Search Results for: rail

How Inflation Will Hurt You

By | | News commentary
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“Inflation is good for you!” proclaims a headline from the Intecept. “Inflation is bad for the 1 percent but helps out almost everyone else,” the article claims.

Inflation in Germany in the early 1920s led to this basket of groceries costing a million marks. Before World War I, one dollar would buy 4 to 5 marks, but by the end of 1923, a dollar was worth more than 5 billion marks.

Inflation “may be a good sign,” agrees New York Times business writer Jeanna Smialek. “Don’t panic” about inflation, says economist Paul Krugman. Continue reading →

Live with Less, Says Former Free-Market Advocate

By | | News commentary
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Since I share my home with a couple of dogs, I tend to wear out a pair of shoes each year. I usually notice I need new shoes in the rainy season (which is most of the year in Oregon) when I come home with wet feet. But, according to Allison Schrager of the Manhattan Institute, I should just suck it up and learn to live with less.

Apparently, it’s a bad thing that Americans can buy “whatever they want whenever they want.” Schrager finds it alarming that 40 percent of American households have three or more televisions, “including 30 percent of households earning less than $40,000 a year!” Similarly worrisome, to her, is that 30 percent of Americans have 2 or more refrigerators. Just think of how horrifying it must have been for her to discover that some low-income people probably have both three televisions and two refrigerators!

The Manhattan Institute claims to be a “free-market think tank” that supports “greater economic choice.” But you wouldn’t know it to read Schrager’s article, which states that we need to live more like Europeans, meaning consuming less and living with lower economic growth. This is because, she claims, “An economy based on consumption is not sustainable.” Continue reading →

White House Reveals How It Will Waste Money

By | | Transportation
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The White House has issued a series of updated fact sheets bragging about how much money the infrastructure bill will spend in each state (see table below). The fact sheets are based on formulas in the bill that account for a little more than three-fourths of the “new” spending in the bill, with the other 22 percent coming from grant programs. The “new” spending, in turn, accounts for $550 billion, while the other $650 billion is a reauthorization of existing spending programs.

It’s hard to look at these numbers without getting the impression that most of the money will be wasted. For example, every state gets a minimum of $100 million to expand broadband access to its residents. Residents of the District of Columbia currently have access to 38 different broadband providers, with 11 of them providing service to residences. Yet DC, like the states, will get the $100 million minimum. What’s the point? (For that matter, everyone in the country has access to at least two satellite providers, but the bill pretends that anything short of a land-line provider is inadequate.)

The excuse for the infrastructure bill is that America’s infrastructure is crumbling, and that may be true for city streets and city- and county-owned bridges. But the tens of billions of dollars going for highways will almost all go to the states, whose infrastructure is in good shape and improving every year. Continue reading →

Mobility Principles for a Prosperous World

By | | Policy brief, Transportation
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Four years ago, Zipcar co-founder Robin Chase wrote, or led the effort to write, ten principles of shared mobility for livable cities. Despite a patina of social justice and green values, these principles were a transparent effort to give her company and companies like hers a huge economic advantage by limiting and eventually forbidding the use of privately owned vehicles in cities.

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

Recently, someone asked me for my response to these principles. While my reply is on page 5 of the PDF, my main response is to offer my own mobility principles. These principles apply to urban and rural areas, to the United States and other countries, and to all forms of transportation. I’ve previously stated most of these principles in various Antiplanner posts, but this one brings them together. Continue reading →

We Dodged This Bullet Train

By | | Transportation
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The United States truly dodged a bullet when it elected not to build any high-speed rail other than the ill-fated California route. As described in recent Youtube videos, high-speed trains are doing more harm than good to China’s economy. The two videos below present similar information but each has some unique data that justify watching both.

China’s nearly 24,000 miles of high-speed rail lines are more than twice as much as the rest of the world combined. Two of the lines — Beijing-Shanghai and Beijing-Guangzhou — are at least covering their operating costs, but the rest are real money sinks, with at least one line not even earning enough in ticket revenues to pay for the electricity required to power the trains. Continue reading →

Brightline Resumes, Wants More Money

By | | Transportation
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After a 20-month shutdown due to the pandemic, Brightline, which wants to run moderate-speed passenger trains from Miami to Orlando, resumed service between Miami and West Palm Beach on Monday — and hit a car on its very first day. The company is building a line to Orlando, and is asking the state-owned Florida Development Finance Corporation for the right to sell tax-exempt private activity bonds to help pay for it.

I would be thrilled to see privately funded passenger trains. But Brightline’s presentation to the Florida Development company’s board of directors contains a lot of distortions of the truth that reduce my enthusiasm for this project. Continue reading →

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
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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
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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
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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 →