Search Results for: rail

Transit “Is Riddled with Inequities”

By | | Transportation
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The transit industry has developed two systems: one for “choice” riders and one for “dependent” riders, “that is to say white and Black,” says urban planner Christof Spieler. A former member of the Harris County (Houston) Metro board of directors, Spieler points out one place where Metro offers riders a choice between bus-rapid transit and a local bus. The BRT is three times faster than the local bus, has plusher seats, and costs $3.25 a ride compared with $1.25 for the local bus.

Spieler makes many good points and I am glad that an urban planner is finally taking this issue seriously. Unfortunately, his inevitable solution — that we should spend more money on transit — is wrong.

Spieler never mentions the Los Angeles Bus Riders’ Union case, in which the NAACP represented minorities whose bus service had declined so that Los Angeles Metro could pay for new rail transit lines to middle-class neighborhoods, but maybe he was unfamiliar with that case. As documented here, LA Metro was ordered by the court to restore bus service for ten years, which it did. Bus ridership recovered, but as soon as the ten years was up, it cut bus service and went back to building rail transit. Continue reading →

Should We Replace Rapid Transit with Buses?

By | | Policy brief
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Metro. Rapid transit. Subway. Elevated. Underground. U-bahn. All of these types of transit are included in what the Federal Transit Administration calls heavy rail. Unfortunately, none of these terms are very accurate.

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

Heavy-rail train cars weigh less than light-rail cars. Even the best metros can’t get you everywhere in a metropolitan area. Rapid transit isn’t very rapid, averaging around 20 miles per hour not counting the time it takes to get to or from a station or to wait for trains. Subways aren’t always under the ground and elevateds aren’t always above the ground. Continue reading →

The Transit-Industrial Complex

By | | Policy brief
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Everybody knows that transit saves energy and protects us from climate change. Everybody knows that transit helps the poor. Everybody knows that transit generates economic development. None of these things are true, but many people believe them because public transit is backed up by a powerful lobby.

Wikipedia has an entry on the highway lobby, but no entry on a transit lobby. In fact, the transit lobby is much bigger than the highway lobby even though highways move a hundred times as many passenger miles as transit, not to mention far more freight. The transit lobby is nonetheless bigger for good reason: most federal and state highway funds come from user fees, so the only thing the highway lobby has to do is protect those user fees from being diverted to other uses, whereas less than a quarter of transit costs come from user fees, so the industry has to scramble for every last transit dollar it can get. Continue reading →

Brightline’s Future Not Too Bright

By | | Transportation
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As decribed in the lates Trains magazine (not available on line), Brightline is currently building tracks so that it can privately operate high-speed trains from Miami to Orlando. A few weeks ago, the company’s effective parent, Fortress Investment Group, was headlined in Forbes for “betting $9 billion that America’s transportation future is passenger rail.”

But things aren’t looking too bright for Brightline since then. For one thing, it has completely shut down its existing passenger train operations due to the pandemic, and doesn’t know when it will be able to revive them. (That may be just as well, as it was losing money on those trains anyway.)

More recently, plans to rebrand the operation “Virgin,” presumably with a significant investment by Richard Branson’s Virgin group, have fallen through. Branson told reporters that he had not actually invested any money into Brightline and that the plan to rename Brightline after Virgin was just a “marketing agreement.” Continue reading →

Can We Trust Government?

By | | Follow up
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The Antiplanner’s friend and frequent commenter on this web site, M (for Michael) Setty, recently co-authored a response to the final chapter of The Education of an Iconoclast, “Lessons from an Iconoclast.” I’m not sure why Michael thought he needed to respond to my memoirs, but here is a brief reply.

The most important lesson, I stated, was “Don’t trust the government.” To which Michael and his co-author respond, more than once, “governments exist to maximize the satisfaction of the public from available resources.” I’m not certain that’s really why governments exist, but even if they do, that doesn’t mean they behave that way. If you assume that governments and government agencies always work they were intended to work, you’re going to be very disappointed when they don’t.

