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New Jet Service a High-Speed Rail Killer

By | | Transportation
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JSX, formerly known as JetSuiteX, is a new airline with a new operating model that will kill any idea that high-speed trains could compete with air travel in short-haul markets. The airline flies many routes that have been planned for high-speed trains, including Oakland-Los Angeles, Los Angeles-Phoenix, and — starting last week — Dallas-Houston.

JSX uses small jet planes with seats for only 30 passengers, allowing it to by-pass TSA requirements as it conducts its own airport screening. Technically, passengers don’t fly JSX, they make reservations and JSX charters a plane that happens to be owned by a JSX subsidiary, which is another way that it by-passes TSA rules. The result is that people can arrive at the terminal just 20 minutes ahead of their flight’s departure. 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 →

September Driving Exceeds 90% of 2019

By | | Transportation, Useful Data
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The number of miles Americans drove in September was just 8.6 percent less than in September, 2019, according to data released last Friday by the Federal Highway Administration. This is the first month since February of this year that driving rose above 90 percent of last year’s levels. This contrasts to transit ridership, which, as noted here last week, remains 62 percent below 2019 levels.

Driving remains lowest, relative to 2019, in Hawaii, which is still down 31.5 percent due to less tourism. The other states with double-digit drops are Illinois, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Nevada, New Jersey, Ohio, Oregon, Pennsylvania, O Rhode Island, Vermont, and Virginia, all of which are between 10 and 15 percent down. Driving in Montana is actually 2 percent greater than it was in 2019, and driving in Idaho and South Dakota are within 1 percent of 2019 levels.
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Urban driving is down by a little more than 10 percent while rural driving is down by only 5 percent. Rural driving is greater than in 2019 in Arizona, Idaho, Montana, and South Dakota and within 1 percent of 2019 in Arkansas, Florida, Michigan, Nevada, and Utah.

Taxing Success to Subsidize Failure

By | | Transportation
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Driving has bounced back. Transit has not, leaving many transit agencies in financial straits. The obvious solution it to tax drivers to keep transit systems running, or even to keep them not running.

Actually, that’s not obvious to me, but it is obvious to some transit executives who are willing to take advantage of the fact that people have been conditioned to believe that cars are evil and transit is good so drivers should be taxed to support transit bureaucracies.

Take, for example, Golden Gate Transit, which started as a way of relieving congestion on the Golden Gate Bridge. Bridge tolls were used to subsidize buses between Marin County and San Francisco, and the people who paid the tolls were supposed to be happy that their commutes were less congested. Continue reading →

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
7 Comments

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 →