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Transit Slowly Recovers

By | | Transportation, Useful Data
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U.S. transit systems carried 73.9 percent as many riders in September 2023 as the same month in 2019, according to data released earlier this week by the Federal Transit Administration. This is transit’s highest level, as a percent of 2019 numbers, since the pandemic began. This is particularly remarkable as September 2023 had one less business day than September 2019.

Highway data for September 2023 are not yet available. This chart and post will be updated when they are released.

Transit was aided by the fact that September ridership in the New York urban area, where 46 percent of all transit rides take place, reached 78.6 percent of pre-pandemic numbers. Transit is also doing better than average in Los Angeles (79.3%), Miami (83.4%), Dallas (78.4%), and Houston (87.2%). Washington reached 73.8 percent, just slightly below the national average. Ridership continues to be below average in Chicago (63.1%), Philadelphia (59.4%), Atlanta (60.6%), Boston (64.0%), Phoenix (55.8%), and San Francisco-Oakland (64.4%), to name a few. Although transit ridership is slowly recovering, it is still well behind driving, which first reached 100 percent of pre-pandemic miles in June, 2021. Continue reading →

Out for Growth

By | | Housing
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A new report on housing decries the fact that many unaffordable housing markets have gotten even less affordable in the last few years. The report’s solution is in the name of the organization that published it: Up for Growth, as in “grow up, not out.”

Click image to download a 24.0-MB PDF of this report.

The reports calls for cities to identify what neighborhoods to build in, “the appropriate increase in density for each location,” and the “optimal housing mix,” in other words, the mix of single-family vs. multifamily housing, for each neighborhood. Where people actually want to live and whether they prefer to live in single- or multifamily housing are not to be considered. Continue reading →

States Shouldn’t Try to Reduce Per-Capita Driving

By | | Transportation
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The most idiotic ideas come from articles written by anti-car writers. This isn’t recent, but a colleague from Washington let me know of a 2022 article from a “public interest” organization called the Frontier Group that reports that “less driving is possible.” Thanks to “compact neighborhoods” and “investments in infrastructure that supports walking, biking or riding transit,” some states have managed to reduce per-capita driving, which the Frontier Group regards as a victory.

To encourage transit while discouraging driving, Washington converted lanes on a bridge that had previously been open to all vehicles into light-rail lines. Image by Sound Transit.

As evidence, the author of the Frontier Group article, Elizabeth Redlington, compared miles of per capita driving by state in 1996 and 2021. Between those two years, some states increased but some declined and the biggest decline was in Washington state, which saw a 15.8 percent drop in per capita driving during that period. Continue reading →

Joe Biden’s Dysfunctional Family

By | | Transportation
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We’ve all heard of families where one person worked hard and made a lot of money, which attracted relatives eager to sponge off of that person’s wealth. Most would call such families dysfunctional because most of those family members should have been able to support themselves. Joe Biden’s family is like that.

An Amtrak train passes through Delaware. Photo by David Wilson.

I don’t mean Jill, Hunter, or any of his blood relatives. I mean Amtrak. As he himself has said, “The conductors, the engineers” on the trains then-Senator Joe Biden once regularly rode between Washington and Delaware “literally became my family.” Continue reading →

The Case Against Affordable Housing

By | | Housing
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Affordable housing projects aren’t making housing more affordable. In fact, says a new study by an MIT economist, construction of new subsidized housing displaces new unsubsidized housing for little net gain in the housing supply. Specifically, the study found, ten new subsidized housing units resulted in eight fewer unsubsidized units.

This is supposed to be an affordable housing project, yet it is already unaffordable because it is six stories high, which costs at least twice as much to build, per square foot, as two-story construction.

Between 1950 and 1986, most subsidized housing was built by government agencies. In 1986, a Republican Congress sought to “privatize” the construction of subsidized housing by giving developers tax credits if they promised to rent their housing at below-market prices for 30 years. Today, low-income housing tax credits worth around $10 billion a year are given to the states to hand out to developers. To see how well this program is working, economist Evan Soltas looked at hundreds of projects built with tax credits. Continue reading →

Why Bus-Rapid-Transit Has Become Popular

By | | Transportation
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Am I ahead of my time or simply out of step with the times? When I began studying light rail, I quickly realized that buses could do everything light rail could do except cost a lot of money. I was especially heartened when Kansas City, whose voters had rejected light rail in something like eight different elections, spent about $3 million a mile (about $4 million a mile in today’s money) installing two bus-rapid-transit (BRT) lines and got 30 to 50 percent increases in ridership, which is more than some light-rail lines get.

