Search Results for: rail

House Dems Propose $547 Transport Bill

By | | Transportation
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Democrats on the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee are proposing to increase transportation spending from $305 billion over the last five years to $547 billion over the next five years. Although this is supposed to be a five-year bill, it will really be a six-year bill spending at least $656 billion, as Congress is never able to pass a major bill during an election year and will simply extend it a sixth year at the then-current rate of spending.

Many megaprojects, such as Boston’s Big Dig and Dulles MetroRail (shown here) are built not because they are needed but because politicians can get the federal government to pay for them with “free” money. The proposed transportation bill will encourage more such megaprojects. Photo by Tom Saunders, Virginia Department of Transportation.

The proposed bill would increase spending on highways by 54 percent, double spending on transit, and triple spending on Amtrak. Although transit and Amtrak together carried 1.0 percent of passenger miles before the pandemic and less than 0.6 percent of passenger miles in the last year, the bill would give them 37 percent of the federal funds. Moreover, while federal funding of roads would be hampered by a “fix-it-first” rule, federal spending on transit would have no such limit even though transit infrastructure is in much worse shape than highway infrastructure. Continue reading →

San Diego’s Insane $163.5 Billion Plan

By | | Policy brief, Regional planning
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If the definition of insanity is doing the same thing and expecting a different result, then San Diego’s latest regional plan  is completely insane. The draft 2021 Regional Plan, which was released on May 28 by the San Diego Association of Governments (SANDAG), includes all of the latest planning fads: active transportation, complete streets, density, rail transit, density, transit-oriented development, microtransit, density, and vision zero. Did I mention density and rail transit?

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

The plan backs up these ideas with dollars, proposing to spend more than $80 billion on transit, $9.8 billion on high-density housing districts, $4.3 billion on bike paths, and $0.0 billion on new roads. In all, the plan proposes to spend $163.5 billion over the next 30 years, more than half of which would go for transit and transit hubs. Some of this is for operating expenses, but transit capital improvements alone would cost $52 billion. Continue reading →

Transit & Amtrak Lag Behind Driving & Flying

By | | Transportation, Useful Data
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Transit carried 40.5 percent as many riders in April, 2021 as in April, 2019, according to data released by the Federal Transit Administration last Friday. This is a slight step backwards from March, in which transit carried 40.8 percent as many people as in March 2019.

As indicated by the dotted line, driving data are not yet available, but a future Antiplanner post will update this chart when they are published.

Amtrak was even worse, carrying 37.2 percent of its 2019 passenger-miles, according to the company’s monthly performance report. This, however, was a bigger improvement over March, when it carried 32.7 percent of 2019 passenger-miles. Continue reading →

A Lot of Blame to Go Around

By | | Transportation
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Three-and-one-half years ago, the first Amtrak train over a new, shorter route between Seattle and Portland crashed and killed three passengers. Now Steven Brown, the engineer who went 80 miles per hour around a 30-mph curve, wants to be reinstated, saying the accident was Amtrak’s fault, not his.

It was Amtrak’s fault because, he admits, he was inexperienced with the route (having made “only” three practice runs and seven to ten observational runs) and had never run that model of locomotive before. Given this lack of experience, he says, Amtrak never should have assigned him the train. Of course, as it was a brand-new route, all of Amtrak’s engineers were equally inexperienced with the terrain, and he was given the job because he had scored 100 percent on a written exam for the route. Continue reading →

How Many Trillions to Waste?

By | | News commentary, Transportation
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President Biden wanted to spend $2.25 trillion we don’t have on projects we don’t need. Republicans countered by saying they weren’t willing to spend more than $568 billion we don’t have on projects we don’t need. President Biden, desiring to show he was willing to compromise, offered to spend $1.7 trillion we don’t have on projects we don’t need.

Now the latest is that Republicans have agreed to spend “close to $1 trillion” we don’t have on projects we don’t need. Whereas Biden hinted that he would agree to raising taxes on corporations and people who earn more than $400,000 a year to pay for part of his plan, a key provision of the Republican proposal is that taxes won’t be raised on anyone to pay for it, thus absolutely ensuring we won’t have the money to pay for their infrastructure projects we don’t need.

