenance. State and local highway subsidies increased only slightly, however, as the decline in miles of driving was partly offset by increases in fuel taxes and other user fees.

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

Two years ago, an Antiplanner policy brief looked at 2018 state and local highway subsidies. Today’s update compares 2020 data with 2019 results based on data published in the Federal Highway Administration’s annual Highway Statistics reports. In these reports, highway user fees, and how much of them are actually spent on highways as opposed to mass transit or other programs, are shown in tables SDF for the states and LDF for local governments. The sources of highway funds, including user fees, general funds, and other taxes, are shown in tables SF-3 and LGF-1. The actual amounts of money spent on roads are shown in SF-2 and LGF-2. Continue reading →

December Driving 2.7% Above 2019

By | | Transportation, Useful Data
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Americans drove 2.7 percent more miles in December 2021 than in December 2019, according to the latest traffic volume data published by the Federal Highway Administration last Friday. According to these data, December was the seventh month in a row that driving exceeded driving in the same month in 2019.

This is a revision from previous reports because the Federal Highway Administration revised the national miles-traveled for December 2019 (shown on page 2 of the report). The preliminary estimate in 2019 was that Americans drove 273.8 billion vehicle miles in December. In 2020, this was revised downwards to 272.2 billion. But this report, for 2021, revised the December 2019 miles downwards even more to 261.8 billion. Continue reading →

Railroads for Passengers or Freight?

By | | Transportation
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Congress’ decision to give Amtrak $16 billion for adding new passenger service has reopened an old debate: which should get priority over the rails — passenger or freight trains? That debate came out in hearings held by the Surface Transportation Board over Amtrak’s proposal to restart passenger service between New Orleans and Jacksonville that had been shut down in 2005 due to damage from Hurricane Katrina.

In 2016, Amtrak ran a test train to Florida to generate support for the Gulf Coast route. Resistance from the freight railroads has prevented Amtrak from reestablishing this service. Photo by Gracebeliever77.

CSX and Norfolk Southern, the railroads over which Amtrak would operate, says the passenger trains would “unreasonably disrupt” their freight trains in the area, many of which serve the Port of Mobile, Alabama, one of the fifteen largest ports in the country measured by tonnage. Unlike most West Coast ports, the Port of Mobile sees more tonnage exported than imported, and much of the freight in both directions goes over CSX and Norfolk Southern tracks. Continue reading →

Downtowns Don’t Deserve to Be Rescued

By | | Regional planning
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The usually sensible Megan McArdle writes in the Washington Post that “Downtown is in deep trouble.” Where she becomes insensible is that she thinks that is a bad thing, arguing that city governments need to take action to lure businesses back into downtowns.

Chicago has the second-largest downtown in the United States, yet that downtown had only 12.5 percent of the jobs in the Chicago urban area before the pandemic, and even less now.

When otherwise sensible people think of a city, they imagine a dense, job-filled downtown surrounded by lower-density residential areas. Yet, as Washington Post writer Joel Garreau wrote more than 30 years ago, downtowns “are relics of a time past.” In fact, he said, downtown-centered cities were the “nineteenth-century version” of a city, and that “We built cities like that for less than a century.” Continue reading →

Detroit to Blow $1.9 Million on Electric Road

By | | Transportation
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Detroit is installing charging coils under one mile of of one lane of a street in the city so people with electric cars can charge them as they drive. This is a crazy idea that I suspect has no future.

To start with, the city is spending $1.9 million to install the charging coils. As the above video notes, installing them throughout the city would cost billions. Continue reading →

Truckers, Congestion, and Class Conflict

By | | Policy brief, Transportation
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“During the pandemic lockdowns, the email jobs caste [meaning remote workers] loved to talk about essential workers,” observes Marxist writer Malcom Kyeyune, but they now regard those workers with “outright hatred.” His fellow leftists claim to speak for the working class, charges Kyeyune, but in fact the leftist movement and the working-class movement have “divorced.”

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

Kyeyune was writing about the Canadian truckers who object to mandatory vaccinations, but he also mentioned European truckers who protested high fuel taxes a few years ago. In the United States, middle-class progressives have come to depend on truckers to deliver all the stuff they order from Amazon but do everything they can to make the daily lives of those truckers miserable. Continue reading →