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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.

Continue reading →

China’s High-Speed Rail Debt Trap

By | | Transportation
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China’s high-speed system is caught a debt trap, having to borrow money to repay the loans taken out to pay for rail construction. Although a few lines claim to be profitable, most are not. As a result, says an article published by New Delhi think tank Observer Research Foundation, since 2015 interest payments on China State Railway debt has been greater than high-speed rail revenues.

The article (all but the last four paragraphs of which is used as the narrative for the above video) was written as a warning that “Poorer countries trying to emulate HSR must be mindful of the pitfalls.” But it is equally valid as a warning to richer countries, where construction costs are higher and where the value of passenger rail is lower due to extensive networks of intercity highways and airports. Continue reading →

An Open Letter to AmeriStarRail

By | | Transportation
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AmeriStarRail is a private company that wants to operate passenger trains in Amtrak’s Boston-to-Washington corridor as well as on nearby routes. It proposes to privately pay for construction of 76 new train sets consisting of 152 locomotives and 760 passenger cars, which it would use to replace all non-Acela trains in the corridor as well as extend service beyond the corridor.

Amtrak’s new Acela train, which is scheduled to go into service next year. AmeriStarRail proposes to use trains of the same make and design, but with 12 cars instead of 9 and locomotives with Diesel engines to provide power when operating on rails with no overhead wires. Photo by Simon Brugel.

AmeriStarRail also says it will spend $5 billion improving tracks in the Northeast Corridor in order to reduce the fastest trip times between New York to Washington from more than 2-1/2 hours to under 2 hours, with similar gains in the Boston-New York portion. The company says it has investors interested in paying for all of this but won’t reveal who they are. Continue reading →

Optimistic Road & Transit Forecasts

By | | Transportation
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“Billions Spent on Roads and Transit Projects Are Often Based on Optimistic Forecasts,” headlines the Wall Street Journal last week. “Researchers have found that transportation planners frequently expect more people to use their road and transit projects than ultimately do so,” said the article. “Yet those optimistic forecasts become part of the justification for spending millions or billions of dollars on such projects,” which, the article goes on to say, is “wasting resources.”

Toll road under construction in Texas. Photo by Larry D. Moore.

Recent FTA studies found that transit projects overestimate ridership by an average of 21 percent, which the article claims “was an improvement over previous years.” As I pointed out a few weeks ago, the “improvement” came about because the FTA changed its frame of reference. While older studies looked at ridership projections made when local transit agencies decided to build the project, the newer studies looked at the projections made when the FTA itself began to subsidize the project. These two steps may be separated by several years. Continue reading →

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 →

July Driving 98.2% of Pre-Pandemic Levels

By | | Transportation, Useful Data
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After June driving slightly exceeded driving levels in 2019, Americans drove 98.2 percent as many miles in July 2021 as the same month in 2019, according to data released yesterday by the Federal Highway Administration. The difference is probably because July had fewer business days in 2021 than 2019.

Airline numbers from the Transportation Security Administration; Amtrak numbers from July, 2021and July, 2020 monthly performance reports; transit numbers from the National Transit Database; highway numbers from the Federal Highway Administration.

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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 →

California Bans Single-Family Zoning

By | | Housing
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Last week, the California legislature passed a Senate Bill 9, which bans single-family zoning. The YIMBYs — really YISEBYs (yes in someone else’s backyard) — claim this is a victory for more affordable housing, but it isn’t. In fact, it is a victory for densification, and density has never made housing more affordable.

Not only are higher densities not more affordable, data from 429 urban areas in the 2019 American Community Survey indicate that higher densities are incompatible with housing affordability; specifically that densities above 4,000 people per square mile almost inevitably drive median housing costs to more than four times median family incomes.

Like Oregon’s anti-single-family zoning law, California’s law effectively allows up to four homes on every lot that now has one. And, like Oregon’s law, experts agree that it will be many years before SB9 has any effect on housing prices, if it ever does. 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 →