Search Results for: rail

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 →

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 →

Funding Obsolete Transportation

By | | Transportation
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Urban transit carried less than half a percent of passenger-miles during the pandemic, yet received 65 percent of the COVID relief funds given by Congress to the Department of Transportation, says an article published last week by the American Institute of Economic Research. Similarly, Amtrak carried less than 0.05 percent of passenger-miles yet received 4.4 percent of DOT’s COVID relief funds. Meanwhile, zero COVID relief funds went to freight supply-chain systems, which proved to be the real transportation problem resulting from the pandemic.

The North Star commuter train. Photo by Jerry Huddleston.

Thanks to the influx of COVID relief funds, plus $40 billion more for transit in the infrastructure bill, transit agencies are seriously considering expansions of transit services that should be considered failures. For example, Minnesota’s North Star commuter train was expected to carry 3,600 riders per weekday in its first year of operation. It carried only 2,200 weekday riders in 2010, its first full year. By 2019, it was still only carrying 2,700 riders per weekday. Continue reading →

Top Ten Lies in Transportation Projects

By | | Regional planning, Transportation
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Bent Flyvbjerg, who specializes in studying megaprojects, has a new paper describing the “Top Ten Behavioral Biases in Project Management.” Each of these biases are ways in which planners lie to themselves, the public, or both. His basic thesis is that these are not just cognitive biases, or accidentally poor judgments, but are political biases, that is, deliberately poor judgments.

According to the San Diego Association of Governments (SANDAG), 8,000 people turned out to witness the opening of a $2.1 billion waste of money. Photo by SANDAG.

While the paper is interesting and I have no doubt that strategic misrepresentations and other political biases take place, I have to wonder why they do. The reason I am surprised is that the general public seems to be completely innumerate when it comes to government spending. Continue reading →

Mandates to Reduce Per Capita Vehicle Travel

By | | Transportation
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Governments around the world should forcibly limit automobile travel to 4,000 kilometers (2,500 miles) per person per year, says the ominously named Patrick Moriarty, an engineering professor at Melbourne’s Monash University. That’s 4,000 passenger-kilometers a year, so in the United States, where the average car carries 1.67 people, that’s really 2,400 vehicle-kilometers (about 1,500 vehicle-miles) per person per year.

Wave good-bye to 80 percent of your mobility if Moriarty has his way.

Since Americans drove about 8,900 vehicle-miles or 15,000 passenger-miles per person in 2019, this mandate would require an 83-percent reduction in auto travel. In other countries, it would be less, of course. According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, Australians drove 255 billion kilometers (about 160 billion miles) before the pandemic. Assuming 10 percent of that was heavy trucks, buses, and motorcycles (as it is in the U.S.), then that represents about 6,000 miles of automobile driving per person. Moriarty’s proposed mandate would reduce that by a mere 75 percent. Continue reading →

St. Louis Plans More Transit Spending

By | | Transportation
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St. Louis, whose transit system carried fewer riders in 2019 than before it built its first light-rail line, is once again planning for a new transit line. The existing light-rail system is mainly oriented east and west, and city officials are talking about building a north-south light-rail or bus-rapid transit line.

The Shiloh-Scott extension added 3.5 miles to St. Louis’ light-rail system in 2003, yet St. Louis transit carried 4.5 percent fewer bus and rail riders in 2004 than it had carried in 2002. Photo by Matthew Black.

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St. Louis Streetcar May Live Again

By | | Transportation
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Everyone from the Wall Street Journal to Reason magazine to Planetizen seems to be worried about the future of the St. Louis Loop Trolley. Nearly everyone in St. Louis agrees that it was a failure, but the Federal Transit Administration has demanded that the city keep running it or repay the $37 million in federal funds used to build it.

The trolley trundles down Delmar Boulevard. Photo by Paul Sableman.

There is supposed to be a good reason for the federal “claw-back” policy: if local officials know they will be required to fund operations, they might be reluctant to ask for federal funds to build a project in the first place. Unfortunately, elected officials have time horizons measured in election cycles, so they really don’t think far enough ahead to worry about operating costs. Continue reading →

The Cincinnati Nightmare

By | | Transportation
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“Hey!” says someone in Cincinnati every few years. “Here’s some obsolete infrastructure that should never have been built in the first place. Let’s spend a few billion dollars finishing it!”

The stuff of nightmares: the unfinished Cincinnati subway. Photo by Jonathan Warren.

They are referring, of course, to the infamous Cincinnati subway. If you’ve never heard of it, it is because it never operated. But if you are transit wonk, you’ve almost certainly heard of it and have probably heard some other transit wonk wax nostalgic about how wonderful it would have been if the city had ever completed it. Continue reading →