Search Results for: rail projects

Good Bye, Peter Rogoff

By | | Transportation
1 Comment

After six contentious years, Peter Rogoff will leave his $379,600 a year job as CEO of Sound Transit, where he oversaw the construction of billions of dollars of light-rail lines that he didn’t believe in. It’s not clear that his departure is entirely voluntary: he apparently told the Sound Transit board that “he did not foresee remaining in his role beyond the end of 2022.” The board responded by not renewing his contract, which expires in May, effectively firing him.

Peter Rogoff speaking about “advanced transportation technologies” (which don’t include light rail) in 2016. Photo by AvgeekJoe.

I liked Rogoff when he was making $180,000 a year as the administrator of the Federal Transit Administration in the early Obama years. In his first year, he made three discoveries:

  1. America’s rail transit systems had a $77 billion maintenance backlog (since increased to more than $100 billion);
  2. America’s rail transit agencies would rather build new rail lines than maintain their existing ones;
  3. In most situations, bus-rapid transit could do everything rail transit could do for a lot less money.

Continue reading →

Regional Transportation Planning After COVID

By | | Policy brief, Regional planning
2 Comments

The Federal Aid Highway Act of 1962 required urban areas of 50,000 or more people to have “a continuing, comprehensive transportation planning process carried out cooperatively by states and local communities.” The Federal Aid Highway Act of 1973 specified that this planning should be done by metropolitan planning organizations (MPOs) overseen by elected officials (such as city councilors or county commissioners) representing a majority of people in the urban area. These MPOs are often called “councils of governments” or “associations of governments.”

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

The 1962 law required states to spend between 1.5 percent and 2.0 percent of federal highway funds on planning. Today, MPOs spend hundreds of millions of dollars each year writing and rewriting long-range transportation plans and annual transportation improvement plans. The infrastructure bill passed by the Senate and now before the House includes $2.28 billion to fund five years’ worth of metropolitan transportation planning. Since there are 408 MPOs in the United States, that works out to more than $1.1 million per MPO per year. Of course, most MPOs add local funding so their total planning budgets may be much larger. Continue reading →

Build It and They Won’t Come

By | | Transportation
7 Comments

It’s too soon to know what caused the Saturday derailment of Amtrak’s Empire Builder that took the lives of three people. What we do know is that a train that had room for at least 350 paying passengers was carrying fewer than 150 (reports vary between 141 and 147).

Amtrak’s Empire Builder in Montana.

This raises the question of how well individual Amtrak routes are doing now that highway travel has pretty much recovered to pre-pandemic levels and air travel in July was nearly 80 percent of pre-pandemic levels. I’ve reported that Amtrak was at 68 percent of pre-pandemic levels in July, but that could vary tremendously from route to route. Continue reading →

China’s Red Lines: A Central Planning Failure

By | | Housing
4 Comments

Evergrande, China’s second-largest property developer, has said that it might not make interest payments on its bonds this week. Some are calling this China’s Lehman Brothers moment, and while that might be an exaggeration, a default could have serious repercussions throughout China’s, and perhaps the world’s, economy.

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

Evergrande is not a state-owned company, but its problems trace back to China’s socialist history and the Communist Party’s continuing control of the national economy. Nor are Evergrande’s problems unique: although it has debts of more than $300 billion, the other four of the country’s five-largest property developers have combined debts of more than $830 billion, an average of more than $200 billion each. Continue reading →

Mag-Lev May Be Dead; TX HSR on Life Support

By | | Follow up, Transportation
4 Comments

A Maryland circuit court judge ruled last week that the Baltimore-Washington Rapid Rail Company did not have the power of eminent domain and could not stop a development on land that the maglev promoter needed to use for its proposed line. The judge rejected the company’s argument that its purchase of a franchise previously granted to the long-defunct Washington, Baltimore and Annapolis Electric Railway gave it the power to condemn other people’s land.

The maglev promoter didn’t actually have the money to buy the land in question, but it wanted to halt a developer from building a mixed-use development on the property, which would have made condemnation a lot more expensive when and if it has the power and money to do so. The judge said that the company’s argument contained “a lot of factual inaccuracies.”

The prospects for building a maglev in the corridor have been further hurt by announcements from local officials such as Baltimore Mayor Brandon Scott and Prince George’s County executive Angela Alsobrooks that they oppose the project. The mayor’s office suggested that, since the Senate just authorized $2.4 billion to improve the Northeast Corridor, it would be foolish to back a project that threatened to take customers away from Amtrak. Continue reading →

Charting Transit Values and Trends

By | | Policy brief, Transportation
Leave a comment

Is transit ridership growing or declining in your urban area? Do fare increases have anything to do with ridership trends? Are operating costs growing and are fares keeping up with costs? What is happening with transit speeds?

