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The European Transport Myth

By | | Transportation
43 Comments

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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Streetcar Woes

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

Portland opened its new east side streetcar line a couple of weeks ago, but the real story is in the Lake Oswego plant that is supposed to be making streetcars to run on the new line. In 2011, the company, United Streetcar, announced that its first streetcars would be several months late and it would only be able to build five streetcars for the price of six–and the company’s president was brazen enough to say, “You’re not getting less. I actually think you’re getting more.”

The company’s streetcars are essentially copies of the first streetcars the city bought from a company in the Czech Republic. The price of the Czech streetcars was $1.9 million apiece (only about six times more than a bus that has more seats). The cost of United Streetcar’s first streetcar? $7 million. If Portland is lucky, it will eventually get five for an average of a little more than $4 million each–but hey, they’re made in the USA (a requirement for federal funding).

Strangely, the city didn’t complain about getting short-changed one streetcar, and it’s response to the delay was to spend more money hiring a company, LTK Engineering Services, to monitor the company making the streetcars, paying it $1.35 million to date. So far, only one of the five streetcars is out on the streets (or, fairly frequently, in the repair shop). To prod United Streetcar into finishing the other four, which are several months behind schedule, the city is about to hand over another $386,000 to LTK.
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How does LTK spend that money? It has eight engineers watching over the shoulders of the workers at United Streetcar, for each of whom it bills the city a mere $162 an hour. Don’t worry, says the city; there are plenty of “contingency funds” in the project’s $148.3 million budget to cover this cost.

Who says streetcars aren’t cost-effective? They are pretty cost-effective for LTK, not to mention United Streetcar.

How Does Amtrak Determine Fares?

By | | Transportation
12 Comments

A transit advocate who calls himself Captain Transit asks, “How can Amtrak charge so much for the Northeast Corridor?” His answer, which he claims to have arrived at with the Antiplanner’s assistance, is that buses carry the low-income passengers in this corridor, so Amtrak can get away with charging first-class rates for high-end passengers.

That’s not exactly correct: there are low-cost buses in a lot of Amtrak corridors, but only in the Northeast Corridor does Amtrak collect average fares exceeding 32 cents per passenger mile. In fact, fares for the Northeast “regional” trains (which is what Amtrak calls the non-Acela trains in the corridor) average 42 cents a passenger mile, while the Acela fares average more than 75 cents a passenger mile (these numbers are from 2011 and are calculated based on page C-1 of Amtrak’s end-of-fiscal-year performance report).

As near as I can tell, Amtrak’s route structure is politically determined. Amtrak trains serve at least one city in all but two of the contiguous 48 states, and that is several states more than when Amtrak was created in 1971. Amtrak could only benefit by adding routes through more states, each of which have two senators. (Significantly, the two contiguous states that Amtrak doesn’t serve, Wyoming and South Dakota, each have only one representative in Congress.)

On the other hand, Amtrak’s fare structure is market driven. This doesn’t mean Amtrak sets its fares to make a profit; obviously it doesn’t. Instead, it sets its fares to be as high as it can get in each market. For example, Amtrak fares between Chicago and Minneapolis are nearly twice airfares because Amtrak has only one train on this route that continues on to Seattle, and Amtrak doesn’t want Chicago-Minneapolis passengers to take seats that might otherwise be filled by Chicago-Seattle passengers.

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Amtrak President Exaggerates

By | | Transportation
12 Comments

Amtrak President Joseph Boardman scored a point when he announced that Amtrak operates the Rocky Mountaineer, a cruise train that takes passengers from Vancouver to Whistler and the Canadian Rockies. He made this announcement at the September 20 House Transportation Committee hearing about 41 years of Amtrak deficits.

The Antiplanner had offered the Rocky Mountaineer as an example of a private rail operator taking over when the government–in this case, VIA Rail Canada–stops serving a route. VIA ended service on the Vancouver-Calgary route in 1990 (the Antiplanner was on the last westbound train), and the Rocky Mountaineer almost immediately began offering cruise trains. Today this company offers several different routes, including some also served by VIA.

Not operated by Amtrak.

So when Boardman said the Rocky Mountaineer “is actually operated by Amtrak,” the mostly pro-Amtrak audience laughed at the Antiplanner’s silliness for using this as an example of privatization. The only problem was that Boardman’s statement was a slight exaggeration–as in totally untrue.

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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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Jerry Brown Tries the Google Car

By | | News commentary, Transportation
21 Comments

California Governor Jerry Brown rode in a self-driving car with Google co-founder Sergey Brin on their way to Google headquarters, where Brown signed legislation creating a framework for introducing driverless cars into California by 2015. Meanwhile, automakers are incrementally automating driving with the introduction of a variety of new technologies.

