Search Results for: peak transit

DC Metro: Less Service for More Money

By | | Transportation, Urban areas
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The Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority (WMATA) was pleased to announce last week that it would not be delaying any rush-hour trains due to maintenance work for a few days. However, starting this week, rush-hour frequencies on the Yellow Green Lines would be reduced by 20 to 50 percent, and part of the Green Line will be completely shut down for two weeks.

All of which has just become business as usual in Washington. The real news is that WMATA plans to raise fares and cut service by up to 25 percent on July 1. Rush-hour fares will go up a dime, non-rush-hour by a quarter, and trains will stop running at 11:30 pm most days, instead of the current 12:30 am.

The big cut, however, will be to rush-hour service. Trains that now operate 10 times an hour will be cut back to 7.5 times an hour, effectively a 25 percent cut in service. Passengers can therefore expect a 33 percent increasing in crowding. Or, more likely, the system will lose even more riders.

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Trump to Congress: Eliminate New Starts

By | | News commentary, Transportation
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When Elaine Chao was confirmed as Secretary of Transportation, rail advocacy groups were optimistic that she and the administration would look favorably towards more funding for rail “infrastructure.” So when Trump’s budget came out, they were shocked, or pretended to be shocked, that Trump proposed cuts to transit, Amtrak, and TIGER grants carried over from the 2009 stimulus program.

Transit cuts were part of Trump’s “attack on cities,” said urbanist Yonah Freemark. No, it was more like part of Trump’s hostility to pouring money down a rathole that produces no benefits.

As the Antiplanner explains in this op-ed in the Morning Consult, New Starts funding is worse than trying to create jobs by digging holes and filling them up. At least the holes, once filled, don’t impose any further obligations on society, but cities that build New Starts projects are legally obligated to continue operating and maintaining the projects for decades. Most of these projects have high costs and negligible benefits.

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Did Nader Really Call Apple a Monopoly?

By | | News commentary
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“Consumer advocate Ralph Nader, concerned about fake news prevalent on social media sites, believes Congress should weigh in with antitrust legislation targeting Facebook, Google, Microsoft and Apple,” reports the Washington Examiner. Say what? Just what do Microsoft and Apple have to do with so-called fake news? How are any of these companies monopolies? Is Ralph Nader getting senile or was he misquoted?

YouTube has a video of part of his comments that he gave at an event commemorating the passage of the Freedom of Information Act. It doesn’t show the whole event, but it appears that one of the other speakers or someone in the audience said something positive about the role of social media in mobilizing grassroots activism.

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APTA Ridership Data

By | | Transportation
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Yesterday, the Antiplanner noted that APTA has published its third quarter ridership report for 2016. The report shows that, nationwide, transit ridership was 2.9 percent less than the same quarter in 2015. Heavy-rail ridership fell by 2.5% and bus by 4.4%, while light rail grew by 4.1% and commuter rail by 0.5%.

In addition to Washington, DC, where heavy rail fell by 13.5 percent, some of the biggest heavy-rail losers include Baltimore, which also declined by 13.5 percent; Atlanta (-9%); San Juan (-8%); and Miami (-5%). Ridership grew in a few places, but that growth was swamped by the 1.4% decline on the New York City subway, which is by far the largest heavy-rail operator in the country.

The main reason light rail grew was the opening of new lines in Seattle and New Orleans, both of which saw growth of around 60 percent, as well as Los Angeles, which saw a 12 percent gain. Light-rail ridership also grew significantly in Baltimore (15%), Boston (13%), and Phoenix (+14%), but light-rail suffered declines of 5 percent or more in Buffalo (-15%), Dallas (-6%), Norfolk (-7%), Pittsburgh (-9%), Sacramento (-9%), San Jose (-12%), and St. Louis (-6%).

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Resisting Rail

By | | Transportation, Urban areas
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San Antonio, notes Texas Public Radio, is “the largest city in the country without a rail system to move” its residents. As a result, the article implies, people are “stuck behind the wheel,” and the article’s headline asks, “Should San Antonio Reconsider Rail?”

Betteridge’s Law of Headlines, of course, suggests that “Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no.” But more important, the article is guilty of the Politician’s Fallacy, which is: “1. We have to do something [in this case, about congestion]. 2. This [rail] is something. 3. We have to do this [build rail].”

Before jumping to any conclusions, San Antonians should ask how well rail is moving people in other cities. The first point to note is that, when TPR says that San Antonio is the largest city not to have rail, there are only six larger cities to consider. We don’t think of San Antonio is being the nation’s seventh-largest city, but it is true because Texas cities have strong annexations powers, so tend to be much larger than cities elsewhere. Houston, Dallas, and Austin are also among the nation’s eleven largest cities.

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Trump’s Trillion-Dollar Infrastructure Plan

By | | News commentary, Transportation
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On the campaign trail, Donald Trump promised to spend twice as much on infrastructure as whatever Hillary Clinton was proposing, which at the time was $275 billion. Doubling down again in a speech after winning the election, Trump now proposes to spend a trillion dollars on infrastructure over the next ten years.

