Interstates Add Billions to Economy

According to Wikipedia, constructing the Interstate Highway System cost $535 billion in 2020 dollars. Now, three economists from the University of Colorado and Florida State University have calculated the amount of benefits the highway add to our economy.

Interstate highways carry a quarter of all vehicle travel and probably more than a quarter of all heavy truck travel. Photo by Rupert Ganzer.

Their answer was $601.6 billion. Per year. In 2012 dollars, meaning $760 billion in today’s dollars using the GDP deflator. And that’s for freight only; the value of passenger travel is probably at least equal to that. Continue reading

June 2022 Driving Up 0.9% from June 2019

Despite record fuel prices, Americans drove almost 1 percent more miles in June 2022 than they did in June 2019, according to data released on Saturday by the Federal Highway Administration. Driving declined on urban interstate freeways, but it increased on other urban roads as well as all types of rural roads.

See the previous post for sources of Amtrak data and the post before that for sources of data for transit and air travel.

The nationwide average price of regular gasoline climbed from $4.58 a gallon on June 1 to a record $5.02 on June 14. Supposed experts claimed that prices would “stay high for a long time,” but instead they have fallen every day since the 14th, reaching $4.80 at the end of June and $3.90 as of yesterday.

On a miles-per-day basis, Americans drove 1.1 more miles in June than in May and 5.1 percent more in June than in April, when gas prices were 60 to 80 cents a gallon less than in June. This suggests that people are less deterred by high fuel prices than auto opponents would hope.

As noted a few days ago, transit ridership made a leap in June, with average daily ridership being 4.5 percent greater than in May. But since Americans travel almost 100 times as many passenger-miles per year by automobile as by urban transit, a large increase in transit ridership translates to a small decline in driving. That increase in transit ridership may have compensated for the decline in urban interstate driving, but lower fuel prices in July and August will probably lead to an increase in urban driving and a compensatory drop in transit travel.

When compared with June 2019, driving grew the most in Indiana (18%), Florida (16.5%), Connecticut (12.9%), Georgia (11.6%), Louisiana and Texas (each 11.7%). It fell the most short of 2019 miles in the District of Columbia (-19.2%), Delaware (-16.1%), Montana (-11.5%), Oregon (-8.7%), and Washington (-8.5%).

Amtrak Carried 84% of Pre-Pandemic PMs

Amtrak carried 83.6 percent as many passenger-miles in June 2022 as it did in June 2019, according to the monthly performance report it posted yesterday. That’s an increase from 78.5 percent in May.

See yesterday’s Antiplanner for sources of transit and airline data.

Relative to its pre-pandemic numbers, Amtrak passenger-miles have been rising at about 5.5 percent per month. In terms of actual passenger-miles, they have been rising at 20 percent per month. However, much of Amtrak ridership is seasonal and it is normal for June ridership to be much higher than February’s. In 2019, for example, June’s passenger-miles were 125 percent greater than February’s compared with only 107 percent in 2022. Continue reading

Gas Prices Push Transit Ridership Up to 65%

America’s transit systems carried 65.0 percent as many transit riders in June 2022 as in June 2019, according to data released last week by the Federal Transit Administration. This is the first time ridership has exceeded 61 percent of pre-pandemic levels since the pandemic began.

Data are not yet available for Amtrak or driving.

Much of this surge in ridership was due to fuel prices, which reached record levels in mid-June. Now the question is whether transit will be able to keep those riders, as prices have fallen every day since June 16. As of yesterday, average prices are lower than they have been since early March. Continue reading

The Importance of Fare Enforcement

According to the New York City police department, subway crime is up 53 percent so far in 2022 compared with 2021. Since ridership grew by 64 percent in that time period, that means that crime rates per rider have actually fallen, but that doesn’t reassure many people.

This photo was taken by MassDOT in 2010, when the MBTA could say that 2009 crime had reached a 30-year low. Yet FTA data show that, by 2021, the MBTA suffered almost 19 times as many “security events” as in 2009: 94 vs. 5.

