Search Results for: peak transit

The Last Pre-Pandemic Snapshot of the USA

By | | Policy brief
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The United States had 2.3 million more workers in 2019 than in 2018, and more than 30 percent of the increase worked at home. This boosted the share of people who worked at home from 5.3 to 5.7 percent.

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

Historian Stephen Davies observes that a major pandemic does not “introduce something novel.” 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.” People working at home is an example of a trend that is being accelerated and magnified by the COVID-19 pandemic. 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 →

The Streetcar Intelligence Test

By | | Policy brief
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The first electric streetcars and the first internal-combustion engine automobiles were first developed just over 130 years ago. Initially, each went about 8 to 10 miles per hour. Today, people routinely drive automobiles at 70 to 80 miles per hour, and some supercars can go well over 200 miles per hour. Meanwhile, according to the American Public Transportation Association, the average speed of streetcars is a whopping 6.9 miles per hour.

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

Streetcars were rendered obsolete in 1927 with the introduction of the Twin Coach bus, the first bus that was both cheaper to buy and cheaper to operate than streetcars. Within a decade, half of America’s streetcar systems had converted to buses. The infamous General Motors streetcar conspiracy, which began in 1937, was actually a conspiracy to take business away from Twin Coach buses, not to destroy streetcars which were already rapidly disappearing. By 1974, only six cities still had streetcars, usually because they went through tunnels or used a dedicated right of way not open to buses. 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 →

Freeways: The Egalitarian Transportation

By | | Transportation
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In the past month or so, we’ve seen the destruction or defacement of statues of Confederate generals, the Father of our Country who was also a slaveowner, the Great Emancipationist, the Great Reconstructionist, and an Abolitionist. So it’s not exactly surprising that someone has proposed to bulldoze urban freeways because of the myth that they were located by racists through black neighborhoods.

There are a lot of institutions associated with American racism that I would abolish long before worrying about freeways. Start with public schools, many of which used to be segregated by law and many of which are still segregated, even in (perhaps especially in) the North.

Second would be public transit. Remember Rosa Parks and the Montgomery bus boycott? Many state laws used to require that people of color sit only in the back of the bus and give up their seats if a white person wanted them. Many transit systems, including those in Atlanta, Dallas, Los Angeles, and San Francisco-Oakland, are still semi-segregated today, with rail lines built to serve white neighborhoods while buses serving black and Hispanic neighborhoods are cut back to pay for the trains. Continue reading →

Recent Opinions

By | | Transportation
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A couple of weeks ago, an article in the Orange County Register discussed transportation resiliency. “In spite of anti-auto policies, 80 percent of passenger travel and 90 percent of urban travel is by automobile,” concluded the article. “It’s time to take back cities for people and the automobiles that have liberated them to reach more productive jobs, better homes, lower-cost consumer goods, and greater recreation and social opportunities.”

Last week, Real Clear Policy published an article on a transportation bill recently passed by the House of Representatives. This bill, said the article, was perfect for the ’20s — the 1920s that is. The bill would effectively quintuple federal subsidies to intercity passenger trains and increase federal subsidies to urban transit by 50 percent, with a heavy emphasis on rail transit.
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The use of both rail transit and intercity passenger trains, the article notes, peaked in 1920. Tens of billions of dollars in annual subsidies to these modes since 1970 haven’t prevented the continuing decline of these obsolete technologies and businesses. The proposed law “was designed for a century ago,” concludes the article. “It’s time to let go of the past and write a bill for the future.”

Traffic Congestion After the Pandemic

By | | Transportation
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Some researchers from Vanderbilt University (and one from Cornell) asked what will happen to traffic congestion after the pandemic. If people reduced the use of transit for commuting, they concluded, congestion will get a lot worse, which is “detrimental to everyone’s commute.” Though they never say so explicitly, the implication is that we need to spend a lot of money supporting transit agencies to prevent that congestion.

Yet their paper is greatly oversimplified and ignores many things. Most importantly, people working at home are going to make a bigger difference to congestion than transit riders. Before the pandemic, more people worked at home than rode transit to work. If after the pandemic the number of people working at home on any given day is double what it was before the pandemic, then there would be less traffic even if no one rode transit.

In fact, the number of people working home is likely to much more than double. More than 40 percent of workers are working at home due to the pandemic, and at least a quarter of those say they expect to continue working at home after than pandemic. That would triple what it was before the pandemic. Moreover, half of those who expect to continue working at home say they will move to a different location, generally a suburb or smaller city. Continue reading →

Spending Money We Don’t Have on Projects We Don’t Need

By | | News commentary, Transportation
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House Transportation & Infrastructure Committee Chair Peter DeFazio yesterday released a proposal to spend tens of billions of dollars the federal government doesn’t have on projects we don’t need. Congressional authorization for federal spending on highways and transit expires this year, and DeFazio proposes to renew this with a program that will increase spending by 62 percent without increasing the taxes that support it.

Whereas the previous law spent an average of $61 billion per year over the last five years, DeFazio’s proposal would spend almost $99 billion a year over five years. At one time, federal spending on highways and most transit came out of gas taxes and other highway user fees and Congress didn’t spend more than came in. Since the mid-2000s, however, Congress has ignored actual revenues and spent billions of dollars a year out of general funds. The 2015 law, for example, simply appropriated $51 billion of general funds into the Highway Trust Fund (which despite the name spends money on both highways and transit).

DeFazio’s bill would not only increase this deficit spending, it includes a poison pill for highways while it unleashes spending increases on transit. For highways, the bill would include a “fix it first” provisions that says that states cannot increase highway capacity until they get existing roads in a state of good repair. No similar provision is made for transit even though transit is in a much poorer state of repair. Continue reading →

The Virtues of Autos and Suburbs

By | | Policy brief
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A growing body of research shows that mass transit is the major reason why the coronavirus has been so deadly in New York City. The New York urban area (roughly New York City plus Nassau, Suffolk, and Westchester counties in New York plus Bergen, Essex, Hudson, Middlesex, Monmouth, and Union counties in New Jersey) provides 45 percent of all transit trips in the United States and, not coincidentally, has seen about 45 percent of COVID-19 deaths in the United States.

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

Despite this, transit advocates have already begun promoting their heavily subsidized form of transportation along with increased restrictions on auto driving—the safest form of travel during an epidemic—after the current pandemic is over. Years of propaganda have successfully demonized cars and urban sprawl, despite the fact that these two interconnected phenomena have produced enormous benefits. Continue reading →

MTA Forbade Employees from Wearing Masks

By | | Transportation
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Last week, I pointed out a recent report that blamed much of the spread of COVID-19 in New York City on the subway system. Recently, I’ve collected a series of memos suggesting that New York’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) is specifically culpable in this spread.

During the 2012 influenza epidemic, the MTA issued a policy directive stating that the agency would keep a six-week supply of sanitizer wipes, sanitizer gel, and N95 respirators on hand for use by employees. The directive specifically stated that the masks would be available for bus drivers, station attendants, train conductors, and cleaners, among others.

The first COVID-19 death in America was reported in Washington state on February 29, 2020. Rather than make its supposed six-week stockpile of masks available to its employees, MTA issued a memo on March 6 forbidding employees from wearing masks, even if they had their own masks. The memo worried that, if bus operators and station attendants were allowed to wear masks, it could lead to “panicked purchasing of facemasks . . . thereby putting health care providers and their communities at greater risk.” Continue reading →