Search Results for: rail

Airlines: Our #2 Source of Mobility

By | | Policy brief, Transportation
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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 →

Gas Prices and Transit

By | | Transportation
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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 →

Won’t Anyone Stop This Ridiculous Project?

By | | Transportation
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Less than a month ago, the California High-Speed Rail Authority released its latest business plan admitting that its previous cost estimates were too low. Now the agency has released an even newer document admitting that the cost of building the line from California’s Central Valley to the Bay Area will be 40 percent more than estimated in the business plan.

Click image to go to download page for this environmental impact report.

This latest document is an environmental impact statement that is literally thousands of pages long. It reveals, among many other things, that constructing this segment of the line will release close to 400 million kilograms of carbon dioxide-equivalent gases into the atmosphere. It claims that this cost will be quickly repaid by the savings from reduced CO2 emissions once the trains are operating, but that’s based on unrealistically high ridership projections along with the assumption that neither automobiles nor airplanes will ever be more energy efficient or climate friendly than they were a few years ago. No doubt the state spent millions of dollars on this poorly reasoned document. Continue reading →

Transit Safety: A Matter of Design

By | | Policy brief, Transportation
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Light rail is safe to ride, but it is one of the most dangerous forms of travel in the United States. That’s because most of the people who are killed by light-rail trains aren’t riding them; they are people struck by the trains. According to Federal Transit Administration (FTA) data, 657 fatalities have been associated with light rail since 2002, but only 20 of them were passengers on board the trains.

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

Counting all fatalities, light rail was associated with 15.9 deaths for every billion passenger-miles that it carried. This is much higher than most other transit modes: buses were 4.9; heavy rail was 5.6; commuter rail was 7.6; and streetcars were 11.6. The only mode more dangerous than light rail was what the FTA calls hybrid rail, which is really light rail but powered by Diesels instead of electricity. It was associated with 20.6 deaths per billion passenger-miles. Continue reading →

RTD Still Planning Longmont Boondoggle

By | | Transportation
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Denver’s Regional Transportation District (RTD) has hired HDR to “study the feasibility of implementing a ‘peak service’ rail schedule between Denver Union Station and downtown Longmont.” HDR has never seen a rail project it didn’t think was feasible. Among other things, it lied to Atlanta, Cincinnati, Salt Lake City and several other cities about the economic development benefits of streetcars in order to get them to hire it to help build new streetcar lines.

The green line is the existing bus-rapid transit line while the circuitous orange line is the proposed rail route to Longmont. The thick grey lines are other rail transit routes that are nearly all in service today. If Longmont were really a worthwhile destination, the logical thing for RTD to do is extend the bus-rapid transit line to Longmont. But Longmont officials were promised a train and they demand to have a train.

Now RTD wants it to study a commuter-rail line to Longmont, a city northwest of Denver. In 2004, RTD persuaded voters to approve FasTracks, a plan to build six new rail transit lines. One of those lines was to Longmont and RTD convinced Longmont officials to support the 2004 ballot measure by promising them a train. Continue reading →

Transit Crime Rates on the Rise

By | | Policy brief, Transportation
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After a woman died when she was shoved in front of a subway train in January, New York Mayor Eric Adams announced a major action plan aimed at reducing transit crimes. The weekend following his announcement, at least six people were stabbed on the subway system. A few days after that, a woman was robbed and her skull fractured after being struck with a hammer in a New York subway station. A few hours later, a man was stabbed in the neck at a Brooklyn subway station and someone set fire to a shopping cart in a station in the Bronx.

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

New York is not the only transit system to be suffering from violent crimes. Last month, a man was shot to death on the San Francisco BART system. BART had seen violent crimes more than double in the years before the pandemic, and crime numbers remained high after the pandemic began. Continue reading →

Portland Downtown Devastated by COVID

By | | Regional planning, Transportation
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The number of people working in downtown Portland dropped from more than 103,000 in mid-2019 to 13,000 in mid-2020, according to a State of the Economy report recently published by the Portland Business Alliance. The report doesn’t actually show numbers, but the chart below, which I took from the report, can be used to make pretty close estimates.

This chart is taken from page 3 of Portland Business Alliance’s State of the Economy report. Click image for a larger view.

By the end of 2021, the downtown area had recovered to about 34,000 workers, still less than a third of pre-pandemic numbers. The pandemic may not be the only factor depressing downtown employment: Black Lives Matter protests that began in May 2020 resulted in “numerous instances of arson, looting, vandalism, and injuries,” many of which affected downtown businesses and will probably continue to do so well into the future. Continue reading →

A New Level of Transit Incompetence

By | | Transportation
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It seems like we are getting more lessons about massive cost overruns for transit projects every couple of weeks. Last week, the Federal Transit Administration issued a “scathing report claiming that the Santa Clara Valley Transportation Authority (VTA) was being “overly optimistic” and “misleading” in its estimates of the costs of building a BART subway to San Jose.

Despite objections from critics, VTA decided to bore an 86-foot deep, 48-foot diameter tunnel rather than build two shallower and smaller tunnels using the cut-and-cover method, which would have been less expensive and saved passengers’ time.

The six-mile-long project was originally estimated to cost $5.6 billion (which is itself ridiculous) and be done in 2029, but the FTA now predicts it will cost as much as $9.1 billion and won’t be complete until 2034. This is $1.5 billion a mile for a transit line that is expected to carry so few riders that early estimates predicted it would cost more than $100 for each new transit rider carried. VTA’s response doesn’t refute anything the FTA said, but basically said it is too late to fix the problems so taxpayers would have to live with them (and pay for them). Continue reading →

Brightline Carnage Continues

By | | Transportation
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Brightline, the privately operated passenger train in Florida, had five accidents that killed three people last week.

  • On February 13, a man was killed when he drove his car around the lowered crossing gates and was hit by a train in Lake Worth Beach.
  • On February 15, a pedestrian was killed when he was struck by a Brightline train in Hallandale Beach.

Brightline posted this video taken from the train that struck a car last week to prove that the accident wasn’t its fault. What it shows is that a freight train had gone through the crossing and an impatient motorist drove around the gates unable to see that a passenger train was coming because his view was blocked by the freight. The accident would have been prevented if Brightline had installed full-width crossing gates instead of gates that covered only half the width of the street.

  • Also on February 15, a woman and her baby narrowly avoided injury when a Brightline train struck her car in Delray Beach.
  • On February 16, a man suffered “incapacitating injuries” when a Brightline train struck his car, also in Lake Worth Beach.
  • On February 19, a man walking on the tracks was killed when he was hit by a Brightline train in Delray Beach.

Continue reading →

December Driving 2.7% Above 2019

By | | Transportation, Useful Data
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Americans drove 2.7 percent more miles in December 2021 than in December 2019, according to the latest traffic volume data published by the Federal Highway Administration last Friday. According to these data, December was the seventh month in a row that driving exceeded driving in the same month in 2019.

This is a revision from previous reports because the Federal Highway Administration revised the national miles-traveled for December 2019 (shown on page 2 of the report). The preliminary estimate in 2019 was that Americans drove 273.8 billion vehicle miles in December. In 2020, this was revised downwards to 272.2 billion. But this report, for 2021, revised the December 2019 miles downwards even more to 261.8 billion. Continue reading →