Search Results for: peak transit

Peak Automobile?

By | | Transportation
19 Comments

Ever since some alarmist came up with the economically nonsensical term peak oil, we’ve been inundated with peak this, that, and the other thing. There’s peak helium. How about peak phosphorus?

More recently, the term has been twisted from a supply issue to a demand issue, such as peak smart phone. And now, peak car. Yet, reading about peak car, the Antiplanner can’t help but feeling that this is neither a supply nor a demand issue but more wishful thinking on the part of city officials who are doing their best to create auto-hostile environments.

Millennials don’t drive? It turns out that’s not true, just as it isn’t true that Millennials avoid the suburbs.

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Transit Idiocy

By | | Transportation
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Self-driving cars could “make congestion dramatically worse,” warns a headline in the Atlantic‘s CityLab. Simulations show that, if just 25 percent of cars on the road are self-driving, the article says, there will be a lot more delays at intersections.

It’s not surprising that the transit crowd would want to try to discredit the idea of self-driving cars, but this is a particularly pathetic attempt. The CityLab article is based on a study that assumed that, for the sake of passenger comfort, self-driving cars would be programmed to accelerate and decelerate no faster than a light-rail or intercity train. Such slow acceleration, the study found, would increase the time it would take cars to get through stop lights.

The study was seemingly done by people who haven’t ever seen a self-driving car in real life, or maybe any car. There’s an obvious difference between cars and trains: people stand up and walk around in trains, so acceleration and deceleration has to be slow. So far, no one has designed a self-driving tall enough to stand in, so there’s no need to cripple the cars that way.

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Portland Transit Implodes

By | | Transportation, Urban areas
25 Comments

Here’s a story by the Oregonian‘s intrepid reporter, Joseph Rose that has it all: deferred maintenance, delayed trains, $950 million in unfunded retirement benefits, transit cuts and fare increases, secret pay raises to transit agency executives, an angry transit union, and a plan to move transit riders on buses around rail work that “basically imploded.”


Worn pavement and light-rail switch near Portland’s Lloyd Center. Photo from Max FAQs.

The Antiplanner has repeatedly harped on the fact that rail transit infrastructure basically lasts only 30 years and then must be replaced, often at greater expense (even after adjusting for inflation) than the original construction cost. Part of the cost is dealing with the interruptions in service that are almost inevitable when replacing rails, wires, and other fixed hardware.

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The Scandal of High-Cost, Low-Capacity Transit

By | | Transportation
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Tomorrow, the Cato Institute will publish a new report on the growing tendency of cities to build high-cost, low-capacity transit systems. Antiplanner readers can preview the report today.


Click image to download a PDF of this paper.

The report focuses on cities that are building systems that, like heavy rail, have costly, exclusive rights of way yet, like light rail, can’t move more than about 9,000 to 12,000 people per hour. Seattle, for example, is spending well over $600 million per mile building an underground light-rail line that will be able to move no more people than San Diego’s original, 1981 light-rail line that cost just $17 million per mile (in today’s dollars). Honolulu is spending $250 million a mile building an elevated line whose capacity will be little greater than a surface light-rail line.

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Peak Oil Panic

By | | News commentary
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The Antiplanner paid $2.99 a gallon for gasoline last week, which–according to my records–is the lowest I’ve paid for three years. The United States is now producing more oil than it imports for the first time since 1995. Not only is the U.S. producing more oil than Saudi Arabia today, it is poised to become the world’s largest oil producer (ahead of Russia, which is currently number one) by 2015.

Despite these dramatic changes, there are some who still want to harp on peak oil. “A new multi-disciplinary study led by the University of Maryland calls for immediate action by government, private and commercial sectors to reduce vulnerability to the imminent threat of global peak oil,” says one news article.

In fact, the study in question doesn’t predict that peak oil will take place soon, only that if it does, it will have serious consequences. But even that conclusion is wrong, as the “multidisciplinary team” would have known if one of the disciplines had been economics.

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Spending Millions on Transit; Getting Thousands in Value

By | | Transportation
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A $112 million transit center in Silver Spring, Maryland, is years behind schedule due to serious construction flaws. After detecting the flaws, Montgomery County officials halted construction and hired en engineering firm to look at the center.

