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Transit’s Minuscule Share of 2021 Travel

By | | Transportation, Useful Data
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Public transit carried 6.4 percent of 2021 motorized passenger travel in the New York urban area. It also carried 1.6 percent in Honolulu, 1.5 percent in San Francisco-Oakland, 1.4 percent in Seattle, 1.2 percent in Chicago, and 1.1 percent in Salt Lake City. In every other urban area it carried less than 1 percent; nationwide, transit carried just 0.7 percent of all motorized urban travel.

Chicago transit carried 1.2 percent, autos the other 98.8 percent of motorized passenger travel.

I calculated these numbers by comparing passenger-miles in the 2021 National Transit Database, which was released last fall, with daily vehicle miles of travel (DVMT) by urban area in table HM-72 of Highway Statistics, which was recently released by the Federal Highway Administration. To make the numbers comparable, I multiplied DVMT by 365 to get annual data and by 1.7 to account for vehicle occupancies, 1.7 being the result when dividing passenger-miles by vehicle-miles in Highway Statistics table VM-1. These numbers don’t include walking, bikes and e-bikes, or scooters, but they do include motorcycles. Continue reading →

Transit Tax Delinquents

By | | News commentary
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Nearly 2,000 people and corporations owe the state of Oregon and state transit agencies more than $330 million in delinquent taxes, according to data recently released by the Oregon Department of Revenue. The list includes taxpayers who owe more than $50,000 apiece. Unfortunately, the list isn’t linkable (you have to go to the Department of Revenue web site, scroll down to “Tools,” and click on “Delinquent Taxpayer List”), it isn’t sortable, and you can’t view more than 5 percent of the list at one time.

American Patriot Brands, doing business near Medford under the name of Urban Pharms, owes Oregon more than $27 million in corporate income taxes.

To remedy these problems, I’ve copied and pasted the entire list into a single Excel spreadsheet. The links from the spreadsheet to “detailed information” on individual taxpayers don’t work, but if you want more information, the spreadsheet lists the order in which the taxpayers are listed. Divide by 100 and add 1 to get the page on which they are listed on the original list (for example, taxpayer 405 is on the 5th of 20 pages). Continue reading →

Cities More Accessible in U.S. Than Europe

By | | Transportation
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“Should the U.S. repair crumbling roads and highways to enhance car-based mobility or replace them with new public transit infrastructure that re-orients U.S. commuting systems away from their current car dependence?” asks a paper recently published by the National Bureau of Economic Research. To answer the question, the paper compared accessibility via transit and driving in about 50 U.S. and 50 European cities. If transit made European cities more accessible, the researchers reasoned, then it would make sense for the U.S. to emphasize transit as well.

Should the United States attempt to build as much transit infrastructure as is found in Europe even if doing so reduces people’s access to jobs and other economic opportunities?

Instead, the researchers — two economists from Yale and one from UC San Diego — found that U.S. urbanites had far more access to their cities than Europeans did in theirs. Moreover, Europeans using cars had far more access to their cities than those who relied on transit. This shouldn’t be a surprise to those familiar with the research published by the University of Minnesota’s Accessibility Observatory, but it seems to have surprised the people doing this research. Continue reading →

Purple Line Seven Years Late at Triple the Cost

By | | Transportation
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Maryland state officials failed to indicate the slightest degree of embarrassment when they announced on Friday that the Maryland Purple light-rail line will be delayed again until Spring 2027 and cost an additional $148 million. When originally approved, the line was expected to cost just over $1.9 billion and to open in mid-2020. Even at that price it made no sense; although nobody but the Antiplanner read the full EIS, that document admitted that the line would significantly increase traffic congestion in Washington DC suburbs.

The executive summary of the Purple Line draft environmental impact statement implied that the purpose of the line was to reduce congestion, but a technical appendix calculated that it would make congestion far worse. However, hardly anyone but the Antiplanner bothered to read that appendix. Click image to go to a list of environmental documents and technical reports written for this boondoggle.

