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Most Americans Want a House in the Suburbs

By | | Transportation
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Most Americans are happy with their commutes and would be willing to trade off even longer commutes in order to live in more desirable housing, according to a survey by YouGov. Moreover, the detailed results indicate that these preferences are almost as strong among 18-29 year olds as among older age classes. YouGov describes itself as a “market research and data company.”

Three out of four people in YouGov’s sample of 1,000 drive to work while 14 percent take transit. Since the Census Bureau’s 2013 American Community Survey found that 85 percent of Americans drive to work and only 5 percent take transit, it seems likely that YouGov’s sample was skewed to big cities where transit commuting is more popular. New York, San Francisco, and Washington are the only major urban areas in which more than 14 percent of commuters take transit to work.

This makes YouGov’s other survey results even more striking. The numbers suggest that anecdotes indicating that large numbers of Millennials want to use transit and live close to jobs aren’t supported by the facts. Among other things, the survey found that differences in commuting and other preferences between Democrats and Republicans are greater than between people in their 20s and people in their 50s.

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Say No to the Purple Line

By | | Transportation
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The Washington Business Journal published an op ed casting doubt on the proposed, $2.4-billion Purple light-rail line in Maryland suburbs of DC. Since the article is behind a paywall, the Antiplanner is taking the liberty of reproducing it here.

The Journal edited out a few paragraphs; while I’m not complaining, I reinserted them here for sake of completion. Those paragraphs are in italics.

Guest Comment: The Purple Line? No thanks

Washington Business Journal: Feb 6, 2015, 6:00am EST
Randal O’Toole

In the wake of Larry Hogan’s election as governor, Maryland has been inundated with propaganda claiming the Purple Line light rail from Bethesda to New Carrollton will do everything from relieve congestion to revitalize the economy. This is all hogwash.

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Outrageously Expensive Transit

By | | Transportation
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The average cost of light-rail construction has grown to nearly $200 million per mile, according to data in the Federal Transit Administration’s 2016 proposal for capital grants to transit agencies under the “New Starts/Small Starts” program. This is up from $176 million a mile in the 2015 plan.

San Diego, which started the light-rail craze when it built the nation’s first modern light-rail line in 1981 at an average cost of well under $10 million per mile–less than $18 million per mile in today’s dollars–wants to spend $194 million per mile on a new Mid-Coast line. Boston, which can’t afford to maintain its existing increasingly decrepit rail system, wants to spend $489 million per mile on a 4.7-mile extension of one of its light-rail lines. The least-expensive light-rail line in the budget is a 2.3-mile extension to an existing light-rail line in Denver costing a mere $98 million per mile, nearly twice as much as the least-expensive new light-rail line in the 2013 plan.

Streetcars, which were supposed to be cheap, are costing an average of $59 million a mile, up from $46 million a mile in last year’s plan. That’s less than a third the average cost of light rail today, but still more than three times as expensive as San Diego’s original light-rail line. (I’m counting the Tacoma rail line as a streetcar, as it uses equipment that is nearly identical to the Portland streetcar; Sound Transit and the FTA call it light rail mainly to justify taxing Tacoma residents to help pay for the outrageously expensive light-rail lines being built in Seattle.) The FTA proposes to fund another streetcar line in Charlotte, and streetcars in Sacramento and Fort Lauderdale are also in the plan though not recommended for immediate funding.

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Why Are the Buses Empty?

By | | Transportation
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Many taxpayers get irate when they see huge buses taking up road space with almost no passengers on board. Transit agencies tint or screen bus windows either to reduce air conditioning costs or to allow billboard-type advertising, but to an outside observer it looks like they are trying to cover up the fact that so many seats are empty.


Is this bus full or empty? It is difficult to see through the tinted glass, but since it is in Pinellas County, Florida, whose buses carry an average of just 7.7 riders, it is likely to be on the empty side. Flickr photo by Bill Rogers.

According to the 2013 National Transit Database, the average urban transit bus (including commuter buses and rapid transit buses) has 39 seats but carries an average of just 11.1 people (calculated by dividing passenger miles by vehicle-revenue miles). That’s actually an improvement from 2012, when the average load was 10.7 people. But it’s a big drop from 1979, when the average loads appear to have exceeded 15 people.*

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More Taxes Equal More Pork

By | | Transportation
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While many interest groups are promoting increased federal spending on infrastructure on the grounds that it will spur economic growth, the Washington Post reports that the “benefits of infrastructure spending [are] not so clear-cut.” Yet there is a simple way to determine whether a particular infrastructure project will generate economic benefits.

Spending on transportation infrastructure, for example, generates benefits when that new infrastructure increases total mobility of people or freight. New infrastructure will increase mobility if it provides transportation that is faster, cheaper, more convenient, and/or safer than before. 

In 1956, Congress created the Interstate Highway System and dedicated federal gas taxes and other highway taxes to that system. The result was the largest public works project in history and one of the most successful. Today, more than 20 percent of all passenger travel and around 15 percent of all freight in the United States is on the interstates.

