Search Results for: rail

A New Level of Transit Incompetence

By | | Transportation
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It seems like we are getting more lessons about massive cost overruns for transit projects every couple of weeks. Last week, the Federal Transit Administration issued a “scathing report claiming that the Santa Clara Valley Transportation Authority (VTA) was being “overly optimistic” and “misleading” in its estimates of the costs of building a BART subway to San Jose.

Despite objections from critics, VTA decided to bore an 86-foot deep, 48-foot diameter tunnel rather than build two shallower and smaller tunnels using the cut-and-cover method, which would have been less expensive and saved passengers’ time.

The six-mile-long project was originally estimated to cost $5.6 billion (which is itself ridiculous) and be done in 2029, but the FTA now predicts it will cost as much as $9.1 billion and won’t be complete until 2034. This is $1.5 billion a mile for a transit line that is expected to carry so few riders that early estimates predicted it would cost more than $100 for each new transit rider carried. VTA’s response doesn’t refute anything the FTA said, but basically said it is too late to fix the problems so taxpayers would have to live with them (and pay for them). Continue reading →

Brightline Carnage Continues

By | | Transportation
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Brightline, the privately operated passenger train in Florida, had five accidents that killed three people last week.

  • On February 13, a man was killed when he drove his car around the lowered crossing gates and was hit by a train in Lake Worth Beach.
  • On February 15, a pedestrian was killed when he was struck by a Brightline train in Hallandale Beach.

Brightline posted this video taken from the train that struck a car last week to prove that the accident wasn’t its fault. What it shows is that a freight train had gone through the crossing and an impatient motorist drove around the gates unable to see that a passenger train was coming because his view was blocked by the freight. The accident would have been prevented if Brightline had installed full-width crossing gates instead of gates that covered only half the width of the street.

  • Also on February 15, a woman and her baby narrowly avoided injury when a Brightline train struck her car in Delray Beach.
  • On February 16, a man suffered “incapacitating injuries” when a Brightline train struck his car, also in Lake Worth Beach.
  • On February 19, a man walking on the tracks was killed when he was hit by a Brightline train in Delray Beach.

Continue reading →

December Driving 2.7% Above 2019

By | | Transportation, Useful Data
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Americans drove 2.7 percent more miles in December 2021 than in December 2019, according to the latest traffic volume data published by the Federal Highway Administration last Friday. According to these data, December was the seventh month in a row that driving exceeded driving in the same month in 2019.

This is a revision from previous reports because the Federal Highway Administration revised the national miles-traveled for December 2019 (shown on page 2 of the report). The preliminary estimate in 2019 was that Americans drove 273.8 billion vehicle miles in December. In 2020, this was revised downwards to 272.2 billion. But this report, for 2021, revised the December 2019 miles downwards even more to 261.8 billion. Continue reading →

Truckers, Congestion, and Class Conflict

By | | Policy brief, Transportation
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“During the pandemic lockdowns, the email jobs caste [meaning remote workers] loved to talk about essential workers,” observes Marxist writer Malcom Kyeyune, but they now regard those workers with “outright hatred.” His fellow leftists claim to speak for the working class, charges Kyeyune, but in fact the leftist movement and the working-class movement have “divorced.”

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

Kyeyune was writing about the Canadian truckers who object to mandatory vaccinations, but he also mentioned European truckers who protested high fuel taxes a few years ago. In the United States, middle-class progressives have come to depend on truckers to deliver all the stuff they order from Amazon but do everything they can to make the daily lives of those truckers miserable. Continue reading →

BART Outlook Grim Because Managers Dim

By | | Transportation
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The San Francisco Bay Area Rapid Transit District (BART) says that its financial outlook is “grim” and it may have to ask voters for a tax increase to keep running. As of December, BART was still carrying just 25 percent as many passengers as it carried before the pandemic.

BART spent nearly $2 million apiece on 775 of these railcars, which first went into service in 2018. In December 2020, BART halted delivery on the new cars because they were so unreliable.

