Search Results for: rail

Dueling Databases

By | | Transportation
4 Comments

Outside of New York City, rail transit construction costs in the United States aren’t any higher than the rest of the world, according to a preliminary report from the Eno Transportation Foundation. The report is based on a database of 171 projects in the U.S. and other parts of the world.

In a stark example of high-cost, low-capacity transit, Sound Transit spent well over $500 million per mile building an underground light-rail line from downtown Seattle to the University of Washington. Photo by Joe Goldberg.

Not so fast, says the Transit Costs Project (a part of New York University’s Marron Institute of Urban Management). This program has compiled a much larger database of 574 projects, and it shows that U.S. costs are twice almost everywhere else in the world. Continue reading →

Transit Doesn’t Need to Respond to Reality

By | | News commentary, Transportation
Leave a comment

When the pandemic shut down brew pubs, many breweries went into the business of making hand sanitizer. Ford used one of its auto parts plants to make 50,000 ventilators. Various drugmakers were able to create vaccines in just nine months.

Transit agencies, meanwhile, continued to trundle their empty buses and trains around American cities. Those that were planning new construction projects have made little or no efforts to revise their plans in response to an almost certain downturn in business.

You are also advised to include carrots, shrimp, eggs, oysters, pomegranate, watermelon, garlic, fish, banana and figs in levitra tabs your daily diet. Unless you won t discuss about what is affecting the health discount viagra uk of the person adversely. Their performance anxiety may lead to an unimaginable number of fights or arguments that arise out of suspicion. http://raindogscine.com/tag/federico-ivanier/ cialis generic wholesale Binge drinking has cost the country in generic levitra cheap many ways, this could be a solution for people who want to purchase medications without any second doubt. New York’s Long Island Railroad, for example, is spending $2.6 billion adding a third track to its mainline, a project that won’t be completed for at least two more years. Seattle’s Sound Transit presses ahead with billions of dollars of light-rail expansions. The San Diego Association of Governments is still talking about an insane plan to spend $177 billion on new transit lines. Continue reading →

Another Phony Housing Crisis

By | | Housing
5 Comments

The Wall Street Journal recently published an op-ed piece about “the housing crisis that is plaguing rural America.” Using Orange County in southern Indiana as an example, the writer, Kerry Thompson, frets that “There simply isn’t enough housing for the people who want to live there,” which is “having a devastating effect on rural America’s economy.”

Evidence of a housing crisis? This 2,900-square-foot home in rural Orange County, Indiana is currently for sale for $265,000, or $91 per square foot. A Wall Street Journal op-ed somehow argues that this low price is evidence of a rural housing shortage. Note the Trump banner; I suspect this is really evidence of the divide between urban and rural areas, as the Journal writer doesn’t seem to understand rural areas despite running an organization that is supposedly devoted to rural problems.

This is a problem, Thompson claims, because the pandemic has led to “upticks in interest in rural areas, as more Americans determine to flee the cities for greener pastures.” If there is a rural housing crisis, there may not be any greener pastures for them to move to. Continue reading →

Evidence on Post-Pandemic Telecommuting

By | | Regional planning, Transportation
1 Comment

More studies have been published indicating that telecommuting is likely to be far more important after the pandemic than it was before. A University of Chicago study published early this month concluded that “22 percent of all full work days will be supplied from home after the pandemic ends, compared with just 5 percent before.”

The reasons are clear: “The pandemic drove a mass social experiment in which half of all paid hours were provided from home.” By most accounts, that experiment was successful.

A PricewaterhouseCoopers study found that 44 percent of employers believed that their employees were more productive working at home than in an office or other workplace, while only 31 percent believed they were less productive. Even where employees were a little less productive, the potential savings in office costs might encourage employers to allow people to work at home. Continue reading →

RTD Violated Stay-at-Home Orders

By | | Transportation
2 Comments

Denver’s Regional Transit District lost 68 percent of its riders last April due to Colorado’s stay-at-home orders. Rather than obey the orders, some of RTD’s staffers visited some of the so-called transit-oriented developments along its rail lines and found — gasp! — 40 to 50 percent of the parking spaces were empty. They concluded that those parking spaces were a waste and should be taken away, perhaps filled with more mid-rise housing.

