Search Results for: rail

Restoring Trust to the Highway Trust Fund

By | | Policy brief, Transportation
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In what some considered to be a backroom deal, the New Jersey Turnpike Authority agreed last month to give more than $500 million a year in toll revenues to New Jersey Transit, up from $164 million a year in the previous five years. The decision was a surprise to the public, as it was made with no preliminary discussion under an agenda item innocuously listed as “State Public Transportation Projects Funding Agreement.”

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

This decision to use highway user fees to prop up a transit agency known for its bad management, including “nepotism, cronyism and incompetence,” further erodes the trust highway users have in the people managing state and local transportation resources. This trust is important partly because roads are mostly funded by a variety of excise taxes that don’t automatically adjust for inflation. Increasing the taxes is more politically difficult if users don’t believe that the funds will go for the facilities they thought they were paying for. Continue reading →

Bringing the FRA into the Fantasy World

By | | Transportation
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“As in many other arenas, California has taken the lead nationally to advance high-speed rail, starting an economically transformative project in the Central Valley and assuming the challenges that come with that leadership.” That sounds like something someone might have made in 2009 when excitement was building over California’s plan to build a high-speed rail line from Los Angeles to San Francisco. There’s no way anyone would talk like that today given what we know about 100 percent cost overruns, more than a decade of delays, and the inability of California to raise the money to finish more than a fraction of the project.

Yet that statement was made just three months ago by Amit Bose, who President Biden has nominated to lead the Federal Railroad Administration and serve as the administration’s cheerleader for high-speed rail and other passenger rail projects.

Bose’s career clearly demonstrates a faith in big-government spending on transportation projects of little value to travelers or shippers. He worked for New Jersey Transit early in his career, and during the Obama administration he worked closely with Secretary of Immobility Ray LaHood, who firmly believed that 8-mile-per-hour streetcars were better than buses despite the buses’ higher speeds, greater capacities, and lower costs. While at DOT, Bose arranged a $2.5 billion federal “loan” to Amtrak to buy new Acela trains despite knowing that Amtrak is unlikely to ever have the funds to repay such a loan (unless they come from other federal grants). Continue reading →

March 2021 Transit Ridership Down 59%

By | | Transportation, Useful Data
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Public transit carried 33 percent fewer riders in March 2021 than in March 2020 and 59 percent fewer than in March 2019, according to data published yesterday by the Federal Transit Administration. Since the pandemic started having an effect on transit in March 2020, we have to go back to 2019 to compare with pre-pandemic levels.

All forms of transport are recovering but some have recovered more than others. March driving data are approximate; actual numbers should be released in a week or so.

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The Columbia River Crossing Rises Again

By | | Transportation
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After being declared dead seven years ago, the proposal to replace the bridge over the Columbia River between Portland and Vancouver has been revived. Proponents of a new bridge have a web site that must be designed for Generation Z, as I find it pretty incomprehensible.

The original Pacific Highway bridge, now known as the Interstate Bridge, had two lanes of traffic including room for trolley cars.

Part of the existing structure opened as a two-lane bridge in 1917, and its capacity was doubled by building a duplicate bridge in 1958. Later the bridges were re-striped for three lanes to match the Interstate 5 freeway lanes north and south of the river. Continue reading →

50th Anniversary of a Loser

By | | Transportation
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Fifty years ago today, Amtrak operated its first passenger trains, a fact that President Biden celebrated a day early yesterday. Biden wants people to think that Amtrak is enough of a success that it deserves $80 billion in additional funding. But the reality is it is just a big loser.

Rail fans remember May 1, 1971, as the day America lost more than half of its passenger trains. On April 30, ten trains left the Midwest for the West Coast: the Empire Builder, Western Star, North Coast Limited, and Mainstreeter (all of which went to Seattle with sections to Portland), City of Portland, Portland Rose, City of San Francisco, San Francisco Chief, City of Los Angeles, and Super Chief. The next day, Amtrak killed all of them except the Empire Builder (and it killed the leg to Portland), Super Chief, and City of San Francisco (which was cut to three days a week). That’s a loss that’s hard to forgive.

Business analysts remember that the idea of a national passenger railroad was sold to Congress as a profitable enterprise. Rather than a normal government agency, Amtrak was created as a for-profit corporation with stockholders and, potentially, investors. The railroads were supposed to give it seed money based on the amount of money they claimed they had lost in the previous three years. After spending that to get started, as I noted six months ago, Amtrak was supposed to make money. Continue reading →

If You Can’t Beat ’Em, Ban ’Em

By | | Transportation
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Rail advocates like to claim that the introduction of high-speed trains has led to a cessation of airline service, apparently to show that high-speed trains can compete against faster planes. While this may have happened on a few routes, European air travel before the pandemic was growing far faster than rail travel. For example, in France, Germany, Italy, and Spain — the main European countries with high-speed rail — rail travel between 2011 and 2019 grew by 14 percent while air travel grew by 34 percent. No European country saw rail travel grow faster than air travel.

