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Transit Not Reinventing Itself

By | | Transportation
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Transit “systems are asking their local governments for bailouts as federal pandemic relief runs dry,” says the New York Times, “but they are also racing to reinvent themselves.” No, they are not.

Source: the Monthly Review: An Independent Socialist Magazine.

The examples of “reinvention” the Times gives mostly involve eliminating fares. But if the problem is that reduced ridership has impacted agency revenues, eliminating fares won’t restore those revenues. That’s not reinvention; it’s merely stepping up the subsidies and the need for even more bailouts. Continue reading →

Making a Good Idea Bad

By | | Transportation
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Back when I first began studying light rail, one of my first questions was, “Why rail when buses can work just as well for a lot less money?” That question is becoming less valid today as transit agencies have done their usual job of making something affordable into something grossly expensive.

Proposed Charleston bus rapid transit line. Graphic by Low Country Rapid Transit.

A case in point is Charleston, South Carolina’s proposal for a bus rapid transit line. Local backers have the audacity to call it South Carolina’s first mass transit system, as if Columbia, Greenville, Charleston, and other South Carolina cities haven’t had bus systems for decades. But the real problem is that they want to spend $625 million on a 21-mile line, or about $30 million per mile. Continue reading →

Name Honolulu’s Train

By | | Transportation
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After wasting billions of taxpayer dollars, transit agencies love to give their transit lines cute names like Link, MAX, BART, and DART. Following this tradition, the Honolulu Authority for Ridiculous Transit (HART) agency has decided to name its new rail line the Skyline. This is a rather lame name, however, so it seems like we should think up a better one.

The name Skyline immediately brings to mind the fact that the elevated rail line is going to spoil views wherever it goes, so my first thought was a name like Viewblocker. But names like these have nothing to do with Hawaii, and it seems like any name for a Hawaiian rail line should be evocative of its location. The name should also hint at the insanely high cost of building the line, the incompetence behind its planning and construction, and the fact that it is likely to become a white elephant with few riders. Continue reading →

April Miles of Driving 91% of 2019

By | | Transportation, Useful Data
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Americans drove 91 percent as many miles in April 2023 as they did in the same month in 2019, according to data released by the Federal Highway Administration yesterday. Relative to before the pandemic, driving hasn’t been this low since August 2020.

See last Wednesday’s post for a discussion of transit and air travel and last Thursday’s post for a discussion of Amtrak travel.

As I pointed out last week, April 2023 had two fewer business days than April 2019. But the number of business days seems to have less of an effect on driving than on transit. After all, commuters make up at least 40 percent of transit ridership but less than 20 percent of vehicles on the road. Driving in February, which has the same number of business days each year, was 104 percent of 2019 while driving in March, which had two more business days than in 2019, was 100 percent of 2019. Continue reading →

Transforming Regressive Taxes into Profits

By | | Regional planning, Transportation
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Just once, I’d like to see a regional transportation plan that didn’t try to transform the region into some planner’s fantasy of how people should live but instead tried to serve the actual transportation needs of the people who lived there. Unfortunately, given that the federal government is giving out tens of billions of dollars for “transformative” projects, we are mainly seeing plans whose only real transformations will be to make some rich people richer and most poor people poorer.

Click image to download a 13.0-MB PDF of this 346-page draft regional transportation plan for Baltimore.

I bring this up because of an op ed earlier this week by two Baltimore-area politicians promoting that region’s $70 billion plan which, they promise, will produce “transformative changes to our transportation system.” More than half of the capital projects in the plan will be for urban transit, including the Red light-rail line that had previously been rejected as a waste of money as well as another, even more-expensive light-rail line. Continue reading →

$2 Billion and Fourteen Years

By | | Transportation
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What does $2 billion and fourteen years buy? In 2009, Congress appropriated $8 billion for high-speed rail, and the Obama administration gave Illinois more than $1 billion of that to speed up trains between Chicago and St. Louis. The state of Illinois provided its own funds, bringing total spending up to $2 billion. Now, fourteen years later, Amtrak is proud to announce the results: the top speed of trains in the corridor will increase from 90 to 110 miles per hour.

New locomotives purchased to pull the not-so-high-speed trains in the Midwest. Photo by Pi.1415926535.

Don’t get too excited. Although 110 miles per hour is 22 percent faster than 90 miles per hour, trains in the Chicago-St. Louis corridor will average just 5 percent faster, or 2 miles per hour, than under the old schedules. Under Amtrak’s old timetables, the fastest of five trains in the corridor averaged the 284-mile trip at 55.7 mph while the slowest went 52.0 mph, with the average of all five being 54.0. In late July, the new schedule the fastest train to 59.6 mph, the slowest to 53.9, and the average of all five to 56.8. Continue reading →

Disaster or Timely Adjustment?

By | | City planning
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The commercial real-estate market is tanking with vacancy rates approaching 20 percent, observes high-tech consultant George Sibble. This is a problem for all of us, he warns, for two reasons.

First, he says, the defaults that are likely to result from this will be much greater than the defaults that caused the 2008 financial crisis. Second, cities depend heavily on commercial real estate for tax revenues. Despite his arguments, I believe this is more of an opportunity than a serious problem. Continue reading →

Entitled Transit Stooges Blackmail for BART

By | | Transportation
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“We are not asking, we are demanding that Governor Newsom allocate $5 billion to public transit,” said Brett Vertocci, a protestor who was blocking rush-hour traffic in San Francisco. “We need the state to step up so that we don’t have to cancel bus lines, so we don’t lose BART weekend service,” Vertocci continued. “Also so we don’t create huge traffic jams in these intersections,” he ominously added.

“Gavin Newsom is killing transit”? No, but maybe the lack of ridership is killing it. But in that case, why not let it die?

How is maintaining BART weekend service going to prevent huge rush-hour traffic jams? Apparently because unless the state forks over $5 billion, people like Vertocci will continue to block rush-hour traffic. In other words, they are blackmailing the state. Continue reading →

Downtown San Francisco Is Dying

By | | City planning
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The owner of San Francisco’s first and fourth largest hotels announced Monday that it is going to walk away from the mortgage it owes for those buildings. The owners of the Hilton Union Square Hotel noted that San Francisco’s path to recovery remains clouded and elongated by major challenges,” including the fact that fewer groups want to hold conventions in a city now more famous for its homeless population than its cable cars and restaurants.

Once famous as the center of the 1960s counterculture, Haight Street is now the home of a new kind of counterculture. Photo by Franco Folini.

Last month, Nordstrom said that it was closing both its stores in downtown San Francisco. “The dynamics of the downtown San Francisco market have changed dramatically over the past several years,” said a Nordstrom official, “impacting customer foot traffic to our stores and our ability to operate successfully.” Continue reading →

Amtrak Carried 91% of Pre-Pandemic PM in April

By | | Transportation
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Amtrak carried 90.9 percent as many passenger-miles in April 2023 as in the same month in 2019, according to the company’s monthly performance report posted yesterday. This was only the second time Amtrak exceeded 90 percent since the pandemic began.

April ridership was strongest in the Northeast Corridor, where Amtrak carried 93.9 percent as many riders as in the same month of 2019. Long-distance trains were next at 88.9 percent. State-supported trains were weakest at 84.5 percent. Continue reading →