Search Results for: rail

Colorado’s Climate Change Roadmap

By | | Transportation
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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
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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 →

One Boondoggle Down, Hundreds to Go

By | | Transportation
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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 →

The Affordable-Housing Industrial Complex

By | | Housing, Policy brief
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Since 1932, Congress has passed dozens of laws aimed at making rental housing and homeownership more affordable. Many of these laws created new programs while few of the older programs were abolished. As a result, more than two dozen programs remain active today, including programs targeted for specific groups such as seniors, people with disabilities, Native Americans, veterans, and people with HIV.

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

These programs fall into two broad categories: programs aimed at assisting low-income people to pay for rental housing and programs aimed at assisting middle-income people to become homeowners. Little effort has been made to assess whether the various programs are cost-effective in what they do. As a result, relative to what they produce, some are far more costly than others. Continue reading →

FlixBus Buys Greyhound

By | | Transportation
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In a move that is sure to shake up America’s fluid, intercity-bus market, one of the newest entries into that market, FlixBus, is buying one of the oldest, Greyhound. Greyhound was previously owned by FirstGroup, one of the two main British companies that emerged from Britain’s bus privatization in the 1990s.

The other British company was Stagecoach, which started Megabus, which revolutionized American intercity bus operations in 2006 by offering curbside bus service (saving the cost of bus stations) and internet ticket sales (saving the cost of ticket agents). FirstGroup responded by buying Greyhound in 2007. Continue reading →

August Driving Dips to 95.6% of 2019 Levels

By | | Transportation, Useful Data
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Americans drove 8.3 percent more miles in August of 2021 than 2020, but 4.4 percent fewer miles than 2019, according to data released yesterday by the Federal Highway Administration. Meanwhile, Amtrak’s monthly performance report for August, which was released last week, shows that the railroad carried 67.0 percent as many passengers as in August 2019, down from 68.2 percent in July.

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Music City Sinkhole Disrupts Few Commuters

By | | Transportation
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Almost no one was affected when a sinkhole opened up under the tracks used by the Music City Star, one of the more pathetic commuter trains in the United States. The sinkhole prevented trains from reaching downtown Nashville, though trains continued to operate between the suburb of Lebanon, which has less than 40,000 residents, and the Nashville neighborhood of Donelson, which has about 30,000 residents.

This photo of the Music City Sinkhole is courtesy of Wego Public Transit.
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In 2019, the Music City Star, Nashville’s commuter train, carried just 1,115 riders or 558 roundtrips per weekday. As of August, 2021, ridership was down 84 percent from 2019 levels, so only about 90 people per day are affected by the sinkhole. Nashville should use the sinkhole as an excuse to replace the train with buses. Commuter buses in the region cost between a third and half as much to operate per vehicle-mile as the train and can easily carry the number of people riding the trains, which averaged just 23 people per railcar before the epidemic.

Mismanaged West Coast Ports

By | | Transportation
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Empty shelves in supermarkets and other stores are due in part to hundreds of thousands of shipping containers waiting to be unloaded at ports in Los Angeles, Long Beach, and other cities. According to market urbanist Scott Beyer, this backlog is due to a combination of labor unrest and NIMBYism.

More than 60 container ships are waiting outside the Port of Los Angeles for space to unload their cargo.

That’s certainly true in Portland, whose container port was completely shut down by labor disputes four years ago, and now is just beginning to function again. Moreover, trucks carrying containers out of Portland face some of the worst congestion in the country, partly due to anti-highway groups that oppose congestion relief on the grounds that it might lead people to drive more. Continue reading →

Not-So-High Capacity Transit

By | | Transportation
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Unlike light rail, which means low-capacity transit, heavy rail is supposed to be high-capacity transit. But Virginia politicians effectively reduced the capacity of the DC Metrorail system when they demanded, over the objections of the Federal Transit Administration and Secretary of Transportation, the construction of the multi-billion-dollar Silver Line to Tysons Corner. Now Virginia politicians want taxpayers and auto drivers to spend tens of billions more rectifying that mistake.

A Yellow Line train crosses the Potomac River on an underutilized bridge that was ignored in WMATA’s analysis of alternatives to deal with the congested Blue-Orange-Silver lines river crossing. CSX’s Long Bridge is in the foreground. Photo by Ron Cogswell.

When the Silver Line opened, the Blue Line was already running at full capacity. Since the two lines, along with the Orange Line, use the same crossing of the Potomac River into DC, adding Silver Line trains meant cutting Blue and Orange Line trains. The number of Blue Line riders lost probably exceeded the number of Silver Line passengers gained. Continue reading →

August Transit <50% of Pre-Pandemic Levels

By | | Transportation, Useful Data
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Transit’s recovery falters as ridership in August was just 49.97 percent of August, 2019 numbers, according to data released yesterday by the Federal Transit Administration. This is only slightly above July’s 49.13 percent of July 2019.

I’ll post Amtrak and driving data when they become available.

August data are not yet available for Amtrak or driving, but both were well above transit levels in July. August flying fell slightly from July, probably because of worries about a new wave of COVID and associated health mandates. These factors may have also depressed transit ridership for the month. Continue reading →