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Why U.S. Infrastructure Is So Expensive

By | | Policy brief, Transportation
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Now that Congress has passed an infrastructure bill, major media outlets are beginning to ask questions about how the money will be spent. Using the Honolulu rail project as an example, the New York Times wants to know why so many infrastructure projects suffer from such large cost overruns. Bloomberg asks similar questions using Boston’s Green Line extension as an example.

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

The Eno Transportation Foundation and Manhattan Institute wonder why projects cost more than in other countries even before the cost overruns. These are all good questions that should have been asked before the bill was passed. Continue reading →

Keeping Poor People In Their Place

By | | Transportation
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California Assemblywoman Cristina Garcia has introduced legislation forbidding the state department of transportation from building or expanding freeways in poor neighborhoods. She noted research showing that freeway expansions allowed more people to travel more, and apparently she doesn’t want to extend such mobility options to low-income people.

Another legislator, state Senator Sydney Kamlager, agreed that the state should focus on “alternative modes of transportation” such as public transit in poor neighborhoods. Transit can’t reach as many places as automobiles and only goes during certain hours of the day, so encouraging poor people to use transit allows more control over when and where they travel.

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Amtrak to Cut Service

By | | Transportation
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Amtrak Joe, meet Vaccination Joe. President Biden’s requirement that all federal workers must be vaccinated by January 4 has led Amtrak to announce that it will have to cut service on some of its routes in anticipation of employees quitting because they don’t want to be vaccinated.

Might not be a lot of vaccinated people eager to work for Amtrak out here.

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New York MTA Spends $1.1 Billion on Overtime

By | | Transportation
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New York’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) is proud to say that it has reduced the amount of overtime it pays its employees from nearly $1.4 billion in 2018 to a little more than $1.1 billion in 2020. That’s still way too much.

MTA spent $24 million installing finger-print ID time clocks such as this one to reduce overtime abuse, but many employees aren’t using them. Image from UKG.

Overtime is a big issue for transit agencies. Many transit employees, from bus drivers to train conductors to maintenance workers, significantly boost their incomes by working overtime. Agencies could save money by hiring more employees, but unions have successfully gone on strike to prevent agencies from doing so. Continue reading →

October Transit 53.5% of 2019 Ridership

By | | Transportation, Useful Data
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Transit ridership in October 2021 was 53.5 percent of October 2019, a slight drop from September’s 53.6 percent, according to data released yesterday by the Federal Transit Administration. Air travel increased from 76.3 percent to 79.7 percent and Amtrak increased from 67.1 percent to 72.2 percent, so transit continues to lag behind other modes.

Amtrak numbers are from Amtrak’s Monthly Performance Report; air travel numbers are from the Transportation Security Administration. Driving numbers should be available in about a week.

Transit agencies offered 80 percent as much service (measured in vehicle-revenue hours) in October 2021 as they did in the same month of 2019. Though this is down from 86 percent in September, this was mainly because October 2019 saw a large increase in service: October 2021 saw 99.6 percent as many vehicle hours as September 2021. Continue reading →

Sutton Mountain Wilderness Yes, Monument No

By | | Policy brief, Public lands
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In November, Oregon senators Jeff Merkley and Ron Wyden introduced legislation to turn Sutton Mountain into a national monument. If you’ve never heard of Sutton Mountain, don’t feel bad: I’ve lived in Oregon all my life and never heard of it until a few months ago. Briefly, Sutton Mountain is a undistinguished summit in eastern Oregon’s Wheeler County that is surrounded by land that is mostly managed by the Bureau of Land Management, which has studied it for potential wilderness status.

