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Restoring Trust to the Highway Trust Fund

By | | Policy brief, Transportation
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In what some considered to be a backroom deal, the New Jersey Turnpike Authority agreed last month to give more than $500 million a year in toll revenues to New Jersey Transit, up from $164 million a year in the previous five years. The decision was a surprise to the public, as it was made with no preliminary discussion under an agenda item innocuously listed as “State Public Transportation Projects Funding Agreement.”

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

This decision to use highway user fees to prop up a transit agency known for its bad management, including “nepotism, cronyism and incompetence,” further erodes the trust highway users have in the people managing state and local transportation resources. This trust is important partly because roads are mostly funded by a variety of excise taxes that don’t automatically adjust for inflation. Increasing the taxes is more politically difficult if users don’t believe that the funds will go for the facilities they thought they were paying for. Continue reading →

Bringing the FRA into the Fantasy World

By | | Transportation
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“As in many other arenas, California has taken the lead nationally to advance high-speed rail, starting an economically transformative project in the Central Valley and assuming the challenges that come with that leadership.” That sounds like something someone might have made in 2009 when excitement was building over California’s plan to build a high-speed rail line from Los Angeles to San Francisco. There’s no way anyone would talk like that today given what we know about 100 percent cost overruns, more than a decade of delays, and the inability of California to raise the money to finish more than a fraction of the project.

Yet that statement was made just three months ago by Amit Bose, who President Biden has nominated to lead the Federal Railroad Administration and serve as the administration’s cheerleader for high-speed rail and other passenger rail projects.

Bose’s career clearly demonstrates a faith in big-government spending on transportation projects of little value to travelers or shippers. He worked for New Jersey Transit early in his career, and during the Obama administration he worked closely with Secretary of Immobility Ray LaHood, who firmly believed that 8-mile-per-hour streetcars were better than buses despite the buses’ higher speeds, greater capacities, and lower costs. While at DOT, Bose arranged a $2.5 billion federal “loan” to Amtrak to buy new Acela trains despite knowing that Amtrak is unlikely to ever have the funds to repay such a loan (unless they come from other federal grants). Continue reading →

March 2021 Transit Ridership Down 59%

By | | Transportation, Useful Data
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Public transit carried 33 percent fewer riders in March 2021 than in March 2020 and 59 percent fewer than in March 2019, according to data published yesterday by the Federal Transit Administration. Since the pandemic started having an effect on transit in March 2020, we have to go back to 2019 to compare with pre-pandemic levels.

All forms of transport are recovering but some have recovered more than others. March driving data are approximate; actual numbers should be released in a week or so.

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Who Lives in Rural Areas?

By | | News commentary
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One of the provisions of President Biden’s American Jobs Plan is to spend $100 billion bringing broadband internet services to “more than 30 million Americans” who live in rural “areas where there is no broadband infrastructure that provides minimally acceptable speeds.” That’s $3,333 per person or about $8,800 per household.

Rural home in desperate need of high-speed internet.

Who are these people who deserve such a big subsidy? Well, I’m one of them. Here in rural central Oregon, we have DSL speeds that are barely faster than dial-up. The alternative is satellite, which is pretty fast but I don’t like the idea of paying by the gigabyte. That’s just me; some of my neighbors have it and it works pretty well for them. Satellite is available everywhere, so it’s not like any rural Americans are physically deprived from broadband. Continue reading →

The Columbia River Crossing Rises Again

By | | Transportation
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After being declared dead seven years ago, the proposal to replace the bridge over the Columbia River between Portland and Vancouver has been revived. Proponents of a new bridge have a web site that must be designed for Generation Z, as I find it pretty incomprehensible.

The original Pacific Highway bridge, now known as the Interstate Bridge, had two lanes of traffic including room for trolley cars.

Part of the existing structure opened as a two-lane bridge in 1917, and its capacity was doubled by building a duplicate bridge in 1958. Later the bridges were re-striped for three lanes to match the Interstate 5 freeway lanes north and south of the river. Continue reading →

Making Massachusetts Housing Affordable

By | | Housing, Policy brief
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by Joshua Rosen and Randal O’Toole

Massachusetts covers 7,800 square miles of land, yet thanks to a variety of land-use rules 92 percent of its residents are confined to a fifth of that land. Even in the Boston metropolitan area, thousands of acres of open space persist. Satellite imagery reveals huge stretches of open, largely undeveloped lands as close to twenty miles from downtown Boston.

