Search Results for: rail

Failing to See the Forest for the Trees

By | | Transportation
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New York University’s Transit Costs Project has issued its final report on why it costs so much to build transit infrastructure in the United States. While some of the answers appear reasonable at first glance, the report suffers from the researchers not asking the right questions.

Click image to download a 26.4-MB PDF of this report.

In its review of Boston’s Green Line, the report notes that “Understaffed agencies lacking experience with large capital construction projects struggle to manage consultants.” One result is less than half the costs of the project went into construction; the rest went to pay consultants. We’ve seen that happen with Honolulu and other rail projects as well. Continue reading →

The Value of VMT

By | | Transportation
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Before the pandemic, there was a mindset among urban planners that driving was bad and the ultimate goal of all of their policies was to reduce vehicle-miles traveled (VMT). That’s why they wanted to build obsolete urban transit systems like light rail and streetcars instead of freeways. That’s why they wanted more people to live in high-density housing projects instead of low-density suburbs. That’s why they wanted to reduce the amount of parking available to residents, shoppers, and others.

Photograph by B137.

So far, the pandemic has not awakened them to the folly of this mindset. Driving has fully recovered and in much of the country people are driving more miles than ever, while transit is little more than half what it was. Instead of acknowledging these changes, cities and regions are writing plans that never mention the pandemic and relying on pre-pandemic data to justify their policies. Continue reading →

You Get What You Pay For

By | | Transportation
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Addis Ababa, the capital of Ethiopia, has a 19.6-mile light-rail system that consists of a north-south line intersecting an east-west line. It cost $475 million, or less than $25 million per mile. That sounds like a good deal compared with U.S. lines now under construction or in planning, the least expensive of which is more than $135 million a mile and the average cost is more than $275 million a mile.

Addis Ababa’s light-rail line. Photo by A.Savin.

There’s just one little problem. Although the light-rail system is just seven years old, it is already suffering serious maintenance problems. Only eight of the city’s 41 light-rail trains are functional, and the city has resorted to operating just every other day in order to do track maintenance. The city estimates it needs $60 million to restore the system to full capacity, which it doesn’t have. Continue reading →

2022 Transit 62.0% of 2019

By | | Transportation, Useful Data
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Urban transit carried just over half a billion trips in the United States in December, and just under 6 billion in 2022 as a whole, according to December 2022 transit data released Monday by the Federal Transit Administration. December’s ridership was 66.0 percent of December 2019 while the calendar year’s was 62.0 percent.

Transit trips are from the National Transit Database; Amtrak passenger-miles are from Monthly Performance Reports; airline passenger data are from the Transportation Security Administration; and highway vehicle-mile data are from the Traffic Volume Trends. December highway data will be available in a week or so.

Meanwhile, after reaching above 90 percent of 2019 numbers in November for the first time since the pandemic, Amtrak numbers fell to 80 percent in December, its lowest, measured as a percentage of 2019, since May. Airline passenger numbers fell a little bit as well, but only from 94.3 to 93.3 percent of 2019. December highway numbers should be available soon. Continue reading →

Transportation After COVID-19

By | | Transportation, Urban areas
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Minnesota transportation agencies need to reinvent themselves if they are to survive after the pandemic, according to a new report published yesterday by the Center of the American Experiment, Minnesota’s free-market think tank. Off the Rails: Minnesota Transportation After COVID-19 says that the world has changed so much that any transportation plans written before 2020 will no longer make sense (if they ever did).

Click image to download a 3.1-MB PDF of this 48-page report.

In case you can’t read the fine print on the image above, the report was written by yours truly and so all of its themes — increased numbers of telecommuters, the follies of light rail, the importance of funding transport out of user fees, not to mention more than a dozen brightly colored charts — will be familiar to Antiplanner readers. But in some respects, the Twin Cities’ post-pandemic experiences have been more extreme than most. Continue reading →

$5.15 Billion a Mile for Caltrains

By | | Transportation
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Caltrains announced last week that the cost of the last 1.3 miles of its commuter-rail line into San Francisco would cost $6.7 billion, a 34-percent increase from an estimate made in 2015. The only rail construction that has cost more per mile is New York City’s Eastside Access project.

The planners of San Francisco’s Transbay Transit Center had taxpayer money to burn so they put a huge city park on top of the station. Photo by Fullmetal2887.

The city is constructing this based on the ridiculous notion that all rail lines should connect together. Currently, the Caltrain commuter trains from San Jose terminate near the site of the historic Southern Pacific train station in San Francisco, while the BART line from Oakland goes to what was once called the Transbay Terminal but now (after a $2 billion upgrade) is called the Salesforce Transit Center after the cloud computing company that paid $110 million for naming rights. Continue reading →

Fabricating Reality with ChatGPT

By | | News commentary
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Last month, a non-profit group called OpenAI made available an artificial intelligence program called ChatGPT that has educators worried that students will use it to write fake essays. ChatGPT relies on information it can find on the World Wide Web up through the end of 2021 and is able to converse on a wide range of subjects.

When it first came out, I was doing research on the history of steam locomotive technology for my other blog, Streamliner Memories. I asked it some questions that I already knew the answers to and it made some reasonably intelligent replies. Continue reading →

The Bureau of Transportation Deceptions

By | | Transportation
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Last Friday, the Bureau of Transportation Statistics, which keeps track of all kinds of transportation, released 2020 data on government revenues and expenditures in transportation. The new data, however, are based on a radically altered definition of revenues and should be rejected.

Under the Bureau of Transportation Statistics’ new definition of revenues, transit revenues more than tripled and highway revenues nearly doubled.

The agency has kept track of this information for many years, with revenues being recorded in table 3-32 and expenditures in table 3-35 of an annual report called National Transportation Statistics. In the latest tables, the numbers go back to 2007, but in earlier editions (such as the 1995 edition), they go back as far as 1980 (in five-year intervals). Continue reading →

An Opportunity to Reinvent an Obsolete Industry

By | | Transportation
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As illustrated by the tweet from Stanford economics professor Nick Bloom, it’s beginning to sink in that transit ridership is not going to recover to more than about 65 percent of what it was before the pandemic. However, instead of raising “concerns over the survival of public transit systems,” we should see this as an opportunity to reinvent an industry that was already obsolete years before the pandemic.

The 2021 National Transit Database reveals that many transit agencies are spending as much per rider as it would cost to send those riders in taxis, Uber, or Lyft. Counting both operating and capital costs, the average cost per light-rail trip was more than $40. Even just counting operating costs, the average cost per light-rail rider in San Jose was more than $53 and in Pittsburgh was almost $49. Continue reading →

Engines of Equality

By | | Transportation
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A recent article in the New York Times is off-target when it calls automobiles “turbo-boosted engines of inequality.” The article points to some genuine problems, but those problems are not the fault of automobiles. Nor is “accessible public transportation” the solution, as the article claims in its conclusion.

The most egalitarian transportation since the first warlord tying a horse to the first chariot made fast transport accessible only to the elites. Image from 1985 Yugo brochure scanned by Tony DiGirolamo.

The truth is that automobiles are the most egalitarian form of transportation since walking. Horses, intercity trains, streetcars, you name it, were always used mainly by the relatively wealthy and were inaccessible to the poor, especially in cities. It was only when Henry Ford developed the moving assembly line that mechanized transportation became available to the vast majority of people. Continue reading →