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Infrastructure Politics

By | | News commentary, Transportation
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Last Monday, I predicted that if Glenn Youngkin won the Virginia governorship, Republicans in Congress would demand more cuts from the infrastructure bill. Nancy Pelosi apparently read my post, as she had the House hastily vote on the infrastructure bill just a few days after Youngkin’s victory. By passing the Senate bill unamended, Pelosi gave fiscal conservatives no opportunities to try to change the bill in conference. Before the Virginia election, Pelosi had been delaying a vote in order to pressure centrists to support the $3.5 trillion non-infrastructure bill, which will now be much harder to pass.

Passage of the infrastructure bill means tens of billions of dollars will be spent on needless and wasteful projects like this Seattle-area light-rail project. Photo by SounderBruce.

As passed, the infrastructure bill is really two bills: first, a reauthorization of federal spending on highways and transit; and second entirely new spending on highways, transit, Amtrak, electric vehicles, airports, ports, clean water, clean energy, and broadband. This entirely new spending is almost entirely unnecessary as the infrastructure crisis was mostly made up in order to get Congress do what it always does, which is throw money at problems. Continue reading →

Transit 2020: The First Year of the Pandemic

By | | Policy brief, Transportation
6 Comments

Transit agencies in 2020 carried 40 percent fewer riders than in 2019, according to data released last Friday by the Federal Transit Administration. To do so, they provided 86 percent as much service (measured in vehicle miles or hours) at 97 percent of the cost.

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

According to the database, transit carried 5.9 billion trips in 2020. We know from the FTA’s monthly reports that transit carried 4.5 billion trips in calendar year 2020. The difference is that data in the annual database are based on transit agency fiscal years, not the calendar year. Continue reading →

Front Range Boondoggle

By | | Transportation
4 Comments

The pandemic has made people reluctant to climb aboard any form of mass transportation. But it hasn’t stopped the state of Colorado from planning an idiotic Front Range passenger train that is proposed to connect Fort Collins and Pueblo, with Denver in between. In June, Governor Jared Polis signed a bill creating a taxing district to pay for the train’s inevitable losses. Last week, the Colorado Transportation Commission agreed to spend $1.9 million on a viability study (whose total cost will be twice that).

Although the endpoints are known, the exact route of the proposed rail line through Denver has yet to be determined. Click image for a larger view.

The Denver Post, which was a major cheerleader for Denver’s $4.9 billion FasTracks plan until it became the $7.9 billion FasTracks plan, by which time it was too late, is now a major cheerleader for the Front Range passenger train plan. It claims that an Amtrak train between Chicago and Milwaukee “shows what it could be.” Yes, because Fort Collins (population: 170,000) and Pueblo (population: 112,000) are just like Milwaukee (population: 577,000), and Denver (population: 715,000) is just like Chicago (population: 2.75 million). Continue reading →

September Transit 53.6% of Pre-Pandemic Levels

By | | Transportation, Useful Data
1 Comment

Nationwide transit ridership in September was 53.6 percent of September 2019, according to data released yesterday by the Federal Transit Administration. This is the first time since the pandemic began that ridership exceeded half of pre-pandemic numbers.

Airline passenger numbers are from the Transportation Security Administration; Amtrak numbers are from its September performance report.

This compares with 76.3 percent for air travel and 67.1 percent for Amtrak. The number of miles of driving in September will not be related for another week or so. Transit’s low ridership numbers are in spite of transit agencies providing more than 86 percent as much service (measured in vehicle-revenue miles) as in September 2019. Continue reading →

Why Your Amazon Delivery Was Late

By | | Transportation
4 Comments

Emmy-award-winning journalist Adam Housley posted this tweet on Saturday, suggesting that thievery from containers on trains in Los Angeles is a common occurrence.

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The Pomona Police Department reported a couple of months ago that it found $100,000 worth of goods stolen from a container train in a homeless camp near Union Pacific’s main line. UP trains had been “a target for thefts over the past several months” so police concluded these goods came from one of those trains. Continue reading →

Colorado’s Climate Change Roadmap

By | | Transportation
7 Comments

If you believe that human-caused climate change is a serious problem, then you would naturally support Colorado Governor Jaren Polis’ Greenhouse Gas Pollution Reduction Roadmap. But if you truly believe that human-caused climate change is a serious problem, then there is no way you should support this plan, as the transportation portion, at least, will cost Coloradans a colossal amount of money but have almost no effect on greenhouse gases.