It is easy to say that this is just politics, but I can’t help but feeling that everyone inside the Beltway has gone nuts. As I noted earlier this week, Democrats have successfully moved the goal posts so far out that Republicans think that spending nearly $1 trillion in funny money is a fiscally conservative proposal. Continue reading →

Safe, Cost-Effective, and Equitable Transport

By | | Transportation
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The North Carolina Department of Transportation (NCDOT) is not the worst state transportation department in the country, but neither is it the best. In 1921, North Carolina was one of the first states to impose a tax on gasoline and dedicate it to roads. It held to the user-pay principle for more than 60 years, but in 1984 it began diverting some of those fuel taxes to transit.

Click image to download an 11.5-MB PDF of this 108-page report.

Today, about 6 percent of NCDOT’s budget, which nearly all comes from highway user fees, gets spent subsidizing transit, Amtrak trains, and state-owned non-commercial airports. That doesn’t sound like very much, but the state is under pressure to increase that percentage. Continue reading →

Columbia River Bridge Faces Opposition

By | | Transportation
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The revived plan to replace the I-5 bridge over the Columbia River between Portland and Vancouver has been hammered by two liberal transportation experts in Portland. New Urbanist Joe Cortright calls it “vastly oversized and over-priced.” David Bragdon, former president of Metro, one of the agencies that wrote the original plan, documented years of falsehoods perpetrated by planners and called the proposal the “most expensive, stupid something” that could be done in the corridor.

As I noted recently, the plan called for a 12-lane bridge to serve a six-lane freeway. It also included a bridge for light rail even though voters in both Portland and Vancouver had rejected funding for this light-rail extension. Piling stupidity on stupidity, the plan called for a bridge that couldn’t open for ship traffic, and because light-rail trains couldn’t go up a steep enough grade to allow such traffic, planners proposed to buy out several existing shipping companies rather than leave light rail out of the plan.

Predictably, Cortright complains about the 12 lanes without ever mentioning the light-rail boondoggle. Bragdon only mentions light rail to suggest that the Washington Department of Transportation planned to stab Oregon in the back by deleting light rail from the project after it was approved. The reality is that both the 12 lanes and the light rail were insane and planners were crazy to propose a project whose 12 lanes would alienate the New Urbanists and whose light rail would alienate fiscal conservatives. Continue reading →

The Case Against Amtrak

By | | Transportation
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CNN says that, with Biden’s proposal to give Amtrak $80 billion, “Amtrak’s moment may finally have arrived.” But what would it mean for Amtrak to have a “moment”? Would it mean that passenger trains return to once again become an important source of transportation, as they were in the 1920s? Or does it mean that Amtrak will get a lot more money for continuing to carry a trivial share of the nation’s passenger travel?

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

Since 1971, Congress has given Amtrak about $54 billion in subsidies, which in today’s dollars is about $85 billion. Biden’s plan would nearly double that in one fell swoop. But this is not going to double Amtrak ridership. For one thing, eleven years ago Amtrak’s Northeast Corridor had a $52 billion maintenance backlog, and it is undoubtedly larger now if only due to inflation. More than half of the $80 billion Biden proposes to give it will be spent rehabilitating existing infrastructure, not making improvements that are likely to increase ridership. Continue reading →

Amtrak Acela vs. Maglev

By | | Transportation
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Amtrak’s CEO, William Flynn, agrees with the Antiplanner on at least one thing: the proposed Baltimore-Washington maglev is a bad idea. The maglev, he told a Congressional subcommittee last week, “would only serve a small number of affluent travelers.”

Of course, that’s the pot calling the kettle black. Flynn probably thinks 0.1 percent of passenger travel (which is what Amtrak carries) is a large number, but it’s not. Amtrak fares in the Northeast Corridor are much higher than bus fares, so Amtrak itself is only serving a small number of affluent travelers.

Flynn also pointed out that the maglev will use a lot more energy than the cars, trains, and buses it would replace. I made the same point in my comments on the maglev, which I submitted last week. Based on the amount of greenhouse gases generated by Maryland’s current electric power plants, the maglev would add more than 300,000 metric tons of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere each year. Wayne Rogers, CEO of the maglev project, told the subcommittee that the maglev would divert “up to 16 million car trips,” but the power required to do so would generate far more tons of carbon dioxide than it would save. Continue reading →