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

Sutton Mountain has some natural values that are deserving of wilderness status. But the Merkley-Wyden bill doesn’t protect natural resources: instead, it is an economic development bill. It proposes to create a national monument in the hope that it would attract tourism to the county that has the smallest population in Oregon. As a national monument, activities would be allowed that would be forbidden in a wilderness area, such as the destruction of juniper trees that some ranchers think reduce forage for their cattle. The bill would also transfer roughly more than 1,300 acres of federal land to a town of fewer than 130 people with the expectation that the town would use the land for economic development. Continue reading →

Americans Keep Moving to the Suburbs

By | | Housing, Useful Data
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Remember a few years ago when urban planners had convinced reporters that “the new American dream is living in a city, not owning a house in the suburbs”? That was from 2014, yet Americans have continued to move out of cities and into the suburbs or, increasingly, the exurbs.

In one trend that hasn’t been accelerated by the pandemic, more than two million Americans move from the cities to the suburbs each year. Photo by Wesley Fryer.

According to the latest Census Bureau estimates, since that claim was made in 2014, more than 13.5 million Americans moved out of the “principal cities” in metropolitan areas. Those metropolitan areas have nevertheless grown because 14.0 million Americans moved to the suburbs of those cities. This only includes Americans; the population decline of major cities has been partly mitigated by the 3.2 immigrants from other countries that have moved to those cities. Cities that actually lost population since 2010 were mostly in the rust belt: Baltimore, Buffalo, Chicago, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Milwaukee, Rochester, and Toledo, but also included Baton Rouge, Memphis, and several more. Continue reading →

2020 Transit Commuting Fell to 3.2% of Workers

By | | Transportation, Useful Data
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The share of American workers who took transit to work fell from 5.0 percent in 2019 to 3.2 percent in 2020, according to survey data just released by the Census Bureau. The share of people working at home grew from 5.7 percent to 15.8 percent. These numbers are the average for the year, while the pandemic was only during the last three quarters of the year, so pandemic work-at-home numbers may have been higher.

Due to the difficulty in collecting data during the pandemic, the Census Bureau didn’t do as detailed a survey as it had in previous years. Previous American Community Surveys had produced more than 1,500 tables of data including such information as how people commuted to work by age, income, race, and number of vehicles in the household, all available for all states and most counties, cities, and urban areas. For 2020, the Census Bureau produced only 54 tables, and so far they are available only for the nation and states.

Still, there are some useful data. Transit didn’t even do well among people who didn’t work at home. Of people who commuted to work, 81.9 percent drove alone (up from 80.5 percent in 2019), 9.4 percent carpooled (unchanged from 2019), and 3.8 percent used public transport (down from 5.3 percent in 2019). Continue reading →

St. Louis MetroWaste

By | | Transportation
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The infrastructure bill was supposed to repair worn out and crumbling infrastructure, but now that it has passed local officials all over the country are eagerly looking forward to spending that money on new projects they won’t be able to afford to maintain. Case in point: St. Louis Mayor Tishaura Jones, who thinks some of those federal dollars should go to building a new light-rail line in the Gateway City.

Light rail in St. Louis operates mostly in an exclusive right of way, which makes it more costly to build but doesn’t add many new riders: MetroLink carried 11 percent fewer riders in 2019 than before it opened its first light-rail line. Photo by Loco Steve.

While admittedly I would be hard pressed to find any light-rail lines that have been successful, St. Louis’ transit system, known as MetroLink, is one of the more unsuccessful. Bus and light-rail ridership had dropped by 25 percent between 2014 and 2019. As of September, it was barely carrying 50 percent of 2019 levels, and given the large numbers of people who plan to keep working at home, it doesn’t look like it will ever fully recover. Continue reading →

Access and Equity

By | | Book reviews, Transportation
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When David Levinson was at the University of California, Berkeley, he calculated that it would cost more to travel between Los Angeles and San Francisco on high-speed rail than either flying or driving even if the high-speed rail line cost only $10 billion to build. When he directed the University of Minnesota’s Accessibility Observatory, he pioneered research showing that automobiles provide access to far more jobs than transit.

So when I learned that he has co-edited a new book, Applications of Access, that is available for on line for free, I immediately downloaded it to learn about the latest research about access. It turns out you get what you pay for, as I found the book to be a big disappointment. Continue reading →