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14 Years & $2 Billion to Increase Speeds by 5 mph

By | | Transportation
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“A Slow Path to Higher Speeds” fills ten pages of the September issue of Trains magazine to tell why it took Illinois 14 years to speed up passenger trains on the Chicago-St. Louis route. Originally funded by the Obama administration in 2009, the project was supposed to increase top speeds from 79 to 110 miles per hour. But top speeds aren’t average speeds, which increased only 5 miles per hour from 50 to 55. The fastest train on the timetable ended up just shy of 60 mph, a 6-mph boost over the fastest train in 2009.

Part of the cost of the Illinois project was buying new locomotives and cars. Photo by Amy Lohrke.

When Illinois received $1.14 billion in high-speed rail funds from the Obama administration in 2009, it predicted that by 2015 it would shave an hour off of Chicago-St. Louis trip times and increase frequencies from five to eight trains per day, which in turn would stimulate a 130 percent increase in ridership. But speeds and frequencies remained unchanged through early 2023. Finally, after spending $1.95 billion, speeds increased on June 26, 2023, but average trip times declined by only about a half an hour, while the number of trains per day remained unchanged at five. Continue reading →

Don’t Rearrange Deck Chairs When Ship Is Sinking

By | | Transportation, Urban areas
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Denver’s Regional Transit District (RTD) has been slower than average to recover from the pandemic, carrying only 59 percent of pre-pandemic riders in June compared with an industry-wide average of 75 percent. Key legislators want to fix this problem by reforming how the agency’s board of directors is selected. Instead of letting voters select board members, they want to have them appointed.

Click image to download a PDF of this commentary.

This is equivalent to rearranging the deck chairs when the ship is sinking, charged an opinion piece in yesterday’s Denver Gazette. The article points out that RTD’s real problem is its downtown-centric route map. Prior to the pandemic, transit carried 22 percent of downtown Denver employees to work but only 2.6 percent of workers in the rest of the urban area. Continue reading →

Dallas Revolt Against Transit Taxes

By | | Transportation
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As of June, the Dallas Area not-so-Rapid Transit (DART) was carrying 80 percent of pre-pandemic riders, a little more than the national average of 75 percent. The decrease in ridership has minimal effect on its budget, since in 2019 fares covered less than 12 percent of operating costs. Still, officials of several cities in the region whose taxpayers are supporting DART are beginning to wonder why they are spending so much money and getting so little.

DART has spent more than $5.5 billion ($8.0 billion in today’s dollars) in capital costs building a light-rail system that has done very little for the region’s transit ridership. Photo by Jeffrey Beall.

DART is primarily funded out of a 1 percent sales tax levied on residents of 13 cities served by the agency. Since early July, the city councils of six of those cities have voted to reduce the sales tax going to DART by 25 percent, and the city councils of Dallas and at least one other city are considering similar resolutions. The tax is levied by DART, not the cities, so the votes are more symbolic of general dissatisfaction with how DART is run. To actually reduce the tax, the DART board would have to put a measure on the ballot and residents of each of the 13 cities would decide. Continue reading →

Amtrak Carried 108.6% of 2019 PM in June 2024

By | | Transportation
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Amtrak carried 654 million passenger-miles in June of 2024, an 8.6 percent increase over the same month in 2019, according to the state-owned company’s monthly performance report issued last Friday. Amtrak passenger-miles have been ahead of pre-pandemic numbers for every month since February 2024.

See last week’s post for transit results. Data are not yet available for driving but will be posted here as soon as they are.

Last week, I noted that the Transportation Security Administration counted 7.4 percent more airline passengers in June of 2024 than 2019. This number is not strictly comparable to the Amtrak number as this is passengers while the Amtrak number is in passenger-miles. The Bureau of Transportation Statistics keeps track of airline passenger-miles but releases the data nearly two months after Amtrak. Continue reading →

Don’t Invest in a Light-Rail Boondoggle

By | | Transportation
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Last week, I observed that “Transit’s failure to recover from the pandemic is due largely to its downtown-centric orientation in most urban areas.” An op-ed in yesterday’s Baltimore Sun makes a similar point about the planned Red Line light-rail project for that city. “The problem with Baltimore transit is not that it doesn’t have enough expensive rail lines; it is that its route map is mired in the past,” said the op-ed. “Most of its routes focus on downtown Baltimore.”