So I should be happy about recent reports favoring BRT.

  • As noted above, the World Bank reports that “Bus Rapid Transit takes cars off the road and moves people quickly, providing the benefits of metros at a fraction of the cost.”
  • An article in Research in Transportation Economics found that the values of homes within a 20-minute walk of a bus-rapid transit station increased by 5 to 7 percent and the total increase in property values was six times the cost of the BRT projects.
  • Jarrett Walker reports “good outcomes” from a new BRT line in Portland, specifically a 30 to 40 percent increase in ridership.

Continue reading →

32 Years of Transit Data

By | | Transportation, Useful Data
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When the Federal Transit Administration released the 2022 National Transit Database, it also released updated time series data tables. These tables have operating data (including costs and ridership) from 1991 through 2022, capital costs from 1992 through 2022, and fare revenues from 2002 through 2022.

This chart shows ridership for six urban areas that I consider to be basket cases, with ridership steadily declining despite — or more likely because of — the construction of light-rail or some other transit infrastructure. Of course, ridership declined everywhere due the pandemic, but most of these are among the slowest to recover to their already low 2019 levels.

The release includes six data tables, but I find just two of them useful as they are the only two that break down data by mode. Table TS3.1 has capital costs by transit agency and mode. Table TS2.1 has all other information — operating costs, fares, service in miles and hours, ridership, passenger-miles, and miles of rail lines — by agency and mode. Continue reading →

Betteridge’s Law Applies Here

By | | Transportation
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“Will Twin Cities to Duluth train succeed where it once failed?” asks a headline from a St. Paul news station. As Betteridge’s law of headlines states, “Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no,” and I’m pretty sure that applies here.

Should Minnesota’s failed commuter train be supplemented by a failed intercity passenger train? Photo by Jerry Huddleston.

There are exceptions to Betteridge’s law, of course. For example, this 2019 headline, “Could the Commuter Rail from Minneapolis to Duluth be a Flop?” poses the same question in the opposite direction. One of the two headlines violates Betteridge’s law. My money is on the law applying to the first but not the second. Continue reading →

2022 National Transit Database

By | | Transportation, Useful Data
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Last year, Americans took about 6 billion trips on transit covering about 30 billion passenger-miles, according to the 2022 National Transit Database, which the Federal Transit Administration released late last week. This was about 61 percent as many trips and 56 percent as many passenger-miles as in 2019. Annual numbers in the National Transit Database are based on transit agency fiscal years and will not agree with calendar year numbers.

Portland’s transit mall has both buses and light rail; it’s worth noting that adding light-rail to the mall reduced the number of people that the mall could move per hour. Photo by Steve Morgan.

The 2022 database comes in the form of 29 different spreadsheets. To simplify it, I have collapsed these into a single spreadsheet that contains that data I find most useful for every transit agency and mode of transit. These data include trips, passenger-miles, service (in VRM or vehicle-revenue-miles and VRH or vehicle-revenue-hours), average weekday ridership, fares (including fares paid by riders and fares paid by organizations), operating costs, capital costs (including costs for existing service and costs for expanded service, plus unspecified costs for smaller agencies), number of vehicles, number of seats, amount of standing room, and revenue rail miles. Continue reading →

More Questions about Electric Vehicles

By | | Transportation
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Four months ago, the Antiplanner observed that the market for electric cars was supposedly booming. Yet I was skeptical. Ford, Toyota, and other mainstream manufacturers were making very limited runs of electric vehicles, making it hard to get one. Others, such as Fiat-Chrysler, weren’t making any at all. Other than Tesla, many of the all-electric manufacturers such as Lucid and Fisker seemed to be mainly producing vapor-ware and what they did produce was pretty high priced. Only Tesla was doing well.

The wave of the future or a dead end?

Since I wrote that post, there were media reports of a glut of nearly 100,000 unsold electric vehicles on dealer lots. Manufacturers were forced to deeply cut prices, which still didn’t end the glut. Continue reading →