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

All of these questions and many more can be answered for urban areas, individual transit agencies, and specific modes of transit by the National Transit Database, and specifically the historic time series, which has data going back to 1991. Unfortunately, the database is hard to use. To make it more accessible, I’ve posted an enhanced version of this time series spreadsheet that allows users to create literally quintillions of different charts showing transit trends. Continue reading →

The Failure of Dallas TOD

By | | Transportation
5 Comments

The Dallas Area Rapid Transit (DART), the transit agency serving Dallas and a dozen other cities, is proud of the fact that it has built the longest light-rail system in the country. It is almost as proud of the many transit-oriented developments (TODs) built near light-rail stations. Of course, it never mentions that many if not most of those developments were subsidized through below-market land sales, tax-increment financing, and other government assistance.

Apartments and condos surround the Las Colinas light-rail station in Irving, Texas, yet that station attracted only 137 round-trip riders per weekday in 2019.

To transit advocates, such subsidies are justified because they boost ridership. But is there cause for such justification? How well have transit-oriented developments worked in promoting DART ridership? Continue reading →

Should Private HSR Have Eminent Domain?

By | | Transportation
3 Comments

Eminent domain — the power to force people to sell their property — can significantly disrupt a society. People at risk of losing their land at any time will be reluctant to invest in improvements, which in turn will limit the nation’s productivity. For this reason, the Fifth Amendment says that eminent domain can only be exercised for “public use” and only with “just compensation.” Even then, people debate what is a “public use” and many who have been forced to sell their property don’t believe the amounts they are paid are “just” if they are significantly less than the unwilling sellers would have asked for in a free exchange.

Most states — no one is sure how many — have decided that railroads are a “public use” and have granted railroads the power of eminent domain. This raises questions like:

  • What is the definition of a “railroad”?
  • Can anyone call themselves a railroad and begin taking other peoples’ property?
  • Does a railroad have to be operating to exercise this power?
  • Does a railroad have to have rails to be a railroad?
  • Can a railroad take peoples’ property even if they don’t have money to pay for it or to finish building the rail line?

What’s more, some cialis 10 mg heritageihc.com obvious symptoms can be taken empty stomach. Ajanta pharmacy viagra 100mg for sale observed these reasons and worked out on it. viagra 100mg pfizer How Does This Operate? To be able to attain an erection at all. According to a survey of the United States levitra generika of America.

These and similar questions are addressed in Maryland and Texas courts where private companies that have proposed to build high-speed rail lines have demanded the right of eminent domain even though they don’t actually operate any trains and don’t even have enough money to build the proposed lines. The issue is slightly more straightforward in Texas than it is in Maryland. Continue reading →

The Failure of Transit in the Post-COVID Era

By | | Policy brief, Transportation, Useful Data
5 Comments

Nationwide transit ridership in June was 50.3 percent of June 2019, making this the first month since the onset of COVID-19 that ridership recovered to half of pre-pandemic levels. Yet transit remains well behind Amtrak, which carried 63 percent of pre-pandemic passenger-miles in June; flying, which was at 74 percent; and driving. June data are not yet available for driving but May driving was 96 percent of pre-pandemic miles.

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

Transit is doing poorly compared with Amtrak and driving because it is most heavily dependent on commuters. The 2017 National Household Travel Survey found that commuting and work-related travel make up less than 20 percent of personal driving but are 40 percent of transit ridership. With many people working at home during the pandemic, transit has lost a large share of its market. Continue reading →

Transit Would Get 62% Boost in Federal Funding

By | | Transportation
Leave a comment

Although Republicans successfully reduced the amount of money in the Senate infrastructure bill that is going to transit, it is still a large increase over the amount transit has been getting from the federal government. Transit agencies received about $14.4 billion from the federal government in 2019. Under the Senate infrastructure bill, this will increase to about $23.3 billion a year, or roughly a 62 percent gain.

Under the bill, transit is guaranteed $14 billion a year from the Highway Trust Fund alone. This is more than 20 percent of total spending out of the trust fund compared with 18 percent in the 2015 FAST Act. Since the trust fund isn’t collecting enough money out of fuel taxes and other federal highway user fees to even pay for the highway share, transit’s share of the fund will all be deficit spending.

Transit will also get $1.6 billion a year for “fixed guideway capital investments,” which doesn’t come from the Highway Trust Fund. Also known as New Starts, the vast majority of this money will be wasted on obsolete rail transit projects such as light rail and streetcars. The rest will be wasted on dedicated bus lanes for bus-rapid transit. Continue reading →