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April Transit Falls to 58.7% of Pre-Pandemic Levels

By | | Transportation, Useful Data
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Transit ridership in April 2022 was 58.7 percent of April 2019, according to data released yesterday by the Federal Transit Administration. This is down from March, when ridership was 61.0 percent of March 2019. When I reported on March numbers, I predicted that April’s numbers would fall below 60 percent of pre-pandemic levels because April 2022 had one fewer business day than April 2019, while March had two more than in 2019.

While airline and Amtrak numbers grew in April (as a percent of 2019 levels), transit numbers fell.

For comparison, airline numbers exceeded 90 percent of pre-pandemic levels (which I also predicted) while Amtrak ridership grew to 73 percent (though that’s a drop from November, when ridership was more than 77 percent of November 2019). Driving numbers won’t be out for another week or so, but will probably be around 100 percent. Continue reading →

Most Big Cities Lost Population in 2021

By | | Follow up, Regional planning
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I announced yesterday I was retiring from daily blog posts, but I also said I would comment on new data when it was relevant. So I can hardly pass up noting that the Census Bureau just posted 2021 population data for the more than 800 American cities larger than 50,000 people. As I predicted in a recent policy brief, the new numbers show that most dense cities lost population while low-density cities grew.

Less than 2 percent of the jobs in the Phoenix area are in downtown Phoenix, making it one of the least downtown-dependent major cities in the country. Low-density housing throughout the region makes it attractive to people wanting to avoid crowded areas. Photo by Adam Fagen.

Of America’s largest cities, expensive ones such as Los Angeles and San Francisco lost residents (with the latter declining by 6.3 percent!), but affordable cities such as Dallas, Houston, and Atlanta also declined. The largest cities whose populations grew were Phoenix, San Antonio, Austin, and Jacksonville. With the exception of Austin, these are all low-density cities whose downtowns are tiny by traditional standards, each with well under 50,000 jobs before the pandemic. In other words, housing affordability was an issue, but more important was people were leaving dense areas for low-density areas. Continue reading →

The World Turned Upside Down

By | | Mission
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Today marks 50 years of my work in public policy analysis. I began in June 1972 as an intern for the Oregon Student Public Interest Research Group. By July, I had written a lengthy paper on how Portland should make transportation improvements to reduce air pollution. Since then, I’ve written somewhere around 200 more papers, several books, and numerous op-eds and articles on topics ranging from endangered species to high-speed rail in geographic areas ranging from Georgia to Tasmania.

I started writing the Antiplanner in January, 2007, and have since written more than 3,700 posts, including 150 policy briefs. That’s enough; it’s time for me to retire. This is difficult because I feel I still have some unfinished business.

The first half of my career was helping environmentalists protect natural resources from corporations that wanted government subsidies to do harm to the environment. After two decades, I left the environmental movement when they began supporting government subsidies to corporations to do harm to the environment. Continue reading →

Brightline Demands $45 Million to Improve Safety

By | | Transportation
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Brightline celebrated its third year of operating passenger trains in south Florida this month by killing two people in two days and then a third person a few days later. This makes a total of 63 deaths due to Brightline, which has been rated the most dangerous railroad in the country.

Of course, as shown in the above video, Brightline blames all of the fatalities on the victims. The deaths have nothing to do with Brightline adding fast, frequent passenger trains to a corridor that previously was used only by slow, infrequent freight trains. Continue reading →

Hybrid Streetcar Begins Operations in Tempe

By | | Transportation
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Leave it to the transit industry to take a good idea and distort it beyond recognition or wisdom. That was my reaction when I learned that Tempe, Arizona began operating a hybrid streetcar last week. The three-mile streetcar line cost $200 million, or $67 million per mile.

For a mere $200 million, Tempe now has a streetcar that doesn’t work as well as a bus route that would have cost only about $3 million dollars. Photo courtesy of Valley Metro.

For rolling stock, Tempe elected to buy vehicles that cost $6.5 million apiece. At first glance, they look like other so-called modern streetcars, but have batteries that allow them to operate where there are no overhead wires. This makes them, according to their manufacturer, “the Prius of the modern streetcar market.” Continue reading →

How Much Does Amtrak Delay Freight Trains?