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Late Night Boston

By | | News commentary, Transportation, Urban areas
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What gives transit riders such an incredible sense of entitlement? The state of Massachusetts has to close a $175 million budget gap. The Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority (MBTA or “the T” for short) is still suffering from a huge maintenance shortfall. Yet Boston transit riders think they should get 24-hour transit service, no matter what the cost or how few people use it.

An experiment with late-night transit service–running certain buses and trains until 2:30 am instead of just 1:00 am–has attracted an average of just 17,000 riders per day, or less than 12,000 per hour, at an annual cost of $13 million. For comparison, before the experiment began, the T carried nearly 1.4 million riders per weekday, or close to 700,000 per hour for the 20 hours the system had been open. Plus, at least some of those 17,000 riders would have used the T anyway, just at an earlier hour.

Transit advocates say longer hours are needed to “retain talented young professionals and tech workers while boosting night life at the same time.” But when the T asked the “corporations that could ultimately benefit from the service by retaining young talent” to contribute to late-night operating costs, they got less than 7 percent of the cost of extending service hours.

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2013 Transit Data

By | | Transportation, Useful Data
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Bus ridership declined in 2013, but rail ridership grew, according to the 2013 National Transit Database. The Federal Transit Administration posted the database recently, which you can download in the form of data tables or in database-formatted spreadsheets. The data tables are easier to read, but the database is easier to use to make calculations of totals, averages, etc.

The database comes in 20 separate spreadsheets for such factors as ridership, operating costs, and fares. The data tables are in 30 spreadsheets. As usual, the Antiplanner has combined the most pertinent data into a single spreadsheet that includes everything from population to energy consumption. This file is similar to those for previous years, but I’ve added a few columns.

As in the past, the spreadsheet is divided into three parts. The first 1851 rows list data for every transit agency and every mode used by each agency. The middle 50 or so rows summarize the data by mode. Since a few agencies and modes failed to report energy consumption, the totals for those that did are listed separately to allow accurate calculations of average energy consumption. Finally, the last 380 rows give totals by urban area.

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Milwaukee Streetcar Debate Continues

By | | Transportation, Urban areas
25 Comments

Supporters of a Milwaukee streetcar boondoggle are chiding a city alderman for expressing the fear that streetcar passengers could be vulnerable to crime. Apparently, opponents of progressive ideas like streetcars aren’t supposed to use real facts when making the case against those ideas.

The Bureau of Transportation Statistics reports crime by transit mode. When those numbers are compared with passenger miles by transit mode, it turns out that light-rail riders are far more likely to be victims of crime than bus riders. Light-rail riders are three times as likely to be raped or sexually assaulted, twice as likely to suffer aggravated assault, and five times as likely to be robbed as bus riders. Yet anyone who points this out is apparently “fear mongering.” Streetcars aren’t exactly the same as light rail, but they share one feature that buses don’t have: the driver is often in a separate compartment from the passengers, so can’t do as good a job monitoring passenger behavior.
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On the other hand, the Wisconsin Reporter reveals the “incestuous relationships” among streetcar supporters, all connected together by a PR firm called Meuller Communications. All this really points out is that streetcars involve lots of money and lots of people want to get in on the action. Contrary to some, the Koch Brothers don’t stand to make a dime if streetcar lines are not built, but many other people and companies stand to make millions if they are built. For this reason alone, Milwaukeeans should be wary of any claims made for streetcars.

Transit Idiocy

By | | Transportation
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Self-driving cars could “make congestion dramatically worse,” warns a headline in the Atlantic‘s CityLab. Simulations show that, if just 25 percent of cars on the road are self-driving, the article says, there will be a lot more delays at intersections.

It’s not surprising that the transit crowd would want to try to discredit the idea of self-driving cars, but this is a particularly pathetic attempt. The CityLab article is based on a study that assumed that, for the sake of passenger comfort, self-driving cars would be programmed to accelerate and decelerate no faster than a light-rail or intercity train. Such slow acceleration, the study found, would increase the time it would take cars to get through stop lights.

The study was seemingly done by people who haven’t ever seen a self-driving car in real life, or maybe any car. There’s an obvious difference between cars and trains: people stand up and walk around in trains, so acceleration and deceleration has to be slow. So far, no one has designed a self-driving tall enough to stand in, so there’s no need to cripple the cars that way.

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Someone Teach Him the Laws of Supply & Demand

By | | Housing
12 Comments

With its “vibrant mix of residential, retail, commercial and green space,” Arlington County, Virginia is exactly where a lot of Millennials in the Washington DC area would like to live–at least according to one such Millennial named Harrison Godfrey. However, many can’t, as the median home price is $550,000, which is far more than two professionals who each earn $50,000 a year can afford.

Godfrey has apparently never taken an economics class. At just 26 square miles (compared with an average of 450 miles for the rest of Virginia’s 94 counties), Arlington County is in reality a small city. According to the 2010 census, it is 100 percent urbanized with a population density of 8,000 people per square mile.

By comparison, the urbanized portion of Montgomery County, Maryland is just 3,500 people per square mile. In other words, there really isn’t any more room to build in Arlington County, at least not without displacing a lot of people who live there now–which would probably mean some of the ethnic minorities that help make the county “vibrant.”

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