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Monthly Archives: February 2023

You Get What You Pay For

By | | Transportation
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Addis Ababa, the capital of Ethiopia, has a 19.6-mile light-rail system that consists of a north-south line intersecting an east-west line. It cost $475 million, or less than $25 million per mile. That sounds like a good deal compared with U.S. lines now under construction or in planning, the least expensive of which is more than $135 million a mile and the average cost is more than $275 million a mile.

Addis Ababa’s light-rail line. Photo by A.Savin.

There’s just one little problem. Although the light-rail system is just seven years old, it is already suffering serious maintenance problems. Only eight of the city’s 41 light-rail trains are functional, and the city has resorted to operating just every other day in order to do track maintenance. The city estimates it needs $60 million to restore the system to full capacity, which it doesn’t have. Continue reading →

2022 Transit 62.0% of 2019

By | | Transportation, Useful Data
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Urban transit carried just over half a billion trips in the United States in December, and just under 6 billion in 2022 as a whole, according to December 2022 transit data released Monday by the Federal Transit Administration. December’s ridership was 66.0 percent of December 2019 while the calendar year’s was 62.0 percent.

Transit trips are from the National Transit Database; Amtrak passenger-miles are from Monthly Performance Reports; airline passenger data are from the Transportation Security Administration; and highway vehicle-mile data are from the Traffic Volume Trends. December highway data will be available in a week or so.

Meanwhile, after reaching above 90 percent of 2019 numbers in November for the first time since the pandemic, Amtrak numbers fell to 80 percent in December, its lowest, measured as a percentage of 2019, since May. Airline passenger numbers fell a little bit as well, but only from 94.3 to 93.3 percent of 2019. December highway numbers should be available soon. Continue reading →

Transportation After COVID-19

By | | Transportation, Urban areas
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Minnesota transportation agencies need to reinvent themselves if they are to survive after the pandemic, according to a new report published yesterday by the Center of the American Experiment, Minnesota’s free-market think tank. Off the Rails: Minnesota Transportation After COVID-19 says that the world has changed so much that any transportation plans written before 2020 will no longer make sense (if they ever did).

Click image to download a 3.1-MB PDF of this 48-page report.

In case you can’t read the fine print on the image above, the report was written by yours truly and so all of its themes — increased numbers of telecommuters, the follies of light rail, the importance of funding transport out of user fees, not to mention more than a dozen brightly colored charts — will be familiar to Antiplanner readers. But in some respects, the Twin Cities’ post-pandemic experiences have been more extreme than most. Continue reading →

The Housing Plot

By | | Housing
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Oregon’s new governor, Tina Kotek, has made housing her top priority and has proposed a number of unrealistic and idiotic remedies to high housing costs and homelessness. For one, she wants spend $54 million to house 1,200 people for one year. That’s $4,000 a month per person. Of course, a lot of that is probably going to go into various housing bureaucracies.

Someone’s idea of affordable housing Portland, because everyone knows that people move out West so they can live in a cramped apartment.

Kotek’s long-term goal is to see 36,000 housing units built per year in Oregon, which five times more than has recently been built. The state has not built 36,000 housing units for 50 years, which by an extraordinary coincidence is when the legislature created the state’s land-use planning process that restricts rural development. Continue reading →