Search Results for: rail

Purple Line’s Costs Up 98%, Delayed 4 More Years

By | | Transportation
5 Comments

Maryland’s Purple Line is now expected to cost more than $3.9 billion to construct, up from under $2.0 billion at the time the line was approved, according to a report from the Maryland Department of Transportation. The $3.9 billion includes a $250 million settlement with previous contractors and $219 million spent by the state on the project after the previous contractor quit. The opening date has also been pushed back to fall, 2026, compared with the original date of mid-2020 and the most-recent date of late 2022.

Maryland Governor Larry Hogan and then-Secretary of Transportation Peter Rahn have a laugh at the expense of the taxpayers when they announced that the state would build a “cost-effective and streamlined version of the Purple Line” in 2015. Memo to Gov. Hogan: Light rail is never cost-effective especially when it is predicted to make congestion worse. Photo by Purple Line Transit Constructors.

Like Honolulu’s rail line, the Purple Line is a project that should never have been approved. Even the Federal Transit Administration said it was not worth building until the state fabricated new, ridiculously high ridership estimates. Now that construction has begun, state officials intend to throw good money after bad no matter what the cost. Continue reading →

Bus Companies Recovering

By | | Transportation
3 Comments

The nation’s private bus industry is recovering from the pandemic, reports the Chaddick Institute, which has followed the bus industry for nearly two decades. Examples of this recovery include:

One sign of recovery is the introduction of the Jet bus, a first-class service between New York and DC which has just 14 motion-cancelling seats aboard each coach.

  • Fifteen different carriers are once again operating buses in the New York-Washington corridor;
  • New, first-class bus services are being offered by Texas’ Red Coach in October and the NY-DC Jet (which promises the smoothest possible rides thanks to”motion cancelling technology”) in November;
  • A variety of bus companies, including Adirondack, Burlington, Martz, and New York Trailways, Jefferson, and Peter Pan have increased their bus frequencies and services since July 2021;
  • FlixMobility’s purchase of Greyhound, showing that it is optimistic about the future of intercity bus services.

Comprising more than 120 pages, the comprehensive report covers all the key sectors in the North African state, identifying their key opportunities and challenges, the major clients and contractors, and their current state following the conflict. “From housing and hospitals to roads and railways, there is considerable underdevelopment viagra sildenafil mastercard see description of existing infrastructure which will require substantial investment in the medium to long term. In some cases, dysfunction may be cialis 5 mg http://www.learningworksca.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/Divided_We_Fail.pdf a fleeting side effect of treatment. It is not possible to determine whether these events were directly related to buy caverta online .It may viagra online canadian cause other side effects besides those listed on this sheet. The dye viagra samples after injunction will give a warm sensation. Continue reading →

November Transit Reaches 56.2% of Pre-Pandemic Riders

By | | Transportation, Useful Data
1 Comment

The nation’s transit systems carried 56.2 percent as many riders in November 2021 as in November 2019, according to data released by the Federal Transit Administration on Friday. Though an improvement over October’s 53.5 percent, transit still lags behind the airlines, at 84.0 percent, and Amtrak, at 76.6 percent.

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

Transit bus ridership numbers were up to 60.5 percent of pre-pandemic levels while rail numbers reached 52.2 percent. Ridership has still failed to reach 50 percent of pre-pandemic numbers in Detroit (35.4%), San Francisco-Oakland (45.0%), Washington DC (45.5%), Sacramento (48.4%), San Jose (49.1%), and Chicago (49.8%). At the other extreme, ridership has recovered the most in Los Angeles (72.1%), San Diego (64.7%), Tampa-St. Petersburg (63.9%), Las Vegas (63.4%), Dallas-Ft. Worth (62.6%), Houston (61.2%), and San Antonio (60.6%). The New York urban area, which produces about 45 percent of all transit numbers in the U.S., was slightly above average at 58.3 percent. Continue reading →

Brightline Still a Killer

By | | Transportation
20 Comments

Two people died last week when their car was struck by a Brightline train in Aventura, Florida. That made a total of five fatalities to Brightline trains in December alone. Railroad officials were quick to blame the latest accident on the auto driver, who drove “around the gates, which were down, flashing and bells ringing, signaling an approaching train.”

Google street view at or near the location where two people were killed in their car last week while trying to cross Brightline tracks. Not only do the crossing gates not cover the entire width of the road, there are no fences to keep pedestrians off the rail right of way.