“The American Constitution is designed to be run by crooks, just as the British constitution is designed to be operated by gentlemen,” wrote Freeman Dyson in his book, Infinite in All Directions. “If ever a World Government should come into existence, it had better be a government designed to be run by crooks rather than a government designed to be run by gentlemen. Gentlemen are too often in short supply.” Continue reading →

Driving Bounces Back

By | | Transportation
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The mayor of San Diego wants to spend $177 billion expanding the region’s transit system in order to make San Diego like “Barcelona, Madrid, Paris.” Meanwhile, Barcelona, Madrid, and Paris are becoming more like U.S. cities, at least in terms of the transportation habits of their residents. Driving is the dominant form of travel in all European cities and is rebounding fast after pandemic lock-downs.

Of course, driving is rebounding even faster in the United States, according to INRIX estimates. Total driving at the end of June, the entire month of July, and the first week of August was more than it had been in the weeks before the pandemic. Of course, it was the middle of winter before the virus, but that’s still an impressive comeback.

Interestingly, that driving hasn’t brought congestion back to its pre-COVID levels. Morning rush-hour driving in most urban areas was only only around 70 to 80 percent of pre-shutdown levels while afternoon rush-hour driving was 80 to 90 percent, with afternoon levels exceeding 100 percent in just a couple of urban areas. As a result, rush-hour speeds are significantly higher than they were before the pandemic. Continue reading →

Why the Hyperloop Will Fail

By | | Policy brief
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Soon after you read this, you may hear that the world’s first long-distance hyperloop has been placed in operation in the United Arab Emirates (UAE). The plan is to build a line connecting Dubai (population 3.4 million) and Abu Dhabi (1.5 million), which are about 87 miles apart, a distance planners say can be covered in 12 minutes in the hyperloop.

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

However, that won’t happen until 2023 at the earliest. This year, Hyperloop Transportation Technologies (HTT) hopes to open a 10-kilometer prototype in Abu Dhabi to both test and demonstrate the technology. Ten kilometers isn’t very long, but it is approximately 9.5 kilometers longer than previous hyperloop test tracks. Continue reading →

June Ridership Down Nearly 70 Percent

By | | Transportation, Useful Data
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America’s public transit systems carried 69.3 percent fewer riders in June 2020 than in June 2019, according to data released by the Federal Transit Administration last Friday. Rail ridership was down 83 percent while bus ridership was down only 56 percent.

That’s an improvement from May, when total ridership was down 81 percent from the previous May. But it’s still a disastrous drop that is leading transit agencies to demand another $32 billion in federal subsidies on top of the $25 billion it received in March, which is on top of the $13 billion it received for 2020 before the pandemic. If Congress provides the $32 billion, the transit industry will have received more money in 2020 from the federal government alone than all of its funding from all sources, including fares, in 2018.

We’ll have June driving data in a few days, but in the meantime June’s gasoline consumption was only 14 percent below June of 2019, suggesting that driving has nearly recovered to its pre-pandemic levels. Unfortunately, this doesn’t discourage anti-auto groups who are using the pandemic to justify closing streets and lanes to auto traffic. Continue reading →

Why Trump Should Veto the Outdoors Act

By | | Policy brief
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Congress recently passed the Great American Outdoors Act, a law trumpeted as the greatest conservation bill in a generation. But really, it’s just pork barrel. President Trump threatened to veto the law, but after he was shown photos of some scenic areas, he said he might sign it. He may have signed it by the time you read this (Update: he did), but this policy brief shows why he should veto it.

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

The bill does two things: it provides funding for fixing the maintenance backlog on the national parks and it creates a dedicated fund for the Land and Water Conservation program, which buys federal lands for recreation. Neither of these sound like bad things, but in large part they are a waste. Continue reading →

Don’t Trap the Poor in Second-Class

By | | Transportation
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Some have argued that subsidies to transit are “socially just” because they help poor people, and some have even gone so far as to say that social justice requires that transit be free. But an opinion piece in Friday’s San Antonio News Express responds that transit is second-class transportation. Those who want to help low-income people should instead focus on helping them acquire first-class transportation, namely automobiles.

Automobiles are so much superior to transit that, except in New York City, it is overly generous to call second class. Steerage is more like it, since transit is so much slower, inconvenient, and less comfortable than traveling in your own private automobile. (I would have used the word steerage in the headline, but I was told that many people wouldn’t know what it was, at least out of context. I guess it’s been a long time since Titanic came out.)
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San Antonio is the largest urban area in the United States that hasn’t succumbed to the fad of building nineteenth-century rail transit. Some people would like to change that. Maybe this op-ed will help dissuade them.