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Railroads for Passengers or Freight?

By | | Transportation
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Congress’ decision to give Amtrak $16 billion for adding new passenger service has reopened an old debate: which should get priority over the rails — passenger or freight trains? That debate came out in hearings held by the Surface Transportation Board over Amtrak’s proposal to restart passenger service between New Orleans and Jacksonville that had been shut down in 2005 due to damage from Hurricane Katrina.

In 2016, Amtrak ran a test train to Florida to generate support for the Gulf Coast route. Resistance from the freight railroads has prevented Amtrak from reestablishing this service. Photo by Gracebeliever77.

CSX and Norfolk Southern, the railroads over which Amtrak would operate, says the passenger trains would “unreasonably disrupt” their freight trains in the area, many of which serve the Port of Mobile, Alabama, one of the fifteen largest ports in the country measured by tonnage. Unlike most West Coast ports, the Port of Mobile sees more tonnage exported than imported, and much of the freight in both directions goes over CSX and Norfolk Southern tracks. Continue reading →

Downtowns Don’t Deserve to Be Rescued

By | | Regional planning
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The usually sensible Megan McArdle writes in the Washington Post that “Downtown is in deep trouble.” Where she becomes insensible is that she thinks that is a bad thing, arguing that city governments need to take action to lure businesses back into downtowns.

Chicago has the second-largest downtown in the United States, yet that downtown had only 12.5 percent of the jobs in the Chicago urban area before the pandemic, and even less now.

When otherwise sensible people think of a city, they imagine a dense, job-filled downtown surrounded by lower-density residential areas. Yet, as Washington Post writer Joel Garreau wrote more than 30 years ago, downtowns “are relics of a time past.” In fact, he said, downtown-centered cities were the “nineteenth-century version” of a city, and that “We built cities like that for less than a century.” Continue reading →

Detroit to Blow $1.9 Million on Electric Road

By | | Transportation
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Detroit is installing charging coils under one mile of of one lane of a street in the city so people with electric cars can charge them as they drive. This is a crazy idea that I suspect has no future.

To start with, the city is spending $1.9 million to install the charging coils. As the above video notes, installing them throughout the city would cost billions. Continue reading →

Truckers, Congestion, and Class Conflict

By | | Policy brief, Transportation
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“During the pandemic lockdowns, the email jobs caste [meaning remote workers] loved to talk about essential workers,” observes Marxist writer Malcom Kyeyune, but they now regard those workers with “outright hatred.” His fellow leftists claim to speak for the working class, charges Kyeyune, but in fact the leftist movement and the working-class movement have “divorced.”

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

Kyeyune was writing about the Canadian truckers who object to mandatory vaccinations, but he also mentioned European truckers who protested high fuel taxes a few years ago. In the United States, middle-class progressives have come to depend on truckers to deliver all the stuff they order from Amazon but do everything they can to make the daily lives of those truckers miserable. Continue reading →

BART Outlook Grim Because Managers Dim

By | | Transportation
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The San Francisco Bay Area Rapid Transit District (BART) says that its financial outlook is “grim” and it may have to ask voters for a tax increase to keep running. As of December, BART was still carrying just 25 percent as many passengers as it carried before the pandemic.

BART spent nearly $2 million apiece on 775 of these railcars, which first went into service in 2018. In December 2020, BART halted delivery on the new cars because they were so unreliable.

In a presentation to the agency’s board of directors, staff noted that Congress had given $1.3 billion in COVID relief funds. It has used just about half of that and is burning through the rest at a rate of $25 million a month. At that rate, it has enough to keep going for about two more years. Continue reading →

A Great Opportunity to Spend Your Money

By | | Transportation
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The latest business plan for the California high-speed rail boondoggle estimates costs will be about $5 billion more than the last one, which were already 150 percent higher than the estimates in effect when voters approved the project in 2008. As noted in an AP news report, the latest estimates indicate that “it could take $105 billion to finish the route.”

Click image to download the plan.

Note the word “could.” The state report is actually estimating the cost will be $86.7 billion to $88.2 billion, but admits it could go as high as $105 billion. The previous (2020) plan projected the final cost would be $82.4 billion to $83.6 billion, with an upper limit of $99.9 billion. So the high-speed rail authority has basically added about $5 billion to all of the estimates. Continue reading →

The 15-Minute City: A Idiotic Dream

By | | Regional planning
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One of the arguments against single-family zoning is that separating housing from other uses forces people to drive to shops, work, and other destinations. Urban planners want to redesign cities so that people can walk to most of those destinations. They even have a name for it: the 15-minute city, meaning everyone can reach all of their primary destinations within a 15-minute walk.

Paris is such a walkable city with everything within 15 minutes of every resident, so no one there has to drive at all, right? Photo by Dr Bob Hall.

In a paper published last month, urban analyst Alain Bertaud has demolished this goal. Noting that Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo made this goal a part of her re-election campaign in 2020 and continues to promote it in office, he looked at the city to see what would need to be done to meet this goal. Continue reading →

A New View of Pedestrian Fatalities

By | | Transportation
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As previously discussed here, fatality rates among occupants of automobiles have gone down or stayed constant, but pedestrian fatality rates have alarmingly increased. The best explanation anyone could come up with for this is the rise of smart phones and distracted driving (and walking).

Is distracted driving the main cause of a spike in pedestrian fatalities since 2009?

New data published by the city of Portland suggests an alternative explanation, or at least a contributing factor: homelessness. According to a report issued last week by the Portland Bureau of Transportation, 70 percent of pedestrian fatalities in 2021 were homeless people. San Jose also reports that 20 percent of all 2021 traffic fatalities (which probably means over half of pedestrian fatalities) were homeless. Continue reading →

2021: The Year Transit Failed to Recover

By | | Policy brief, Transportation, Useful Data
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Despite receiving tens of billions of dollars in support from Congress, the transit industry in 2021 failed to recover most of the riders it lost to the pandemic in 2020. Ridership in 2020 had fallen by 54 percent from 2019 due to the pandemic, and was only 3 percent greater, or 52 percent below 2019 numbers, in 2021, according to data released by the Federal Transit Administration last week.

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

Ridership did improve over the pandemic months of 2020, but not by much. The year 2020 ended with ridership at 38 percent of pre-pandemic levels. It reached 50 percent for the first time in July 2021, slowly climbed to 55 percent in September, and hovered around 55 to 57 percent for the rest of the year. Continue reading →

December Transit Is 56.4% of Pre-COVID Ridership

By | | Transportation, Useful Data
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When measured as a percent of pre-pandemic numbers, transit in December carried 56.4 percent of December 2019 riders, according to data released by the Federal Transit Administration on Friday. This compared with 56.2 percent reported last month for November. These numbers are preliminary as some transit agencies may have been late in reporting ridership totals; the December report revised November ridership upwards by about a percent. This and other corrections are reflected in the chart below, so if December numbers are corrected by similar amounts, the final number may be closer to 58 percent.

Amtrak numbers from its Monthly Performance Report; airline numbers from the Transportation Security Administration. December highway numbers will be available in a week or so.

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