The government of France has found a solution to for-profit airlines outcompeting government-subsidized trains: ban the competing air travel. Under a law passed earlier this month, airlines will not be allowed to operate on routes that trains can serve in less than two-and-a-half hours. If high-speed trains were able to compete on their own, they wouldn’t need such a law.

Of course, French politicians justified this law based on the supposed savings in carbon emissions. But conventional trains are only a little more energy efficient than planes, and high-speed trains require well over 50 percent more energy, per train-car-mile, than conventional trains. Passenger occupancies also tend to be much higher on planes than trains — typically 85 percent vs. 50 percent — because planes usually operate in non-stop service while trains make many stops, so the size of planes can be set to demand while trains must be sized to fit the portion of the journey where demand is highest. Continue reading →

Can U.S. Power Plants Support Electric Cars?

By | | Policy brief, Transportation
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Will electric cars completely replace internal-combustion vehicles anytime soon? Are electric vehicles, whether rail or highway vehicles, truly cleaner, especially in states where most electric power comes from burning fossil fuels? Does the United States electric grid have the capacity to power the nation’s automotive fleet? A detailed look at America’s energy budgets and electrical power supply systems will help answer questions like these.

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

Today’s Electrical Grid

The Department of Energy’s Monthly Energy Review shows that the leading source of electricity in the United States is natural gas, which produced 40 percent of the nation’s electricity in 2020, while coal produced 19 percent. This is a turnaround from just 15 years ago, when coal produced half of our electricity and natural gas just 19 percent. Some people blame coal’s decline on the Obama administration’s hostility to fossil fuels, but much of the credit is due to the development and widespread use of hydraulic fracturing and the low-cost natural gases it produced. Continue reading →

Forum on Competing Infrastructure Plans

By | | Transportation
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On Monday, April 26, the Antiplanner will join the Reason Foundation’s Bob Poole and Cato Institute’s Chris Edwards in a forum discussing infrastructure plans now before Congress. The forum will start at noon, Eastern Time, and last one hour. To register, click here.

Biden’s Infrastructure Plan and Alternatives from Cato Institute on Vimeo.

Yesterday, just in time for the forum, Republicans introduced their own infrastructure plan. This plan would spend almost 40 percent more money on transportation than Biden’s, but the funds are distributed differently. Except for broadband and water, the plan leaves out all of the non-transportation-related things that are in Biden’s plan, allowing for its total cost to be only about a quarter of Biden’s. Continue reading →

Quadruple the Cost Plus 11 Years of Delay

By | | Transportation, Urban areas
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Today the Cato Institute is publishing a new report on high-speed rail. In consideration of the work that went into that report (which is partly based on past Antiplanner policy briefs), I am taking this week off of my usual Tuesday policy brief.

Honolulu buses could easily move the number of passengers likely to ride the train, for far less money. Photo by 123TheBusHonolulu6969.

Instead, behold the latest revelations about the Honolulu rail transit line, which is currently under construction. Originally projected to cost less than $3 billion, the Honolulu Authority for Rapid Transit (HART) now admits that it is expected to cost $11.3 billion, or “about $12 billion” when finance charges are included. This is after years of denying that the cost would rise above $10 billion. Continue reading →

A Shared Love for Obsolete Transportation

By | | Transportation
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Transit ridership at the Santa Clara Valley Transportation Authority (VTA) has declined in every year since Nuria Fernandez was made CEO of San Jose’s principle transit agency at the end of 2013. By 2019, transit fares collected by VTA covered just 9 percent of operating costs, far lower than the national average of 32 percent. VTA light-rail cars carried an average of just 14 passengers, compared with a national average of 24. Most San Jose light-rail “trains” are just one car long, meaning they could easily be replaced by buses at a huge savings to taxpayers.

VTA light rail: a model of government waste. Notice the HOV lanes that could have supported buses carrying more people to more destinations than the light-rail line.

Before Fernandez arrived, VTA had spent billions of dollars building a light-rail system that did nothing but jeopardize the agency’s finances, which in turn contributed to the dramatic decline in ridership: Between 2002 and 2019, the region’s population grew by 15 percent yet transit ridership fell by 29 percent. While she didn’t make the decision to build those light-rail lines, she is proud that she was able to get federal funding to help build a subway line into downtown San Jose. Continue reading →