Search Results for: peak transit

Living Without Cars

By | | Transportation
32 Comments

How many times a year does some twenty-something come up with what they think is the brilliant and innovative idea that, since they can live without a car, no one else should be allowed to have one either? The answer probably roughly corresponds to the number of twenty-somethings who think about transportation. I know I thought of that idea, at least with respect to downtown Portland, when I was a twenty-something.

The latest to come up with this idea is Treehugger writer Lloyd Alter, who teaches “sustainable design.” From his photo, he looks to be older the twenty-something, which means he should know better, but apparently doesn’t.

Alter’s argument is simple. A single-occupancy vehicle weighs something like 20 times as much as the occupant, and it is a waste of energy to move that much mass to move just one person. So therefore cars are a waste and should be banned. Continue reading →

FTA Historic Times Series Through 2016

By | | Transportation, Useful Data
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Since 1992, taxpayers have spent $364 billion (in 2016 dollars) on transit capital improvements. More than $257 billion of this went to rail transit, while $94 billion went to bus transit. The Antiplanner calculated this information on the Federal Transit Administration’s historic time series capital costs spreadsheet.

The official data show that transit ridership peaked in 2014 at 10.5 billion trips and by 2016 had declined 2.5 percent to 10.2 billion trips. This ridership includes urban, rural, and tribal transit agencies, but rural and tribal together add up to only about a million trips per year. The Antiplanner calculated this information on the Federal Transit Administration’s operations spreadsheet.

Tuesday’s post about the 2016 National Transit Database mentioned that the Federal Transit Administration has also posted the 2016 update to its historic time series, which has operating and ridership data back to 1991, capital costs back to 1992, and fares back to 2002 broken down by transit agency and mode. Except for the capital costs, which are in a separate file, all of the information is on worksheets that can be sorted in the same order, allowing users to make such calculations as operating cost per trip or fare per passenger mile. Continue reading →

August 2017 Ridership Down 4.0% from ’16

By | | Transportation, Useful Data
11 Comments

Last week, the Antiplanner reported that July 2017 transit ridership was 3.6 percent below the same month of 2016. Now the Federal Transit Administration has posted data for August 2017 showing that ridership for that month was 4.0 percent less than in August 2016.

Naturally, the Antiplanner has posted an enhanced version of this data file showing totals by year from 2002 through 2017, as well as totals by transit agency and for the 200 largest urban areas. The file also shows the change in transit riders in August 2017 vs. August 2016, January-August 2017 vs. same in 2016 as well as 2014 and 2010, and 2016’s total vs. the peak for each mode, transit agency, or urban area from 2008 through 2015.

These numbers have to be frightening transit industry leaders. Update: They are. Just comparing the first eight months of 2017 against 2016, ridership has fallen by more than 10 percent in Philadelphia, Milwaukee, Charlotte, El Paso, and Albuquerque, and nearly 10 percent in Miami, Cleveland, San Jose, and Raleigh, among other urban areas. Since this decline is, in most cases, on top of declines in 2016, we’re seeing 25 to 40 percent declines in some urban areas over the past few years.

Continue reading →

DC Metro More Reliable But Riders Are Not

By | | Transportation
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The Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority (WMATA) has blamed much of the rail system’s ridership declines on the system’s reliability problems and all of the track work it did in 2016 and early 2017 to fix those problems. Now, the system has become more reliable, but riders don’t seem to be returning.

The Federal Transit Administration has published month-by-month ridership data for all transit systems through June, 2017. The numbers show that Metro rail ridership in February, March, and April of this year were all about 10 percent less than in the same months last year. In May, however, it was only 1.5 percent less, while June 2017 ridership was actually more than in June 2016–though only by 0.6 percent.
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While that’s grounds for a bit of optimism, Metro rail ridership still has a long way to go before it returns to its 2009 peak, which was 28 percent higher than the year ending June 2017. I don’t like making predictions because there are too many unknown variables, but I suspect ridership will never return to those levels partly because many former riders have lost faith in the system and partly because the band-aid work done on the system in the last year won’t solve its long-term reliability problems. Time will tell.

LaHood to DC Metro Board: “You’re Fired!”

By | | Transportation, Urban areas
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Washington DC’s Metro system has a multibillion-dollar maintenance backlog, declining ridership, and serious problems with labor unions. The systems problems are so bad that Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe asked former Secretary of Immobility Ray LaHood, one of the least credible people ever to hold that office, to lead a search for new funds for the agency.

Now LaHood has come out with his proposal. Has he found a billion dollars stuck in the seat cushions of Metro trains? Nope. Has he discovered a treasure map at the White House that leads to a city of gold? Nope. Has he found any money at all? None.

Instead, he proposes to replace Metro’s current sixteen-member board of directors with a “reform board” consisting of “five members who are solely responsible to the transit system, not the parochial interests of the local officials who would appoint them.” Continue reading →

Denver Solves a Problem

By | | Transportation
6 Comments

Since it opened a little more than a year ago, Denver’s airport rail lines, known as the A Line, has had a serious safety problem: the crossing gates aren’t reliable. Now Denver’s Regional Transit District (RTD) claims it has solved the problem, which is transit-speak for they haven’t solved the problem; they’ve just given up.