“Americans are morons,” a railroad conductor commented on a Jalopnik article about the accident. But who is the moron: the person who drove around the crossing gates or the person who decided to run 79-mph passenger trains on tracks whose crossing gates had been installed when the only trains running on those tracks were 40-mph freights? Continue reading →

Transit Agencies Can’t Spend Money Fast Enough

By | | Transportation
3 Comments

You have to feel sorry for transit agencies. Congress gave them $69 billion COVID relief funds and $40 billion in the infrastructure bill on top of a $14 billion annual federal subsidy. But, due to labor shortages, agencies can’t find enough workers to drive around their nearly empty buses and trains.

The Washington Metrorail 7000-series cars don’t look much different from earlier series of cars. But, in addition to falling off the tracks a lot, they also come with the “feature” that they can’t be operated in tandem with earlier cars, whereas all earlier cars were compatible with one another. Another great example of your tax dollars at work. Photo by Swagging.

This threatens “the recovery of city life,” warns the Washington Post. Give me a break. Most workers aren’t going back to work in the cities and most of those who are don’t want to take transit. For some reason, though, reporters think that transit, unlike any private business, should be exempt from having to cut back service just because few people use it. Continue reading →

The New York Subway Was Never Private

By | | Transportation
2 Comments

My friend Scott Beyer, who calls himself a market urbanist, has his heart in the right place but often has his facts wrong. He thinks he believes in free markets, but he loves transit so much that he can’t accept that, in a true free market, most transit would disappear.

New York City subway construction, entirely paid for by taxpayers, in 1901.

His latest article asks if America will “get private subways (again)?” The article makes it clear that he believes the New York City subways were built with private money. Nothing could be further from the truth. Continue reading →

U.S. Road Conditions and Performance in 2020

By | | Policy brief, Transportation
3 Comments

While Americans drove their cars only 84 percent as many miles in 2020 as in 2019, according to data recently published by the Federal Highway Administration, they drove semi-trucks 101 percent as many miles. These and other data are from the 2020 Highway Statistics, an annual compilation of data on the condition, use, and financial status of the nation’s highway network.

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

Unlike the annual National Transit Database, which the Federal Transit Administration releases as a group of two dozen or so tables together each fall, the Federal Highway Administration releases Highway Statistics incrementally. To date, it has released most of the 2020 tables relating to the extent and performance of highways, but very few financial tables. This policy brief will review some of the non-financial tables that have been released. Continue reading →

Amtrak’s Revolving Door

By | | Transportation
2 Comments

Amtrak announced last week that its current chief executive officer, William Flynn, will retire in January and be replaced by Stephen Gardner. Gardner thus will become the company’s fifth CEO in six years.

Amtrak’s new CEO will oversee the spending of $30 billion to improve the Northeast Corridor and another $30 billion or more to increase service in other parts of the country. Photo by Simon Brugel.

Six years ago, Joseph Boardman had been one of Amtrak’s longest-serving CEOs, having been hired in 2008. But there were reports that he suffered temper tantrums and profanity-laced tirades to subordinates. Many people were happy to see him go when the board of directors replaced him with Charles “Wick” Moorman in late 2016. Continue reading →

Begger-Thy-Neighbor Shinkansen to Open in 2022

By | | Transportation
6 Comments

The West Kyushu Shinkansen or high-speed rail line is nearing completion and will open in 2022, a few years late. Construction of the 41-mile (66-kilometer) line began way back in 2012 and is expected to cost $5.44 billion, or more than $130 million per mile. The line isn’t connected to any other high-speed rail line and offers some insights into rail politics.

The West Kyushu route is the tiny dotted line on the far left of this map.

Kyushu is the third largest Japanese island and is located less than a mile from Honshu, the main island. The two islands were connected by a conventional railroad tunnel under the Kanmon Straits in 1942, by a highway tunnel in 1958, a highway bridge in 1973, and a high-speed rail tunnel in 1975. For what it’s worth, I’ve been through both the conventional and high-speed rail tunnels but can’t say much about them because it was too dark to see. Continue reading →

Reducing Greenhouse Gases from Flying

By | | Transportation
11 Comments

Rail advocates say we need to spend hundreds of billions of dollars on high-speed rail to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions from flying. But there is probably a more cost-effective way of reducing the greenhouse gas emissions from flying, such as using aviation fuel that emits fewer net greenhouse gases.

Of course, there’s no reason to think that high-speed rail would reduce greenhouse gas emissions anyway. The best study on the issue found that the huge amount of greenhouse gases emitted during construction would require 71 years of savings to balance out. But rail lines must be extensively rebuilt every 20 to 30 years, and I don’t see that the study factored the greenhouse gas emissions of such reconstruction into the analysis. Continue reading →