Search Results for: rail

Brightline Kills Again

By | | Transportation
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As one of the comments to last week’s post noted, a Brightline train killed a pedestrian on the first day of service to Orlando. To be fair, the train that was involved in the accident wasn’t going to Orlando and the accident took place on the old part of the rail line, not the newly built line from Cocoa to Orlando.

But why should we be fair? Brightline has killed around 70 people so far, including 28 in Palm Beach County alone. I don’t have exact month-by-month data, but my sense is that the fatality rate has not been declining. The company says it plans to use government funds to make its line safer, but why should taxpayers have to pay for a supposedly private rail operation? Continue reading →

Brightline Begins

By | | Transportation
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Brightline will begin killing people carrying passengers between Miami and Orlando today. I hope the new line will be safe, but Brightline trains began killing people even before they went into revenue service and again when they resumed service after the pandemic. Brightline says it is willing to spend $45 million making its route safer for pedestrians and auto drivers — on the condition that taxpayers put up $35 million of it (so much for it being unsubsidized).

I’ve previously predicted that Brightline’s Miami-Orlando line is quite possibly the only higher-than-normal-speed passenger train route in American that could earn a profit. That’s because the route connects Orlando theme parks with the three busiest cruise ship ports in the United States: Miami, Fort Lauderdale, and Port Canaveral. Together, they saw 11.9 million cruise ship passengers last year, which is about 15 percent less than before the pandemic, but still quite a lot. If only 40 percent of those passengers take a round-trip to Orlando on Brightline, the line would carry more passengers than Amtrak’s Northeast Corridor carried in 2022. Continue reading →

A Polycentric Plan for Portland

By | | Transportation
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Portland’s TriMet transit agency is attempting to serve a 2020s urban area with a 1910 transit system, says a new report published by the Cascade Policy Institute. The agency’s infatuation with rail transit underscores this problem, as rail transit makes no sense for rapidly evolving regions with multiple economic centers. TriMet’s current route map works well only for downtown employees: while more than 40 percent of downtown workers took transit to work before the pandemic, less than 3.5 percent of workers in the rest of the urban area used transit.

The Cascade Policy Institute report proposes to replace TriMet’s current bus route map with a hub-and-spoke system using nine hubs. Yellow circles are the hubs. Blue lines represent non-stop buses from every hub to every other hub. Red lines represent local buses radiating away from each hub. The lines are not exact routes and only show the origins and (in the case of the red lines) approximate destinations of each route. Click image for a larger view.

All of these problems were made worse by the pandemic, which hit rail transit especially hard and which greatly reduced the importance of downtown Portland as an economic center. According to the latest report, Portland’s downtown has the second-worst recovery of any of the nation’s 50 largest downtowns, with less than 40 percent the economic activity of the pre-pandemic period. Yet TriMet still wants to build two new light-rail lines to downtown even though the last line it opened gained no net new riders for the transit system. Continue reading →

July 2023 Transit Ridership 65% of July 2019

By | | Transportation, Useful Data
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After reaching 70 percent of pre-pandemic numbers in June, transit ridership in July fell back to 65 percent of July 2019, according to data released last week by the Federal Transit Administration. Since July 2019 had 22 working days while July 2023 only had 20, this decline is not surprising.

Meanwhile, Americans drove 97.2 percent as many miles in July 2023 as in the same month of 2019, according to Federal Highway Administration data released last week as well. Amtrak’s monthly performance report indicates that the railroad carried 91.2 percent as many passenger-miles in July 2023 as July 2019, while the Transportation Security Administration says that 98.8 percent as many travelers passed through security in July as in 2019. Continue reading →

How to Pay for Amtrak’s Deficits

By | | Transportation
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Amtrak operations lost $1.2 billion last year without even counting depreciation and the other costs that Amtrak pretends aren’t real. (The $1.2 billion is calculated by adding $885 million “adjusted operating earnings” to the $329 million “state supported train revenue” that Amtrak pretends isn’t a subsidy.) A railroad in Japan provides an example of one way Amtrak could cover this deficit.