By | | Transportation
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At a time when almost everyone in the nation is affected by supply-chain problems but almost no one is riding Amtrak, the Federal Railroad Administration is frantic about how Amtrak trains are being delayed by freight trains. According to the agency’s latest report, Amtrak trains were delayed by a total of 1.3 million minutes (that’s 21,666 hours) in the first quarter of 2022, up 9 percent from the previous quarter.

Who is delaying whom? Photo by Patrick Dirden.

“The largest cause of delays was freight train interference at 299,252 minutes of delay — 22 percent of total delay minutes, an increase of 12 percent from the previous quarter,” says the report. However, the report makes no attempt to estimate the number of minutes of delays to freight trains caused by Amtrak. Passenger train delays, continues the report, caused a minuscule 2 percent of Amtrak riders — about 18,290 — who were connecting with a different train to miss their connections. Continue reading →

Towards Global Peace and Prosperity

By | | Policy brief
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Three years ago, it was easy to be optimistic about the future. World poverty was in rapid decline. Many major diseases had been nearly eradicated. Global trade tied nations together, limiting military conflicts in most of the world outside of the Middle East. Thanks to good old American innovation, energy prices were low. Most environmental problems, including air and water pollution, were either solved or proven solvable. While doomsayers made dire predictions about climate change, it was hard to take them seriously when their prescriptions were the same tired old central planning ideas they had always advocated even though most of those ideas would, in fact, increase greenhouse gas emissions.

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

Today, it is much easier to be pessimistic. The COVID-19 pandemic not only killed at least 6 million people (with perhaps a third of them in the U.S.), it revealed several critical weaknesses in the global trading system. Congress’ response to the pandemic, which was to dump trillions of dollars into the economy without increasing economic productivity, caused the worst inflation America has seen in 40 years. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is leading to both energy and food shortages around the world that are bound to get worse as the war continues. On top of this, the conflict has revived fears of nuclear war.

Continue reading →

March Driving 2% More Than Before the Pandemic

By | | Transportation, Useful Data
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Americans drove 2.1 percent more miles in March 2022 than in March 2019, thus returning to more than 100 percent of pre-pandemic levels, according to data released late last week by the Federal Highway Administration. Driving first exceeded 100 percent of pre-pandemic in July 2021 and remained above 100 percent through the end of the year. It then dipped below 100 percent in January and February, but now is back above 100 percent.

See this post for sources of data for air, transit, and Amtrak.

As noted here before, air travel is approaching 90 percent of pre-pandemic levels, while Amtrak is still below 70 percent and transit has just barely breeched 60 percent. I suspect transit will fall below 60 percent in April as March 2022 had two more work days than March 2019 while April 2022 had one fewer work day than April 2019. Continue reading →

New Trolleys for Philadelphia

By | | Transportation
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The Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority (SEPTA) is buying new vehicles to replace 130 light-rail cars. Normally, my suggestion when rail systems wear out is to replace them with buses, but in this case it’s worth a close look.

One of SEPTA’s 40-year-old light-rail cars. Photo by jpmueller99.

The 130 cars are expected to cost $800 million, or a little over $6.1 million apiece. That’s a lot more than a bus, which typically costs under $500,000 if Diesel-powered and under $1 million if electric. But buses have an expected lifespan of only about 15 years, while SEPTA’s light-rail cars are 40 years old. The railcars are also a little larger than buses, having 50 seats compared with an average of 40 seats on SEPTA buses. Still, the railcars cost more than $3,000 per seat-year, while even million-dollar buses cost only $1,666 per seat-year. Continue reading →

DC Metro Hires New General Manager

By | | Transportation
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The Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority’s (Metro) next general manager and CEO, Randy Clarke, brings an interesting resume to the job. The troubled agency is suffering from serious safety issues, including frequent derailments and the failure of hundreds of train operators to renew their certification, not to mention transit ridership lagging behind the rest of the industry and serious financial woes. The problems are so bad that the agency’s current CEO, Paul Wiedefeld, just resigned early.

Washington Metro’s 7000-series of rail cars, which makes up 60 percent of its fleet, have all been taken out of service due to frequent derailments, a problem that won’t be fixed for at least several more months. Photo by Ben Schumin.

At first glance, Clarke is the perfect person to replace Wiedefeld. From 2010 to 2016, he worked on safety and operations at Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority. The American Public Transportation Association apparently thought he did such a good job that it hired him as its vice president in charge of safety, operations, and technical services, a post he held for two years. Then he became CEO of Capital Metro, Austin’s transit agency. Continue reading →