In a presentation to the agency’s board of directors, staff noted that Congress had given $1.3 billion in COVID relief funds. It has used just about half of that and is burning through the rest at a rate of $25 million a month. At that rate, it has enough to keep going for about two more years. Continue reading →

A Great Opportunity to Spend Your Money

By | | Transportation
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The latest business plan for the California high-speed rail boondoggle estimates costs will be about $5 billion more than the last one, which were already 150 percent higher than the estimates in effect when voters approved the project in 2008. As noted in an AP news report, the latest estimates indicate that “it could take $105 billion to finish the route.”

Click image to download the plan.

Note the word “could.” The state report is actually estimating the cost will be $86.7 billion to $88.2 billion, but admits it could go as high as $105 billion. The previous (2020) plan projected the final cost would be $82.4 billion to $83.6 billion, with an upper limit of $99.9 billion. So the high-speed rail authority has basically added about $5 billion to all of the estimates. Continue reading →

2021: The Year Transit Failed to Recover

By | | Policy brief, Transportation, Useful Data
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Despite receiving tens of billions of dollars in support from Congress, the transit industry in 2021 failed to recover most of the riders it lost to the pandemic in 2020. Ridership in 2020 had fallen by 54 percent from 2019 due to the pandemic, and was only 3 percent greater, or 52 percent below 2019 numbers, in 2021, according to data released by the Federal Transit Administration last week.

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

Ridership did improve over the pandemic months of 2020, but not by much. The year 2020 ended with ridership at 38 percent of pre-pandemic levels. It reached 50 percent for the first time in July 2021, slowly climbed to 55 percent in September, and hovered around 55 to 57 percent for the rest of the year. Continue reading →

Funding Obsolete Transportation

By | | Transportation
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Urban transit carried less than half a percent of passenger-miles during the pandemic, yet received 65 percent of the COVID relief funds given by Congress to the Department of Transportation, says an article published last week by the American Institute of Economic Research. Similarly, Amtrak carried less than 0.05 percent of passenger-miles yet received 4.4 percent of DOT’s COVID relief funds. Meanwhile, zero COVID relief funds went to freight supply-chain systems, which proved to be the real transportation problem resulting from the pandemic.

The North Star commuter train. Photo by Jerry Huddleston.

Thanks to the influx of COVID relief funds, plus $40 billion more for transit in the infrastructure bill, transit agencies are seriously considering expansions of transit services that should be considered failures. For example, Minnesota’s North Star commuter train was expected to carry 3,600 riders per weekday in its first year of operation. It carried only 2,200 weekday riders in 2010, its first full year. By 2019, it was still only carrying 2,700 riders per weekday. Continue reading →

Top Ten Lies in Transportation Projects

By | | Regional planning, Transportation
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Bent Flyvbjerg, who specializes in studying megaprojects, has a new paper describing the “Top Ten Behavioral Biases in Project Management.” Each of these biases are ways in which planners lie to themselves, the public, or both. His basic thesis is that these are not just cognitive biases, or accidentally poor judgments, but are political biases, that is, deliberately poor judgments.

According to the San Diego Association of Governments (SANDAG), 8,000 people turned out to witness the opening of a $2.1 billion waste of money. Photo by SANDAG.

While the paper is interesting and I have no doubt that strategic misrepresentations and other political biases take place, I have to wonder why they do. The reason I am surprised is that the general public seems to be completely innumerate when it comes to government spending. Continue reading →

Mandates to Reduce Per Capita Vehicle Travel

By | | Transportation
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Governments around the world should forcibly limit automobile travel to 4,000 kilometers (2,500 miles) per person per year, says the ominously named Patrick Moriarty, an engineering professor at Melbourne’s Monash University. That’s 4,000 passenger-kilometers a year, so in the United States, where the average car carries 1.67 people, that’s really 2,400 vehicle-kilometers (about 1,500 vehicle-miles) per person per year.

Wave good-bye to 80 percent of your mobility if Moriarty has his way.

Since Americans drove about 8,900 vehicle-miles or 15,000 passenger-miles per person in 2019, this mandate would require an 83-percent reduction in auto travel. In other countries, it would be less, of course. According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, Australians drove 255 billion kilometers (about 160 billion miles) before the pandemic. Assuming 10 percent of that was heavy trucks, buses, and motorcycles (as it is in the U.S.), then that represents about 6,000 miles of automobile driving per person. Moriarty’s proposed mandate would reduce that by a mere 75 percent. Continue reading →