Search Results for: rail

Amtrak Continues to Lie

By | | Transportation
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Amtrak is maintaining the twin fictions that subsidies from state taxpayers are “passenger revenues” and that depreciation isn’t a real cost even though its accountants list it as an operating cost on its consolidated financial statements. Based on these fictions, Amtrak claimed that it was “on track to break even financially for the first time in its history” in 2020.

The pandemic derailed that fantasy, so now Amtrak claims that it lost $801 million in fiscal year 2020 (which for Amtrak ended on September 30). Yet a close look at its unaudited end-of-year report reveals that the actual operating losses were well over $2 billion.

The end-of-year report says that Amtrak received $342 million in state operating subsidies, up $110 million from 2019. It counts these as passenger revenues even though most of the passengers on state-supported trains would never have ridden those trains if they were asked to pay the full fares. Continue reading →

The Obscure Origins of the Deep State

By | | Policy brief
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The idea that there is a “deep state” is strongly associated with Trump-loving conservatives. Many other people view this as a nonsensical conspiracy theory. But the United States does have a deep state. Another term for it is government bureaucracy.

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

The nation’s founders envisioned three branches of government: executive, legislative, and judicial. These branches had different powers and were designed to act as checks and balances against one another. It worked, more or less, for many years. Continue reading →

Don’t Blame Congress for Transit Cuts

By | | Transportation
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“D.C. Metro faces service cuts due to Congress,” says a recent headline. The Metro board decided yesterday to cut both bus and rail service, but said it wouldn’t have needed to make those cuts if Congress had passed another bailout bill.

But don’t blame Congress for not spending money the federal government doesn’t have to rescue transit agencies that have already had a $25 billion bailout and more than six months to adjust to the new reality of much lower ridership. Instead, blame the fact that most DC transit riders are able to work at home, with the result that ridership is down 81 percent as of September. Blame the fact that, instead of cutting service in parallel with the drop of ridership and revenues, Metro cut service by only 42 percent as of September.

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Watching the Sausage Get Made

By | | Transportation
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Amtrak ridership is down by 87 percent, so Amtrak needs a $2.9 billion rescue from Congress, the company’s executive vice president, Stephen Gardner, told a congressional subcommittee yesterday. Transit ridership is down 70 to 90 percent, added American Public Transportation Association president Paul Skoutelas, so the transit industry wants a $32 billion bailout from Congress.

Those are just their short-term demands, as was made clear in the hearing held by the House Subcommittee on Railroads, Pipelines, and Hazardous Materials. Both Amtrak and New York commuter railroads want $20 billion for the Gateway Project, which would replace bridges and tunnels between Newark and New York City. Transit agencies want $106 billion to restore their backlog of poorly maintained rail systems. And even that is only the beginning. Continue reading →

Vote No, They’ll Build It Anyway

By | | Transportation
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In 1998, Portland-area voters rejected plans to build a new light-rail line. So TriMet, the region’s transit agency, built it anyway.

In the recent election, Portland-area voters rejected plans to build a new light-rail line. Now TriMet is salivating at the possibility that the next Congress will pass an economic stimulus bill that will allow it to build it anyway, perhaps by requiring only 20 percent local matching funds instead of the current 50 percent.

Portland’s first light-rail line, which opened in 1986, cost about $30 million a mile in today’s dollars to go east from downtown Portland to Gresham, Portland’s largest suburb. The second line, which opened in 1997, cost about $75 million a mile in today’s dollars to go west from downtown Portland to Beaverton and Hillsboro. Continue reading →

Transit’s 93-Year-Old Technology

By | | Policy brief
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In an era when transit industry buzz is all about light rail, streetcars, bus-rapid transit, and similar exotic (and expensive) services, it is often forgotten that the workhorse of the industry is the conventional bus (which Federal Transit Administration jargon calls the motor bus). Plodding along at average speeds of about 12 miles per hour, stopping as often as six times every mile, conventional bus services carry more daily riders than any other kind of transit and almost as many as all other modes combined. They aren’t sexy, yet close examination reveals a lot of problems within the transit industry.

