Search Results for: rail

Good Bye, Peter Rogoff

By | | Transportation
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After six contentious years, Peter Rogoff will leave his $379,600 a year job as CEO of Sound Transit, where he oversaw the construction of billions of dollars of light-rail lines that he didn’t believe in. It’s not clear that his departure is entirely voluntary: he apparently told the Sound Transit board that “he did not foresee remaining in his role beyond the end of 2022.” The board responded by not renewing his contract, which expires in May, effectively firing him.

Peter Rogoff speaking about “advanced transportation technologies” (which don’t include light rail) in 2016. Photo by AvgeekJoe.

I liked Rogoff when he was making $180,000 a year as the administrator of the Federal Transit Administration in the early Obama years. In his first year, he made three discoveries:

  1. America’s rail transit systems had a $77 billion maintenance backlog (since increased to more than $100 billion);
  2. America’s rail transit agencies would rather build new rail lines than maintain their existing ones;
  3. In most situations, bus-rapid transit could do everything rail transit could do for a lot less money.

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Regional Transportation Planning After COVID

By | | Policy brief, Regional planning
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The Federal Aid Highway Act of 1962 required urban areas of 50,000 or more people to have “a continuing, comprehensive transportation planning process carried out cooperatively by states and local communities.” The Federal Aid Highway Act of 1973 specified that this planning should be done by metropolitan planning organizations (MPOs) overseen by elected officials (such as city councilors or county commissioners) representing a majority of people in the urban area. These MPOs are often called “councils of governments” or “associations of governments.”

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

The 1962 law required states to spend between 1.5 percent and 2.0 percent of federal highway funds on planning. Today, MPOs spend hundreds of millions of dollars each year writing and rewriting long-range transportation plans and annual transportation improvement plans. The infrastructure bill passed by the Senate and now before the House includes $2.28 billion to fund five years’ worth of metropolitan transportation planning. Since there are 408 MPOs in the United States, that works out to more than $1.1 million per MPO per year. Of course, most MPOs add local funding so their total planning budgets may be much larger. Continue reading →

Build It and They Won’t Come

By | | Transportation
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It’s too soon to know what caused the Saturday derailment of Amtrak’s Empire Builder that took the lives of three people. What we do know is that a train that had room for at least 350 paying passengers was carrying fewer than 150 (reports vary between 141 and 147).

Amtrak’s Empire Builder in Montana.

This raises the question of how well individual Amtrak routes are doing now that highway travel has pretty much recovered to pre-pandemic levels and air travel in July was nearly 80 percent of pre-pandemic levels. I’ve reported that Amtrak was at 68 percent of pre-pandemic levels in July, but that could vary tremendously from route to route. Continue reading →

Automobiles: Low Cost and Socially Just

By | | Transportation
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An anti-auto, pro-cycling group called the Institute for Transportation Development Policy (ITDP) claims that Americans spend too much on transportation, and if only they lived more like Europeans they would save a lot of money. However, there are some fundamental flaws in their analysis.

According to the article, Americans spend 13 percent of their household expenditures on transportation while Europeans spend only 11 percent. The first problem with their claim is the source of their data: the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). BLS compiles data based on surveys. While BLS data might be useful comparing cities and states within the United States, the surveys are not completely reliable.

The Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA), however, collects all the data about where money goes in the national economy. According to the BEA, only 9.2 percent of “personal consumption expenditures” went for transportation in 2019. This includes motor vehicles, transit, airlines, and other forms of mass transportation. These data are more comparable to the European data cited by ITDP. Continue reading →

China’s Red Lines: A Central Planning Failure

By | | Housing
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Evergrande, China’s second-largest property developer, has said that it might not make interest payments on its bonds this week. Some are calling this China’s Lehman Brothers moment, and while that might be an exaggeration, a default could have serious repercussions throughout China’s, and perhaps the world’s, economy.

