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Free Transit Is Just More Oppression

By | | Transportation
3 Comments

“The fight for free transit is about connecting people to opportunity,” proclaims Boston Mayor Michelle Wu. More realistically, the fight for free transit is about keeping poor people oppressed.

The Rosa Parks bus at the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, Michigan. Photo by Roderick Eime.

At one time, blacks in the South were expected to ride in the back of transit buses and to yield their seats to whites on demand. Whites at the time probably thought themselves generous that they allowed blacks to ride the buses at all. Today, well-off people such as Wu think they are generous in wishing to use other people’s money to give blacks and other poor people free transit rides. Continue reading →

The Myth of Rail Mobility

By | | Policy brief, Transportation
5 Comments

Now that the war in Ukraine has revealed that Europe is even more dependent on foreign oil than the United States, Americans can smugly sit back and say, “If only those Europeans acted more like, you know, Europeans, they wouldn’t be in this fix.” Because, as everyone knows, Europeans travel mostly by electric public transit and high-speed trains, so they aren’t dependent on oil to get around by car or airplane.

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

The myth that rail transit and intercity passenger trains are dominant forms of transportation in Europe is one that I’ve addressed before, but it is repeated so often that it is worth examining again using the latest data. These data show that passenger trains are not an important source of mobility in most developed and developing nations, where rail travel is heavily outweighed by highway travel and, in most countries, air travel. Continue reading →

Don’t Build High-Speed Rail in Earthquake Zones

By | | Transportation
5 Comments

The recent earthquake off the coast of Japan derailed a high-speed train and forced East Japan Railway to shut down the rail line. Fixing the line, the company admitted, may take “a considerable amount of time.”

Highways are generally more resilient than trains. They usually provide alternate routes if one route is damaged and roads are easier to fix than railroads, especially high-speed rail lines that must be built to high-precision standards. Fortunately, no one in the United States would build a high-speed rail line in an earthquake zone, right?

Transit’s Dim Future

By | | Transportation
2 Comments

Transit agencies that have been gobbling up billions of dollars of subsidies each year are now facing the prospect that hardly anyone wants to ride transit even with the subsidies. A Wall Street Journal story focuses on commuter-rail lines, which in January carried less than 35 percent of pre-pandemic riders. However, commuter-bus lines are even worse, carrying only 27 percent of pre-pandemic riders.

Loudoun County commuter buses carried less than 6 percent as many passengers to DC in January 2022 as they did in January 2020. Photo by Virginia Department of Transportation.

Individually, the worst-performing rail line is the Minneapolis North Star commuter train, which carried only 7 percent of pre-pandemic riders in January. Maryland and Virginia commuter trains serving DC, the Altamont and CalTrains commuter trains in the Bay Area, and commuter trains in Chicago and Seattle all carried less than 20 percent of pre-pandemic numbers, while trains in Los Angeles, Nashville, Philadelphia, and Connecticut were just over 20 percent. Meanwhile, commuter-bus lines in Atlanta, Milwaukee, Boston, Washington, San Francisco, Charlotte, Austin, and Sacramento all carried less than 10 percent of pre-pandemic numbers. Continue reading →

January Driving 7.8% below Pre-Pandemic Miles

By | | Transportation, Useful Data
1 Comment

Americans drove more than 240 billion vehicle-miles in January 2022, according to preliminary data released yesterday by the Federal Highway Administration. This was a 7.8 percent decrease from the nearly 261 billion vehicle-miles driving in January 2020. This was the first month in half a year that driving was less than the same month before the pandemic.

Driving thus follows the same pattern as other modes of travel, declining in January after several months of increases relative to before the pandemic. When compared with December, miles of driving fell by 10.4 percent, compared with 21.9 percent for air travel, 14.0 percent for transit, and 37.8 percent for Amtrak. These declines must have been due to concerns about the omicron variant of the coronavirus. Continue reading →

Densification Was a Communist Plot

By | | City planning, Housing
7 Comments

Can there be any doubt that one of the reasons why the U.S.S.R. favored high-density apartment buildings for everyone in the Ideal Communist City is that it would be easier to bomb them if ever anyone tried to revolt? And one of the reasons why the communists favored mass transit over private automobiles is that it would be more difficult for people to escape such attacks?

