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Monthly Archives: February 2025

Houston Transit: Back to Basics Not Enough

By | | Transportation
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Houston’s Metro transit is going back to basics, focusing on public safety and giving up its expensive light-rail and bus rapid transit plans. This follows the election of a new mayor, John Whitmire, who took office on January 1, 2024 and quickly replaced several members of the Metro board. Though Whitmire is a Democrat, he took office at a time when Houston was facing serious financial problems and so he is taking a fiscally conservative approach to spending.

By many measures, Houston’s Metro is doing better than most U.S. transit agencies. At the end of 2015, it implemented new bus routes, changing from a downtown-centric system to a grid system, as recommended by Jarrett Walker. Partly as a result, ridership grew by 5 percent between 2019 and 2019, a period during which ridership declined in most other urban areas. As of December 2024, ridership has recovered to nearly 88 percent of pre-pandemic levels, compared with a national average of 76 percent. Continue reading →

Charlotte Shows Why Transit Is a Waste

By | | Transportation
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I suspect it has begun to dawn on transit agency officials that the Trump administration is not going to shovel money their way as the Biden administration did. That means many of the larger agencies are going to have to put some of their rail plans on the shelf for at least four years or until a more sympathetic administration takes power. Unfortunately, I doubt that many will seriously consider altering their long-term dreams of building rail lines all over whatever urban areas they serve.

Light-rail train in Charlotte. Photo by James Willamor.

A case in point is the Charlotte Area Transit System (CATS), whose ridership (as of December) is still less than two-thirds what it was before the pandemic. Despite this, CATS has grandiose plans for its future. Central to those plans are the development and operation of a 25-mile Red Line commuter train from downtown Charlotte to the suburb of Mount Mourne. This line is such a loser that the Federal Transit Administration refused to fund it back in 2011, so CATS tried and failed to get local communities to find half while the state would fund the other half. Continue reading →

Twin Cities Metro Transit Gets Real

By | | Transportation
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The Antiplanner called Minnesota’s Northstar commuter train a “flop” in 2016. It took the pandemic to do it, but it looks like the state has finally agreed and is now considering plans to shut the line down.

Minnesota’s commuter train was a failure before the pandemic and an even bigger failure after. Photo by Jerry Huddleston.

The line, which cost more than $300 million to start up, was supposed to carry 4,100 riders per weekday, which seems absurdly small for the price. Yet it peaked in 2017 at just 2,800 riders and fell to 2,700 riders in 2019. Since the pandemic, it hasn’t recovered to more than about a sixth of that. The state estimates that the costs of running this service would fall from $12 million a year to $2 million a year if it replaced the trains with buses. In 2023, fares covered less than $325,000 of that $12 million in operating costs. Continue reading →

DOGE Is Failing

By | | News commentary
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Last November, I wrote that Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency ran the risk of following in the Clinton administration’s Reinventing Government footsteps. That program evaluated all sorts of ways to make government work better, but ended up doing almost nothing but laying off employees. The layoffs lasted only a few years, after which Congress restored the number of employees and agency budgets.

Gallatin National Forest; Forest Service photo.

Instead of simply cutting employees, I wrote, Musk should focus on creating new incentives for agencies to operate more efficiently and more effectively. “Such new incentives would focus agencies on the people they are supposed to serve rather than on simply increasing their budgets,” I added. “More important, if properly designed these would be lasting changes, not ones that would disappear as soon as the next administration takes office.” Continue reading →

Mayhem in Maumee

By | | City planning
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In 2024, Strong Towns declared Maumee, Ohio to be the nation’s “strongest town,” largely because the city rebuilt its main street to favor pedestrians over cars. It removed two of the four lanes and reduced the amount of parking on the street.

Google Street View of Conant Street before it was rebuilt.