On October 23, Volvo and the Embassy of Sweden are co-sponsoring a Washington, DC seminar to discuss the policy implications of autonomous vehicles. The seminar will include speakers from Volvo, Google, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, and the Center for Automotive Research. The Antiplanner can’t make it, but readers in the Washington DC area may want to reserve a spot.

Volvo’s contribution to the technology focuses on road trains, in which a lead vehicle is driven by a professional and other vehicles can follow without active drivers. The system has been tested in Spain with just 20-foot gaps between vehicles. Volvo hopes the system will also improve fuel economy by about 20 percent.
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What Is Middle Class?

By | | News commentary
15 Comments

Critics of Mitt Romney laughed when he said that “middle-class income” was “between $200,000 and $250,000” when what he actually said was that it was “between $200,000 and $250,000 or less” meaning that the $200,000 to $250,000 was the upper limit. As the Huffington Post points out, Democrats including Obama and Pelosi have also used that definition. Of course, both Romney and Obama have incomes well above that amount.

But all of these views are wrong, because classes such as middle class are not defined by income. As Michael Zweig writes in The Working Class Majority, “just looking at a person’s income doesn’t tell us anything about how the person got the income, what role he or she plays in society, how he or she is connected to the power grid of class relations.”

What Romney, Obama, and the various pundits are referring to is middle income, not middle class. As only 16 percent of U.S. households earn more than $100,000 a year, and only 4 percent more than $200,000, the upper limit for middle income is probably much lower than $200,000. But I suspect Romney stated it the way he did to preserve the claim that he has no desire to raise taxes on anyone below that limit.

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USA Today‘s Interesting Arithmetic

By | | News commentary, Transportation
25 Comments

USA Today reports that “fewer Americans commuting solo.” As the story says, “The dismal economy and skyrocketing gas prices may have accomplished what years of advocacy failed to: getting more people to stop driving solo.”

To put some numbers on this, Wendell Cox
points out that the number of people commuting solo has declined from 104.86 to 105.64 million. That’s a minus 780,000-person decline, also known as an 780,000 person increase.

A few days ago, USA Today reported that “bikes rule the road” in Portland. In fact, the 17,000 people commuting to work by bicycle reported by USA Today increased to nearly 19,000 in 2011, but this still represents less than 7 percent of commuters. So in what sense can 7 percent “rule the road”? Perhaps only because the 202,000 commuters (73 percent) who drive to work live in fear of hitting a cyclist. Continue reading →

Amtrak Shrugged

By | | Follow up
57 Comments

Watching one of the first showings of part II of Atlas Shrugged was a surrealistic experience after testifying to the House Transportation Committee about Amtrak. In the movie, government officials piously argue that for the “greater good” (a phrase that turned out to be just as deadly in Harry Potter as in Atlas Shrugged) they need to provide “guidance” to the nation’s capitalists–and the more guidance they give, the more capitalism fails, which justifies even more guidance.

In the hearing, I testified that Amtrak can’t be reformed because as a government entity it will also be controlled by politics, and the only solution was privatization. This led Peter DeFazio, my own former congressman (I moved to an adjacent district four years ago) to ream me out for not having faith in government.

“You don’t believe government should run our air traffic control? You don’t believe government should run our highways? You don’t believe government should subsidize the Port of Los Angeles?” Before I could fully answer each question, he would roll his eyes and interrupt me with incredulous moans. Fortunately, one of the other committee members rescued me and gave me a chance to answer.

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Back in the Air Again

By | | Transportation
4 Comments

Today the Antiplanner is in Washington DC to testify at a hearing on Amtrak subsidies. The Antiplanner will tell the House Transportation & Infrastructure Committee that it should “support privatization of Amtrak, in the context of a broader effort to end federal subsidies to and unfair taxation of all forms of transportation.”

My testimony points out that Amtrak is the most costly form of intercity transportation we have, costing (with subsidies) about 60 cents per passenger mile, compared with about 16 cents for air travel and less than 10 cents for the “new model” of bus service pioneered by Megabus. While Amtrak is a little more energy efficient than flying, at the rate both modes’ energy efficiencies are changing, by 2030 flying will require less energy to move passenger miles than Amtrak (and so will driving).
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With Amtrak fares costing, on average, twice airline fares, Amtrak is really just a subsidy for the rich. The testimony speculates that, if Amtrak were privatized, we would see a growth of “cruise trains” in the West similar to Canada’s Rocky Mountaineer, which now has four or five different routes including one that starts in Seattle, Washington. But even if we did not, the country would be better off relying on cars and relatively unsubsidized buses for short distances and airlines for long distances.