That firm’s report found that the pillars supporting the three-level center are inadequate to hold the buses that are supposed to use one of the levels; the concrete covering the steel reinforcement bars is so thin that the center will probably rust out in about 12.5 years, instead of the 50 years for which it was designed; and the center doesn’t meet fire standards.

Really, why does Silver Spring need an expensive, three-level transit center anyway? They could have fit everything they wanted in a ground-level, surface parking lot that would have cost far less than $112 million. This is simply another case of transit going for the high-cost solution to any problem.

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The Fading of the Peak Oil Myth

By | | News commentary
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Remember all the talk about peak oil a few years ago? You don’t hear much about it today. The United States, supposedly almost out of oil, began producing more oil than Saudi Arabia a few months ago.

No one thinks there’s an infinite supply of oil in the world, but the peak-oil proponents were claiming that world oil production was about to peak and then head forever downwards just as China and India were consuming more, leading gasoline prices to inexorably rise to $20, $30, even $100 a gallon. This would force everyone out of their cars and onto mass transit, a prediction that was used to justify all sorts of otherwise ridiculous light-rail lines and land-use regulations.

The Antiplanner scrutinized these ideas eight years ago and concluded that those who held them had no understanding of the laws of supply and demand. For one thing, there are plenty of alternative sources of energy that are economically inefficient today but that could come on line if ever oil prices did rise enough.

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2010 Transit Data Update

By | | Follow up, Transportation, Useful Data
31 Comments

The Antiplanner has reposted the consolidated spreadsheet for the 2010 National Transit Database. The revision of a file I posted last month fixes an error in the calculation of the total number of seats and standing room provided by each transit agency and mode of travel.

More important, the revised file includes some calculations, including BTUs and CO2 emissions per passenger mile, seats and standing room per vehicle, the average number of passengers per vehicle (passenger miles divided by vehicle revenue miles), and operating subsidies per trip and passenger mile. Many more calculations can be made using this spreadsheet and you are welcome to download it and do them.

The Federal Transit Administration added a new kind of transit this year: demand-taxis (id code DT). This is a demand-responsive system that uses private taxis in place of the wheelchair-accessible buses used by many transit agencies. This actually saves money as the average demand-responsive bus costs taxpayers about $30 a ride while the average taxi costs about $17 a ride.

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Another Lying Transit Agency

By | | News commentary, Transportation
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Tomorrow, Vancouver Washington voters will be asked to raise sales taxes in order to “preserve existing bus service.” Without the sales tax increase, says C-Tran, the transit agency, “C-TRAN would need to implement a system-wide service reduction of about 35 percent by early to mid 2013.”

It turns out that is a lie. An accountant named Tiffany Couch has scrutinized C-Tran’s budget and projected costs and revenues and concluded that existing taxes are sufficient to maintain bus service for many years.

So why does C-Tran say that service will decline without the tax increase? The answer, says Couch, is that C-Tran has already decided it wants to build a light-rail line connecting with Portland’s light rail. Without the tax increase, C-Tran will have to cut bus service in order to pay for the light rail.

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Have We Reached “Peak Travel”?

By | | Transportation
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The New Year brings a number of news reports fretting (or hoping) that the amount of travel we do has peaked or plateaued. Given that cars are becoming more fuel-efficient, that means that the total amount of energy we use driving will significantly decline. However, the real implications of the claim are far more dire.

The news reports are actually based on a paper published by researchers at Stanford University more than a year ago. The researchers followed the time-honored technique of looking at past data trends, drawing a dotted line into the future, and claiming it as a prediction. Reality is somewhat more complicated.

A much more interesting report, published more than a decade ago by the Minnesota Department of Transportation, compared population and job densities with travel behavior in 31 cities. “Land use, at least at the aggregate level studied here, is not a major leverage point in the determination of overall population travel choices,” the study found. “On the one hand, certain relationships emerge which correspond to generally held beliefs, for example that high residential concentration increases transit share,” though it did not reduce driving or congestion. “On the other hand, aggregate land use characteristics had little or no discernable impact on other measures of travel behavior.”

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