Search Results for: rail

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 →

The Future of Intercity Buses

By | | Transportation
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Like other forms of mass transportation, the intercity bus industry is imperiled by the coronavirus pandemic. Unlike Amtrak and transit numbers, bus data are hard to come by, but the latest report from the Chaddick Institute for Metropolitan Development at DePaul University estimates that intercity bus ridership in December 2020 was down by more than 75 percent from December 2019.

Click image to download this 2.5-megabyte, 26-page report.

Intercity bus travel grew rapidly after 2006 thanks to the introduction of the Megabus model, which was infrastructure-light. Instead of maintaining expensive bus stations and ticket sales offices, Megabus sold tickets over the internet and loaded and unloaded passengers at curbsides. Megabus sometimes contracted out its operations to other companies but also owned a large fleet of its own buses. All of these savings allowed it to sell tickets for much lower prices than Greyhound, which still depended on maintaining its own bus stations. Continue reading →

Amtrak Won’t Connect Us

By | | Policy brief, Transportation
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Biden’s American Jobs Plan proposes to spend $115 billion on highways that carry 87 percent of all passenger-miles in the United States and $80 billion on Amtrak that carries 0.1 percent of passenger-miles. That’s what rail advocates call “balanced transportation funding.”

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

Biden’s plan “is what this nation has been waiting for,” enthuses Amtrak’s CEO. It’s certainly what many railfans–the people who collect old railroad timetables and model trains–have been waiting for. But I’m not sure many other Americans care enough about an obsolete form of travel they never use to say they have been eagerly waiting to have more deficit dollars spent on it. Continue reading →

Our Over-Promiser in Chief

By | | Transportation
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“The Interstate Highway System transformed the way we traveled, lived, worked, and developed,” said President Biden in his March 31 speech introducing his American Jobs Plan. “Imagine what we can do, what’s within our reach, when we modernize those highways,” he continued. “You and your family could travel coast to coast without a single tank of gas onboard a high-speed train.”

The late Senator Arlen Specter shares a ride on an Amtrak train with then-Vice President Joe Biden in 2009.

When I read this, I had to wonder: is Biden’s speechwriter a total ignoramus when it comes to transportation? Or did Biden depart from the speech and allow his mind to drift to a total non-sequitur? I wondered this because, in case you weren’t aware, high-speed trains will not go on even modernized interstate highways. Although many people talk about building rail lines in the median strips of interstate highways, that’s just a fantasy: trains cannot handle the grades and high-speed trains cannot handle the curves found on interstate freeways. Not to mention the fact that there is no money for high-speed trains in Biden’s infrastructure plan anyway. Continue reading →

The CTA Wants You

By | | Transportation
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No one expects transit agencies to work very hard to provide safe, efficient services taking people where they need to go. But sometimes urban residents need a reminder that it is their job to rearrange their lives and risk their health and safety to insure that transit has enough riders to justify the huge subsidies it receives.

At least, that’s the opinion of Chicago Sun-Time columnist Laura Washington, who urges Chicago residents to “get on the L or bus. Or both.” After all, she reasons, “If riders don’t return to the CTA [Chicago Transit Authority], Metra [commuter trains] and Pace [suburban buses], look for layoffs, service cuts and hefty fare hikes.” Her view is enthusiastically endorsed by Streetsblog Chicago.

The latest data — compiled several days after Washington wrote her article telling people they had to risk getting COVID in order to save transit — indicate that less than 20 percent of Illinois residents and less than 18 percent of Cook County (Chicago) residents have been fully vaccinated. But apparently that’s no reason to hesitate taking transit. Continue reading →

February Transit Ridership Down 66.2 Percent

By | | Transportation, Useful Data
2 Comments

Light is visible at the end of the pandemic tunnel: millions of people are being vaccinated each day and many are going back to work. But that light isn’t shining on transit agencies, as ridership in February, 2021 was only 33.8 percent of the same month in 2020, according to data released Tuesday by the Federal Transit Administration. This is down from 34.3 percent in January.

Measured as a percent of 2020, Amtrak data show that rail passenger miles picked up slightly in February and airline passenger numbers from the Transportation Security Administration also increased, but transit ridership fell. Driving data won’t be out for another week or so.

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Maglev to Destroy Habitat & Climate

By | | Transportation
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A proposed maglev line between Washington and Baltimore will disrupt 1,000 acres of “parks, recreational facilities and wetlands,” according to a recently released draft environmental impact statement (DEIS) for the project. That’s a lot of land considering that all but nine miles of the project would be underground. While 180 acres are for a maintenance facility, the remaining acres represent a right-of-way that is an average of 750 feet wide.

This potential disruption has raised the ire of the local chapter of the Audubon Society, which is opposing the plan. As the Antiplanner recently noted, such land disruptions will be an issue for all high-speed rail lines, and in that analysis I was clearly being conservative in assuming a mere 80-foot right-of-way. By contrast, airlines don’t need any right-of-way once they leave the airports.

Bird watchers are not the only opponents of the maglev plan. NASA has facilities that “require minimal disturbances from vibration, artificial lighting and electromagnetic interference,” it says, and it opposes the location of the maglev because it will disturb those facilities. City of Washington planners warn that a proposed station near Mount Vernon Square would destroy the character of that neighborhood. Continue reading →