Search Results for: peak transit

Transit Follies #5: Higher Fares and Less Service in Utah

By | | Planning Disasters, Transportation
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The Utah Transit Authority (UTA), which operates transit along the Wasatch Front from north of Ogden to south of Salt Lake City, opened its first light-rail line in 1999. Since then it has added to its light-rail system and last year began building its first commuter-rail line.

Now the agency is proposing to increase transit fares by 33 percent (phased in over two years) and, at the same time, to cut many of its bus routes. This has led to a storm of protest from transit-dependent people who say the revised bus routes will greatly reduce their mobility.

Photo courtesy UTA.

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The Antiplanner’s Law of Rail Transit

By | | Transportation
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I often hear people say things like, “Light rail might make sense in Europe, but it doesn’t make sense here because our city isn’t dense enough.” To which I respond, “Light rail doesn’t make sense in Europe either.”

In fact, based on the numbers in the post on moderate-capacity transit, we can derive the following Antiplanner’s Law of Rail Transit:

By the time a city is dense enough to justify rail transit, it is too dense for light-rail transit.

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Schools Demand Continuance of Old Taxpayer Scam

By | | Public lands
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“Rural schools in California already struggle with declining enrollment, staffing shortages and wildfires,” says Carolyn Jones, writing for Calmatters, a left-leaning policy web site. “Now they’re facing the possible loss of money they’ve relied on for more than a century.” What Jones doesn’t say is that the counties have been scamming federal taxpayers for that money for decades and they’d naturally rather continue the scam than have to raise the money locally.

No children live in the Trinity Alps Wilderness Area, which imposes no costs on the Trinity Alps School District. Yet the school district superintendent somehow finds it “mind boggling” that Congress might not force federal taxpayers to pay the district for every acre of wilderness area and other national forest lands that happens to be in Trinity County, California. Photo by Kee Yip.

Federal lands aren’t taxable by state or local governments. When Congress began setting aside national forests, it decided to make it up to local governments by giving them 25 percent of any revenues the forests earned. In some places, the counties got 50 percent. Congress specified that national forest payments to counties had to be spent on roads and schools. Continue reading →

A Polycentric Plan for Portland

By | | Transportation
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Portland’s TriMet transit agency is attempting to serve a 2020s urban area with a 1910 transit system, says a new report published by the Cascade Policy Institute. The agency’s infatuation with rail transit underscores this problem, as rail transit makes no sense for rapidly evolving regions with multiple economic centers. TriMet’s current route map works well only for downtown employees: while more than 40 percent of downtown workers took transit to work before the pandemic, less than 3.5 percent of workers in the rest of the urban area used transit.

The Cascade Policy Institute report proposes to replace TriMet’s current bus route map with a hub-and-spoke system using nine hubs. Yellow circles are the hubs. Blue lines represent non-stop buses from every hub to every other hub. Red lines represent local buses radiating away from each hub. The lines are not exact routes and only show the origins and (in the case of the red lines) approximate destinations of each route. Click image for a larger view.

All of these problems were made worse by the pandemic, which hit rail transit especially hard and which greatly reduced the importance of downtown Portland as an economic center. According to the latest report, Portland’s downtown has the second-worst recovery of any of the nation’s 50 largest downtowns, with less than 40 percent the economic activity of the pre-pandemic period. Yet TriMet still wants to build two new light-rail lines to downtown even though the last line it opened gained no net new riders for the transit system. Continue reading →

Another Billion-Dollar Boondoggle for San Jose

By | | Transportation
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San Jose’s transit system is a mess, partly because the region decided to spend billions on light rail even though it is completely unsuited for such transportation. But in addition, the Valley Transportation Authority (VTA) is simply poorly managed. For example, in 2021 the agency spent $249 per mile operating buses and $536 per vehicle-mile operating light rail, when the national averages are only $158 for buses and $389 for light rail.

In 2019, fares paid by VTA riders covered just 9.1 percent of the agency’s costs. As if that wasn’t pathetic enough, by 2021, this had fallen to 3.4 percent. At the same time, the share of Silicon Valley workers taking transit to work fell from 4.8 percent to 1.1 percent. More Silicon Valley residents who live in households without cars drive alone to work than all of the ones who take transit to work. Continue reading →

U.S. Drove 4.3% More Miles in 2/23 Than in 2/19

By | | Transportation, Useful Data
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Americans drove 224.1 billion miles in February 2023, which was 4.3 percent more than in the same month in 2019, according to data released by the Federal Highway Administration yesterday. This was the biggest increase in driving over pre-pandemic levels since the pandemic began.

For more information on transit, Amtrak, and air travel, see Monday’s post.

Driving increased, relative to 2019, on all kinds of roads in both urban and rural areas. Urban driving was 2.5 percent greater than in 2019; rural driving was 10.2 percent greater. Continue reading →

Portland Bicycle Ridership Declining

By | | Transportation
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Portland, Oregon has 385 miles of bikeways, 121 of which have been built since 2014. But these bikeways have failed to boost the number of bicycle riders in the city. In fact, a report from the city of Portland says that, in the wake of COVID, the number is declining rapidly.

According to the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey, the share of Portland employees riding bicycles to work peaked at 7.2 percent in 2014. By 2019, it had fallen to 5.2 percent. The pandemic led to a surge in bicycle sales, and the share grew to 5.4 percent in 2020 but then fell dramatically to a measly 2.8 percent in 2021. Continue reading →

The Future of Working at Home

By | | News commentary
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Employers are increasingly demanding that remote workers return to offices or other workplaces. Some are offering bonuses and pay increases to return to work while others are threatening to fire employees who don’t return.

Click image to download a copy of this report.

Employers such as Disney argue that the creative work they want out of their employees requires collaboration that can only be found when employees are working together. Others say that working in one location creates a work culture that is vital to the success of their companies. Continue reading →

You Get What You Pay For

By | | Transportation
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Addis Ababa, the capital of Ethiopia, has a 19.6-mile light-rail system that consists of a north-south line intersecting an east-west line. It cost $475 million, or less than $25 million per mile. That sounds like a good deal compared with U.S. lines now under construction or in planning, the least expensive of which is more than $135 million a mile and the average cost is more than $275 million a mile.

Addis Ababa’s light-rail line. Photo by A.Savin.

There’s just one little problem. Although the light-rail system is just seven years old, it is already suffering serious maintenance problems. Only eight of the city’s 41 light-rail trains are functional, and the city has resorted to operating just every other day in order to do track maintenance. The city estimates it needs $60 million to restore the system to full capacity, which it doesn’t have. Continue reading →

Stressing Out Over CO2

By | | News commentary
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Emissions of carbon dioxide in the United States peaked in 2007 at 6.14 billion tons. Since then it declined, initially due to the 2008 recession but later to use of more efficient fuels (mainly natural gas instead of coal). By 2019, it had declined by 0.76 billion tons, or 12 percent, while in 2021 it had fallen another 0.37 billion tons, or 18 percent less than 2007. Some of the decline in 2021 was due to COVID, but some was due to continuing efficiencies.

Source: Our World in Data.

Over the same time period, 2007 to 2021, emissions in China grew by 4.49 billion tons, or almost four times the decline in the United States. As of 2021, China was producing almost two-and-a-half times as much carbon emissions as the United States. Much of the increase in China was due to burning of coal that we and other countries that are busy reducing their carbon footprints are exporting to China. Continue reading →