“More highway spending won’t rev up the economy,” argues a recent article in the Wall Street Journal. However, the article’s writer, David Harrison, seems a little confused about how highway spending might help the economy.
“The U.S. already has an extensive system of roads, so building more wouldn’t add much to productivity, economists say,” writes Harrison. But this depends entirely on where roads are built. Continue reading
Amtrak’s May ridership surged to 45.2 percent of pre-COVID levels (as compared with May 2019), surpassing public transit, which reached only 42.3 percent of 2019 levels. Transit’s recovery was partly hurt by the fact that May 2021 had two fewer business days than May 2019, but the slow growth makes transit the least-recovered of the various modes of travel.
Shown are transit trips from the National Transit Database, and airline trips from Transportation Safety Administration, and Amtrak passenger miles from the May performance report. Driving is in vehicle miles from the Federal Highway Administration’s Traffic Volume Trends; May highway data won’t be out for another week or so.
As usual, rail transit is doing worse than bus transit when compared with 2019, but rail has also recovered more since 2020. Most of rail’s recovery is in heavy rail and commuter rail; light rail’s recovery is only slightly faster than transit buses and hybrid rail (meaning Diesel-powered light rail) isn’t even recovering as fast as buses. Continue reading
Someone should teach The Hill‘s headline writers a little history. A recent article about why we should give more subsidies to Amtrak and high-speed rail was headed, “The US is a first-world nation with a third-world rail system.”
Actually, the United States is a first-world nation with a first-world rail system which is probably the best rail system in the world. The only other contender for the title would be Canada.
Few people seem to remember that “first-world” terminology grew out of the Cold War. At that time, the First World consisted of capitalist countries such as the United States and Canada while the Second World was socialist countries such as the Soviet Union and China. The Third World included developing countries that hadn’t really decided whether they were going to follow the capitalist or socialist model (with those that failed to choose capitalism remaining poor today). Continue reading
In what may be one of the most obvious reports ever, the Texas Transportation Institute has announced that congestion in 2020 was only about half as bad as congestion had been in 2019. The institute used to publish its congestion reports each year, but the 2021 Urban Mobility Report is the first in several years. The last report had data only through 2017, but this one goes through 2020.
Click image to download a copy of this report.
The report estimates that congestion cost commuters $190 billion in 2019, declining to $101 billion in 2020. Congestion also cost shippers $172 billion in 2019, falling to $95 billion in 2020. While these are interesting, if somewhat incomprehensible, numbers, the report doesn’t provide a lot of guidance about what to expect in the future. Continue reading
Last month, the San Jose city council approved a plan for Google to practically double the size of downtown San Jose. The plan allows Google to build up to 7.3 million square feet of office space, 4,000 to 5,900 housing units, 1,100 hotel/extended stay units, and half a million square feet of retail or cultural space on 80 acres of land located just west of downtown. The site is immediately adjacent to the San Jose train station, which serves commuter trains, light rail, and Amtrak.
Click image to download a four-page PDF of this policy brief.
According to city planning documents, this is exactly the kind of development San Jose was looking for in this area, one which (according to a staff presentation) would “create a vibrant, welcoming, and accessible urban destination consisting of a mix of land uses and that are well-integrated with the intermodal transit station.” Yet in order to get the project approved, Google had to put up $200 million for various special interest groups who were protesting the plan. This may actually have the perverse effect of discouraging future development in the city. Continue reading
The White House and Senate Republicans have compromised on a $1.2 trillion infrastructure bill. Meanwhile, President Biden and Republican leaders have agreed to a $579 billion infrastructure bill.
Since $579 billion is less than half of $1.2 trillion, both of these statements can’t be true — and yet they are. The difference is that the $1.2 trillion includes “baseline spending,” or the amount that would have been spent on infrastructure even if no bill were passed. The actual infrastructure bill would only include $579 billion of new spending. That’s quite a concession on the part of the White House, which had originally proposed $2.3 trillion in new spending, or nearly four times as much as the bipartisan agreement. On the other hand, $579 billion is exactly $579 billion more than Republicans had proposed to spend before Biden released his original proposal on March 31.
At the same time, the so-called baseline appears to represent the amount that would be spent on surface transportation by the bill proposed by House Democrats, or about $78 billion a year. This is a large increase from the amount that has been spent in the past few years, which has been about $55 billion a year. In order to get the total above $1 trillion, allowing the president to save some face, the $78 billion a year is extended for eight years, even though the House bill would authorize only five years of spending. Continue reading
Plans to build a maglev line between Tokyo and Nagoya may be threatened by local opposition. The proposed route would go through the Shizuoka prefecture, where people fear that a long South Alps Tunnel required for the train will affect their water supplies.
This famous scene of the Shinkansen in front of Mount Fuji is in Shizuoka prefecture. Photo by MaedaAkihiko.
Leading the opposition is Shizuoka Governor Heita Kawakatsu, who won re-election this week in a campaign where the rail line was a major issue. Kawakatsu represents a minority party while his opponent was endorsed by the Liberal Democratic party, which has been the majority party in Japan for many years. Continue reading
The next time you travel through a city, see if you can find many four-, five-, or six-story buildings. Chances are, nearly all of the buildings you see will be either low rise (three stories or less) or high-rise (seven stories or more). If you do find any mid-rise, four- to six-story buildings, chances are they were either built before 1910, after 1990, or built by the government.
Click image to download a five-page PDF of this policy brief.
Before 1890, most people traveled around cities on foot. Only the wealthy could afford a horse and carriage or to live in the suburbs and enter the city on a steam-powered commuter train. Many cities had horsecars—rail cars pulled by horses—but they were no faster than walking and too expensive for most working-class people to use on a daily basis. Continue reading
The pro-transit TransitCenter has discovered something that the Antiplanner has been saying for years: transit policies are effectively racist. Many urban areas have “two-tiered transit systems,” says the TransitCenter’s Mary Buchanan, where an expensive form of transit, such as light or heavy rail, whisks high-income people, who are often white, to work while a cheaper, slower form of transit, such as local buses, trundles low-income people, who are often minorities, to their jobs.
Black households have significantly lower auto ownership rates than whites. Source: American Community Survey table B25044. When broken down by race, the Census Bureau only has five-year data for 2011-2015; some auto ownership rates have probably improved since then. Census Bureau data also don’t breakdown Hispanic vs. non-Hispanic ownership rates; most Hispanics are included with whites.
Buchanan and her colleagues evaluated transit in major urban areas such as New York and Chicago and found that low-income people would be much better off owning a car than relying on transit to get to work, which is another thing the Antiplanner has been saying for years. Of course, the TransitCenter sees this as one more reason to increase transit subsidies, while I see it as a reason to encourage more car ownership. Continue reading
Almost every effort to justify subsidies to urban transit makes similar claims: transit supposedly saves energy, reduces greenhouse gas emissions, promotes economic development, relieves congestion, and helps low-income people. Previous policy briefs have shown that, in all but a handful of urban areas, transit uses more energy and produces more greenhouse gases than the average car; often makes congestion worse; fails to promote economic growth; and hurts the 95 percent of low-income workers who don’t ride transit.
Click image to download a three-page PDF of this policy brief.
But what about the 5 percent of low-income workers who do commute by transit (or, at least, did so before the pandemic)? For some transit advocates, it’s not enough that nearly 80 percent of the costs of transit are subsidized. They argue that, to truly help low-income people, transit should be free. Is transit a cost-effective way of providing mobility needed to thrive in modern cities? Continue reading
