Reeling from five years of ridership declines, the transit industry is stumbling around looking for a new mission, or at least new strategies to restore some of its revenues. New research and on-the-ground experience suggests the task will be difficult and may be hopeless.

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The opening pages of the American Public Transportation Association’s (APTA) recently released 2019 Transit Fact Book present a cheery picture of transit’s success by comparing 2018 transit numbers with numbers from the 1990s, which saw historic lows in transit ridership. Yes, ridership grew from 1995 to 2014, but bus ridership peaked in 2008 and rail in 2014 and both have been declining since then, a reality APTA hopes people will overlook. This is typical of the kind of cherry-picking of data that transit advocates so often use to promote their agendas. Continue reading →

If Amtrak were a public corporation rather than a government-owned entity, a recent press release and other public statements by Amtrak officials would be considered securities fraud. According to the press release issued last week, fiscal year 2019 was Amtrak’s best year ever. The release claimed that operating revenues covered 99.1 percent of its operating costs, and Amtrak officials are so optimistic about the future that they predict the company will actually earn a profit next year.

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Amtrak made these statements before it released its annual financial report (which is still not available), substituting instead an infographic. Moreover, the press release deliberately misrepresented the information that will eventually be published in that financial statement. Amtrak is counting on the fact that far fewer people will read the financial statement than the press release or news reports about that release. Continue reading →

Austin is one of the fastest-growing cities in America, and the city of Austin and Austin’s transit agency, Capital Metro, have a plan for dealing with all of the traffic that will be generated by that growth: assume that a third of the people who now drive alone to work will switch to transit, bicycling, walking, or telecommuting by 2039. That’s right up there with planning for dinner by assuming that food will magically appear on the table the same way it does in Hogwarts.

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Austin planners say that 74 percent of Austin workers drive alone to their jobs. In this, they are already behind the times, as the 2018 American Community Survey found that 75.4 percent of Austin workers drove alone (that’s for the city of Austin; the drive-alone share in the the Austin urban area was 77.0 percent). The 2018 survey was released only a month before Austin’s latest planning document, but even the 2017 survey found that 75 percent of Austin workers drove alone. You have to go back to the 2016 survey to find 74 percent drive-alones. So while Austin planners are assuming they can reduce driving alone from 74 to 50 percent, it is actually moving in the other direction. Continue reading →

Rail transit lines built with federal support have done more harm than good to transit riders and urban transportation systems as a whole. Too often, the high cost of rail has forced transit agencies to cut bus service and raise fares. In the worst cases, the systems lost more bus riders than they gain rail riders. In most other cases, per capita ridership and/or transit’s share of commuting declined. These regions and transit systems would have been better off without the federal government enticing them into build rail transit.

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A little over a century ago, more than a thousand American cities, including every city with more than 15,000 people, had some form of rail transit. Then, in 1927, the first buses were produced that cost less both to buy and to operate than rail transit. By then, many of the rail lines built in the nineteenth century were wearing out, so transit riders appreciated the buses because they were faster and more comfortable than the railcars and could easily take on new routes. Buses can also move more people per hour than almost any rail line because buses, though having lower capacities per vehicle, can safely operate far more frequently than rail lines. Continue reading →

Supporters of increased subsidies to urban transit and intercity passenger trains often argue that all transportation is subsidized, so it’s only fair that transit and Amtrak should also be subsidized. While it’s true that most transportation is subsidized, it is worth looking at the extent of those subsidies to judge whether subsidies to some forms of transport should be increased or reduced.

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Americans spent about $1.3 trillion of their personal incomes on transportation in 2017 (based on the Bureau of Economic Analysis’ National Income and Product Accounts (NIPA) table 2.5.5, lines 53 and 116). On top of this, transportation received about $200 billion in subsidies from federal, state, and local governments (based on subtracting total government expenditures on transport from total government revenues from transport). Continue reading →

Phoenix has seen the least increase in congestion of any major urban area in America. According to the data set accompanying the Texas Transportation Institute’s recently released 2019 Urban Mobility Report, the average commuter in Phoenix suffered from 80 hours of delay in 2017, up 26 hours from 1982. That compares with an 82-hour growth in delay per commuter in the San Francisco and Washington urban areas and an average 53-hour increase in delay for the nation’s top 50 urban areas.[*]

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Phoenix’s relatively small increase in traffic congestion is largely due to the massive increase in freeways in the region. According to an earlier edition of the urban mobility report, Phoenix had 210 lane-miles of freeways in 1982, growing to 2,015 by 2017. Part of this increase was due to an expansion of the urban area, leading to the addition of freeways that already existed but were previously outside the urban area. But the region has little more than doubled in land area since 1982 while the freeway lane-miles increased by nearly ten times. No other region has seen such a large increase in freeway lane-miles. Continue reading →

Amtrak is a conundrum that has been difficult for both politicians and Amtrak managers to solve.

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• Politicians and the media act as if it is an important mode of travel, yet it carries less than 1 percent as many passenger miles as domestic airlines and just 0.1 percent of total domestic passenger miles.
• Rail advocates claim intercity passenger trains are economically competitive, yet Amtrak fares per passenger mile average nearly three times airline fares, and when subsidies are added Amtrak costs four times as much per passenger mile as the airlines and well over twice as much as driving.
• Amtrak claims that some of its trains earn a profit and overall passenger revenues cover 95 percent of its costs, yet even the Rail Passengers Association, the leading supporter of intercity passenger trains, believes Amtrak’s accounting methods misrepresent reality.

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