Soviet-style apartment in Mariupol after Russian bombardment has damaged most of them. YouTube video by SkyNews.

After 9/11, we were warned by World War II historian Stephen Ambrose:” Don’t bunch up.” Yet urban planners in the United States, supported by fellow travelers in the Cato Institute and Mercatus Center, successfully persuaded the California legislature to pass laws that will make that state’s urban areas, already the densest in the nation, even denser. The people supporting these laws either have no understanding of history or are deliberately trying to make America more vulnerable to its enemies, or at least easier to control from the top down. Continue reading →

Attempting to Ward off Cyber Attacks

By | | Housekeeping
1 Comment

Since the Antiplanner is vital to national security, I was disturbed to learn that people with .ru domain names have signed up and attempted to take control of this web site. In fact, there are nearly 10,000 .ru users.

A few years ago, I realized that nearly 50,000 users had signed up, and while it is flattering to think that many people were interested in my pearls of wisdom, I was disillusioned to discover that most of them were spammers. At the time I searched in vain for a way to delete those users in bulk without deleting any real users. Instead, I installed a captcha system that supposedly would prevent bots from signing up.

It didn’t do a very good job as the Antiplanner had 156,600 users yesterday. I found a WordPress plug-in that would delete users who have never left a comment, so I tried to use it. It would only let me delete 1,000 at a time, and after deleting 10,000 the system broke down.

Unfortunately, I suspect that it also deleted some real users. If you have been unable to log in, you may have to sign up again as a new user. Please accept my apologies. If anyone is a WordPress expert who can recommend a way to delete spam users, please let me know.

Airlines: Our #2 Source of Mobility

By | | Policy brief, Transportation
2 Comments

Airlines carried Americans 77 percent as many miles of domestic travel in 2021 as they did in 2019, according to data recently released by the Bureau of Transportation Statistics. International air travel was still far short of pre-pandemic levels, being just 29 percent of 2019 numbers. The 578 billion miles of domestic air travel was about the same as in 2013, while the 1,743 miles per capita was slightly more than in 2003.

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

U.S. airlines are, or should be, the envy of the world. They carry Americans far more miles per capita than airlines (or, for that matter, railroads) of almost any other country. Airport infrastructure is in excellent condition: as of 2020, 85 percent of commercial airport runways were in good condition, 13 percent in fair condition, and only 1 percent in poor condition. U.S. airlines’ safety record is second to none, experiencing just 14 fatalities while carrying more than 7 trillion passenger-miles since 2010. And airlines do all this at a profit: while some companies have lost money in some years, the domestic airline industry as a whole earned a profit in every year since 2010. Continue reading →

Prolonging the Climate Crisis

By | | Transportation
11 Comments

It is probably appropriate that climate extremists have named their policies after Roosevelt’s New Deal, a response to the Great Depression that, most economists agree, prolonged that depression. I find myself increasingly skeptical of the climate-change narrative, not because of the data but because the people promoting it seem more interested in social engineering than in reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

Click image to download this report.

A case in point is a recent report from the Climate and Community Project, a “project of the Tides Center.” Full disclosure: the Tides Foundation once gave money to the Thoreau Institute, but they stopped when they figured out I wasn’t a socialist. In any case, the new report proposes “a green new deal for transportation” that will “build just and sustainable communities.” Note that social justice has suddenly become as important as climate change. Continue reading →

Gas Prices and Transit

By | | Transportation
10 Comments

While no Americans are happy about the “special military operation” in Ukraine, transit agencies and advocates are positively giddy about the effect of that operation on gas prices. Despite all their bombast about light rail, bus-rapid transit, and other expensive programs, they know that, historically, the only thing that really boosts transit ridership is rising fuel prices.

How high will prices go — and more important, how long will they remain high? Photo by Chris Yarzab.

The problem with that is that the forces against transit are much stronger than they were before the pandemic, when more than 7 million people a day marched to jobs in big city downtowns. That was transit’s target market, and now it has all but evaporated. Continue reading →