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

Evergrande is not a state-owned company, but its problems trace back to China’s socialist history and the Communist Party’s continuing control of the national economy. Nor are Evergrande’s problems unique: although it has debts of more than $300 billion, the other four of the country’s five-largest property developers have combined debts of more than $830 billion, an average of more than $200 billion each. Continue reading →

Seven to Become Six

By | | News commentary, Transportation
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There was a time when every region and almost every major city in the country was served by at least three major railroads. The Northeast had Erie, Lackawanna, New York Central, and Pennsylvania, among others. The Southeast had Atlantic Coast Line, Seaboard, and Southern. The Midwest had the Burlington, Chicago & North Western, Milwaukee, and Rock Island. The Northwest had the Great Northern, Milwaukee Road, and Northern Pacific. The Southwest had Santa Fe, Southern Pacific, and Union Pacific.

Canadian Pacific and Kansas City Southern meet at only one point, so a merger between them preserves competition. Kansas City Southern photo.

Then came the merger movements of the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, and now we are down to just seven class 1 railroads: two in the East, two in the West, two in Canada making various incursions into the United States, and Kansas City Southern, which connects Missouri with Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Mexico. Continue reading →

National Obsolete Transportation Month

By | | Policy brief, Transportation
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From San Francisco to North Carolina, transit agencies have declared September to be “Transit Month.” “This month is all about celebrating the vital role of public transit for our communities,” says one transit agency, which means “getting elected leaders to make transit a priority issue.”

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

From a transportation viewpoint, agencies don’t have much to celebrate this year. Cities have proven they can get along quite well without transit. With more than half of all American employees working at home at the beginning of this year, roads are less congested so people who continue to work outside of their homes can more easily drive to work. While driving recovered to 100 percent of pre-pandemic levels by June 2021, transit remained stuck at 50 percent in June and July. Continue reading →

Mag-Lev May Be Dead; TX HSR on Life Support

By | | Follow up, Transportation
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A Maryland circuit court judge ruled last week that the Baltimore-Washington Rapid Rail Company did not have the power of eminent domain and could not stop a development on land that the maglev promoter needed to use for its proposed line. The judge rejected the company’s argument that its purchase of a franchise previously granted to the long-defunct Washington, Baltimore and Annapolis Electric Railway gave it the power to condemn other people’s land.

The maglev promoter didn’t actually have the money to buy the land in question, but it wanted to halt a developer from building a mixed-use development on the property, which would have made condemnation a lot more expensive when and if it has the power and money to do so. The judge said that the company’s argument contained “a lot of factual inaccuracies.”

The prospects for building a maglev in the corridor have been further hurt by announcements from local officials such as Baltimore Mayor Brandon Scott and Prince George’s County executive Angela Alsobrooks that they oppose the project. The mayor’s office suggested that, since the Senate just authorized $2.4 billion to improve the Northeast Corridor, it would be foolish to back a project that threatened to take customers away from Amtrak. Continue reading →

Biden to STB: Screw the Environment

By | | Transportation
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President Biden and Democrats in Congress want to spend trillions of dollars on a green new deal. But their true colors are revealed when it comes to railroad re-regulation: the needs of the environment are less important than the needs of labor unions and shippers who want the federal government to exercise more control over the railroads.

This container train is saving thousands of tons of greenhouse gas emissions, savings that will be lost if regulation allows trucks to capture some or all of this traffic. Photo by David Jordan.

This is made clear in a report that was released yesterday by the Reason Foundation. Written by the Antiplanner’s faithful ally, Marc Scribner, Pathways and Policy for 21st Century Freight Rail points out that railroads produce less than 10 percent as much carbon dioxide per ton-mile as trucks. As the Antiplanner observed a few weeks ago, the railroads have become more competitive with trucks since deregulation took place in 1980. Continue reading →

Charting Transit Values and Trends

By | | Policy brief, Transportation
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Is transit ridership growing or declining in your urban area? Do fare increases have anything to do with ridership trends? Are operating costs growing and are fares keeping up with costs? What is happening with transit speeds?

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

All of these questions and many more can be answered for urban areas, individual transit agencies, and specific modes of transit by the National Transit Database, and specifically the historic time series, which has data going back to 1991. Unfortunately, the database is hard to use. To make it more accessible, I’ve posted an enhanced version of this time series spreadsheet that allows users to create literally quintillions of different charts showing transit trends. Continue reading →