Search Results for: rail projects

October Transit 53.5% of 2019 Ridership

By | | Transportation, Useful Data
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Transit ridership in October 2021 was 53.5 percent of October 2019, a slight drop from September’s 53.6 percent, according to data released yesterday by the Federal Transit Administration. Air travel increased from 76.3 percent to 79.7 percent and Amtrak increased from 67.1 percent to 72.2 percent, so transit continues to lag behind other modes.

Amtrak numbers are from Amtrak’s Monthly Performance Report; air travel numbers are from the Transportation Security Administration. Driving numbers should be available in about a week.

Transit agencies offered 80 percent as much service (measured in vehicle-revenue hours) in October 2021 as they did in the same month of 2019. Though this is down from 86 percent in September, this was mainly because October 2019 saw a large increase in service: October 2021 saw 99.6 percent as many vehicle hours as September 2021. Continue reading →

Sutton Mountain Wilderness Yes, Monument No

By | | Policy brief, Public lands
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In November, Oregon senators Jeff Merkley and Ron Wyden introduced legislation to turn Sutton Mountain into a national monument. If you’ve never heard of Sutton Mountain, don’t feel bad: I’ve lived in Oregon all my life and never heard of it until a few months ago. Briefly, Sutton Mountain is a undistinguished summit in eastern Oregon’s Wheeler County that is surrounded by land that is mostly managed by the Bureau of Land Management, which has studied it for potential wilderness status.

Click image to download a four-page PDF of this policy brief.

Sutton Mountain has some natural values that are deserving of wilderness status. But the Merkley-Wyden bill doesn’t protect natural resources: instead, it is an economic development bill. It proposes to create a national monument in the hope that it would attract tourism to the county that has the smallest population in Oregon. As a national monument, activities would be allowed that would be forbidden in a wilderness area, such as the destruction of juniper trees that some ranchers think reduce forage for their cattle. The bill would also transfer roughly more than 1,300 acres of federal land to a town of fewer than 130 people with the expectation that the town would use the land for economic development. Continue reading →

St. Louis MetroWaste

By | | Transportation
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The infrastructure bill was supposed to repair worn out and crumbling infrastructure, but now that it has passed local officials all over the country are eagerly looking forward to spending that money on new projects they won’t be able to afford to maintain. Case in point: St. Louis Mayor Tishaura Jones, who thinks some of those federal dollars should go to building a new light-rail line in the Gateway City.

Light rail in St. Louis operates mostly in an exclusive right of way, which makes it more costly to build but doesn’t add many new riders: MetroLink carried 11 percent fewer riders in 2019 than before it opened its first light-rail line. Photo by Loco Steve.

While admittedly I would be hard pressed to find any light-rail lines that have been successful, St. Louis’ transit system, known as MetroLink, is one of the more unsuccessful. Bus and light-rail ridership had dropped by 25 percent between 2014 and 2019. As of September, it was barely carrying 50 percent of 2019 levels, and given the large numbers of people who plan to keep working at home, it doesn’t look like it will ever fully recover. Continue reading →

How Inflation Will Hurt You

By | | News commentary
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“Inflation is good for you!” proclaims a headline from the Intecept. “Inflation is bad for the 1 percent but helps out almost everyone else,” the article claims.

Inflation in Germany in the early 1920s led to this basket of groceries costing a million marks. Before World War I, one dollar would buy 4 to 5 marks, but by the end of 1923, a dollar was worth more than 5 billion marks.

Inflation “may be a good sign,” agrees New York Times business writer Jeanna Smialek. “Don’t panic” about inflation, says economist Paul Krugman. Continue reading →

Live with Less, Says Former Free-Market Advocate

By | | News commentary
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Since I share my home with a couple of dogs, I tend to wear out a pair of shoes each year. I usually notice I need new shoes in the rainy season (which is most of the year in Oregon) when I come home with wet feet. But, according to Allison Schrager of the Manhattan Institute, I should just suck it up and learn to live with less.

Apparently, it’s a bad thing that Americans can buy “whatever they want whenever they want.” Schrager finds it alarming that 40 percent of American households have three or more televisions, “including 30 percent of households earning less than $40,000 a year!” Similarly worrisome, to her, is that 30 percent of Americans have 2 or more refrigerators. Just think of how horrifying it must have been for her to discover that some low-income people probably have both three televisions and two refrigerators!

