Search Results for: peak transit

Back in the Air Again

By | | Travels
2 Comments

Tomorrow, the Antiplanner will fly to Atlanta, the city that spent $23 million to finish a pedestrian bridge in time for the Super Bowl only to have officials declare it a security risk and close it to pedestrians before the game. That’s an appropriate metaphor for a city that spent billions on rail transit but cut back on bus service, resulting in a 66 percent decline in per capita transit ridership.

In any case, on Wednesday Thursday I’ll be speaking about Romance of the Rails twice. First will be a luncheon sponsored by the Georgia Public Policy Foundation beginning at 11:30 am at the Metropolitan Club in Alpharetta. The deadline to register for this event is today.

Second will be an evening event sponsored by the Franklin Roundtable from 7 to 9 pm at 799 Roswell Street, Marietta. No registration is required for this event. If you are in the Atlanta area, I hope to see you at one of these forums.

Ft. Worth Rail Boondoggle Opens This Week

By | | Transportation
4 Comments

The Fort Worth Transit Authority, also known as Trinity Metro, will open TEXRail, a new commuter-rail line from downtown Ft. Worth to the Dallas-Ft. Worth Airport, at the end of this week. Built at a cost of more than a billion dollars, the line is expected to carry an average of 4,000 round trips per weekday in its first year. It probably will fall short.

When the project first appears in the Federal Transit Administration’s New Starts reports, for 2014 (but based on 2012 data), it was supposed to be 38 miles long, cost under a billion dollars, and attract nearly 10,000 weekday riders (5,000 round trips) in its first year of operation. By 2016 the cost had risen to well over a billion despite chopping off 11 miles west of downtown Ft. Worth, leaving just 27. This pushed projected first-year ridership down to 8,300 weekday trips (4,150 round trips).

Now that the money has been spent and it is too late to do anything about it, the transit authority is projected TEXRail will carry 8,000 riders per weekday, probably low-balling the 8,300 figure in case ridership falls short. And it is likely to fall short, as the Trinity Railway Express, a 34-mile commuter-rail line from Ft. Worth to Dallas, carried only 7,400 weekday riders in 2017, a number that has dropped by nearly 1,000 since 2014. Continue reading →

Enjoy Your Subway Ride

By | | Transportation
9 Comments

A few days ago, a man struck a woman with a metal pipe in a Manhattan subway station. A day or two before that, a man attempted to sexually assault a woman in a Brooklyn subway station. A few days before that, a man pushed a woman onto the tracks at another Manhattan subway station. A few days before that, a man trying to steal a backpack slashed the victim with a knife.

Lots of people ride the subways and they are still safe for most riders. But New York police say that transit crime is increasing even as overall crime in the city is on the decline.

Despite this, we — or at least New Yorkers — are supposed to “fall in love with stuffy, crowded subways,” argues Aaron Gordon in Medium. “If we’re ever going to make cities work,” says Gordon, “we need to accept, and come to love, a fundamental truth: Packed urban transit is good urban transit.” Continue reading →

Riding the Rail Runner

By | | Transportation
9 Comments

After speaking about Romance of the Rails in Albuquerque Friday night, I took advantage of a day off between engagements to ride the New Mexico Rail Runner to Santa Fe and back. This train is costing the state close to $800 million in capital costs including interest (which works out to annual payments of about $30 million a year) plus another $30 million a year in operations and maintenance costs, while it is bringing in slightly more than $2 million a year in fares. The federal government also recently gave the state another $30 million to install positive train control.

Click any photo for a larger view.

The Albuquerque train station has a large memorial commemorating the end of the first, second, and third years of Rail Runner service in 2007, 2008, and 2009. Though there is plenty of room for more plaques, perhaps the state gave up on annual celebrations because they were embarrassed by poor ridership. Continue reading →

BART Can’t Solve Bay Area Housing Crisis

By | | Housing
5 Comments

Last weekend, California Governor Jerry Brown signed Assembly Bill 2923, which gives BART the authority to ignore local zoning rules and build high-density housing on its own land in the Bay Area. This bill faced fierce opposition from mayors and city councils in Contra Costa County, but was supported by affordable housing advocates.

Ignoring the debate over density at the moment, what makes anyone think that BART, which can’t even effectively run a transit system, can suddenly become an expert housing developer? BART estimates that, with passage of this bill, it will be able to build 20,000 units of housing, about a third of which will be “affordable” (which in the Bay Area can mean affordable to people who earn $115,000 a year or less). While the region could use 20,000 housing units, there is no reason to think that BART can build them affordably or that high-density housing can even be affordable.

