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Hoodwinking Reporters

By | | News commentary, Transportation
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Nearly two weeks after the American Public Transportation Association issued its deceptive press release about 2013 transit ridership, some reporters are still being fooled. Just two days ago, for example, NPR did a story claiming commuters are “ditching cars for transit in record numbers.”

Ironically, NPR begins its story in Chicago, where (APTA data reveals) 2013 transit ridership declined by 2.7 percent from the year before. “Throughout the entire country, just about every public transportation system saw hikes in ridership,” the story incorrectly claims. In addition to Chicago, transit systems in Albuquerque, Atlanta, Austin, Baltimore, Boston, Charlotte, Dallas, Kansas City, Louisville, Memphis, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Portland, San Antonio, and Washington DC all lost riders in 2013. Don’t NPR reporters check their facts?

While reporters might be fooled, three urban planning professors writing in the Washington Post weren’t. “The association’s numbers are deceptive,” they say, and any claims that the nation is “moving away from driving” is “misguided optimism.” In fact, they continue, “transit is a small and stagnant part of the transportation system.”

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Who’s Counting the Costs?

By | | Transportation
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Per capita incomes in Flint, Michigan, are only about half the national average, and poverty rates are three times the national average. So what does the city’s transit agency do? Why, spend $2.4 million for a $327,000 bus.


Zero emissions? Not really. Flickr photo by Earthworm.

Of course, this is a special bus: instead of being powered by Diesel fuel, it is powered by hydrogen fuel cells. And everyone knows that hydrogen power has zero emissions. The transit agency is so happy with the bus that it wants to order up to 30 more.

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Eliminating the Carbon Emissions of 3 Million Cars

By | | News commentary
16 Comments

Indoor marijuana production uses 1 percent of U.S. electricity, enough to produce the carbon emissions of three million cars. Meanwhile, the federal government is working hard to eradicate marijuana production from national forests. Reports suggest that such production is harmful to wildlife.

So how about a win-win solution? First, legalize marijuana at both the state and federal levels. Second, let the Forest Service pick some national forest locations where marijuana cultivation won’t harm wildlife or other values, then collect royalties on that cultivation, with 25 percent being kept by the Forest Service and the rest going to the federal treasury. Marijuana users win. Wildlife wins. The Forest Service and federal taxpayers win. The climate wins, or at least carbon dioxide emissions are reduced. Who could object to that?
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Of course, marijuana doesn’t have to be grown on national forest lands. People grow it there for the same reason they grow it indoors: it’s illegal and they hope for some secrecy. This nation has a billion acres of agricultural lands, only 400 million of which are used for growing crops. When marijuana is completely legalized, most will be grown outdoors on private farms just like any other crop. So if you want to blame marijuana smokers for contributing to climate change, blame the prohibitionists instead.

To Save Energy, Take an Intercity Bus

By | | Transportation
25 Comments

The American Bus Association is releasing its latest annual Motorcoach Census today, and it strikes quite a blow at those who support increased funding for Amtrak. A “motorcoach” is a long-distance bus longer than 35 feet whose passenger deck is typically elevated above luggage bays. The census counts only private buses available for public use; transit agency buses and private buses used only for private use, such as Google commuter buses, are not counted.


Click image to download the report.

Most intercity buses are motorcoaches, but motorcoaches are also used for charters, tours, commuting, airport service, and other purposes. According to the survey, slightly more than 30 percent of the more than 1.9 billion motorcoach miles traveled in 2012 were scheduled, intercity buses.

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Another High-Cost, Low-Capacity Transit Line

By | | Transportation
6 Comments

Panama City is opening a new rail transit line this month, but the Antiplanner’s review of the project found a significant flaw: though it cost as much to build as a heavy-rail line, it’s capacity to carry people is less than a light-rail line. The city says it can move about 15,000 people an hour, which is not very many considering that the city estimates nearly 100,000 people enter the city during a one-hour period on weekday mornings. But the 15,000 is at crush capacity, and I estimate a more realistic number is about half that.

As with the Mumbai monorail, I have to ask: if you are going to the expense of building a heavy-rail line, why are you providing the capacity of a light-rail line or less? One answer is the city expects the low-capacity trains to be full, thus giving the impression that the project is a great success.

