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Poison Pills in the Senate Infrastructure Bill

By | | Transportation
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The House-approved INVEST Act included a provision requiring states to insure that all existing roads were in a state-of-good-repair before building new roads. I called that a “poison pill” because it poisoned the idea of using federal funds to promote mobility. This is especially true because Amtrak and transit have far more severe maintenance backlogs than highways, yet the bill included no similar provisions for those modes.

Click image to download a 4.0-MB PDF of this bill.

I’ve read through the 2,702-page Senate infrastructure bill and the good news is that it doesn’t include the same fix-it-first provision for highways as the House bill. However, it does have several mobility poisons of its own. Continue reading →

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
6 Comments

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
4 Comments

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
4 Comments

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 →

Transit Workers Overpaid

By | | Transportation
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Transit workers in many cities get paid more than twice as much as private sector employees working in transportation, according to a new report from the Heritage Foundation. The report compared average pay by major transit agencies in Atlanta, Chicago, New York, Philadelphia, San Francisco, and Washington with the average pay for all workers and the pay for transport workers in those regions.

Transit Premium Over Other Workers in Same Region

CityAll WorkersTransport Workers
Atlanta11.7%58.8%
Chicago31.4%77.1%
New York50.1%27.1%
Philadelphia39.7%109.7%
San Francisco61.0%147.8%
Washington31.5%121.1%

As shown in the table, Heritage Foundation researcher David Ditch calculated that average transit pay is anywhere from 12 to 61 percent greater than average pay for all workers in these regions and 59 to 148 percent more than average pay for transport workers. There are a couple of caveats, however. Continue reading →

Urban Sociopaths

By | | Housing
45 Comments

Sociopaths are people who “have no regard for others’ rights or feelings, lack empathy and remorse for wrongdoings, and have the need to exploit and manipulate others.” That definition perfectly fits New Urban planners and the environmentalists who support them.

I could be referring to planners eager to inflict congestion on commuters in order to persuade a few of them to take transit. But today I’m referring to planners eager to drive up housing prices in order to force more people to live in multifamily housing. Continue reading →

Electric Bus Dreams in Shambles

By | | Transportation
7 Comments

Philadelphia’s electric transit buses are in a “complete shambles” as a result of poor design and poor quality construction. The buses, which were proudly displayed at the 2016 National Democratic Convention, have broken frames, broken batteries, and other problems, and have been totally withdrawn from service.

Proterra electric buses similar to this one were withdrawn from service in Philadelphia as the weight of the batteries led to cracked frames and the battery range turned out to be significantly less than the manufacturer promised. Photo by SounderBruce.

Although transit advocates like to claim that transit is environmentally friendly, a dirty secret of the transit industry is that buses use 50 percent more energy and emitted 50 percent more greenhouse gases per passenger mile than the average car. That’s based on 2019 data; in 2020, the numbers will be much worse. Continue reading →