BART is well known for the cost overruns, maintenance problems, and crime problems on its transit system. It will be interesting to see how it applies these skills to housing. It’s hard to imagine the results will be very desirable. Continue reading →

Notes from All Over

By | | Transportation
3 Comments

Tomorrow the Antiplanner will review more 2017 census data, but today I’ll briefly comment on a few events that took place while I was reviewing census data last week. First, the New York Metropolitan Transportation Authority is blaming subway delays on the passengers, claiming that late-arriving riders sticking their feet in the doors as they are closing are responsible for slow trains. Because no one ever did that before this year!

Speaking of the MTA, a member of MTA’s board is suing Mayor de Blasio and New York policy commissioner James O’Neill for their failure to release data on subway fare evaders. Because it is easier to blame financial problems on someone else than it is to actually do your job of overseeing the agency’s finances.

Speaking of fare evaders, San Francisco’s Muni is upset to discover that one out of four transit riders on the city’s famous cable cars aren’t asked if they have paid their fares. Since most riders pay before they board, this doesn’t mean that one in four haven’t paid, only that they haven’t had their tickets checked by the conductor. Continue reading →

California Bill Threatens Neighborhoods

By | | Housing
10 Comments

Speaking of the San Francisco Bay Area, as the Antiplanner was doing yesterday, the California legislature may be on the verge of passing a bill that will make that crowded region even more congested. Assembly Bill 2923 would allow, even require, that the Bay Area Rapid Transit Authority to overrule local zoning and impose high-density housing on neighborhoods within a half-mile of BART stations.

Not surprisingly, many cities including Fremont, Hayward, Lafayette, and Pleasant Hill oppose this preemption of their local authority. More surprising is opposition from the California chapter of the American Planning Association. While the APA supports minimum-density zoning, it doesn’t believe that transit agencies should be allowed to preempt local cities. Apparently, more APA members work for cities than for BART.

The bill’s advocates argue that high-density housing will be more affordable, a myth the Antiplanner has addressed before. Mid-rise construction costs 50 percent more and high-rise costs 68 percent more per square foot than low-rise housing. Land in areas with urban growth boundaries can be hundreds of times more expensive per acre than areas without boundaries, so densities would have to be that many times greater to get land costs per unit of housing down to reasonable levels. Continue reading →

Let’s Be as Dense as Hong Kong

By | | Housing, Regional planning
4 Comments

Vox‘s Johnny Harris looks at housing in Hong Kong, noting that it is rated the least-affordable housing market in the world. (At least the English-speaking world, China, Japan, and Singapore, which are the housing markets reviewed in Wendell Cox’s 14th International Housing Affordability Survey). Harris shows living conditions roughly similar to the 1890 tenements of New York City documented by Jacob Riis in How the Other Half Lives.

Harris reveals that housing prices aren’t high because Hong Kong has run out of land. Instead, he notes, “Flying over Hong Kong, you start to see that, while yes, there’s a very dense urban landscape, but there’s also a whole lot of green space. Government land-use data says that 75 percent of the land in Hong Kong is not developed.” Continue reading →

H+T Not So Efficient

By | | Housing, Transportation
2 Comments

One of the excuses planners have made for their support of densification is that, yes, housing costs are higher in dense areas, but this is more than offset by lower transportation costs. They call this the H+T Affordability Index, but — as the Antiplanner pointed out nearly five years ago — this claim was based solely on hypothetical and, in some cases, obviously inaccurate numbers.

Despite the lack of any real evidence, density advocates managed to persuade lending authorities to loosen mortgage loan criteria for people locating in dense, transit-rich areas. Since people living in such areas supposedly saved a bundle on transportation, they could afford to spend more on a mortgage.

Now a new study has come out that collected ten years of real data from 11,000 families who moved to compact, transit-rich areas. The study found that some people saved money on transportation, but others spent more, and the net overall effect was a wash. “We conclude that the location affordability literature may significantly overstate the promise of cost savings in transit-rich neighborhoods,” say the researchers. Continue reading →

Does Light Rail Help the Working Class?

By | | Transportation
4 Comments

“Weak transit hurts working class,” claims an article in the Portland Tribune. “Communities of color, lower-income communities and English language learners have moved farther from city centers due to rising rents, and into high-crash corridors,” reports the article. “These community members are injured and killed in pedestrian crashes at a higher rate than white, higher-income urbanites.”

What the article doesn’t say is that the reason why low-income people were pushed out of their rented, single-family homes near the city center is because Portland’s urban-growth boundary prevented the construction of affordable new single-family homes on the urban fringes. This forced middle-class families to buy single-family homes in the city, evicting the renters.

Those renters then moved into high-density transit-oriented developments built along Portland’s light-rail line. Since those developments tend to be built on busy streets, the streets are more dangerous to pedestrians than the local streets where their former single-family homes are located. Thus, Portland’s transit dreams are the cause, not the solution, to this problem. Continue reading →