President Obama had proposed to fix infrastructure with an infrastructure bank, though just where the bank would get its money was never clear (actually, it was perfectly clear: the taxpayers). Trump’s alternative plan is for the private sector, not taxpayers, to spend the money, and to encourage them he proposes to offer tax credits for infrastructure projects. He says this would be “revenue neutral” because the taxes paid by people working on the infrastructure would offset the tax breaks. In short, Trump is proposing tax credits in lieu of an infrastructure bank as a form of economic stimulus.

America’s infrastructure needs are not nearly as serious as Trump thinks. Throwing a trillion dollars at infrastructure, no matter how it is funded, guarantees that a lot will be spent on unnecessary things. As Harvard economist Edward Glaeser recently pointed out in an article that should be required reading for Trump’s transition team, just calling something “infrastructure” doesn’t mean it is worth doing or that it will stimulate economic growth.

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November 8 Ballot Measures to Watch

By | | Transportation
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If you think the presidential election is stupid, just get a look at all of the cities that are voting on stupid rail transit projects. Los Angeles wants $120 billion; Seattle $54 billion; San Diego, $7.5 billion; San Francisco, $3.5 billion; San Jose, $3 billion; Atlanta, $2.5 billion, Kansas City, $2 billion; Virginia Beach, $310 million; and Tigard, Oregon, which has the chance to kill a $2 billion project in Portland. That’s nearly $200 billion worth of stupidity that has rail contractors salivating.

Voters from these cities should look at the experiences other cities have had with rail. Portland opened a new light-rail project a year ago that was supposed to carry 17,000 people a day in its first year. Actual ridership is more like 11,000. Rail apologist Jarrett Walker says he isn’t surprised as rail lines “are designed to encourage denser and more sustainable development in addition to serving people who are there now,” so initial ridership is “almost always disappointing.” C’mon, Jarrett: planners took this into account when they made their projections (or if they didn’t they should have). By the way, the article also says the project came in “under budget,” but it doesn’t say that the budget was almost twice as much as the original projected cost, just one more way transit agencies lie about rail transit.

Speaking of cost overruns, Honolulu is the smallest urban area in America to be building rail transit, and its project, which was originally projected to cost less than $3 billion, is now up to $8 billion and possibly more than $10 billion, which would be more than $10,000 for every resident of Oahu. The city is stuck because it doesn’t have enough money to finish it, but if it doesn’t finish it, the Federal Transit Administration says it will demand that the city return the federal share of the cost.

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Your Government at Work

By | | Housing, Urban areas
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The city of Portland, which likes to call itself “the city that works,” subsidized the renovation of a 50-unit downtown apartment building. The apartments will now be made available to people who earn less than $15,400 a year.

“In Portland, we strongly believe that downtown should be a place where people of all incomes can live,” said city commissioner Dan Saltzman. One problem with that philosophy, as Willamette Week‘s Nigel Jaquiss points out, is that the city spent $514 per square foot renovating those apartments. For a lot less money, it could have built twice as many brand new apartments elsewhere in the city.

In many ways, Portland is the model for nearly all of the policies advocated in the White House policy paper described here yesterday: minimum-density zoning, streamlined permitting for developers who want to build high densities; all single-family neighborhoods put in zones allowing accessory dwellings; lots of neighborhoods zoned for high-densities and multifamily housing; tax-increment financing and property tax abatements to subsidize density; and elimination of off-street parking requirements (which is the only policy discussed in detail by a Washington Post article about the White House paper). Yet, despite doing all of the things that the White House recommends to make housing affordable, Portland politicians claim that the city is suffering from a terrible housing crisis. Of course, most of the ideas proposed to solve the crisis, such as rent control and inclusionary zoning, will just make it worse.

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Straddling Bus or Scam?

By | | Transportation
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The New York Times, among others, has publicized a claimed test run of the “straddling bus,” aka “transit elevated bus” (TEB), that promises to relieve congestion by “floating” above regular traffic. In fact, it was less of a test drive than a publicity stunt, moving a vehicle at 6 miles per hour on a few hundred feet of test track, not on a real city street or highway.

Supposedly, the advantage of these 300-passenger behemoths (or 1,200 if four are hooked together) is that, unlike rail transit, they can be added to a city without building a lot of new infrastructure. But that’s a lie. The vehicles themselves run on tracks, and they weigh so much–upwards of 100 tons–that such tracks will be expensive to install. As Wired points out, it “is not a bus. . . it is a train.” (Technically, it is a railcar; it only becomes a train when two or more are hooked together, but you get the point.)

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DC Rail Still Unsafe

By | | Transportation, Urban areas
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Washington Metro is shutting down parts of its rail system in succession so it can do maintenance work on them. Commuters appear to be adjusting to Metro’s slowdowns and shutdowns, but Metro employees haven’t.

Metro calls its maintenance program “SafeTrack,” but it appears to be anything but safe. In the course of one five-hour period yesterday, a Metro maintenance railcar derailed; a train carrying passengers collided with the mirror on the derailed railcar; and an empty train collided with a stationary train in a rail yard.

Fortunately, no one was hurt, but why was a revenue train allowed to use a track right next to the derailed railcar? Why did the railcar–whose job it was to secure rails to the ties–derail in the first place? Did the operator of the train in the rail yard fall asleep? All these events suggest that, while Metro may be spending money on maintenance, it still does not have the safety culture it needs to operate a public transportation system.

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