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60 Desks for Every 100 Workers

By | | Transportation
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Mutual of Omaha is building a new headquarters in downtown Omaha, which at first appears to be a revival of downtown fortunes. But the company has 4,000 employees in the Omaha area, and the new headquarters will have room for no more than 2,500 of them, as the rest are expected to work from home on any given day.

Mutual of Omaha’s planned skyscraper may become the tallest building in Omaha — but it will only have enough room for about 60 percent of the company’s Omaha-area employees.

So why locate downtown? Maybe because of the $68.6 million in subsidies — 16 percent of the building’s cost — the city is giving to the insurer. 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 →

January Travel Dips

By | | Transportation, Useful Data
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Most modes of travel took a nosedive in January, whether measured on a month-to-month basis or compared with pre-pandemic travel. Amtrak passenger-miles fell from 404 million in December to 231 million in January. January travel is generally a little less than December’s, but in this case it is much less: as a percent of pre-pandemic numbers, Amtrak passenger-miles fell from 69 percent in December (relative to December 2019) to 56 percent in January (relative to January 2020), according to Amtrak’s Monthly Performance Report.

Transit is also lagging behind, according to data released earlier this week by the Federal Transit Administration. Transit carried 377 million riders in January, down from 438 million in December. As a share of pre-pandemic numbers, transit fell from 56 percent in December to 47 percent in January. 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 →

Fix-It First for Highways but Not Transit

By | | Transportation
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Last week, Republican Senator Shelly Capito grilled Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg about why he included language from a House bill that had been rejected by the bipartisan group writing the infrastructure bill into a memo to the states about infrastructure funding. The House bill required states to put all of their roads into a state of good repair before they could use any federal funds to built new roads. I called this provision “poison pill” because transportation systems always need some maintenance, but expansions are necessary too.

Buttigieg’s memo wasn’t a mandate, but as Capito noted, it included “language from the House bill basically verbatim.” The Department of Transportation, the memo says, “does not prohibit the construction of new general purpose capacity on highways or bridges, but in most cases Federal-aid highway and Federal Lands funding resources made available through the BIL should be used to repair and maintain existing transportation infrastructure before making new investments in highway expansions.” Continue reading →

Can Micromobility Reduce Congestion & GHGs?

By | | Transportation
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Media reports say that a study from Carnigie Mellon has found that micromobility — a fancy word for electric bikes — can relieve traffic congestion and reduce greenhouse gas emissions. However, this is largely based on wishful thinking.

Electric bicycles in California. Photo by waltarrrrr.

The study looked at 2014 travel data for Seattle and concluded that “18% of short trips in Seattle can be replaced by micromobility modes” based on the age of the people making the trip and their trip purpose. “If even 10 percent of short car trips during peak afternoon travel were replaced with micromobility,” reports say, it would reduce congestion and greenhouse gas emissions by 2.76 percent. Continue reading →

Traffic Fatalities Up 18% from 2019

By | | Transportation
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The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) says there were 31,720 traffic fatalities during the first nine months of 2021, which was 12 percent more than in the same months in 2020 and 18 percent more than 2019. The biggest increases in fatalities were in Idaho (36%), Nevada (30%), Oregon (29%), and Minnesota (26%). Fatalities declined in Nebraska (-18%), Maine (-14%), Maryland (-13%), Rhode Island (-8%), Wyoming (-6%), and six other states.

Blame the increase in traffic fatalities on Generation Y and Zers who are more likely to engage in risky behavior. Photo by Frans Van Heerden.

NHTSA doesn’t speculate on why fatalities have increased by such a large amount. However, a report from the American Automobile Association provides one answer: people who are more likely to take the risk of traveling during a pandemic are also more likely to engage in risky behavior while driving. 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 →

Honolulu Rail Has More Rail Problems

By | | Transportation
23 Comments

Honolulu rail transit tracks, which as still under construction, are too close together in some spots, which could lead to derailments. This is different from last year’s problem, in which the wheels of the railcars were found to be too narrow for some of the tracks.

Honolulu’s high-cost, low-capacity rail line under construction. Click image for a larger view. Photo by Anthony Quintano.

No one yet knows how much it will cost and how long it will take to fix the new problem. But fixing last year’s issue significantly added to the delay and cost of the project, which is currently not expected to be finished until 2031, eleven years later and at more than twice the cost that was originally projected. Continue reading →