Strong Towns believes that suburbs are not fiscally sustainable. Its goal is to “replace” traditional suburbs with a different kind of development that is supposedly “financially strong and resilient.” This new kind of development includes denser housing, an end to new road construction, and redesigning existing streets to be more walkable and less auto friendly. In other words, New Urbanism. Continue reading →

Families and Transportation

By | | Transportation
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On his second day in office, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy directed federal transportation agencies to “give preference to communities with marriage and birth rates higher than the national average,” to which my friend Bob Poole responded with a profound “huh?” Matthew Yglesias, meanwhile, fretted that this policy could backfire, erroneously claiming that directing funding to low-density communities with higher birth rates would make housing in such communities even more expensive, which would reduce birthrates.

Darker colors show higher fertility rates measured in births per thousand women. Source: CDC. Click image for a larger view.

As I noted in an article published by the Institute for Family Studies, it may seem strange for the Department of Transportation to get involved in family policy, but in fact it already has been involved in such policy for many years through the Federal Transit Administration. That agency’s transit capital grant program (which was specifically cited in Duffy’s memo) favors grants to communities that provide “transit-supportive land use,” meaning zoning and subsidies favoring high-density housing. Continue reading →

December Transit 77.3% of Pre-Pandemic Ridership

By | | Transportation, Useful Data
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Transit carried 77.3 percent as many riders in December of 2024 as the same month in 2019, according to preliminary data released late last week by the Federal Transit Administration. That’s down from 78.4 percent in November. Ridership for calendar year 2024 ended up being 76.5 percent of 2019.

Highway data will be added as soon as it is available. For a discussion of Amtrak and airline data, see this post from last week.

Because monthly numbers are preliminary and FTA updates prior months with each new release, I went through and corrected transit numbers for previous months in the above chart. I counted only 96.55 percent of February 2024 riders as that month had one more day than February 2019. As corrected, transit reached a peak, relative to pre-pandemic levels, of 78.7 percent in October, and dropped in both November and December. Continue reading →

Beluga Caviar or Pâté de Fois Gras?

By | | Housing
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A YouTube site called “Oh the Urbanity!” challenges the “myth” that five-stories is the “optimal” height for residential buildings. I would agree, except Oh the Urbanity! thinks that taller, not shorter, is better and criticizes other urbanists who are satisfied with “only” mid-rise buildings.

I’ve got news for Oh the Urbanity! Most Americans (surveys say 80 percent) wouldn’t want to live in your towers even if they cost no more than a similarly sized single-family home. They especially don’t want to live in mid-rise or high-rise buildings that cost a lot more, per square foot, than single-family homes. Continue reading →

The $346 Million Business Killer

By | | City planning, Transportation
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San Francisco’s Van Ness Avenue is full of vacant storefronts, and city officials are blaming past city policies discouraging chain stores in the area. In order to fill those vacancies, city officials have promised to speed any permitting applications for new stores, chain or otherwise.

Google street view shows that 1700 Van Ness Avenue was occupied by a chain store, Staples, in 2013. Note that there is parking the entire length of Van Ness on both sides of the street plus a nice tree-filled center strip.

That’s nice of them, but at least one of the stores that is now vacant used to be a chain store. The Staples at 1700 Van Ness was open in May 2022 but closed by December. Continue reading →

Amtrak Does Well in December; Airlines Do Better

By | | Transportation
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Amtrak carried 7 percent more passenger-miles in December of 2024 than in the same month of 2019, according to its monthly performance report issued earlier this week. The airlines, meanwhile, carried 10 percent more passengers in December of 2024 than 2019, according to TSA passenger counts.

Transit and highway data will be added as soon as it is available.

The airlines, of course, carried a lot more passengers than Amtrak. Amtrak carried about 3.0 million passengers in December while the airlines carried 66 million. The difference in passenger-miles is even greater. While airline passenger-mile data is not yet available for December, the average Amtrak trip is about 200 miles long while the average domestic airline trip is 950 miles, which means domestic airlines carry about 100 times as many passenger-miles as Amtrak. When international airline trips are included, the difference is even greater. Continue reading →