The Manhattan Institute claims to be a “free-market think tank” that supports “greater economic choice.” But you wouldn’t know it to read Schrager’s article, which states that we need to live more like Europeans, meaning consuming less and living with lower economic growth. This is because, she claims, “An economy based on consumption is not sustainable.” Continue reading →

Mobility Principles for a Prosperous World

By | | Policy brief, Transportation
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Four years ago, Zipcar co-founder Robin Chase wrote, or led the effort to write, ten principles of shared mobility for livable cities. Despite a patina of social justice and green values, these principles were a transparent effort to give her company and companies like hers a huge economic advantage by limiting and eventually forbidding the use of privately owned vehicles in cities.

Click image to download a five-page PDF of this policy brief.

Recently, someone asked me for my response to these principles. While my reply is on page 5 of the PDF, my main response is to offer my own mobility principles. These principles apply to urban and rural areas, to the United States and other countries, and to all forms of transportation. I’ve previously stated most of these principles in various Antiplanner posts, but this one brings them together. Continue reading →

Infrastructure Politics

By | | News commentary, Transportation
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Last Monday, I predicted that if Glenn Youngkin won the Virginia governorship, Republicans in Congress would demand more cuts from the infrastructure bill. Nancy Pelosi apparently read my post, as she had the House hastily vote on the infrastructure bill just a few days after Youngkin’s victory. By passing the Senate bill unamended, Pelosi gave fiscal conservatives no opportunities to try to change the bill in conference. Before the Virginia election, Pelosi had been delaying a vote in order to pressure centrists to support the $3.5 trillion non-infrastructure bill, which will now be much harder to pass.

Passage of the infrastructure bill means tens of billions of dollars will be spent on needless and wasteful projects like this Seattle-area light-rail project. Photo by SounderBruce.

As passed, the infrastructure bill is really two bills: first, a reauthorization of federal spending on highways and transit; and second entirely new spending on highways, transit, Amtrak, electric vehicles, airports, ports, clean water, clean energy, and broadband. This entirely new spending is almost entirely unnecessary as the infrastructure crisis was mostly made up in order to get Congress do what it always does, which is throw money at problems. Continue reading →

Transit 2020: The First Year of the Pandemic

By | | Policy brief, Transportation
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Transit agencies in 2020 carried 40 percent fewer riders than in 2019, according to data released last Friday by the Federal Transit Administration. To do so, they provided 86 percent as much service (measured in vehicle miles or hours) at 97 percent of the cost.

Click image to download a four-page PDF of this policy brief.

According to the database, transit carried 5.9 billion trips in 2020. We know from the FTA’s monthly reports that transit carried 4.5 billion trips in calendar year 2020. The difference is that data in the annual database are based on transit agency fiscal years, not the calendar year. Continue reading →

Front Range Boondoggle

By | | Transportation
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The pandemic has made people reluctant to climb aboard any form of mass transportation. But it hasn’t stopped the state of Colorado from planning an idiotic Front Range passenger train that is proposed to connect Fort Collins and Pueblo, with Denver in between. In June, Governor Jared Polis signed a bill creating a taxing district to pay for the train’s inevitable losses. Last week, the Colorado Transportation Commission agreed to spend $1.9 million on a viability study (whose total cost will be twice that).

Although the endpoints are known, the exact route of the proposed rail line through Denver has yet to be determined. Click image for a larger view.

The Denver Post, which was a major cheerleader for Denver’s $4.9 billion FasTracks plan until it became the $7.9 billion FasTracks plan, by which time it was too late, is now a major cheerleader for the Front Range passenger train plan. It claims that an Amtrak train between Chicago and Milwaukee “shows what it could be.” Yes, because Fort Collins (population: 170,000) and Pueblo (population: 112,000) are just like Milwaukee (population: 577,000), and Denver (population: 715,000) is just like Chicago (population: 2.75 million). Continue reading →

September Transit 53.6% of Pre-Pandemic Levels

By | | Transportation, Useful Data
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Nationwide transit ridership in September was 53.6 percent of September 2019, according to data released yesterday by the Federal Transit Administration. This is the first time since the pandemic began that ridership exceeded half of pre-pandemic numbers.

Airline passenger numbers are from the Transportation Security Administration; Amtrak numbers are from its September performance report.

This compares with 76.3 percent for air travel and 67.1 percent for Amtrak. The number of miles of driving in September will not be related for another week or so. Transit’s low ridership numbers are in spite of transit agencies providing more than 86 percent as much service (measured in vehicle-revenue miles) as in September 2019. Continue reading →