The Choshi Electric Railway hit some hard times in the 1990s, as did most Japanese businesses, due to the nation’s economic slump. The railway almost went out of business, but then it hit upon the idea of asking its customers and patrons to buy rice crackers. Today, it makes twice as much money on its rice crackers than on the rail line itself. Continue reading →

“Priming the Pump” = Subsidizing the Myth

By | | Transportation
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Maryland has decided it needs to “take a more active role in promoting development around transit stations,” according to an article in the Baltimore Banner. “It’s priming the pump to get these things moving,” says Secretary of Transportation Paul Wiedefeld, who used to be general manager of Washington Metro.

Maryland’s stack-’em-and-pack-’em vision for transit recovery. But what if nobody wants to live there?

As of May, Baltimore transit ridership was about 67 percent of pre-pandemic levels, slightly less than the national average. But most of that was due to buses, which were at 73 percent. Baltimore light rail was only 59 percent and Baltimore’s subway was just 58 percent. Wiedefeld hopes that promoting transit-oriented developments will boost ridership. Continue reading →

Spending Other People’s Money

By | | Transportation
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Washington state Democrats believe that a Portland-Seattle-Vancouver high-speed rail line is vital to the future of the Northwest. It is so vital, in fact, that they want someone else to pay for it, namely the federal government. The federal government, after all, seems to be unique in the world in that it can spend unlimited amounts of money without raising taxes to cover those costs.

You’ll never guess why they think high-speed rail is needed so badly. According to a letter from Washington members of Congress to Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg, the high-speed train will “allow people to live in less densely populated areas and work anywhere in the megaregion.” So much for the supposed benefits of high-density living! Continue reading →

The Irrational Planning Process

By | | Regional planning
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Land-use and transportation planning is supposed to follow a rational planning process. That process includes defining the problem that needs to be solved, identifying alternative solutions, evaluating the alternatives, developing a final plan based on the best alternative or combination of alternatives, implementing the plan, monitoring the effects to see how well reality matches planning assumptions, and using the results of that monitoring as feedback into future plans.

This 1969 book describes the rational planning process on page 95.

The rational planning model has been around since at least 1969. Yet today, more than 50 years later, hardly any government agency follows this model. Instead, most government plans I’ve reviewed follow what can only be called an irrational planning process. Continue reading →

June Transit Carried 71% of Pre-COVID Riders

By | | Transportation, Useful Data
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America’s transit agencies carried 71.4 percent as many riders in June 2023 as they did in the same month of 2019, according to data released by the Federal Transit Administration yesterday. This is the highest percentage of 2019 ridership since February, 2020. One reason for the gain above previous months is that June had two more business days in 2023 than it did in 2019.

Data are not yet available for highway or Amtrak travel. However, boarding numbers from the Transportation Security Administration indicate that the airlines carried 100.8 percent as many riders in June of 2023 as June of 2019. I’ll post updates for driving and Amtrak when those data are released. Continue reading →

Houston BRT Failure

By | | Planning Disasters, Transportation
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A Houston bus rapid transit route over dedicated bus lanes is attracting less than 10 percent of the riders that were projected for it. The Silver Line opened in August 2020 with the expectation that it would carry 14,850 weekday riders, but in fact it is carrying less than 900 riders per weekday, about 6 percent of projections.

A Houston Silver Line sits empty, which is not unusual for it even when in motion. Photo by Ricky Courtney.

Metro, Houston’s transit agency, originally wanted to put a light-rail line in the Silver Line corridor, but opposition from local residents led it to “downgrade” the line to bus rapid transit. According to Houston businessman Bill King, Metro still managed to spend $200 million on the 4.7-mile route, mostly through tax-increment financing. This was a lot less than the $500 million or so that light rail would have cost but still a lot more than necessary. Continue reading →