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High-Capacity Transit Deceptions

By | | Policy brief
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Transit advocates routinely make deceptive claims about the advantages of transit over cars or rail transit over buses. Often those claims deal with the capacity of different modes of transportation to move people. This policy brief will scrutinize some of these claims.

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

Deception #1: Buses vs. Cars

Transit advocates often use a particular photo set that purports to show the “space required to transport 60 people by car, bicycle, and bus.” The photo on the right shows a conventional 40-foot bus, which has about 40 seats in it and room for about 20 people standing. Next to the bus are the 60 passengers. Continue reading →

New Transit Lines Won’t Relieve Congestion

By | | Policy brief
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Voters in Austin and Portland will be asked to increase local taxes to pay for rail transit this November. Less than 8 percent of Portland-area workers and just 2.3 percent of Austin workers take transit to work, so why do transit agencies think that a majority of voters would support spending billions of tax dollars on rail transit?

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

The answer to this question is provided by a famous article in the Onion that claimed a survey by the American Public Transportation Association had found that “98 percent of Americans support the use of mass transit by others.” Congestion in many American urban areas has grown significantly and the Onion article quotes a commuter as saying, “It’s about time somebody did something to get some of these other cars off the road.” Continue reading →

NYC Auto Traffic Back to 85-95% of Normal

By | | Transportation
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Auto traffic in New York City is back to 85 to 85 percent of pre-pandemic levels, and truck traffic is up to 100 percent or more, according to “Gridlock” Sam Schwartz. Schwartz is the traffic engineer who popularized and possibly coined the term “gridlock.”

As the Antiplanner noted a couple of weeks ago, nationwide driving in July had returned to 89 percent of July, 2019 levels. But how can traffic be that high if everyone is working at home?

According to the National Household Transportation Survey, less than 19 percent of personal auto travel is for commuting. When trucks and other commercial traffic are added, the percentage of motor vehicle trips that are made by commuters is much smaller. Thus, traffic could rise to 85 or even 90 percent of normal even if almost none of the increase was for commuting. Continue reading →

Home Sales Reveal Demographic Shift

By | | Housing, News commentary
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Last week, the Census Bureau reported a huge surge in July and August new home sales while the National Association of Realtors reported a parallel growth of existing home sales. Total homes sold is the greatest since the 2006 housing bubble while the year-on-year growth in sales was the greatest since 1983, when the economy was recovering from a recession.

The growth in sales in 2020, however, isn’t due to a bubble or an economic recovery. Instead, it represents a major demographic shift. Financial blogger Wolf Richter argues that it is more evidence of a movement “taking place from some densely populated cities, and especially city centers, and especially from rental apartments, to houses a little further out, or in more distant suburbs.”

The Census Bureau and Realtor data don’t indicate whether the sales are in cities or suburbs, but both agree that the greatest increases are in the South and Midwest, while increases in the Northeast and West are much smaller. This would fit Richter’s guess that people are leaving expensive apartments in New York City and San Francisco and buying homes in more affordable places in Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Minnesota, North Carolina, and Ohio, states that already had some of the fastest-growing urban areas before the pandemic. Continue reading →

Public Transit’s Last Stand

By | | Transportation
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As transit agencies run out of money running nearly empty buses and trains, the rhetoric for another Congressional bailout of transit has gotten even more shrill. Yet it is all just hot air.

“Without public transit, there will be no economic recovery,” says transit advocate Nick Sifuentes. In case Mr. Sifuentes hasn’t noticed, the economy is already recovering, thanks in part to driving recovering to 89 percent of pre-pandemic levels but no thanks to transit, whose ridership remains nearly 65 percent below last year’s.

“America faces a mobility crisis that will have ‘profound’ implications — especially for those on low incomes and people of color — if Congress does not step in to fill the nation’s $32bn public transport funding gap,” says the ever-Left Guardian. How serious can a mobility crisis be when only 5 percent of low-income workers rely on transit to get to work? Continue reading →

Rapid Bus: Finding the Right Model

By | | Policy brief
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In 2005, Kansas City opened its Main Street bus-rapid transit line, one of the first of its kind in the nation. The buses were “branded’ with distinctive paint jobs and, like light rail, stopped less frequently than regular buses, increasing their average speeds. They also ran four times per hour instead of the twice-per-hour schedules of many local buses.

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

Sharing lanes with other traffic, the buses didn’t have a dedicated right of way, didn’t require people to pay before they board, didn’t have priority at traffic signals, and didn’t use other advanced technologies. Despite this, the increased frequencies and speeds generated a 50 percent increase in ridership on the route. Continue reading →

Should We Replace Rapid Transit with Buses?

By | | Policy brief
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Metro. Rapid transit. Subway. Elevated. Underground. U-bahn. All of these types of transit are included in what the Federal Transit Administration calls heavy rail. Unfortunately, none of these terms are very accurate.

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

Heavy-rail train cars weigh less than light-rail cars. Even the best metros can’t get you everywhere in a metropolitan area. Rapid transit isn’t very rapid, averaging around 20 miles per hour not counting the time it takes to get to or from a station or to wait for trains. Subways aren’t always under the ground and elevateds aren’t always above the ground. Continue reading →

Will the Cities Come Back?

By | | Housing, News commentary
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“The Twilight of Great American Cities Is Here,” screams the headline of an article by my friend, Joel Kotkin. He argues that, between the pandemic and the riots following the George Floyd death, people are not going to return to the cities.

Certainly, rents are down and vacancy rates are up in New York City and San Francisco. But does that mean that the cities won’t bounce back after the pandemic is over?

A major pandemic does not “introduce something novel,” observes a historian named Stephen Davies. Instead, “it accelerates and magnifies trends and processes that were already under way.” It can also bring “a final stop to processes that were already exhausted.” Continue reading →

SunFail: Orlando’s Commuter-Rail Disaster

By | | Policy brief
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Central Florida politicians face difficult choices about the future of SunRail, a commuter-rail line out of Orlando. One question is whether to finish the originally conceived project by improving 12 miles of tracks and building a new station for a cost of about $100 million, which is expected to add 200 riders per day. A second question is whether to build a new extension to the Orlando Airport, which is expected to cost about $200 million.

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

Beyond new construction, a major problem is how to get anyone to ride the trains, as ridership is well below expectations and 2018 fare revenues only covered 5 percent of operating costs. A final question is how to pay to continue operating the trains, which lost more than $40 per passenger in 2018. The state has been subsidizing operations but wants four county governments to take over. Continue reading →

High-Speed Rail: Yesterday’s Tech Tomorrow

By | | Policy brief
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One of the candidates for president in this November’s election is known by the nickname, “Amtrak Joe.” The Democratic-controlled House wants to triple federal funding for intercity passenger trains. A member of Congress from Massachusetts has proposed spending $205 billion on high-speed rail.


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

Given the growing momentum behind these ideas, it is instructive to take a look at how well the last frenzied spending on intercity passenger trains worked. In 2009 and 2010, President Obama persuaded Congress to dedicate $10.1 billion to high-speed rail projects around the country. To this was added at least $1.4 billion in other federal funds and at least $7 billion in state and local funds. After ten years, some of those projects must be working, right? Continue reading →