Search Results for: rail

No One’s Riding Trains So Spend More

By | | Transportation
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Amtrak ridership is down more than 75 percent. Commuter-rail ridership is down more than 80 percent. So naturally Amtrak and commuter-rail agencies want more money to expand service.

Commuter train in Utah. Photo by Paul Kimo McGregor.

Amtrak wants to resume service on a route from New Orleans to Jacksonville, or possibly just to Mobile, that had been dropped after Hurricane Katrina. The renewed route would begin operating in 2022 with full federal funding of operating costs for the first year. The implication is that Amtrak is demanding that Alabama and other states provide some of the funding after that. Proponents claim a 15-to-1 benefit-cost ratio. It’s more like 1-to-15. Their legislatures should say no. Continue reading →

The Dark Side of Japan’s Bullet Trains

By | | Policy brief, Transportation
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In 1964, the Japanese National Railways (JNR) was on a roll. The state-owned but largely unsubsidized company had just finished seven years of uninterrupted profits. Moreover, in 1964 it opened the Shinkansen (meaning new main line) between Tokyo and Osaka in time for the Summer Olympics. This exposed an international audience to the latest in Japanese technology in the form of the fastest trains in the world with top speeds of 130 miles per hour and average speeds as high as 86 miles per hour. These quickly became the envy of other countries, leading even the United States Congress to pass a law promoting high-speed trains in 1965.

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

Today, salarymen and tourists ride shinkansen the full length of Japan’s main island of Honshu as well as on the outer islands of Hokkaido and Kyushu. However, there is a dark side to the shinkansen. Like Darth Vader, who started out as a nice little boy who loved speed but whose life was corrupted by a power-hungry politician, the shinkansen was warped by politicians and ended up doing more harm than good to Japan’s economy. Continue reading →

Time to Rethink Amtrak Subsidies

By | | Transportation
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Amtrak will celebrate the 50th anniversary of the start of its operations in May. There’s not much to celebrate, however, as an audited financial statement recently posted on the company’s web site reveals that it lost $1.7 billion in 2020, up from $0.9 billion in 2019. Even that is deceptive, however, as the auditors bought into Amtrak’s claim that subsidies from the states are “revenues” and don’t distinguish such subsidies from ticket sales and food and beverage income.

Amtrak’s unaudited year-end results indicate that the company received $342 million from the states in fiscal year 2020 (which ended September 30). If these are counted as subsidies from the states, rather than passenger revenues, then the real losses were almost $2.3 billion in 2020, up from $1.1 billion in 2019.

Actually, the audited statement reveals in notes on page 10, most of that $342 million didn’t come from the states but was funded by Congress “to support the Company’s state partners in making their State Supported route subsidy payments due to Amtrak.” This means even the auditors admit that it is a subsidy, but they don’t disclose even in the notes that this subsidy was included in the revenues in the statement of operations on page 5. Continue reading →

A Socially Just Transportation Policy

By | | Transportation
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Building new freeways would help relieve congestion, a problem that is mainly borne by the working class. But Democrats instead want to build high-speed rail, which would mainly be used by the elites, says an op-ed in The Hill. Yet Democrats say they support social justice.

They point to China, which has built 22,000 miles of high-speed rail lines. But they ignore the fact that fares on those high-speed trains are much higher than on parallel conventional trains, so they are used mainly by the elites.

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The Law of Large Proportions Saves Energy

By | | Policy brief, Transportation
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Americans drove more miles in 2019 than the previous year but used less energy to do so, according to data released by the Department of Energy last week. This isn’t a new trend: American energy consumption for highway passenger vehicles has declined 12 percent since 2007 despite the fact that we are driving 7 percent more miles.

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

The data were published in edition 39 of the Transportation Energy Data Book, which has information all modes of transportation, often going back to 1970. The data in the book show that not only is our energy consumption for transportation declining, the carbon footprint of motor vehicles is also falling, which helped the United States reduce total greenhouse gas emissions by 13 percent since 2005. The book also has information about petroleum production around the world, auto ownership for many other countries, toxic air pollution, and other energy- and transportation-related topics. Continue reading →

Sustainable Transport in China

By | | Transportation
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The government of China recently released a paper called Sustainable Development of Transportation in China. It doesn’t have a lot of new information — the data it uses are only current through the end of 2019 — but it does make one assertion I’d like to examine in more detail.