I’ve never been to Panama City, and early responses to my review suggest that the bus-rapid transit alternative I propose wouldn’t work on Panama City streets. But I suspect it would cost a lot less to modify a few of the streets to allow more buses that could move a lot more people than the rail line will be able to handle.
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Prospects for Mileage-Based User Fees

By | | Transportation
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“We focus on mileage-based user fees as if they are an end, but they are really just a vehicle to an end,” Jack Basso, chair of the Mileage -Based User Fee Alliance, told the audience at what the group hopes will the first of an annual series of conferences. While everyone in the audience could agree with that statement, there was a sharp division over what should be the real purpose of such fees.

For Robert Atkinson, who recently chaired the National Transportation Infrastructure Financing Commission, the purpose of such fees is to give transportation users incentives to use the transportation system efficiently and transportation providers incentives to manage it efficiently. Such fees, he pointed out, would make it easy to use congestion pricing to relieve or eliminate the waste of traffic jams. Moreover, creating a “platform” for such fees would allow a variety of new groups to manage roads. Private parties could build and toll roads in congested areas. Neighborhood associations could take over street maintenance.

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Back in the Air Again

By | | Follow up, Transportation
20 Comments

The Antiplanner is in Washington, DC, today attending a conference on mileage-based user fees. When my plane landed in DC at 3:50 pm, I turned my cell phone on and got a voice mail that Lars Larson wanted to interview me on his radio show about yesterday’s transit numbers. We arranged to have the interview begin at 4:20.

That put me in a dilemma. I had a meeting in the city at 5:30 and wanted to drop my luggage off at my hotel in Roslyn. If I waited to the the radio show before leaving the airport, I’d be late for my meeting. So I hustled to take the subway to Arlington and hoped I’d arrive before 4:20, as cell service doesn’t extend underground.

Roslyn is five station stops from National Airport. As I’m thinking about the irony that I’m depending on public transit to get to an interview where I expect to be critical of public transit, our train pulls into the third stop, which is the Pentagon. People stand up to get off the train, but the doors don’t open. The crowd of people outside the train who want to get on grows, but the doors don’t open. I’m afraid I’m going to miss my interview, and the doors won’t open. Finally, the driver makes an incomprehensible announcement and the train leaves–and the doors never opened. I no longer felt that riding transit to criticize transit was so ironic.

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Interpreting the Data

By | | News commentary, Transportation
22 Comments

At nearly 10.7 billion trips, transit ridership in 2013 reached its highest level in 57 years, says the American Public Transportation Association. This increase shows that people are “saying we want these (transit) investments made,” APTA’s president, Michael Melaniphy, told USA Today. Needless to say, by “investments” he means building new rail transit lines.


Any century now, transit is bound to overtake driving. Source: Transit data from APTA, urban driving from the Federal Highway Administration, and urban population from the Census Bureau. Click image for a larger view.

However, a close look at the data shows something entirely different. It turns out that New York City subways alone were responsible for more than 92 percent of the increase in transit ridership. Nationally, ridership grew by 115 million trips; New York City subway ridership grew by 106 million trips. According to the New York Times, the growth in subway ridership resulted from “falling unemployment.”

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Dead Again–This Time For Certain?

By | | Transportation, Urban areas
9 Comments

The Columbia River Crossing, which was dead, then was alive, now is once more dead. This $3 billion to $4 billion project was going to replace the Interstate 5 bridge across the Columbia between Oregon and Washington, extend light rail into Vancouver, Washington, and rebuild several of the freeway interchanges north and south of the river.

Bridge supporters said it would relieve congestion, but it wasn’t clear how replacing a six-lane bridge with a twelve-lane bridge would relieve congestion when there were only six lanes approaching the bridge from the north and south. Instead, the real goal was to create lots of contracts for bridge builders, rail builders, highway contractors, and various other engineering and construction firms.

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Taxing Commuters Living Abroad

By | | News commentary
29 Comments

Governing magazine has a great idea for cities that are hard up for cash: tax suburban commuters. After all, those leeches live outside the city but depend on the city to provide them with jobs. Thus, they should pay a tax for a privilege of working in the city.

Just to make sure they get people coming and going, cities like Detroit also want to tax reverse commuters. That is, they want suburban employers to deduct taxes from the pay of their employees who happen to live in Detroit.

These are both great ideas if the goal is to hasten the fiscal demise of the cities. After all, think how well the cities would be doing if all the employers in the cities moved to the suburbs. The cities wouldn’t have to pay to provide urban services to those employers, but they also wouldn’t collect any property or other taxes from the businesses. Would they be better or worse off? If you think they would be worse off losing those jobs, then a commuter tax is redundant since the city is better off having the jobs without the commuter tax. (The same rationale applies to a reverse commuter tax on city residents who work in the suburbs.)

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