Search Results for: rail

Comments from Colorado

By | | Transportation
2 Comments

The Denver/Colorado Springs Gazette has published two articles by the Antiplanner highlighting problems with transportation planning in Denver and nationwide. The first, dated September 11, argues that cities have lost the war on cars. In particular, Denver has been reducing roadway capacities and spending billions on transit, yet driving keeps growing. A follow-up editorial by the newspaper agrees.

Stuck in traffic in Denver, thanks to local and regional transportation planners. Photo by Adrian Black.

More recently, an op-ed by the Antiplanner argues that the pandemic has changed Colorado transportation for good, yet transportation planners still plan for a pre-pandemic world. The number of people working at home in the Denver urban area tripled between 2019 and 2021, which devastated transit ridership yet led to an 8 percent increase in driving as people working at home run errands and take other auto trips they weren’t taking when confined to an office. Continue reading →

U.S. Not Running Short of Land

By | | Housing
1 Comment

Alert the FBI! Someone has stolen and hidden away most of the land in the United States. At least, that’s the message I get from a recent Wall Street Journal article that claims that “the U.S. is running short of land for housing.”

More than 600,000 acres of land like this can be found outside of San Jose. It isn’t prime farm land, nor is it too steep to build on. Yet San Jose has some of the most expensive housing in America because almost no one can see that this land is available for housing.

According to a 2017 land inventory by the Department of Agriculture, the contiguous 48 states have about 1.9 billion acres of land. Of these, about 116 million have been developed (including rural developments such as roads and railroads). Another 406 million acres are federal. The USDA doesn’t say so, but about 70 million acres are state land. An unknown number are county or city lands, but it is probably under 50 million acres. Continue reading →

Scrutinizing July Transit Data

By | | Transportation
2 Comments

The Antiplanner is back from Wheeler County where I happened to meet some Portland transportation consultants who were cycling through the area. If you are reading this, I hope you had a good trip with no more mechanical problems.

I promised I would take a closer look at the transit data that the FTA released last week. The data continue to show that rail transit is lagging behind bus ridership, with rail at 57 percent and bus at 61 percent of pre-pandemic levels. Yet worst off is commuter bus, at a mere 36 percent of July 2019 numbers. Rapid bus is 64 percent, and hybrid rail is at 82 percent — though that’s because a new line opened in North San Diego County since the pandemic began. Continue reading →

Pandemic Reversal?

By | | Transportation
2 Comments

A recent article in the San Jose Mercury-News reports that transit ridership in “car crazy” Los Angeles has exceeded ridership in the “transit mecca” of the San Francisco Bay Area, a “reversal that could remake California’s mass transit landscape.” This would be a lot more interesting if the writer hadn’t done the arithmetic wrong.

Contrary to the implications of the Mercury-News story, Los Angeles has always been one of the biggest transit markets in the country and certainly bigger than that of the Bay Area. Photo by Downtowngal.

The story compares ridership carried by the major agencies in six San Francisco Bay Area counties with ridership carried by the main agencies in Los Angeles county. But Los Angeles County is not all of the Los Angeles urban area any more than San Francisco County is all of the San Francisco Bay Area. The Los Angeles urban area includes all of urban Los Angeles County and all of urban Orange County, while the Greater Los Angeles area also include three more counties. Continue reading →

Triumph of the Exurb

By | | Transportation
7 Comments

The amount of money spent on business travel in 2021 was less than half of 2019, according to the Global Business Travel Association. Moreover, it is likely never to fully recover.

Forty percent of Americans who once frequently traveled for business say they never expect to do so again. Photo by Business Travel Panama.

According to a recent survey of Americans who once traveled for business at least three times a year, 40 percent say they never expect to travel for business again and 12 percent say they don’t expect to travel for at least the next year. In France, Germany, and the United Kingdom, the share who say they never expect to travel for business again is 50 percent or more. “Business travel will never return to a pre-pandemic normal,” concludes the survey. Continue reading →

MBTA Crashes and Burns

By | | Transportation
12 Comments

The Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority (MBTA) is crashing and burning, sometimes literally. An Orange line train caught fire a few weeks ago. A Red Line train ran away out of control. The Orange line and parts of the Green line are in such bad shape that they have been shut down at least until September.

The Orange line in 1978, when it was in a lot better condition than it is today. Photo by Henry Petermann.

The situation is so bad that various think tanks have proposed putting the agency in receivership, which would mean taking control from its highly politicized board of directors. At least one member of Congress from Massachusetts agrees, saying that the federal government should take control. But it’s not clear that federal oversight of DC’s Metro system did much to solve that system’s safety problems a few years ago. Continue reading →

Interstates Add Billions to Economy

By | | Transportation
3 Comments

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 →

The Importance of Fare Enforcement

By | | Transportation
8 Comments

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 →

“Equity” Means Less, Not More Transit Subsidies

By | | Transportation
14 Comments

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 →

Concrete Columns Cracked

By | | Transportation
6 Comments

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 →