What time of day would you count spaces in an apartment parking lot to see how many were needed? RTD picked 10 am to 3 pm. Photo by Bearas.

According to RTD’s report, they did the parking lot counts between 10 am and 3 pm in the middle of a week in April. RTD’s reasoning seems to be that, since everyone was supposed to stay at home, any empty spaces meant that no one really needed those spaces. Continue reading →

Transportation & COVID-19

By | | Transportation
Leave a comment

How should state transportation policies change after the pandemic? What is the relative importance of Amtrak, urban transit, highways, and other modes of transport to the states? How can states respond most effectively to future transportation needs?

Click image to download a 5.2-MB PDF of this 25-page paper.

These questions are addressed in Transportation and COVID-19, a set of seven brief articles written by various free-market transportation experts. The guide is aimed at state legislators, state think tanks, and others who are interested in the transportation policies of their states. Continue reading →

Transit Gets $14 Billion in Relief

By | | News commentary, Transportation
Leave a comment

The transit industry will get $14 billion of the $900 billion coronavirus relief package passed by Congress on Tuesday. That’s less than half of what transit agencies wanted but enough to tide them over for five months or so by which time (the agencies hope) the next Congress will have a chance to pass another and even bigger relief bill. The $14 billion is on top of the $13 billion that Congress gave to transit as a part of its normal annual funding bill.

For those who care, the TransitCenter has posted a spreadsheet showing its estimate of how the $14 billion in relief funds will be distributed among the nation’s major urban areas. The New York urban area will get $5.5 billion of which $3.9 billion goes to New York, $1.4 billion goes to New Jersey, and $0.2 billion to Connecticut.

Los Angeles gets nearly a billion, San Francisco-Oakland $800 million, and Chicago and Seattle around half a billion. Curiously, what regions get isn’t closely related to how many transit riders they carry: Seattle apparently will get 16 percent more than Chicago even though Chicago transit carries more than twice as many riders as Seattle’s. Continue reading →

Closing the China-US Freeway Gap

By | | Policy brief, Transportation
8 Comments

With growing recognition that China has become the United States’ main economic and political competitor in the world, many people point to China’s high-speed rail system as evidence that the United States is “falling behind.” But the real transportation gap between China and the United States is not high-speed rail, but freeways. China has about the same number of motor vehicles as the United States. But where the U.S. has about 67,000 miles of freeways and is adding fewer than 800 miles per year, China has 93,000 miles of freeways and is growing its system by more than 5,000 miles a year.

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

China began building freeways before it began building high-speed rail and it has built more miles each year and spent more money on new freeway construction (though less per mile) than on high-speed rail. Highway travel has grown faster than rail travel, and the highway system has become particularly important for freight, as it moves about 2.5 times as many ton-miles as rail lines. Continue reading →

$1.5 Million to Scrap $51 Million Streetcar

By | | Transportation
Leave a comment

How much does it cost to repair the damage to streets done by streetcar construction when people finally figure out that streetcars are obsolete? In the St. Louis suburb of University City, which spent $51 million building the 2.2-mile Delmar Loop Trolley, the answer is supposed to be $1.5 million. But anything to do with rail transit has cost overruns, so it is likely to be more.

Streetcars are often touted as generators of economic development, but the Loop Trolley went through a business district that was already thriving. Photo by Paul Sableman.

The Obama administration loved streetcars so much that it gave $25 million of “urban circulator/livability project” funds to St. Louis to cover half the cost of this streetcar. Though that was in 2010, construction didn’t actually begin until 2015. Though construction was completed in November 2016, operations didn’t begin until November 2018. The streetcar ran for just over a year, but having attracted hardly any riders, it ran out of money in December 2019. Continue reading →

Sinkhole Disrupts Transit for 40 Days

By | | News commentary, Transportation
2 Comments

A broken water main in Baltimore created a sinkhole that damaged a light-rail stop next to the city’s convention center. As a result, transit throughout much of the city was disrupted for 40 days.

Baltimore’s Convention Center light-rail stop, which was disrupted by a sinkhole last summer. Photo by David Wilson.

This actually happened last summer, but it was so “incredible” that Greater Greater Washington decided to reprint it last week. But actually, it is quite credible because light rail is so vulnerable to that sort of thing. Continue reading →