An expressway and rail line leaving Shanghai, China. Photo by Pyzhou.

According to chart 3, on page 12 of the Word version, the share of passenger travel that goes by highway declined from 93.5 percent in 2012 to 73.9 percent in 2019. The difference was taken up by railway transport. This makes China’s high-speed rail program, which grew from 6,000 miles in 2012 to 22,000 miles in 2019, look like a great success. Continue reading →

Are Accidents of History Irreversible?

By | | Policy brief, Transportation
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There’s a popular belief that the federal government began subsidizing public transit and Amtrak to protect the environment and help provide mobility to low-income people. In fact, while energy and poverty later became excuses for continuing subsidies that had already begun, neither of these issues were on Congress’ collective mind when it began subsidizing transit in 1964 and created Amtrak in 1970. Instead, both of these programs are little more than accidents of history.

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

Transit: Saving Big-City Downtowns

The environment wasn’t even an issue when Congress created the Urban Mass Transit Administration and started giving federal grants to local transit agencies in 1964. Nor was helping poor people a major concern. Instead, the primary goal of federal transit funding was to protect the value of downtown properties in a few big cities. Continue reading →

Forum on State Transportation Issues

By | | Housekeeping
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State transportation issues during and after the pandemic will be the topic of an on-line forum next Wednesday, February 17. The Antiplanner will join several other experts, including Robert Poole, Baruch Feigenbaum, Marc Scribner, Wendell Cox, and Mariya Frost, to discuss highway, transit, and similar issues from noon to 1:30 pm Pacific Time (3:00 pm to 4:30 pm Eastern Time).

The forum is aimed at state policy think tanks, legislative staff, and other people who deal with state transportation issues agencies, budgets, and policies. Presentations will be based on Transportation and COVID-19, a group of articles published in December. More information and event registration are available from the Washington Policy Center.

Speaking of seminars, University of Oxford Professor Bent Flyvbjerg, noted expert on megaprojects, is holding an on-line class on Reference Class Forecasting. The projected cost of constructing the typical light-rail line rises by 40 to 50 percent between the initial cost estimate and project approval. The actual cost of constructing it rises another 40 to 50 percent between project approval and project completion. Continue reading →

Transit 2020: Subsidies Up, Ridership Down

By | | Policy brief, Transportation
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The transit industry carried 37.5 percent as many riders in December 2020 as it had in December 2019, according to data released last week by the Federal Transit Administration. This is a slight increase over the 36.9 percent carried in November. For the year as a whole, it ended up carrying 46.1 percent as many riders as it had transported in 2019.

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

The industry had begun the year carrying about 6 to 7 percent more riders than the first two months of 2019, suggesting that it might have been about to turn around the decline that it had experienced over the previous five years. The pandemic foiled this recovery, and the industry avoided total disaster only by the American Public Transportation Association and transit agencies convincing Congress to give transit $25 billion in April and $12 billion in December, with more on the way. This has taught the transit industry a perverse lesson: it doesn’t have to actually carry many passengers to continue to receive subsidies. Continue reading →

A Global Leader in Obsolete Technology

By | | Transportation
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Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg wants to make the United States the “global leader” in high-speed rail. That’s like wanting to be the world leader in electric typewriters, rotary telephones, or steam locomotives, all technologies that were once revolutionary but are functionally obsolete today. High-speed trains, in particular, were rendered obsolete in 1958, when Boeing introduced the 707 jetliner, which was twice as fast as the fastest trains today.

Slower than flying, less convenient than driving, and far more expensive than either one.

Aside from speed, what makes high-speed rail obsolete is its high cost. Unlike airlines, which don’t require much infrastructure other than landing fields, high-speed trains require huge amounts of infrastructure that must be built and maintained to extremely precise standards. That’s why airfares averaged just 14 cents per passenger-mile in 2019, whereas fares on Amtrak’s high-speed Acela averaged more than 90 cents per passenger-mile. Continue reading →