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$10 Billion Boondoggle Opens

By | | Transportation
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Honolulu officials worried that their new train would be “overwhelmed” with riders when it opened at 2 pm on June 30. They needn’t have worried; a local news station reported that “scores of people” lined up to ride the trains, which were free the first five days of operation.

Most trains are running nearly empty. Photo by Honolulu Authority for Rapid Transportation.

In fact, about 9,000 people rode the train the first afternoon. Considering that each train can hold 800 passengers and they ran six times an hour until 6:30 pm, they were operating at about 40 percent of their capacity on opening day. Continue reading →

Transit Fatalities Set Record in 2022

By | | Transportation
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Urban transit killed more people in 2022 than any year in recent history, according to data released last week by the Bureau of Transportation Statistics. The numbers show that 340 people were killed in 2022, up from 268 in 2019 and 237 in 1990. No data are available from before 1990, but it is likely that transit fatalities were less than 300 per year going back to at least 1960.

This figure shows 2022 transit fatality rates and the urban road fatality rate for 2021, as 2022 data aren’t yet available.

This rise in fatalities is particularly concerning considering that transit agencies operated only about 86 percent as many vehicle-miles of service in 2022 than they did in 2019. Despite a 14 percent reduction in service, fatalities rose by 27 percent. Continue reading →

Highway Safety Results Are Mixed

By | | Transportation
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Highway fatalities declined slightly in 2022 despite an increase in the miles of driving, and they declined again in the first three months of 2023. However, the changes are small and it’s too soon to say whether this is a trend or just a short-term quirk in the data.

Photo by Ragesoss.

Short-term changes in fatalities and fatality rates are something of a mystery. In the long run, safer roads and safer cars have pushed down fatalities from a peak of 55,600 in 1972, for a rate of 44.1 deaths per billion vehicle-miles of travel, to a low of under 32,500 in 2011, for a rate of only 11.0 deaths per billion vehicle-miles. The rate fell even lower to 10.8 per billion in 2014. Continue reading →

Gen Z Moving Out of Cities

By | | Regional planning
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Remember the young people who supposedly loved cities and rejected the suburbs? It turns out they are the ones who have been fleeing the cities since the beginning of the pandemic. According to a recent analysis of census data, while the number of people in large cities declined by 0.9 percent since the pandemic began, the number of children under 5 — an indicator of young families — fell by more than 6 percent.

Americans have long preferred to raise children in the suburbs, and Gen Z turns out to be no exception. Photo by Cade Martin.

The notion that families with children prefer suburbs to inner cities will be a surprise only to urban planners who insisted that the suburbs are passé and that no one wanted to live in them anymore. Yet this narrative had become an established part of media reports about census data for the past couple of decades. Continue reading →

Have a Safe and Happy Holiday

By | | Housekeeping
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This Fourth of July is a four-day weekend for many and a record 50 million Americans are expected to travel to celebrate, including more than 43 million by auto. Please keep in mind the latest highway accident data and drive carefully to wherever you are going.

Once you arrive, remember: only you can prevent forest fires, which means avoiding fireworks in dry areas. Fireworks start over 19,000 fires a year including a 47,000-acre fire in Oregon’s Columbia River Gorge in 2017. The Forest Service urges people to use red, white, and blue silly string instead of fireworks, though even that is controversial.

With these cautions in mind, I hope you have a great holiday.

“The City That Jerks”

By | | News commentary
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Portland used to call itself “the city that works,” and I pointed out in a paper 16 years ago that, not only was it not working, it was especially ironic that it borrowed that claim from Chicago, another dysfunctional city. But if Portland wasn’t working in 2007, it is anti-working today, that is, actively working to alienate as many people and businesses as possible.

The latest example is Kevin Howard, who has been a Portland property developer for 40 years. The last property in the city that he owned was worth $800,000 a few years ago, but he was forced to sell it for little more than half that due to repeated invasions by homeless people and the city’s failure to do anything about it. Continue reading →

Transit’s Insatiable Appetite

By | | Transportation
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A few weeks ago, the Antiplanner reported that transit advocates were holding up rush hour traffic in San Francisco in order to blackmail the legislature into giving billions of dollars to transit systems that few people are riding anymore in order to prevent a fiscal cliff. I also noted that the blackmail worked as the state gave transit $2 billion including $1.1 billion for BART.

Is there a fiscal cliff ahead? Photo by Cary Lee.

Fiscal cliff averted! Except state senator Scott Weiner wants to “temporarily” raise Bay Area bridge tolls by $1.50 (from the current $7) for five years in order to provide more subsidies to transit. The increase will only be needed for five years, Weiner says, because by then he hopes Bay Area voters will have passed another tax increase to support transit systems they are no longer using. Continue reading →

Three Questions about EVs

By | | Transportation
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Judging from the headlines, the electric vehicle market is booming. Tesla is now the second-highest selling auto in California. General Motors, Ford, VW, and other companies claim to have set targets to largely transition from petroleum-powered vehicles in a few years. Each week, it seems, new models are being introduced, including everything from subcompacts to giant SUVs and pickups.

Will electric vehicles free us or tie us down?

Still, the closer I look the more questions I have. In particular, are auto manufacturers (other than Tesla) really serious about making EVs? Will electric vehicles ever be more than a niche product? And are they really a cost-effective way of reducing greenhouse gas emissions? Continue reading →

Interstate 95 and Induced Demand

By | | Transportation
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Kudos to the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation for constructing a temporary replacement for a collapsed overpass in just 12 days, something that many predicted would take months. The replacement is just six lanes wide rather than the eight on the original overpass, but that leaves room for the department to construct a permanent replacement.

Some people are drawing the wrong lessons from the response to the highway collapse, however. According to Joe Cortright, the fact that there was no “carmageddon” during the 12 days the highway was closed proves that we don’t need highways at all. According to what Cortright calls the “science of ‘induced demand,'” building new roads simply leads to more driving and, conversely, closing roads leads to “traffic evaporation.” Continue reading →