Search Results for: rail projects

Privatizing Amtrak and Cutting Transit

By | | Transportation
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Every line item in the federal budget has at least one special interest group advocating for its growth and ready to cry bloody murder if anyone proposes to reduce it. So it is no surprise that Trains magazine is shocked that Elon Musk would propose to privatize Amtrak.

Amtrak received a $7.3 billion federal grant to buy 83 new trains from Siemens that will be used in the Northeast Corridor and on state-subsidized day trains.

“Amtrak’s business performance is strong,” Trains quotes an Amtrak spokesperson. “Ridership and revenue are at all-time highs.” But a “strong” performance didn’t prevent Amtrak from losing well over $2 billion on operating costs alone in 2024, and Amtrak’s all-time highs are still pretty low: in 2024, Amtrak carried the average American just 19.6 miles. Americans ride bicycles far more than they ride Amtrak, they fly more than 100 times as many miles, and they travel more than 700 times as many miles by car as they ride Amtrak. Continue reading →

Houston Transit: Back to Basics Not Enough

By | | Transportation
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Houston’s Metro transit is going back to basics, focusing on public safety and giving up its expensive light-rail and bus rapid transit plans. This follows the election of a new mayor, John Whitmire, who took office on January 1, 2024 and quickly replaced several members of the Metro board. Though Whitmire is a Democrat, he took office at a time when Houston was facing serious financial problems and so he is taking a fiscally conservative approach to spending.

By many measures, Houston’s Metro is doing better than most U.S. transit agencies. At the end of 2015, it implemented new bus routes, changing from a downtown-centric system to a grid system, as recommended by Jarrett Walker. Partly as a result, ridership grew by 5 percent between 2019 and 2019, a period during which ridership declined in most other urban areas. As of December 2024, ridership has recovered to nearly 88 percent of pre-pandemic levels, compared with a national average of 76 percent. Continue reading →

Charlotte Shows Why Transit Is a Waste

By | | Transportation
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I suspect it has begun to dawn on transit agency officials that the Trump administration is not going to shovel money their way as the Biden administration did. That means many of the larger agencies are going to have to put some of their rail plans on the shelf for at least four years or until a more sympathetic administration takes power. Unfortunately, I doubt that many will seriously consider altering their long-term dreams of building rail lines all over whatever urban areas they serve.

Light-rail train in Charlotte. Photo by James Willamor.

A case in point is the Charlotte Area Transit System (CATS), whose ridership (as of December) is still less than two-thirds what it was before the pandemic. Despite this, CATS has grandiose plans for its future. Central to those plans are the development and operation of a 25-mile Red Line commuter train from downtown Charlotte to the suburb of Mount Mourne. This line is such a loser that the Federal Transit Administration refused to fund it back in 2011, so CATS tried and failed to get local communities to find half while the state would fund the other half. Continue reading →

Cliff Slater: A Hawaiian Hero

By | | News commentary
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I was sad to learn that my friend, Cliff Slater, died earlier this week at the age of 92. Cliff was a genuine hero who worked hard to improve life for people in Hawaii and in particular devoted thousands of hours and lots of his own money fighting the Honolulu rail boondoggle.

Cliff Slater does battle with the rail transit cabal in this political cartoon by John Pritchett. Used with permission.

Born in England in June, 1933, Cliff grew up in Chingford, a suburb of London. After serving as an officer in the Royal Air Force, he moved to Hawaii in his 20s. In Maui, he met Jack Ackerman and Larry Windley, who had started a tourist diving company called Maui Divers. They had also discovered black coral beds and were making some of the coral into jewelry. Continue reading →

Highways, Amtrak, Airlines Set Records in 2024

By | | Transportation
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Americans drove 2.8 percent more miles in October 2024 than the same month before the pandemic, according to data released by the Federal Highway Administration last Friday. Both urban and rural driving were greater in October 2024 than October 2019.

