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Researchers: Logging Won’t Stop Fires

By | | Wildfire
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Despite rain in the valleys and snow in the mountains, wildfires are still smoldering in Oregon and people are still trying to blame those fires on the lack of government spending on logging or prescribed burning. Yet increased logging wouldn’t have stopped western wildfires this year, a number of researchers told reporters in an article jointly written by the Oregonian, Oregon Public Broadcasting, and Propublica.

“The belief people have is that somehow or another we can thin our way to low-intensity fire that will be easy to suppress, easy to contain, easy to control,” retired Forest Service researcher Jack Cohen told the reporters. “Nothing could be further from the truth.” 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.

Tesla’s Self-Driving Beta Test

By | | Transportation
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Tesla released what it calls “full self-drive beta” software to selected Tesla owners last week, and while it does not really make a Tesla into a true driverless car, it works pretty well under most conditions and provides a glimpse of what driverless cars will be like in the near future.

Tesla has taken a different approach to autonomy from other manufacturers. While Waymo, Ford, and GM driverless cars rely heavily on extremely precise maps, which means they can only be used within “geofenced” (i.e., mapped) areas, Elon Musk has criticized this approach. In technical terms, an autonomous car that relies on maps is called a level 4 vehicle while Tesla wants to go straight to level 5, meaning a vehicle that can go anywhere based on the geography that it detects with on-board sensors. Continue reading →

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 →

Portland Wises Up

By | | News commentary
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Austin voters apparently approved the cities foolish $7 billion light-rail plan. San Francisco Bay Area voters apparently approved a regressive tax-increase to support high-income riders of the Caltrain commuter train. But Portland voters have apparently rejected a $5 billion transportation measure that was mainly aimed at building the region’s most-expensive light-rail line yet.

Portland’s rejection of light rail is not too surprising as the region has rejected every transit tax measure that’s been on the ballot since 1996 because voters have learned that light rail costs too much and does too little. Too bad Austin couldn’t have learned from Portland’s experience.

Portland voters also appear to have returned centrist Ted Wheeler to the mayor’s office even though polls showed he was running well behind leftist challenger Sarah Iannarone. Wheeler had earned the ire of Black Lives Matter protesters when he didn’t try to stop police from stopping property destruction in downtown Portland. Iannarone, meanwhile, openly supported antifa violence and wore clothing celebrating Chairman Mao. Continue reading →

10 Reasons Not to Build High-Speed Rail

By | | Policy brief
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Did you know that a single gallon of fuel is enough to power an entire high-speed train to go from New York to Los Angeles and back? Neither did I, but the U.S. High-Speed Rail Association (US HSR) made this preposterous claim on its web site last week. Someone there apparently figured out that it is ridiculous and took it down, but below is the graphic that accompanied the claim.

US HSR’s claim that high-speed trains can go 6,600 miles on one gallon of fuel is absurd, and its claim that airliners can only go 400 feet on one gallon is also wrong.

Like the claim that one rail line can move as many people as an eight-lane freeway, this claim for energy efficiency is startling enough that we are likely to hear it again as Democrats attempt to spend a few trillion dollars building a high-speed rail system across the country. In preparation for that debate, here are ten reasons why the United States should not build high-speed rail. Continue reading →

Texas Central Project May Be Dead

By | | Transportation
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After promising that their Dallas-Houston high-speed rail project would be built solely with private funds, Texas Central backers are sending out feelers about getting a federal guaranteed loan to build it. A letter from the company chairman to Texas state senator Robert Nichols says the project “hit a snag” due to the coronavirus, but “monies we hope to receive from President Trump’s infrastructure stimulus” could make it “construction ready this year.”

The fact that President Trump doesn’t have any infrastructure stimulus money is just a minor detail. Company officials cited possible loans through the Railroad Rehabilitation & Improvement Financing (RRIF) or the Transportation Infrastructure Finance and Innovation Act (TIFIA) programs. However, neither of these loan programs are large enough for the kind of project contemplated by Texas Central.

Texas Central was originally supposed to cost $10 billion. Then it was going to cost $20 billion. But the letter to Nichols now admits that the project may cost $30 billion. Continue reading →

50th Anniversary of a Mistake

By | | Transportation
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Today is the 50th anniversary of Congressional passage of the Rail Passenger Service Act, which created the National Railroad Passenger Corporation, later known as Amtrak. This law was based on several factual errors, the most important one being a claim that passenger trains could make money if only they were freed from the stodgy railroad executives who supposedly preferred freight over passenger service.

Early Amtrak train to San Francisco from Chicago. It took several years to repaint all of the equipment into Amtrak colors. Photo by Drew Jacksich.

Passenger train ridership had been declining since 1920 and the decline accelerated after World War II. A 1958 report from the Interstate Commerce Commission predicted that intercity passenger trains would disappear by 1970. In response, Congress passed legislation making it easier for the railroads to stop running interstate trains. Continue reading →