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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 →

The Myth of Exclusionary Zoning

By | | Housing
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Jerusalem Demsas, a writer for Vox, thinks people should “sue the suburbs” to eliminate their exclusionary zoning, meaning single-family zoning. Her example is Franklin, Tennessee, a suburb made well-off by the location of North American corporate headquarters for both Nissan and Mitsubishi.

As a result, the median home price in Franklin is higher than nearby Nashville. Demsas blames that on exclusionary zoning. But incomes in Franklin are higher than Nashville; when compared with incomes, Franklin housing is actually more affordable than Nashville’s. Considering all of the businesses located in Franklin, it is only a suburb in the sense that it is near Nashville, not in the sense that huge numbers of commuters pour into Nashville from Franklin every morning.

Demsas says that Franklin’s relatively small share of multifamily housing is evidence of exclusionary zoning. In fact, it is just evidence that when people get enough income, they prefer to live in single-family housing. Using 2019 American Community Survey data for more than 500 cities across the country, there is almost no correlation between the percentage of housing that is multifamily and the affordability of housing in those cities (correlation = 0.3 where 1 is perfect and 0 means no correlation). Continue reading →

Ridership Down, Crime Up

By | | Transportation
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Subway ridership may be down by 67 percent, but subway crime has doubled. New York City subways have seen eight murders since the pandemic began, and the six people murdered in 2020 were twice the number in 2019. Rapes have also doubled and robberies and other violent crimes have increased as well.

This mirrors the 11 percent decline in driving in the third quarter of 2020 that was accompanied by a 13 percent increase in traffic fatalities. Yet murders and other violent crimes are much more likely to deter transit riders than accidents are to discourage auto drivers.
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To counter this, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority is asking the city to triple the number of police monitoring the subways, adding 1,500 patrol officers. At an average of $100,000 per police officer, including salary and benefits, this would cost taxpayers about $150 million per year. Since this comes out of city funds rather than MTA’s budget, this is a hidden subsidy to transit. Even with increased police, public awareness of such crimes will be one more obstacle to transit recovery after the pandemic.

Someone Doesn’t Like the Antiplanner

By | | Housekeeping
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Since Tuesday, this web site has been under repeated denial-of-service attacks. That means some kind of bot has been repeatedly trying to query the site; since it is only allowed so many queries per hour, other people have a hard time accessing it. You may get an installation page or another error message.

For what it’s worth, all of the attacks have been coming from the same IP address, 45.146.165.104, which is supposedly in the United Kingdom. The only advice my server has is to pay it more money to increase the number of queries that are allowed per hour.
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I’m hoping instead that whoever is doing this gets bored and quits. In the meantime, if you get an error message, please wait a few minutes and try again. Thanks for your patience.

The State of Driverless Cars

By | | Transportation
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Cruise founder Kyle Vogt takes OpenAI CEO Sam Altman on a virtual 75-minute drive in a driverless car through the streets of San Francisco in the video below. Cruise vehicles use LIDAR, radar, and optical sensors and are connected to to Cruise offices through the 4G cell network. The video demonstrates that autonomous vehicles are ready to enter ride hailing service, but not quite ready to go on sale to consumers.

To save time, the video has been speeded up five times so that 75 minutes are compressed into 15. During this time, the car handily deals with pedestrians, cyclists riding the wrong way, unprotected left turns, double-parked cars, and other road hazards. Vogt notes that the car’s computer not only tracks every other vehicle and pedestrian in its view, it simulates that vehicle or person’s movement and tries to predict where they are going so as to avoid any collisions. Since the accompanying map shows that the vehicle is tracking dozens of other moving objects at any given moment, this is pretty impressive. 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 →

Bus vs. Rail in Manhattan

By | | Transportation, Urban areas
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The formerly free-market Manhattan Institute, which has lately become a shill for transit and other big-government subsidies, has taken a stand against spending $10 billion on a bus terminal in New York City. The only problem is that, instead of the bus terminal, the Manhattan Institute proposes to spend multiple tens of billions of dollars on new underground rail transit lines connecting Manhattan with New Jersey.

The Port Authority Midtown Bus Terminal. Photo by Hudconja.

The 1937 opening of the Lincoln Tunnel led to hundreds of buses roaming the streets of Manhattan after bringing commuters and other travelers from New Jersey. To reduce congestion, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey built a midtown bus terminal near the Manhattan entrance of the tunnel in 1950. That terminal cost $24 million, less than $210 million in today’s dollars. Continue reading →