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Energy vs. Social Justice Trade-Off

By | | Transportation
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Our society has a near-consensus that fuel economy and social justice are both important. Even if the terms can sometimes be politically charged, there is no point in wasting energy nor does any decent person seek to oppress others simply because of their race, religion, or education. At the same time, we have to recognize that policies that promote one can end up harming the other.

Photo by Niagara.

Transportation engineer Michael Sivak has scrutinized the fuel economy of cars, trucks, and other motor vehicles. He periodically updated data for many years when with the University of Michigan Transportation Research Institute and, since 2018, as an independent consultant. Continue reading →

How Much Is a Trillion Dollars?

By | | Policy brief
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In 1939, the federal budget was $9 billion, the most in peacetime history. The year before, when looking at the proposed budget, a young congressman named Everett Dirksen was quoted by the New York Times as saying, “a billion here, a billion there, and by and by it begins to mount up into money.” (Later, someone amended the quote to “real money,” which has a greater effect in print, but probably wasn’t necessary when spoken in Dirksen’s baritone voice.)

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

In today’s dollars, the 1939 federal budget would be about $140 billion. But Congress spent much more than that in 2020. After adding the $2.2 trillion Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act, total federal spending was nearly $6.6 trillion, more than 700 times the 1939 budget and around 50 times the inflation-adjusted 1939 budget. Since revenues don’t come close to these expenses, the federal deficit soared to $3.1 trillion and the federal debt today is nearly $28 trillion. Continue reading →

Still a Ways to Go

By | | News commentary
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“I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a state sweltering with the heat of injustice, sweltering with the heat of oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice.” — Martin Luther King, Jr.

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The $25 Billion Theft

By | | Transportation
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The states siphoned off 21 percent of gasoline taxes and other highway user fees to pay for mass transit and other non-highway activities in 2019, according to table SDF of the 2019 Highway Statistics, which was posted this week by the Federal Highway Administration. The table shows that $9.8 billion in highway user fees were spent on transit and $15.1 billion were spent on other non-highway activities for a total of nearly $25 billion out of the $120 billion collected by the states from highway users.

State diversions of highway user fees to non-highway programs grew rapidly after 1980.

In terms of total dollars, the worst offender was Texas, which spent more than half of the user fees it collected, nearly $6.5 billion, on education and other non-highway activities. Transit received an insignificant portion of Texas’ highway revenues. Continue reading →

Bicycle Safety Knowns & Unknowns

By | | Transportation
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Traffic fatalities between 2007 and 2019 declined by 13 percent, but bicycle fatalities increased by 21 percent. In response, many cities have installed or are planning to install bike lanes, often by taking away lanes from automobiles. However, no one really knows whether such practices actually improve bicycle safety.

Cyclists riding at night are five times more likely to be killed in accidents than those riding in the daytime, yet most cities aiming to improving cycling safety are focused on other issues. Photo by PxHere.

A 100-page report on bicycle safety released in 2019 by the National Transportation Safety Board was able to draw upon at least eight large databases on bicycle accidents. Yet it was unable to definitively show whether the safety measures being taken by many cities, including bike lanes, road diets, and complete streets, truly increase bicycle safety or merely create an illusion of safety. Continue reading →

Idaho Is Roaring

By | | Housing
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“Had someone asked me in March,” wrote economist Megan McArdle in September, “I would have predicted that after six months of pandemic, the housing market would be full of panicked people frozen in their homes, except for those who were being evicted. Instead, the housing market is roaring.”

It continues to roar today. As the Economist observes, those roars are fed by low interest rates, government cash handouts, and a desire of many to move to homes suitable for telecommuting.

Of course, some housing markets are roaring louder than others. As CNN notes, “home prices are rising faster in the middle of the U.S. as Covid drives people away from coasts.” CNN cites home price index data published by the Federal Housing Finance Administration. Continue reading →

Transit: Browner Than Ever

By | | Policy brief, Transportation
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With ridership stuck at around 37 percent of 2019 levels, transit advocates have stopped claiming that transit is energy-efficient and climate-friendly. Even in 2019, transit wasn’t particularly green, but the fall-off in ridership associated with the pandemic has completely destroyed any claim that transit agencies may have that they save energy by providing an alternative to the automobile.

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

In 2019, the transit industry as a whole used more energy per passenger-mile than the average light truck and emitted about the same amount of greenhouse gases per passenger mile as the average car. In October 2020, based on agencies for which data are available, transit used about twice as much energy per passenger mile as the average light truck and emitted twice as much carbon dioxide per passenger mile as the average car. Continue reading →

Dueling Databases

By | | Transportation
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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 →

November Ridership Down 63 Percent

By | | Transportation, Useful Data
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Transit ridership in November 2020 was 63.1 percent less than in 2019, according to data released yesterday by the Federal Transit Administration. That was down from October, which was 62.7 percent less than in 2019, and September, which was 62.0 percent less than in 2019. These numbers are preliminary as a few agencies may not have submitted their November ridership numbers in time for this report, but ridership has been stuck at around 37 percent of 2019 numbers since July.

While private businesses have scrambled to cut costs in response to the pandemic, transit agencies continue to operate at 80 percent of 2019 levels. Agencies, of course, received a $25 billion bailout from Congress in April. Since total transit fares were only about $16 billion in 2019, most of this bailout was predicated on the assumption that the state and local taxes that transit agencies rely on would significantly drop due to the pandemic and associated shutdowns.

In fact, state and local tax revenues in the first nine months of 2020 were just 1 percent less than in the same period in 2019. While we don’t yet have exact data for transit systems, it seems likely that transit agencies were awash with cash in 2020 due to the huge federal bailout. This allowed them to maintain service at 80 percent of 2019 levels despite losing more than half of their riders over the year. Continue reading →

Worries for My Country

By | | News commentary
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The events at the Capitol yesterday make me worry for my country. I don’t fear that there will be a revolution or coup, but I do worry that political discourse has become so polarized that everything from masks to the electoral college becomes the subject of violent debate that prevents any sensible policy from being implemented.

I worry that private companies like Google, Facebook, and Apple are threatened with government regulation or break up simply because they are big. I worry that some of those private companies, which claim to be offering the public an open platform for communication, take it upon themselves to censor their customers for expressing views they disagree with. I worry that the president says such insane things that those private companies feel they have to censor him.

I’ve supported President Trump’s transportation policies, but Trump himself seems to me to be a crazy man. That doesn’t mean his policies are crazy; like any president’s, some are good and some not so good. But by middle-class standards, which means my standards, his behavior has been insane, and never more so than in the last few days. Continue reading →