According to Denver Transit Partners, the private consortium that built and operates the line, “the problem with the crossing technology is impossible to fix.” Instead of fixing it, they’ve gotten a waiver from the Federal Railroad Administration to allow them to run the trains anyway–provided they have human flaggers at every crossing, which costs about $6 million a year.

Supposedly the crossing gate system is incompatible with the positive train control that the federal government also requires. The Antiplanner doesn’t claim to be an expert on railroad signal technology, but the basic principles behind positive train control were developed more than 100 years ago by Frank Sprague, the electrical genius who also developed the first workable electric streetcar, the first electric rapid transit system, and the first high-speed electric elevators. Continue reading →

Light Rail for Las Vegas?

By | | Transportation, Urban areas
5 Comments

On the same day that the Antiplanner debated rail transit with Vukan Vuchic, the Las Vegas Sun announced that transit planners there are once again studying light rail. Las Vegas is the nation’s third-largest urban area not to have spent large amounts of money on rail transit: Detroit has a people mover and is building a streetcar line; Tampa has a streetcar; and Las Vegas has a monorail connecting casinos, but none of these were megaprojects (and all should be considered failures).

Rather than pat themselves on the back for avoiding the cost headaches that come with light rail, the city’s Regional Transportation Commission is considering an $800 million light-rail line vs. a $350-million bus-rapid transit line. Officials should look at Denver, where the bus-rapid transit line provides faster service than any of the region’s rail lines; is the only line that didn’t have huge cost overruns and did greatly exceed ridership projections; and whose buses share space with cars so the line relieves congestion for everyone, not just a handful of train riders.

Professor Vuchic maintains that light rail is somehow essential for urban livability. Cities that built light rail, he said, created pedestrian friendly streets. On one hand, light rail kills three times as many pedestrians as buses, per billion passenger miles carried, so I don’t consider that very friendly. On the other hand, any actions that can be taken to create a pedestrian-friendly environment are completely independent of what kind of transit is provided. Continue reading →

Back in the Air Again

By | | Transportation, Travels
5 Comments

The Antiplanner is in Philadelphia today for the World Metrorail Congress. Apparently, one of the conference organizers thought it would be a good idea to have the It is believed that men with ED have low DHEA in their blood. levitra discount The flowers are order generic viagra http://deeprootsmag.org/2019/08/19/robert-neubeckers-little-plane-that-could/ bell shaped and vary in color (white, pale yellow, purple). You can also buy Kamagra UK over the internet let the sufferers save their valuable time and hard useful deeprootsmag.org generico cialis on line work . It is a high quality generic purchase viagra medicine that comes in a soft-gel capsule. Antiplanner debate University of Pennsylvania Professor Vukan Vuchic about the future of transit. Needless to say, I will take the position that its future is very short.

Tax You, Tax Them, Tax Everyone Else

By | | Transportation, Urban areas
7 Comments

To help “close a budget gap,” Washington Metro is scheduled to raise fares and cut service later this month. The Amalgamated Transit Union Local 689, which represents 88 percent of Metro’s employees, calls this the “pay more, get less” plan.

In response, the union issued its own plan to cut fares and increase service. It could have called this the “pay less, get more” plan, but instead it called it “fund it, fix it, make it fair.” The union didn’t originate this slogan; instead, it seems to be a mantra for the “transit justice” community, which seems to believe that, because a few low-income people ride transit, everyone should be subsidized.

For the “fund it” part of the plan, the union calls for the creation of assessment districts that would pay fees–not taxes–to help run the system. The union plan tries to imply that only the wealthy owners of properties whose values are enhanced by the transit system would have to pay, but when an assessment district was created to fund construction of the Silver Line, owners of properties miles away from any transit station were forced to pay as much as those next door to a station. Continue reading →

Only the Government

By | | Transportation
4 Comments

Only the government would complain when the number of customers using one of its services grows. At least, that’s the case with an article about the increase in freight traffic as UPS, FedEx, and other shipping companies make more deliveries due to on-line sales. Supposedly, a “siege of delivery trucks is threatening to choke cities with traffic.” If roads were properly priced, of course, this wouldn’t be a problem–but if they were properly priced, the transit lobby wouldn’t be able to steal $16 billion a year from highway user fees.

In a statement sometimes attributed to Will Rogers but whose true author is unknown, someone said, “the solution to congestion is for government to make cars and business to build the roads.” Whoever said this understood that government tends to create shortages of things that people want, while private businesses tend to create plenty.

Speaking of private businesses, Waymo–the new name for the spin-off company developing Google’s self-driving cars–is inviting residents of the Phoenix metropolitan area to apply to be among 500 “early riders.” The company will loan 500 self-driving Chrysler Pacifica minivans to families to try out. Apparently, this is on top of cars that have already been loaned to 100 families in the area.

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