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Amtrak Carried 86% of Pre-Pandemic PM in May

By | | Transportation, Useful Data
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Amtrak carried 492 million passenger-miles in May 2023, which was just 86.4 percent of the 569 million passenger-miles it carried in the same month of 2019, according to Amtrak’s latest monthly performance report. Considering that Amtrak’s April passenger-miles were nearly 91 percent as many in 2023 as 2019, this is a disappointing result. Since Amtrak ridership usually usually picks up in May due to increased vacationers, this suggests that Americans aren’t enthusiastic about riding trains for discretionary travel in a post-COVID world.

For detailed comments on transit and highways, see my July 12 post.

All three types of Amtrak trains underperformed in May, with Northeast Corridor trains carrying less than 88 percent of pre-pandemic riders, long-distance trains carrying 85 percent, and state-supported day trains carrying less than 81 percent. It is worth noting that Amtrak is putting most of the money it received for expansion in the infrastructure bill into state-supported trains even though they are the worst-performing part of its network. Amtrak’s reasoning is that Congress gave it money for capital improvements but not operating costs, so it will need to persuade the states to pay for operating costs of any new routes or increased frequencies. Continue reading →

Fixing the Failed the Music City Star

By | | Transportation
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The Regional Transportation Authority of Nashville is asking members of the public how the agency can make its commuter train more convenient to riders. The train, once called the Music City Star but since renamed the much less evocative WeGo Star, was supposed to carry 700 round trips a day in its first year but the closest it came was in 2018 when it carried 581 round trips a day.

In 2021, this fell to a mere 69 round trips a day. The transit agency, which also calls itself WeGo, spent $4 million operating the line but earned less than $142,000 in revenues, which works out to an operating subsidy of more than $108 per rider. The agency claims ridership is currently up to 200 round-trips a day, but even if that’s true it still represents subsidies of around $35 per rider. Continue reading →

Is Telecommuting More Productive?

By | | Transportation
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A few weeks ago, the Economist gravely announced that people working at home were less productive than people who commuted to a workplace. I didn’t find its evidence persuasive, however, as the studies it cited mostly dealt with low-skilled jobs such as call centers and data entry.

Click image to download a 17.4-MB PDF of this report from the McKinsey Institute.

Yesterday, the Hill reported just the opposite: telecommuting, a new study has shown, increases worker output. This is partly because remote workers save a lot of time by not having to commute, and they tend to spend almost half of that time working. The article also pointed out that overall worker productivity is higher now than before the pandemic, and telecommuting is one of the factors increasing that productivity. Continue reading →

Get Those Cows off My Lawn!

By | | Public lands
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The Antiplanner is hardly a radical environmentalist, but I’ve lost patience with one environmentally destructive activity: livestock grazing on public lands. Taxpayers spend tens of millions of dollars a year to subsidize this grazing, while the ranchers who have permits to do it have successfully lobbied Congress to keep they fees they pay almost zero while their cattle and sheep trample fish habitat and compete with wildlife for forage.

Cattle on BLM land in eastern Oregon. BLM photo by Gary Shine.

Livestock grazing was once a profit center for the Forest Service; in 1920, the agency actually made a profit and most of its income came from ranchers, not timber buyers. But in 1978, ranchers persuaded Congress to impose a fee formula on the Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management that supposedly calculated fair market value by starting with the value of livestock and subtracting all of the costs of production. What was left over was supposed to be the fee. Continue reading →

Houston BRT Failure

By | | Planning Disasters, Transportation
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A Houston bus rapid transit route over dedicated bus lanes is attracting less than 10 percent of the riders that were projected for it. The Silver Line opened in August 2020 with the expectation that it would carry 14,850 weekday riders, but in fact it is carrying less than 900 riders per weekday, about 6 percent of projections.

A Houston Silver Line sits empty, which is not unusual for it even when in motion. Photo by Ricky Courtney.

Metro, Houston’s transit agency, originally wanted to put a light-rail line in the Silver Line corridor, but opposition from local residents led it to “downgrade” the line to bus rapid transit. According to Houston businessman Bill King, Metro still managed to spend $200 million on the 4.7-mile route, mostly through tax-increment financing. This was a lot less than the $500 million or so that light rail would have cost but still a lot more than necessary. Continue reading →

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 →