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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 →

Hybrid Offices in Manhattan

By | | Transportation
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As of the end of April, 72 percent of Manhattan office workers were back at work in their offices. Most, however, were working there only three days a week or less. On any given weekday, only 38 percent of offices were occupied, according to a survey released by the Partnership for New York City. Of the ones who have returned to their offices, more are working there just two days a week than any other schedule.

Currently, working at home full-time is most common among former Manhattan office workers, followed by working in the office two days a week.

The Partnership survey also asked how employers expect people to be working in September. By that time, about a third expect to work in offices three days a week, but 14 percent still expect to work at home full time. On any given weekday, slightly less than half of offices will be occupied. Continue reading →

The Automobile Won

By | | Policy brief, Transportation
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Last month, anti-automobile activists led by the Congress for the New Urbanism announced the formation of a national Freeway Fighters Network. The network opposes new freeways and freeway expansions and wants to shift freeway money to other forms of transportation. Among other things, they object to new freeway capacity because it induces more highway travel.

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

I have a message for these anti-auto activists: The war on the automobile is over. The automobile won. More accurately, auto drivers and users won. It is time for those engaged in this war to stop wasting their time, and everyone else’s, and start doing something productive. People concerned about the impacts of the automobile should give up trying to reduce driving, which has never worked, and instead encourage new automobiles and highways that are safer, cleaner, and more energy efficient.

Continue reading →

Seattle’s Sound Transit Is Officially Insane

By | | Transportation
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Mariya Frost, of the Washington Policy Center, has alerted me that Seattle should be added to the list of cities with transit projects gone wild. Sound Transit, the region’s rail transit authority, has raised the projected costs of projects built between 2017 and 2046 from $54 billion to $142 billion.

An artist’s impression of a planned Seattle light-rail line. Notice that the artist didn’t project any decline in automobiles or driving. Photo from Siemens.

Most of the increase is for the cost of building 62 miles of light-rail lines. Seattle already had the most-expensive light-rail system in the nation, but the latest costs are completely insane. Continue reading →

Housing Policy Debate

By | | Housing
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Last week, the Antiplanner participated in a Federalist Society debate over housing issues, which can now be downloaded as a podcast. Leading off the debate was Richard Rothstein, an NAACP-affiliated attorney whose book, The Color of Law, argued that zoning and lending has historically discriminated against blacks. His presentation claimed that such discrimination continues in today’s suburbs and his solution was to rezone the suburbs to allow lower-cost housing such as garden apartments and townhouses.

Land-use policies that artificially increase housing shortages force more people to live in apartments when they would rather live in single-family homes. Photo by Pubdog.

Next came Vanderbilt University law professor Christopher Serkin, who said that he personally favored higher density development but noted that most Americans did not. He was followed by Notre Dame law school professor Nichole Garnett, who was also a little skeptical about planning for density. Continue reading →

Telecommuting Wins over Returning to Offices

By | | Transportation
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The most credible estimates say that at least 20 percent of workers will continue to work at home on any given day after the pandemic, up from less than 6 percent before the pandemic. The share of remote workers is likely to be much higher in Silicon Valley, where a lot of workers do jobs that don’t require daily office visits and high housing prices give workers extra incentives to want to live elsewhere.

Last June, Apple got some push-back from employees when it announced it wanted them to return to the office at least three days a week. Plans to return to offices were delayed by further COVID waves, but last month employees were still threatening to quit if forced to return to the office three days a week. Continue reading →

Transit Construction Costs Run Wild

By | | Transportation
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America’s transit industry has been heavily criticized for spending so much on construction. Yet the industry continues to roll up cost overrun after cost overrun for projects that should have been too expensive to build in the first place.

VTA’s planned single-bore tunnel into downtown San Jose. Figure by VTA.

Take, for example, the BART line to San Jose, which is being planned and built by the Santa Clara Valley Transportation Authority (VTA), which has never displayed much competence in the past. Rather than cut and cover two small tunnels into downtown San Jose, which is the usual practice, VTA wants to bore one gigantic tunnel three to four stories underground. The 6-mile line was originally projected to cost $4.1 billion, but last October the Federal Transit Administration (FTA) announced that it expected the cost to be $9.1 billion, or $1.5 billion a mile, and the agency expressed doubts that VTA had the funds to cover this cost overrun. Continue reading →

Transit’s Zombie Future

By | | Policy brief, Transportation, Useful Data
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March transit ridership pushed up above 60 percent of pre-pandemic numbers for the first time since the pandemic began, according to data released by the Federal Transit Administration last week. Ridership was boosted by the fact that March 2022 had two more weekdays than March 2019. Since April 2022 has one fewer weekday than April 2019, ridership is likely to dip back down below 60 percent in April.

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

Transit is still lagging well behind other modes of travel. Amtrak carried 68 percent as many passenger-miles as in March 2019 while the airlines carried 88 percent. Domestic air travel was probably above 90 percent, but data sorting domestic from international travel won’t be available for a couple of months. Miles of driving in March will be available in about a week but are likely to be more than 100 percent of March 2019 miles.

Continue reading →

LA Metro Celebrates Losing 138 Million Bus Riders

By | | Transportation
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Los Angeles Metro recently celebrated the tenth anniversary of the opening of its Expo light-rail line. Construction on the line began in 2006, a year in which LA Metro buses carried 409 million trips, and the line opened in April, 2012.

The LA Expo line shortly after it opened. Photo by Gary Leonard for Los Angeles Metro.

To help pay for the Expo and other new light-rail lines, LA Metro cut bus service by nearly a quarter between 2006 and 2019. This contributed to the loss of a third of its bus riders, or nearly 138 million trips per year. The Expo line, meanwhile, boosted light-rail ridership by about 2 million annual trips, enough to make up 1.5 percent of the loss in bus ridership. Continue reading →