Search Results for: rail

Transit Carried 73.7% in December

By | | Transportation, Useful Data
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Transit carried 73.7 percent as many riders in December 2023 as the same month in 2019, according to data released by the Federal Transit Administration yesterday. As I predicted last month, this was a slight decline from the 74.9 percent reported for November because November had one more business day in 2023 than 2019 while December had one fewer.

Amtrak ridership, as a share of 2019 levels, declined from 103.1 percent in November to 93.6 percent in December according to Amtrak’s monthly performance report released last week. This may suggest that holiday travelers are still wary of taking trains. It also raises questions about why Amtrak numbers have been bouncing up and down so much over the past several months. Air travel has not been so bouncy: according to TSA passenger counts, air travel grew from 101.2 of 2019 levels in November to 103.1 percent in December. Continue reading →

Do More Subsidies Increase Efficiency?

By | | Transportation
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Streetsblog posted an article yesterday that quotes and attempts to refute the Antiplanner by claiming that increasing subsidies to transit agencies actually makes them more efficient. The article, written by former Strong Towns staffer Kea Wilson, misinterprets both the Antiplanner’s quote and the meaning of efficiency.

Does reducing the share of transit costs that are covered by farebox revenues increase efficiency? Photo by AgentAkit.

Transit systems get more efficient when they are more heavily subsidized, Wilson asserts. How can this be true? Efficiency is economically defined as “when all goods and factors of production in an economy are distributed or allocated to their most valuable uses and waste is eliminated or minimized.” Before the pandemic, transit agencies were typically spending four times as much money moving someone a passenger-mile as automobiles. That sounds pretty inefficient to me and increasing subsidies even more is likely to be even more inefficient. Continue reading →

The Benefits of Congestion Relief

By | | Transportation
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Data published by the University of Minnesota Accessibility Observatory a few months ago reveals some of the benefits of congestion relief that resulted from the COVID pandemic. I’ve used 2019 data in the past to show that residents of U.S. urban areas can reach far more jobs in a 20-minute auto drive than a 60-minute transit trip. The latest data for 2021 reveal that the number of jobs reachable by transit or bicycle was about 9 percent greater in 2021 than 2019, but the number reachable by a 20-minute auto drive was 66 percent greater.

On average, over 50 urban areas and for trips of 10 to 60 minutes, auto users were able to reach 48 percent more jobs in 2021 than in 2019. Solid lines show 2021 and dotted lines show 2019.

These numbers are the average of the nation’s 50 largest urban areas, but for some the increased access caused by less traffic was much greater. In a 20-minute auto drive, residents of Atlanta, Boston, Los Angeles, San Francisco, San Jose, and Washington could reach more than twice as many jobs in 2021 than in 2019. Of course, jobs are only one possible set of destinations that became more accessible; other social and economic opportunities also became equally more accessible. Continue reading →

Transit Carried 74.9% of 2019 Riders in November

By | | Transportation, Useful Data
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America’s transit systems carried nearly 75 percent as many riders in November 2023 as the same month in 2019, according to data released on Friday by the Federal Transit Administration. This is the most riders transit has attracted, as a share of pre-pandemic levels, since the pandemic began in March 2020.

Transit’s failure to carry even three-fourths of its pre-pandemic passengers stands in contrast to Amtrak, which carried 3.1 percent more passenger-miles in November 2023 than 2019, and the airlines, which carried 4.3 percent more riders in November than in 2019. Release of airline passenger-mile data tends to be more than a month later than passenger numbers, but in September domestic air routes carried 6.0 percent more passenger-miles than the same month in 2019. November highway data are not yet available but an update will be posted here when they are. Continue reading →

Pulling the Pin

By | | Housekeeping
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I started this blog 17 years ago today and since then have put up nearly 4,000 posts. Today, I’m taking the next step towards retirement by ending my practice of posting nearly every weekday.

Is this the origin of the phrase “pulling the pin”? Maybe not but as a railfan it is nice to think so. Photo by Ben Franske.