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

The first modern bus was developed in 1927 by the Twin Coach company. That in itself is a problem because it one of the newest technologies used by today’s transit agencies: streetcars, heavy rail, and commuter trains are all much older. Light rail is newer only as a slight variation of streetcars. The only technology that is really newer than buses is automated guideway systems such as peoplemovers in Detroit and Miami, but they are almost universally regarded as failures. Continue reading →

Biden Appoints Congestifiers

By | | Transportation
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Phillip Washington, the transit executive who thinks Los Angeles isn’t congested enough, has been named the leader of Biden’s transition team in charge of the Department of Transportation and Amtrak. Washington is the CEO of Los Angeles Metro, the main transit agency in Los Angeles County.

A year ago, as Los Angeles bus ridership was collapsing due to LA Metro’s insistence on building expensive light rail, Washington blamed the loss of bus riders instead on Los Angeles’ famously uncongested freeways. “It’s too easy to drive in this city,” he told the Wall Street Journal. To restore bus ridership, the city has to “make driving harder.”

“Sometimes you have to tell people what’s good for them,” Washington also told the Journal. He will clearly fit right in to Biden’s top-down view of how the world should work. Washington’s support for obsolete light-rail transit will go hand-in-hand with Biden’s support for obsolete intercity passenger trains. Continue reading →

Transit’s Diminishing Returns in 2019

By | | Policy brief, Useful Data
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The nation’s transit industry carried 19 million more trips in 2019 than in 2018, representing a 0.2 percent increase in ridership, according to the 2019 National Transit Database that was posted by the Federal Transit Administration last week. To get that increase, transit agencies had to spend 5 percent more on operating costs and increased capital spending by more than 10 percent.

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

While even a 0.2 percent increase would have been welcome to a transit industry that had seen declines in each of the previous four years, the reality is that ridership declined in the vast majority of urban areas, and it took a 92-million trip increase in the New York urban area to overcome all of those declines. New York ridership had been depressed in 2018 due to delays caused by work being done on the city’s subway system, so the growth in 2019 was due more to the end of such work rather than any real recovery in transit ridership. Continue reading →

September Transit Ridership Down 62 Percent

By | | Transportation, Useful Data
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Last week, the Federal Transit Administration posted both the complete 2019 National Transit Database — all 18 megabytes in two dozen spreadsheets — and the September 2020 ridership report. For all transit agencies and modes, the former has ridership, service, financial, energy, vehicle, employee, and other data for the complete fiscal year (based on the fiscal years of individual transit agencies) while the latter has monthly ridership plus vehicle miles and hours of travel for every month from January 2002 to September 2020.

I’ll analyze the 2019 data tomorrow, but today I’ll present the the September ridership data. Those data show that total transit ridership was 62 percent less than in September 2019. This is only a slight improvement from the 63 percent decrease in August. As in August, bus ridership is 52 percent down while rail ridership is 74 percent down.
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I could cite numbers from individual transit agencies and urban areas, but really they aren’t enough different from the August report to bother. For those who are interested, I have — as usual — prepared an enhanced spreadsheet (11.7-MB Excel file). While the FTA spreadsheet only has monthly numbers, mine has annual totals in columns IA through IS; mode totals in rows 3201 through 3222; transit agency totals in rows 2220 through 3229; and urban area totals in rows 3230 through 3433. Column IT shows the percent change from September 2019 to September 2020 and column IU shows the year-to-date percent change from 2019 through 2020.

An Incentive for Fraud

By | | News commentary
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Since the 2016 election, the Antiplanner has been dismayed by the number of people whose opinion I otherwise respect who have argued in favor of retaining the electoral college. Their argument is mainly that, with the college, everyone’s vote counts because without it presidential candidates would only bother to campaign in a few large cities that house most of the voting population.

The problem with that argument is that most people’s votes don’t count today because most people live in either a red state or a blue state where presidential candidates don’t bother to campaign. The only states that receive attention are the battleground states, of which there are as few as six or at most a dozen.

The lack of any chance that someone’s vote in the other states will influence the outcome depresses voter turnout. Why bother to vote if you know your state is going to always go for one party in the election that you care about the most? The result is that fewer people bother to learn about other elections such as state legislature or city council races because they don’t feel their vote counts. Continue reading →