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

Unlike Pacific Coast states that use urban-growth boundaries to keep people in existing urban areas, Massachusetts’ land-use patterns result from a variety of causes, including the abolition of county governments, several programs that aggressively acquire land for conservation, and large-lot zoning by the towns that control much of the land in the state. These policies and programs combine together to reduce the affordability in Boston and other Massachusetts cities. Continue reading →

More Like an Artificial Shortage

By | | Housing
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As previously noted here nearly three years ago, Hong Kong is one of the densest and least affordable housing markets in the world. According to Chinese University of Hong Kong geography professor Ng Mee Kam, the region’s housing shortage “is more like an artificial shortage.”

That’s because Britain only allowed development on 25 percent of the territory’s land, and the government of China has continued this policy since it took over in 1997; the other 75 percent is owned by the government. The dense area packed with high rises occupies just 3.7 percent of the land and such high rises are prohibited on the other 21 percent or so that is developed. Continue reading →

50th Anniversary of a Loser

By | | Transportation
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Fifty years ago today, Amtrak operated its first passenger trains, a fact that President Biden celebrated a day early yesterday. Biden wants people to think that Amtrak is enough of a success that it deserves $80 billion in additional funding. But the reality is it is just a big loser.

Rail fans remember May 1, 1971, as the day America lost more than half of its passenger trains. On April 30, ten trains left the Midwest for the West Coast: the Empire Builder, Western Star, North Coast Limited, and Mainstreeter (all of which went to Seattle with sections to Portland), City of Portland, Portland Rose, City of San Francisco, San Francisco Chief, City of Los Angeles, and Super Chief. The next day, Amtrak killed all of them except the Empire Builder (and it killed the leg to Portland), Super Chief, and City of San Francisco (which was cut to three days a week). That’s a loss that’s hard to forgive.

Business analysts remember that the idea of a national passenger railroad was sold to Congress as a profitable enterprise. Rather than a normal government agency, Amtrak was created as a for-profit corporation with stockholders and, potentially, investors. The railroads were supposed to give it seed money based on the amount of money they claimed they had lost in the previous three years. After spending that to get started, as I noted six months ago, Amtrak was supposed to make money. Continue reading →

If You Can’t Beat ’Em, Ban ’Em

By | | Transportation
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Rail advocates like to claim that the introduction of high-speed trains has led to a cessation of airline service, apparently to show that high-speed trains can compete against faster planes. While this may have happened on a few routes, European air travel before the pandemic was growing far faster than rail travel. For example, in France, Germany, Italy, and Spain — the main European countries with high-speed rail — rail travel between 2011 and 2019 grew by 14 percent while air travel grew by 34 percent. No European country saw rail travel grow faster than air travel.

The government of France has found a solution to for-profit airlines outcompeting government-subsidized trains: ban the competing air travel. Under a law passed earlier this month, airlines will not be allowed to operate on routes that trains can serve in less than two-and-a-half hours. If high-speed trains were able to compete on their own, they wouldn’t need such a law.

Of course, French politicians justified this law based on the supposed savings in carbon emissions. But conventional trains are only a little more energy efficient than planes, and high-speed trains require well over 50 percent more energy, per train-car-mile, than conventional trains. Passenger occupancies also tend to be much higher on planes than trains — typically 85 percent vs. 50 percent — because planes usually operate in non-stop service while trains make many stops, so the size of planes can be set to demand while trains must be sized to fit the portion of the journey where demand is highest. Continue reading →

Did Ride Hailing Increase Congestion?

By | | Transportation
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“A new MIT study found that not only do rideshares increase congestion, but they also made traffic jams longer, led to a significant decline in people taking public transit, and haven’t really impacted car ownership,” reports Gizmodo. As noted here previously, transit advocates blame ride hailing for all sorts of problems in order to justify taxes and other restrictions to limit competition.

The new study from MIT is frankly unpersuasive. First of all, it says very little about the methodology used to come up with its results: page 1 of the study is an introduction and page 2 immediately begins to present the results. It appears the writers compared data in 44 urban areas before and after the introduction of ride hailing into those areas between 2012 and 2016.

Second, the writers appear to have made no effort to correct for or even consider any other variables. Although Uber began operating in San Francisco in 2010, ride hailing didn’t really begin growing until 2014. But the other thing that happened in 2014 was a huge drop in gasoline prices — prices fell by 50 percent in some areas. This isn’t even mentioned in the paper even though that drop could have most of the same effects the paper attributes to ride hailing. Continue reading →