Search Results for: peak transit

Density’s Parking Impact

By | | News commentary, Transportation, Urban areas
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The City of Portland has approved numerous massive four- and five-story apartment buildings in neighborhoods of single-family homes separated by streets of single-story shops. These buildings stress the infrastructure built to handle a smaller population, which is most obvious in the increased traffic and parking problems–especially since many of the buildings are designed without parking.

Despite Portland’s reputation as a car-free city, I can attest that neighborhoods that once had few cars parked on the streets are now jammed with cars, indicating far more cars per housing unit than there were a few decades ago. The introduction of apartments lining the business corridors of these neighborhoods has led to huge increases in congestion, which isn’t helped by the fact that the city carefully keeps most signals uncoordinated so that people now frequently drive on neighborhood streets to avoid stopping at frequent red lights.

To allay concerns that the apartments were taking parking away from existing homes and businesses, the city just published a report reviewing the parking situation around eight recent buildings. Four of these had about two-thirds of parking space per dwelling unit on site, while the other four had no on-site parking (page 3). The city’s report found that, even during peak periods, at least 25 percent of on-street parking within two blocks of these buildings was vacant (p. 2).

That was enough to lead the Oregonian to headline its story about the report, “City study finds increase in no-parking apartments but little neighborhood parking impact.” There’s more to the story, however.

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The European Transport Myth

By | | Transportation
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An article in Transport Reviews compares U.S. and European transit usage and argues that Europeans use transit more because they have better transit service, low fares, multi-modal integration, high taxes and restrictions on driving, and land-use policies that promote compact, mixed-use developments–all things that American planners want to do here. One obvious problem with the paper is that it doesn’t quantitatively assess how much each of those factors actually contributes to transit usage. If high fuel taxes are responsible for 95 percent of the difference, then efforts to promote transit-oriented development or multi-modal integration in American cities are likely to be a big waste.

A more subtle problem with the paper is that it measures transit usage in trips, not passenger miles. This leads to a bias in favor of shorter trips: Netherlanders, the Transport Reviews article says, take 26 percent of their trips by bicycle, but they certainly don’t cycle for 26 percent of their passenger miles. Yet longer trips are actually more valuable than shorter ones because they can reach more destinations: a two-mile trip can access four times as much land as a one-mile trip.

When measured in terms of passenger miles, instead of trips, European transit mobility looks a lot less impressive. Eurostat measures four kinds of personal mobility by country: autos, buses, intercity trains, and metros/trams. The agency’s latest report that shows passenger kilometers by country has data through 2006. The table below compares these numbers (converted to passenger miles and divided by 2006 populations) with similar data for the United States.

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Privatize or Contract Out?

By | | News commentary, Transportation, Urban areas
28 Comments

The Metropolitan Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority (MARTA) spends $50 million more than its peers on employee benefits, says KPMG in an audit of the agency. Reducing benefits to national average levels (easier said than done) and contracting out some services such as cleaning would allow MARTA to erase a $33 million deficit in its annual budget.

Comparing a transit agency to its peers is like criticizing a bank robber for stealing more than home burglars. The fact is that they are both ripping people off, and just because some are a bit less rapacious doesn’t make them any more morally correct.

Private jitney in direct competition with MARTA bus.

So the Antiplanner has a more aggressive agenda: complete privatization. Atlanta is one of the few cities that doesn’t outlaw private transit in competition with the public agency, and as a result it has a number of private jitneys that operate without subsidies and often charge riders less than MARTA. The jitneys even stop at MARTA’s bus stops.

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Back to the Drawing Board

By | | Transportation
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Besieged by fiscal conservatives for deficit spending and by the transit lobby for eliminating a guaranteed source of transit subsidies, Speaker of the House John Boehner has postponed consideration of the transportation bill (which Roll Call calls the “transit bill” even though transit gets only about 20 percent of the money). In a post on the Cato Institute’s blog yesterday, the Antiplanner makes some suggestions for fixing the bill.

There are really three ways that House Republicans could try to compromise with Senate Democrats. One would be to include earmarks and other pork barrel in the bill, which Democrats and many Republicans love but Tea Party Republicans hate. The second would be to give more money to transit at the expense of highways–and in particular to allow transit to keep a share of federal gas taxes.

The third way is to spend more than the government is taking in. The 2005 bill provided guaranteed spending every year, but due to the recession gas tax revenues declined after 2007, leading to deficit spending. When House Republicans made a proposal last summer to reign in spending to be no more than revenues, Democrats wailed that the bill would cost thousands of jobs.

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Reauthorization or Gridlock in 2012?

By | | News commentary, Transportation
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Speaker of the House John Boehner announced last week that House Republicans will soon introduce a surface transportation reauthorization bill called the American Energy and Infrastructure Jobs Act. The good news is that the plan (now available only in outline form) would eliminate New Starts and other slush funds that encourage cities to waste money. The bad news is that the plan would create a new slush fund that will encourage states to waste money on highways and bridges.

As Antiplanner readers know, Congress was scheduled to reauthorize surface transportation–meaning spending of gas taxes and other federal highway user fees–in 2009. But recently Congress has been gridlocked between Tea Party Republicans, who oppose new taxes and wasteful spending, and Senate Democrats, who want to increase spending to “create jobs” but don’t know where the money would come from.

Boehner proposes to resolve this by increasing production of oil & gas on federal lands, including Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, and dedicating the revenues from such production to highways and bridges. Boehner’s plan continues to include no more earmarks; ending or consolidating nearly 70 transportation funds such as New Starts; removing requirements that gas taxes be spent on non-highway projects; and streamlining transportation planning.