Click image to download a 3.3-MB PDF of this plan.

The plan calls for a 10 percent reduction in total driving by 2030. Colorado’s population grew by 15 percent between 2010 and 2020, and it is likely to grow 15 percent more by 2030, which means the plan is really calling for a 25-percent reduction in per capita driving. Continue reading →

A Data-Driven Approach to Transportation Safety

By | | Policy brief, Transportation
4 Comments

About 20,160 people died in traffic accidents in the first half of 2021, according to an early estimate released last week by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA). This puts this year on track to being the first since 2007 to have more than 40,000 annual fatalities.

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

Historically, fatality rates peaked at more than 450 per billon vehicle miles in 1909, and then declined fairly steadily to 10.1 in 2014. The 2021 rate of 13.4 represents a 33 percent increase over 2014 levels. This increase is partly due to changes in driving behavior during the pandemic, but rates had increased even before the pandemic, reaching 11.4 fatalities per billion miles in 2016. Although the evidence isn’t clear, many experts believe much of the increase, both before and during the pandemic, was due to people being distracted by smart phones. Continue reading →

Infrastructure Bill Deferred

By | | News commentary, Transportation
3 Comments

Rather than pass the Senate-approved $1.2-trillion infrastructure bill, the House of Representatives decided to punt, instead extending existing surface transportation programs until December 3. At issue was not the infrastructure bill, which most people thought would pass, but the $3.5-trillion social-spending bill, which seemed much less likely to pass.

Progressives in the House demanded that both bill be voted on at the same time, effectively holding the infrastructure bill hostage in order to promote passage of the social-spending bill.

While the infrastructure bill is dubious enough, it has the advantage that roughly half the spending in the bill is one-time only, while the other half is merely an extension of spending that is already happening. The social-spending bill, however, proposes to create several major new entitlement programs, such as free child care, medicare expansion, and housing programs. The $3.5-trillion cost is only the estimated cost for the first ten years of the programs, but like Obamacare and other entitlements, they are likely to go on for many years beyond that. Continue reading →

Environmentalists Sue to Save Ferret

By | | Fish & wildlife, Follow up
2 Comments

Three environmental groups filed a lawsuit yesterday challenging the Fish & Wildlife Service for its failure to recover the black-footed ferret, an animal the agency once called “the most endangered mammal in North America.” The three groups — WildEarth Guardians, Western Watersheds Project, and Rocky Mountain Wild — argue that the agency has not taken the steps needed to save the ferret in Wyoming.

Black-footed ferrets peer out of a burrow that was probably dug by prairie dogs. The ferrets rely on prairie dogs for both food and shelter. Fish & Wildlife Service photo by Kimberly Fraser.

As I noted in a recent policy brief (and as described in much more detail in this 1996 report), the ferret relies on prairie dogs for both food and shelter, but ranchers have convinced both the federal and state governments to poison prairie dogs by the tens of thousands. For the first decade after the Endangered Species Act was passed, the leading poisoner of prairie dogs was the Fish & Wildlife Service itself, whose aggressive anti-prairie dog campaigns had already eliminated the animal from 95 to 98 percent of its historic range. Continue reading →

One Boondoggle Down, Hundreds to Go

By | | Transportation
2 Comments

New York Governor Kathy Hochul has killed the LaGuardia AirTrain, a ridiculously expensive people mover that had been supported by her predecessor, Andrew Cuomo. “I don’t feel obligated to accept what I have inherited,” Hochul said, noting that there were lower-cost alternatives that had been ignored by Cuomo and rejected by the Port Authority.

This bridge has become a symbol of Portland, but it really should be read as a symbol of the Portland light-rail mafia‘s willingness to spend $1.5 billion on a new light-rail line that added no net new riders to the region’s transit system, which carried fewer riders the year after it opened than the year before. Photo by Steve Morgan.

Of course, those lower-cost alternatives are still going to cost a lot of money, and spending that money is problematic in an age when many people are no longer comfortable in crowded conditions. As noted here earlier this month, New York City offices have some of the highest vacancy rates in decades, and even offices that are still under lease may be nearly empty as the number of people entering those offices is down by more than 70 percent. Downtown groups have released similarly dire reports for Seattle and Washington, DC, among other cities. Continue reading →