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September 2021 Driving 98.2% of September 2019

By | | Transportation, Useful Data
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Driving on rural interstates surged in September, according to data released yesterday by the Federal Highway Administration. Americans drove 9.3 percent more miles on rural interstates in September 2021 than September 2020, and 4.7 percent more than in September 2019. Overall driving was 7.9 percent more than September 2020 and 1.8 percent less than September 2019.

Motor vehicles and highways have come closer to recovering from the pandemic than any mode of mass transportation.

Driving reached 100.5 percent of pre-pandemic levels in June, but since then has hovered around 98 percent. There were two more workdays in June 2021 than 2019, which helps explains why driving was so much greater in June 2021. July 2021 had one fewer work day than 2019, August was the same as 2019, and September was one more than in 2019. 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 →

Highways Are Egalitarian, Not Racist

By | | Transportation
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During a press conference early this week, Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg contended that “some beltways and interstates and highways were built . . .to be racist.” He used this argument to justify the $1 billion in the recent infrastructure bill aimed at “reconnecting communities” as well as other spending that will supposedly be focused on disadvantaged communities.

The Southern State Parkway, which Robert Caro claimed was designed by Robert Moses to prevent buses filled with blacks from traveling to Jones Beach. In fact, there is room for buses under the central part of the arch. Photo by Doug Kerr.

The argument that highways were racist stems from two sources. First, Robert Caro’s book about Robert Moses claimed that Moses deliberately built overpasses on New York City parkways too low to allow buses in order to keep blacks and other minorities (who would presumably ride buses and not drive cars) from reaching popular recreation areas such as Jones Beach. Second, the anti-highway movement of the 1960s claimed that highways were deliberately targeting black neighborhoods to force them out of cities. “No white man’s freeway through black man’s neighborhood” became the rallying cry. 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 →

Why Your Amazon Delivery Was Late

By | | Transportation
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Emmy-award-winning journalist Adam Housley posted this tweet on Saturday, suggesting that thievery from containers on trains in Los Angeles is a common occurrence.

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The Pomona Police Department reported a couple of months ago that it found $100,000 worth of goods stolen from a container train in a homeless camp near Union Pacific’s main line. UP trains had been “a target for thefts over the past several months” so police concluded these goods came from one of those trains. Continue reading →