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Questions about Intercity Buses

By | | Follow up, Transportation
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The Antiplanner rarely responds to comments in a post, but Andrew asked many good questions and requested a lot of background information last week. Most of his questions are answered by citations in the report, but since he did not seem to understand those citations, here are my responses.

1. “Intercity buses carry at least 50% more PM than Amtrak in Amtrak’s showcase Northeast Corridor.” “How is this computed and what are the data sources? What trains are you including in the Amtrak total vs. what buses?

I compiled the on-line schedules for what turned out to be sixteen different bus companies for the week of May 15 to 21. The schedules included all buses connecting Northeast Corridor cities: Boston, Providence, New Haven, New York, Newark, Philadelphia, Wilmington, Baltimore, and Washington. I used Google maps to calculate the bus miles between these cities. I then calculated seat miles assuming that premiere lines like Bolt, DC2NY, and Vamoose have 50 seats, Megabuses have 79 seats, and Chinatown buses have 56 seats. My numbers may be an underestimate as some companies may not post their schedules on the web.

To convert to passenger miles, I assumed the seats are 60 percent full. According to the American Bus Association, this is accurate for the major carriers but conservative for the Chinatown buses. Even if the buses are only 50 percent full (which is Amtrak’s average), they carry far more people than Amtrak.

My Amtrak numbers come from page C1 of Amtrak’s 2010 performance report. The September report includes data for the entire fiscal year. Seat miles and passenger miles can both be calculated from this table. I only included Northeast Corridor trains, not trains such as the Crescent, but I also did not include buses such as New York to Raleigh or New York to Atlanta.

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State of the Subways

By | | News commentary, Transportation
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About thirty years ago, the Antiplanner’s first visited the East Coast, traveling there by Amtrak and riding rail transit lines in as many cities as possible. The Washington DC subway looked like a set from Stanley Kubrick’s 2001, with gleaming trains quietly zooming into and out of clean stations that mostly featured high arch ceilings. In contrast, New York City subway cars were covered with graffiti, stations were grimy, and crime was a serious worry.

How things have changed. In the 1990s, Mayor Giuliani saved the city’s subways by, in part, cleaning up the graffiti and controlling the crime. A recent report from the New York Public Interest Research Group finds that New York subways are, for the most part, getting better still, with car breakdowns only once every 170,000 miles in 2010, a 26 percent improvement over 2008.

Meanwhile, Washington subway cars are experiencing breakdowns every 43,500 miles, or more almost four times as frequently as New York’s. One group of cars breaks down every 30,000 miles. A Metro board member calls these cars “dogs,” but he shouldn’t be very proud of the fact that the agency’s newest and most reliable cars break down every 90,000 miles, twice as frequently as New York’s fleet. But perhaps they can take satisfaction in the fact that New York’s worst trains break down every 60,000 miles, or only 38 percent less frequently than DC’s subways.

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Back in the Air Again

By | | Housekeeping
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The Antiplanner is in Washington DC today and tomorrow to participate in various meetings on transportation. Tomorrow (Friday), I’ll speak on Capitol Hill at a Cato forum on America’s transportation future. Alan Pisarski, the author of Commuting in America, will talk about the future of commuting. Clyde Hart of the American Bus Association will talk about the future of intercity buses. Reason behind levitra prescription cost male erectile dysfunctionMED is caused because of phosphodiesterase type5. This ingredient works at a viagra super store physiological level in treating erectile dysfunction is Kamagra Jelly. What Are the Side Effects of Intagra? Prolonged erection resulting to damage to the penile blood vessels is recommended only when there is leakages in the cause of erectile dysfunction. order viagra australia The functioning of buy female viagra s results in thick, full, firm and long-lasting erections after a certain response time. I’ll probably talk about transportation funding and, of course, driverless cars.

On Saturday, I’ll be in Boston (actually, Medford) at the Tufts University Energy Conference. They’ve asked me to speak on a panel about why mass transit is not the way to save energy, a thesis that probably won’t be welcomed by much of the audience. If you are in DC or Medford, I hope to see you there.

High-Speed Rail Is Out of the Budget

By | | News commentary, Transportation
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Early Tuesday morning, Congressional leaders agreed on a 2011 budget package that zeros out funding for high-speed rail and rescinds $400 million in 2010 funding that remains unspent (transportation begins on p. 404). The package has the support of Senate Majority Leader Reid, House Speaker Boehner, and House Appropriations Committee Chair Hal Rogers.

The budget plan, now more than six months overdue, also cuts Amtrak’s budget by $80 million and rescinds 2010 highway funds that remain unspent by the states. But the federal government will continue to spend money on highways, transit, and Amtrak. The real significance is that the budget plan is probably the death knell for Obama’s ambitious plan to spend more than $500 billion extending high-speed rail to most major American cities.

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Is LaHood Admitting Defeat?

By | | News commentary, Transportation
14 Comments

Last week, Secretary of Immobility Ray LaHood designated the Boston-to-Washington corridor as an eleventh high-speed rail corridor. This makes Amtrak eligible for some of the $2.4 billion in high-speed rail funds released when Florida rejected federal funds for the Tampa-Orlando route.

Of course, $2.4 billion won’t even scratch the surface of Amtrak’s $117 billion plan to speed up trains in the Northeast Corridor. But Amtrak would probably use the funds to smooth a curve or two, improve stations, or buy another couple of trainsets.

The Boston-to-Washington corridor already has the fastest trains in America, with an average speed of 81 mph between New York and Washington (but a paltry average speed of just 64 mph between Boston and New York). Since the whole point of Obama’s plan was to bring such fast trains to other parts of the country, why is the administration now inviting Amtrak and states in the Northeast Corridor to apply for rail funds?

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