Rooted in the past: Baltimore’s light-rail system. As an aside, the Orioles ad features steam locomotive wheels because the Orioles play at Camden Yards Stadium, which was built on a former Baltimore & Ohio freight yard, with B&O’s passenger station incorporated into the station. Photo by Mr.TinMD.

This isn’t entirely a coincidence since the Antiplanner wrote the op-ed. “Before the pandemic, more than 20 percent of downtown Baltimore workers commuted by transit, while less than 6 percent of the rest of the region’s workers commuted on transit,” says the article, echoing what I wrote here last week. “The system’s downtown orientation simply does not work for 94 percent of non-downtown workers.” Continue reading →

Transit Carried 74.9% of 2019 Riders in June

By | | Transportation, Useful Data
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After creeping up above 75 percent of pre-pandemic ridership for the first time in May, transit ridership fell back down to 74.9 percent in June, according to data released by the Federal Transit Administration on Tuesday. Meanwhile, air travel continued soaring at 7.4 percent above pre-pandemic numbers, according to TSA counts.

Data are not yet available for Amtrak and driving but will be posted here as soon as they are.

Transit’s failure to recover from the pandemic is due largely to its downtown-centric orientation in most urban areas. Before the pandemic, almost half of all transit commuters in the nation’s 50 largest urban areas worked downtown, and almost half of downtown workers commuted by transit whereas less than 6 percent of non-downtown workers used transit to get to work. Although less than 10 percent of urban employees worked downtown, transit didn’t work for most of the other 90 percent. Continue reading →

Winnipeg’s Plan to Catch Up with Vancouver

By | | Regional planning
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Winnipeg is the most affordable major housing market in Canada. According to Wendell Cox’s 2024 International Housing Affordability report, the average price of a 1,500-square-foot home in Winnipeg is $310,000, compared with $1.1 million in Toronto and $1.4 million in Vancouver.

Click image to download a 38.5-MB PDF of this 159-page plan.

Don’t worry: Winnipeg planners have a plan to bring Winnipeg housing prices up to Toronto if not Vancouver levels. It’s called the 20-50 plan and it calls for adopting all of the land-use policies that have made Vancouver a mecca for anyone who can afford to spend well over a million dollars on a home. Continue reading →

Electric Buses Not a Panacea

By | | Transportation
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Last week, the city of Seneca, South Carolina decided to shut down the Clemson Area Transit System, which served Seneca and nearby Clemson University. Once touted as owning the world’s first all-electric bus fleet, just a few years later two thirds of its expensive electric buses had broken down, the company that made them went bankrupt, parts were no longer available, and the city can’t afford to buy replacement buses.

Seneca is not exactly a major metropolis. But Clemson Area Transit isn’t the only transit agency to have trouble with electric buses. Just the day before Seneca decided to shut down its transit system, Austin’s Capital Metro announced that it was giving up on its plan to electrify its bus fleet by 2030. Electric bus technology, said the agency, simply hasn’t progressed far enough to replace Diesels. Continue reading →

Welcome to Grizzly

By | | Housekeeping
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The Antiplanning family has a new member: Grizzly, a ten-week-old Belgian Tervuren puppy. He is our fifth dog of this breed and we look forward to many miles of hikes with him.

After we lost Smokey in January, I didn’t want to get another dog right away. But I was still grieving six months later when a breeder we admire contacted us and said she had a puppy for us. Suddenly, I found myself looking towards the future and not the past. I’ll never forget Smokey, but everything I wanted to do with him I’ll be able to do with Grizzly. Continue reading →

Hopes Dim for Brightline

By | | Transportation
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Ridership on Florida’s Brightline passenger trains has more than tripled since the company opened its extension to Orlando last September. However, that increase hasn’t been enough to cover costs, as the company reported losing $116 million in the first three months of 2024. This is more than double the $53 million it lost in the first quarter of 2023, indicating that expenses increased by nearly three times as much as revenues.

Brightline’s station at Orlando International Airport. Photo by elisfkc.

When the Orlando line opened, Brightline predicted that it would carry 7.0 million passengers in 2024. However, it has recently reduced that estimate to 5.5 million. One problem is that Brightline has had to turn away passengers in the “short-distance” Miami-West Palm Beach segment of its route in order to keep seats available for the “more profitable long-distance” travelers to or from Orlando. As of May, year-to-date revenue in the short-distance segment declined from $18.8 million in 2023 to $17.2 million in 2024. Continue reading →