I still have more posts planned. I’ve written two more major reports that I hope will be published soon and will post them here. I expect to continue monitoring new releases of transportation, housing, and census data and report on them here. I also need to write at least one more chapter in The Education of an Iconoclast. Continue reading →

When the Economist Lost Its Way

By | | News commentary
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Last week, the Economist published an article about when the New York Times lost its way. The article traces it to a June 2020 opinion piece by conservative U.S. Senator Tom Cotton that provoked such outrage among Times staffers that the editorial page editor, James Bennet, was forced to resign. Since Bennet now writes for the Economist, and in fact was the author of this article, it is easy to see why he would consider that incident to be a turning point for the Gray Lady.

In 2020, the Economist argued that countries should take advantage of the pandemic to enact draconian policies aimed at reducing climate change.

While it is easy to argue that the New York Times lost its way long before that incident, I have a different question: When did the Economist lose its way? The weekly magazine that calls itself a newspaper was founded 180 years ago based on the principles of free trade and free markets. Yet it seems to have forgotten those principles today, advocating for more and more government control of the world and national economies. Continue reading →

Silicon Valley Transit Plan

By | | Transportation
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The Santa Clara Valley Transportation Authority (VTA) and its predecessors serving San Jose and Silicon Valley have spent more than $7 billion (in today’s dollars) on rail transit. Yet it carried fewer bus and rail riders in 2019 than buses alone carried in 1986, before San Jose’s first light-rail line opened.

Lines show only origins and approximate destinations, not exact routes. Click image for a larger view.

This failure can be blamed on the usual suspects: rail transit is designed to take lots of people to a central hub, but less than 4 percent of Silicon Valley jobs are in downtown San Jose. In such an urban area, rail transit just because an expensive bus that doesn’t serve many people but does take money from potentially better bus service in the rest of the region. Continue reading →

Turning Colorado into Greenwich Village

By | | Regional planning, Transportation
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The state of Colorado will celebrate its 150th birthday in 2026, and to celebrate the state’s Democratic governor, Jared Polis, has proposed what he thinks is a “visionary” land-use and transportation plan. In fact, it is just a tired old rehash of recent urban planning fads that are based on obsolete views of how people want to live.

Click image to download a 9.2-MB PDF of this 34-page report.

The plan is partly a repackaging of a bill the governor promoted in the last session of the state legislature that would have given cities housing targets and required them to build more multifamily housing to meet those targets. The bill was defeated thanks to strong opposition from city governments that didn’t want the state to preempt their zoning powers, but that didn’t sway Polis. Continue reading →

Infrastructure Guidelines

By | | Transportation
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With President Biden handing out $6 billion for California high-speed rail projects and $2.2 billion more for other passenger-rail projects, it seems important to review some basic guidelines for infrastructure spending. Nobel-prize-winning economist Elinor Ostrom, whose work focused on incentives and institutions, once offered the following evaluation criteria:

Elinor Ostrom. Photo by Holger Motzkau.

  • Efficiency: How well are inputs translated into outputs?
  • Fiscal equivalence – Do those who benefit from a system pay at a level
    commensurate with their benefit?
  • Redistribution – Does the system take from the rich and give to the poor or from rich areas to poor areas or rich groups to poor groups?
  • Accountability – Do decisions reflect the desires of final users and other stakeholders?
  • Adaptability – Can infrastructure providers respond to ever-changing
    Environments?

Continue reading →

The Rise and Fall of Bogotá’s Rapid Buses

By | | Transportation
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The New York Times reviewed (non-paywall version) the ground-breaking bus-rapid transit system in Bogotá Columbia 23 years after it opened. The TransMilenio bus system first opened in December 2000 under fiscally conservative mayor Enrique Peñalosa and each route-mile is capable of moving more people per hour than New York City subways.

A high-capacity TransMilenio bus. Photo by Felipe Restrepo Acosta.

The system almost immediately doubled transit ridership, partly because the rapid buses were much faster than the buses they replaced but also because Bogota has a lot of low-income people who don’t own cars whose mobility was greatly enhanced by faster transit. Columbia had well under 200 motor vehicles per thousand people in 2000 (compared with more than 800 in the U.S.) and even today Columbia has fewer than 300 vehicles per thousand (compared with more than 900 in the U.S.). Whatever the reason, the rapid bus system carries up to 2 million riders a day, which is more than some U.S. light-rail lines carry in a year. Continue reading →