Search Results for: rail

Is Transit Safer Than Driving?

By | | Transportation
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“Is public transit really safer than driving?” asks Unscientific American. I call it “unscientific” because the magazine’s methodology was to ask Todd Litman, a Victoria BC transit advocate who has done work for the American Public Transportation Association — not exactly an unbiased observer.

Six people died in this 2016 collision between a school bus and a transit bus in Baltimore. Photo by National Transportation Safety Board.

Litman compared auto fatality rates per billion passenger-miles on all urban roads in 2022 with those on all rail transit in 2013 and all transit buses in 2021. The first problem with this approach is the differences in years: transit carried 40 percent fewer passenger-miles yet killed about 40 percent more people in 2022 than in 2013, so the fatality rate for rail transit was much higher in 2022. Continue reading →

They Don’t Care

By | | Transportation
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Minnesota legislators are not only considering shutting down the Northstar commuter train, they are raging at the Metropolitan Council, which is the Twin Cities’ regional planning agency which also runs its transit agency, for its light-rail cost overruns. At issue is the Southwest light-rail line, which when Metro first asked the federal government for funding was supposed to cost $1.25 billion but now, according to a state legislative audit, is costing $2.86 billion.

Twin Cities light rail: overbudget and underperforming. Photo by Central Corridor.

Even after adjusting for inflation, that’s roughly a 100 percent cost overrun. By the time the federal government agreed to share half the costs, the projected cost had risen to $2 billion. From that point on, the state or local government is responsible for all cost overruns, so what they thought was going to cost state and local taxpayers $1 billion is ending up costing them almost $2 billion. Continue reading →

“Independent” Journalists Depend on Bureaucrats

By | | News commentary, Transportation
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I remember when journalists tried to get both sides of a story. Now they are content to get the side of the poor, beleaguered bureaucrats and ignore the taxpayers who have to fund them. Case in point: a recent article in the “independent” Texas Tribune reads more like a transit agency press release than a news article.

An expensive station on the Dallas light-rail line. Photo by Mbrstooge.

The article reports on a bill in the state legislature that would redirect 25 percent of sales tax funds that are now going to transit to “general mobility” programs instead. Such programs could go for bike paths, new traffic signals, roads, and even transit. According to the lead paragraphs in the “news” article, this bill “could imperil the future of public transportation” by “sap[ping] hundreds of millions of dollars” from transit agencies. Continue reading →

Amtrak, Air Travel Each Grow 8 Percent

By | | Transportation
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Amtrak and the airlines each carried about 8 percent more passengers in February 2025 as the same month in 2019. According to Amtrak’s monthly performance report, the state-owned railroad carried 8.2 percent more passenger-miles, while Transportation Security Administration boarding data indicate that airlines carried 8.1 percent more passengers.

Transit and highway data are not yet available but will be reported here soon.

Airline passenger-mile data for February won’t be available for several more weeks. However, as of December, the latest month for which data are available, domestic air passenger-miles were 5.1 percent greater than in December 2019. Domestic airlines carried Americans 108 times as many passenger-miles as Amtrak in December 2024. Continue reading →

Tyranny, Thy Name is YIMBY

By | | Housing
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Californians are being subjected to some of the worst tyrannies found in the former Soviet Union, according to Los Angeles attorney Chris LeGras. His recent articles, California Tyranny Part 1 and Part 2, show that efforts to build high-density housing in cities is harming people and the neighborhoods they live in, all under the name of YIMBY.

See any similarities?

YIMBY advocates “could not care less about housing affordability, much less about quality of life,” says LeGras. Instead, they want dense housing and revile single-family housing. They claim that advocates of single-family housing are racists, even though 16 million Latinos and 2.2 million blacks live in their own homes in California, and millions more live in single-family homes that they rent. Continue reading →

Does Longmont Really Need a Train?

By | | Transportation
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When Denver’s Regional Transit District proposed a tax increase to build six new rail lines in 2004, it promised it would build the lines without cost overruns by 2014. But soon after the election, it “discovered” that the lines would cost far more than projected — ultimately, about 67 percent more. With the money it had available, it wouldn’t be able to finish all of the lines before 2042.

This commuter train in Westminster, Colorado goes 6 miles to downtown Denver. Longmont wants RTD to extend the train another 35 miles even though RTD’s analysis shows few people will ride it. Photo by Xnatedawgx.

Further analysis by RTD found that most of the lines would end up costing taxpayers about $6 to $10 per ride, but one line, which went northwest of Denver to Longmont, was extra expensive and projected to carry so few passengers that it would cost more than $60 per rider. RTD decided to defer that line and build the rest. Continue reading →

American Mobility in 2024

By | | Transportation, Useful Data
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Using recent Department of Transportation data, I estimate that the average American traveled close to 18,000 miles in 2024. This is down from nearly 20,000 miles before the pandemic, a change that I’ll go into below.

American Airlines carried Americans more passenger-miles than any other airline in 2024. Photo by N509FZ.

Last week, the Bureau of Transportation Statistics released December air travel data indicating that the domestic flights carried people 800 billion passenger-miles in 2024. Since the Census Bureau’s latest population estimates say that the U.S. had 340.1 million people in 2024, that’s an average of 2,350 miles per person. Continue reading →

January Transit Ridership Reaches 79.8% of 2019

By | | Transportation, Useful Data
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January transit ridership in 2024 was 79.8 percent as much as in 2019, according to data released late last week by the Federal Transit Administration. That’s the highest level since the beginning of the pandemic and may be due to an increased number of people returning to workplaces in Manhattan.

While transit in the New York urban area carried 88.2 percent of 2019 levels and the New York Metropolitan Transportation Authority carried 90.5 percent, transit in the rest of the country carried only 73.1 percent. Transit ridership continued to be particularly dismal in Chicago (66.7%), Atlanta (48.0%), Phoenix (50.2%), San Francisco (65.7%), Minneapolis-St. Paul (64.5%), Tampa-St. Petersburg (59.7%), and St. Louis (55.4%). Continue reading →

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 →

Climate Change Will Reduce Transit Ridership

By | | Transportation
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Here’s the latest breathtaking finding from University of Oregon researchers: Fewer people (the article says “less people,” but it was written by journalists) ride transit during extreme weather events. As if we needed a university research study to tell us that.

There’s a flood, forest fire, tornado, or hurricane near your home today. Why aren’t you out riding transit? Photo by Howard Pelling.

Scholars at the University of Oregon Planning School wanted to know how climate change will affect transit ridership. Since everyone knows that climate change is going to increase severe weather events, they examined how such events affected ridership over the last 17 years. No one should be surprised to learn that ridership fell during such events. Continue reading →