Search Results for: rail

Moving from Transit Apartheid to Transportation Equity

By | | Policy brief, Transportation
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In 2014, the Metropolitan Council—the Twin Cities’ regional planning agency—proudly announced that it was adopting a regional transit equity program. Under this program, the region would spend billions of dollars building light-rail lines to wealthy, largely white suburbs. Meanwhile, it would spend a few million dollars building 150 to 200 bus shelters, most of them in low-income, largely black, neighborhoods.

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

The claim that this was equitable was so absurd that the council’s announcement might as well have been written by the Onion. Yet this was a continuation of policies that had been followed by transit agencies for several decades. Continue reading →

Ramming Together Two Sinking Ships

By | | Transportation
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The Titanic is sinking! Let’s save it by ramming it into another sinking ship. Maybe together they will survive.

This merger didn’t work out so well.

Probably not. But that seems to be the theory behind proposals to merge Caltrain, which runs commuter trains between San Jose and San Francisco, with the Bay Area Rapid Transit District (BART), which runs heavy-rail transit throughout the Bay Area. Continue reading →

Transit Spin Doctors Hard at Work

By | | Transportation
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The transit industry is terrible at accurately predicting future costs and ridership. It is terrible at cost-effectively moving people. But it is very good at one thing: spin.

When the pandemic dropped ridership by more than 80 percent, did the industry say, “I guess we aren’t needed right now; you can cut our subsidies”? No! It said, “We are carrying essential workers to their jobs, therefore you must increase our subsidies.”

Now that ridership is slowly recovering, is the industry saying, “we are now carrying only 42 percent of pre-pandemic levels, so you can cut our subsidies”? No! Instead it is saying, “Ridership of some agencies has increased by as much as 80 percent, so you must increase our subsidies!” Continue reading →

Senate Passes $550 Billion Infrastructure Bill

By | | Transportation
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With support from 17 Republicans and 50 Democrats, the Senate passed a bill that includes:

  • $110 billion for roads and bridges;
  • $11 billion for “road safety,” which probably means anti-auto programs like complete streets;
  • $39 billion for transit;
  • $66 billion for rail (mostly Amtrak);
  • $15 billion for electric vehicle infrastructure and electric buses for transit agencies;
  • $1 billion for “reconnecting neighborhoods,” another anti-auto program;
  • $25 billion for airports;
  • $17 billion for ports;
  • $55 billion for drinking water;
  • $65 billion for broadband; and
  • $73 billion for clean energy infrastructure.

Continue reading →

Who Is to Blame for HS2?

By | | Transportation
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HS2, a high-speed rail line from London to northern England, was projected to cost £32.7 billion in 2011 pounds, or about £40 billion in today’s money. After the Conservative Party-run government approved the line in 2012, costs ballooned to the current estimate of £106 billion, a 165 percent increase. The final cost will probably be even more.

HS2 is supposed to be built in two phases: phase 1 from London to Birmingham and phase 2 from Birmingham to Manchester and Leeds.

Liberals such as the Guardian blame the fiasco on the Conservative government, but they forget that they supported the rail line since the beginning while current Conservative Party leader and prime minister Boris Johnson opposed it. The Guardian cites a report from the National Audit Office that says the government failed to account for the risks and likelihood that the original estimates were too low, something that would have been true of any government that approved the project. Continue reading →

Cost Overruns and Ridership Shortfalls

By | | Policy brief, Transportation
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Rail transit projects built in the United States typically suffer severe cost overruns and end up carrying far fewer riders than originally projected. The latest studies published by the Federal Transit Administration (FTA) indicate that the projections made for some recent projects are better than those made in the past. However, this is partly because the FTA has changed its definition of “cost overrun” and partly because the FTA has not yet looked at some projects that we know have huge overruns, such as the Honolulu rail project.

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

The Department of Transportation first looked at this issue in a 1990 report by Don Pickrell, who looked at four heavy rail, four light rail, and two automated guideway (“people mover”) projects in nine cities. On average, Pickrell found, building these projects ended up costing 62 percent more than projected, operating them cost 130 percent more than projected, and ridership was 47 percent less than projected. Continue reading →

Dems Admit Highway Hostility

By | | Transportation
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Democrats looking to the 2022 election must worry that some of their number are working so hard to alienate the vast majority of American voters. As noted in Politico, members of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, led by the Antiplanner’s own congressman, Peter DeFazio, are openly hostile to American’s favorite form of travel.

“You can’t pave over the whole country,” says DeFazio, whose INVEST Act, which recently passed the House, contains provisions that would severely restrict the ability of state to spend federal highway dollars on new highways. Yet highways occupy a vanishingly small share of the nation’s land area, and the idea that there is any danger to them paving over the whole country is just fear mongering.

Americans use highways for 87 percent of their personal travel while Amtrak and transit, which DeFazio and friends favor, provide just 1 percent of passenger-miles. There are good reasons for this: motor vehicles and highways are cheap, convenient, and fast relative to the Democrats’ alternatives. So it’s not surprising that 92 percent of American households own at least one car, 96 percent of American workers live in a household with at least one car, and at least a third of the 4 percent of American workers who live in households without cars nonetheless get to work by automobile. Continue reading →

$117 Billion to Save “Almost an Hour”: Who Cares?

By | | Transportation
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Before the pandemic, two people commuted from Podunk, Michigan to Detroit, a drive of about one hour. If someone built them a high-speed rail line, they could save nearly half an hour, assuming they don’t decide to work at home. Of course, the fares they pay would never come close to covering the $6 billion cost of building the rail line, but who cares about the cost per rider?

“Who cares?” seems to be the attitude of the Northeast Corridor Commission, which consists of Amtrak and the commuter rail agencies that run trains on part of the Boston-to-Washington rail system. Where its 2010 master plan called for spending $52 billion in the corridor, the 2021 plan demands $117 billion to keep running trains in the corridor. But who cares about the increased cost? Continue reading →

May Driving Reaches 96% of Pre-Pandemic Levels

By | | Transportation, Useful Data
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Americans drove 95.6 percent as many miles in May 2021 as they did in May 2019, according to data released by the Federal Highway Administration yesterday. This is up from 91.9 percent in April but down from 97.2 percent in March. May’s record is pretty good considering that May had two fewer business days in 2021 than in 2019 while March had two more.

At 99.4 percent of pre-pandemic levels, rural driving is ahead of urban driving, which was just 93.9 percent in May. Drivers in 21 states drove more in rural areas in 2021 than in 2019; urban driving in May 2021 exceeded 2019 in just six states. Continue reading →

Reinventing Transit for a Post-COVID World

By | | Policy brief, Transportation
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As society rebuilds after the pandemic, the transit industry at a crossroads. It could totally reinvent itself to truly serve the residents of modern cities. Alternatively, it could come up with new reasons for ever larger subsidies despite continuing to be ineffective and wasteful. Since President Biden and Democrats in Congress seem eager to give it subsidies with few to no questions asked, it is likely to choose the latter course.

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

Transit ridership has declined steadily since 2014, losing 7.7 percent nationally between 2014 and 2019. During that time, transit ridership declined in about 85 percent of the nation’s major urban areas. On a larger scale, it has been declining for the last century, with per capita ridership falling from nearly 290 trips per urban resident in 1920 to just 37 in 2019. As of April, 2021, ridership was 60 percent lower than it had been before the pandemic, and it isn’t clear that ridership will ever recover to 2019’s already low levels. Continue reading →