Nationwide, Federal Transit Administration data show that, through the end of March 2022, transit crime (not counting suicide) is 44.4 percent more than the same period in 2021. This is almost exactly the same as the increase in ridership, which was 44.9 percent. Former riders who are reluctant to return to transit may be justified in not doing so. Continue reading

Transit’s Existential Crisis

In November 2020, a report from McKinsey & Co. to the New York Metropolitan Transportation Authority predicted that transit ridership would recover to as high as 92 percent of pre-pandemic levels by 2025. Now McKinsey has revised that number downward to as low as 70 percent. Even that is probably optimistic considering that recent data indicate that New York subway ridership has been flat at least since February 2022, and has even declined somewhat since June.

In McKinsey’s study, scenario S1 assumes people will steadily return to working in offices while the much more likely S2 assumes many will continue to work at home at least three days a week. Neither is good news for New York City transit but S2 is particularly bad, especially since even it is probably optimistic.

More than in most cities, transit in New York depends on fare revenues. Before the pandemic, fares covered more than half the operating costs of New York City transit but only about a quarter of the costs elsewhere. A decline in ridership hits the city’s transit budget harder than almost anywhere else, so it’s no surprise that both national and local media are focused on the “fiscal cliff” that MTA is likely to hurdle over when it runs out of federal COVID relief funds, probably in 2024. Continue reading

“Equity” Means Less, Not More Transit Subsidies

Danny Westneat, a columnist for the Seattle Times, openly wonders why Seattle is building so much light rail when we seem to be entering “an era of ‘untransit.'” He quotes a Stanford law review article saying that Zoom is “the modern equivalent of the streetcar — a technological advance that will profoundly alter land use.”

Puget Sound Transit is spending tens of billions of dollars building high-cost, low-capacity transit lines that make even less sense after COVID than they did before, yet there is no indication that Sound Transit is changing is plans in response to the pandemic. Photo by brewbooks.

Instead of altering their plans, however, transit agencies and transit advocates are busy trying to figure out how to justify increased subsidies for decreased ridership. Many of them are hoping that “equity” can be the issue that tips the balance in favor of more subsidies. Continue reading

Preserving Vital Technologies

Protecting America’s typewriter and slide rule industries is critical for the nation’s future, said John Underwood, with the American Public Typewriter Association, and William Keuffel, with Slide Rule America, in a report released today by the Typewriter-Slide Rule Center. “Typewriters and slide rules played a vital role in the nation’s victory in World War II,” noted Underwood. “What will happen to the U.S. if we don’t have access to these irreplaceable technologies in the future?”

We couldn’t have won World War II without it.

It is commonly believed that these tools have been replaced by microcomputers and the internet, but Keuffel scoffed at that claim. “The original internet was subsidized by the Defense Department,” he pointed out. “If the typewriter and slide rule industries had received similar subsidies, they would be thriving today.” Continue reading

Concrete Columns Cracked

The first phase of the Honolulu rail transit system is supposed to open at the end of this year, with trains serving nine of the planned 21 stations. But those plans may be put on hold because contractors have discovered cracks in the concrete pillars holding up the elevated stations. Due to these cracks, the consultants have “advised that passengers not be allowed into the seven affected stations until further inspections are done.”

The Honolulu rail project was idiotically designed to be entirely elevated, creating problems both with scenic views and differential settling in swampy land.

That leaves just two stations that might open later this year. Most likely, none will open at all. What is known for sure is that the cracks are growing. Continue reading

May Driving Exceeds Pre-Pandemic Miles

Americans drove almost 288 billion miles in May 2022, compared with 286.4 billion in May 2019, according to data released yesterday by the Federal Highway Administration. This represents a 0.5 percent increase over pre-pandemic levels. Considering that regular gasoline prices were under $3 a gallon in May 2019 and around $4.50 a gallon in May 2022, this suggests that high fuel prices aren’t leading many Americans to abandon autos for transit or other modes.

While transit ridership appears to have plateaued at 60 percent of pre-pandemic levels, miles of driving have exceeded pre-pandemic numbers for most of the last year.

Transit advocates are increasingly promoting free transit for everyone, regardless of income, as a solution to transportation equity issues, when in fact transit practically irrelevant to 95 percent of American workers (including low-income workers) before COVID, and even more since. The real inequity is in low automobile ownership among low-income households, and that inequity can be reduced without giving everyone, regardless of income, free cars.