Now the line is $3.8 billion over budget, meaning it is costing about three times as much to build as originally projected. That number comes with a qualifier, however. Maryland is building the line through a public-private partnership in which it is contracting to the private partner to not only build it but to operate it for 30 years. The cost of the contract was originally supposed to be $5.6 billion and now is up to $9.4 billion but state officials refuse to say what portion of that is construction and what portion is operating costs. While it is possible that the operating costs grew which means the construction cost less than tripled, the $148 million increase includes a $205 million increase in construction costs and a $57 million reduction in operating costs. Continue reading →

Honolulu Says It Underreported Riders

By | | Transportation
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The Honolulu Authority for Really-overpriced Transportation (HART) says that early reports of ridership on its new rail line only included people who paid full fares but not people who boarded with a transit pass. When all riders are counted, the rail line carried about 4,000 riders a day in its first week, about double its early reports.

Another nearly empty train obstructs views in Honolulu. Photo by HART.

Even 4,000 is a little short of the number that HART projected it would attract once the system is completed: 84,000 people a day. Unfortunately, the agency hasn’t published ridership estimates for the portion of the line that opened on June 30, but I doubt they would be anywhere near as low as 4,000 a day. Continue reading →

Who’s to Blame for This?

By | | Transportation
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A video is going around of a Charlotte streetcar being delayed because someone left their car parked on the tracks.

The Antiplanner’s question is: who should be more embarrassed? The idiot driver who left their car on the tracks? Or the idiot transportation planner who thought it was a good idea to spend $150 million on a streetcar that can’t go around obstacles in the road when for a tiny fraction of that money the same (or better) service can be provided by buses that can easily drive around parked cars? Continue reading →

Transit Continues to Lag Behind Driving

By | | Transportation, Useful Data
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Americans drove more miles in May 2023 than the same month of 2019, according to data released by the Federal Highway Administration earlier this week. Transit ridership, however, was still less than 70 percent of 2019 levels, according to the Federal Transit Administration’s latest data.

At 69.9 percent of pre-pandemic levels, transit ridership was very close to 70 percent, a threshold it has breached only once since March 2020. To be fair, Cleveland’s regional transit agency is late in reporting ridership numbers. Though the agency carries only 0.3 percent of the nation’s transit riders, when its numbers are added, the national total for May will slightly exceed 70 percent of 2019. Continue reading →

Transit Ridership Down? Build More Rail!

By | | Transportation
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Like San Francisco BART, the DC Metro rail system is facing a fiscal cliff, with a $750 million projected shortfall in operating funds in 2025. So why is the agency considering spending tens of billions of dollars on a new rail extension that will increase annual operating costs by $200 million?

For a mere $40 billion or so, DC Metro Rail can go from this. . .

Like BART, DC’s rail system historically has covered a high percentage of its operating costs with fares. Though that has declined from 68 percent in 2011 to 48 percent in 2019, the agency was still more vulnerable to ridership declines than agencies such as San Jose’s VTA, which before the pandemic covered less than 10 percent of its operating costs out of fares. Continue reading →

$10 Billion Boondoggle Opens

By | | Transportation
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Honolulu officials worried that their new train would be “overwhelmed” with riders when it opened at 2 pm on June 30. They needn’t have worried; a local news station reported that “scores of people” lined up to ride the trains, which were free the first five days of operation.

Most trains are running nearly empty. Photo by Honolulu Authority for Rapid Transportation.

In fact, about 9,000 people rode the train the first afternoon. Considering that each train can hold 800 passengers and they ran six times an hour until 6:30 pm, they were operating at about 40 percent of their capacity on opening day. Continue reading →

Transit Fatalities Set Record in 2022

By | | Transportation
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Urban transit killed more people in 2022 than any year in recent history, according to data released last week by the Bureau of Transportation Statistics. The numbers show that 340 people were killed in 2022, up from 268 in 2019 and 237 in 1990. No data are available from before 1990, but it is likely that transit fatalities were less than 300 per year going back to at least 1960.

This figure shows 2022 transit fatality rates and the urban road fatality rate for 2021, as 2022 data aren’t yet available.

This rise in fatalities is particularly concerning considering that transit agencies operated only about 86 percent as many vehicle-miles of service in 2022 than they did in 2019. Despite a 14 percent reduction in service, fatalities rose by 27 percent. Continue reading →