Meanwhile, Amtrak brags that it carried an all-time record number of passengers in its fiscal year 2024 (which ended September 30). In that year, it carried 32.8 million riders and 6.54 billion passenger-miles. That is only a small fraction of the number carried by passenger trains when they were private, as ridership peaked at 1.2 billion in 1920 and passenger-miles peaked at 89 billion in 1944. But 2024 was a record year since Amtrak began in 1971. Continue reading →

October Amtrak & Airline Riders Up 6% from 2019

By | | Transportation
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Amtrak carried 6.2 percent more riders and almost 8 percent more passenger-miles in October of 2024 than the same month before the pandemic, according to the entity’s latest monthly performance report. The airlines, meanwhile, carried 5.9 percent more passengers, according to TSA passenger counts.

October transit and highway data will be posted here when it is released by the Department of Transportation.

Although growth in air travel did not quite equal growth in rail travel, airlines still carried 25 times as many passengers and far more passenger-miles than Amtrak. While October airline passenger-miles won’t be available for a month or so, in August domestic airlines carried 110 times as many passenger-miles as Amtrak. When international air travel is included, airlines carried 226 times as many passenger-miles as Amtrak. Continue reading →

Amtrak Ridership Up in September

By | | Transportation
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Amtrak carried 4.8 percent more riders and 3.5 percent more passenger-miles in September 2024 than in the same month of 2019, according to the September monthly performance report that it posted yesterday. For Amtrak’s fiscal year, which ended September 30, it carried 0.8 percent more riders and 0.9 percent more passenger-miles than in F.Y. 2019.

Amtrak earned $2.5 billion in ticket revenues and food & beverage sales in F.Y. 2024. That works out to about 38.4¢ per passenger-mile. For comparison, commercial airline fares averaged 20.1¢ per passenger-mile in 2023. Continue reading →

Charlotte Wants to Tax Low-Income Families to Give High-Income Workers Fancy Transit Rides

By | | Transportation
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In 2012, the Charlotte Area Transit System (CATS) proposed to operate commuter trains between uptown Charlotte and the suburb of Mount Mourne. In 2011, it predicted (based on 2009 prices) that start-up costs for the 25-mile Red Line route would be about $452 million, slightly more than the cost of Charlotte’s first light-rail line (which was $444 million). While the commuter-rail route was almost three times as long as Charlotte’s first light-rail line, it was projected to carry fewer than a third as many riders: 5,600 per day as opposed to 18,100 per day.

Map of proposed Red Line commuter train.

Due to the high cost and small number of riders, the Federal Transit Administration refused to provide any federal funding for the project. At the time, the FTA’s cost-effectiveness rule limited federal funding to projects that cost less than about $25 per hour saved by transportation users, and the commuter train wasn’t projected to save enough hours to get the cost below this threshold. Continue reading →

The Shinkansen and Japan’s Lost Decades

By | | Transportation
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Japan is known for many things, but two of them are the Shinkansen high-speed trains and the nation’s three Lost Decades of slow economic growth. Unfortunately, most tourists who go to Japan see the former and don’t see the latter and especially don’t see the connection between the two.

The distinctive noses of Japan’s first high-speed trains led people to call them bullet trains, a name that has endured even though later trains were shaped quite differently.

Yesterday’s 60th anniversary of the first revenue runs of the Shinkansen generated many laudatory articles about the trains. “Bullet trains changed the world of rail travel forever,” said CNN. The Guardian called it “The train that helped rebuild the idea of a country.” Continue reading →

$650 Million Plus $17 Million a Year for 1,100 Daily Riders

By | | Transportation
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In 2004, Denver’s Regional Transit District persuaded the region’s voters to support a sales tax increase to pay for six new rail lines that together would cost about $3.5 billion to build. The agency claimed to be surprised when costs doubled soon after the election. Since then, the $7 billion RTD has spent on rail capital improvements was only enough to build five lines, while the sixth line, which was supposed to connect Longmont and Boulder with downtown Denver, remains unbuilt.

A Denver commuter train connecting the airport with downtown. Photo by Jarrett Stewart.

While all of the rail lines were idiotic, there were good reasons to delete the Longmont line. First, the Boulder part of the line was duplicated by a bus-rapid transit line that has probably been the most successful of the projects funded by the 2004 tax increase. Second, RTD’s own analysis found that the line to Longmont would be so expensive and carry so few passengers that the cost of carrying one rider would be more than $60 compared with under $10 for most other FasTracks lines and no more than $22 for any other line. The line was projected to cost a third as much as all of the other lines put together yet carry only 7 percent as many passengers. Continue reading →