Tag Archives: transit

This is Daquan Rogers. He is a 27-year-old Minneapolis light-rail rider who has a history of transit crimes including being arrested last month for brawling aboard a light-rail train. Following the arrest he was released pending his court case.

On May 20, while standing on a light-rail platform, he got into an argument with 41-year-old Eugene Snelling. A horrific video shows Rogers pushing Snelling on to the tracks between two light-rail cars. Snelling died and Rogers was arrested in what was considered to be a homocide case. Continue reading →

Politico has just discovered that transit systems are still carrying “less than 70 percent of their pre-pandemic traffic.” As a result, “Public transit is facing a financial rut that’s spurred their CEOs to press city and state governments for new funding streams and taxes.”

Why subsidize empty transit vehicles? Photo by Ashton Emanuel.

I am continually appalled, though not surprised, that so many reporters take it for granted that transit should continue operating at existing or even expanded levels no matter what the cost to taxpayers. They take it as a given that transit doesn’t exist to serve cities or their residents; instead, urban residents exist as a funding source to keep transit running. If you aren’t riding transit, you should still be forced to pay taxes to keep it operating. Continue reading →

Spending billions of dollars on on transit infrastructure, as proposed by a group called the Transit Alliance for Middle Tennessee, would be a complete waste. The group was formed to support the city’s 26-mile, $5-billion light-rail proposal that was rejected by voters five years ago. Now that the pandemic has proven that Nashville doesn’t need any transit infrastructure, the group is reemerging as an “advocate for action.”

The group wants “multimodal transportation,” which to them means bus-rapid transit on dedicated lanes, light rail, commuter rail, and maybe even heavy rail and monorail. For some reason, the group doesn’t mention cars, trucks, bicycles, pedestrians, scooters, and local buses, all of which make Nashville’s existing transportation infrastructure pretty multimodal. Continue reading →

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 →

Transit advocates cheered when, in 2018, a census of downtown Portland found that 42 percent of the 102,000 people who worked downtown took transit to work. What they didn’t want to hear is that less than 10 percent of workers in the Portland area worked downtown, and transit only carried 3.4 percent of non-downtown employees to work. As demographer Wendell Cox says, “transit is about downtown.”

Long an icon of downtown Portland, Jackson Tower is facing hard times. Photo by Steve Morgan.

While I’ve reported on the impacts of telecommuting on transit, just as important is the decline of many downtowns due to the pandemic and the inability of many cities to solve problems of crime and homelessness. Portland’s downtown is doing so bad that the owners of Jackson Tower recently defaulted on their mortgage, which a representative of the owners blames on “the deterioration of downtown.” A court has appointed a receiver who may end up selling the graffiti-marked building at foreclosure. Continue reading →

“The public transportation market is forecasted to grow by $90.07 bn during 2022-2027,” says a new report from someone called Infiniti Research. That represents an annual growth rate of 5.84 percent per year.

For a mere $2,500 ($4,000 for the “enterprise” version), you can read this fairy tale about how the transit market is going to grow once we install multi-billion-dollar hyperloops in every city.

“The development of hyperloop transportation systems [is] one of the prime reasons driving the public transportation market growth during the next few years,” claims the report, putting it in the world of pure fantasy land. Actually, 5.84 percent annual growth seems pretty modest considering how diminished the transit industry is today: at that rate, it would take 8 years to fully recover to pre-pandemic levels. At the same time, unless most employers force employees to stop working at home, even 5.84 percent seems unlikely. Continue reading →

David Zipper, who has a master’s degree in urban planning, writes on Vox about how transit agencies need to save themselves from a fiscal cliff. To do so, he says, they must “secure new and reliable revenue streams from state and regional sources.” To convince skeptical members of the public they need to provide those revenue streams out of their taxes, agencies need to “demonstrate an ability to replace car trips, not just serve economically disadvantaged people,” because only by replacing car trips can they prove they are “curtailing congestion, reducing auto emissions, and boosting economic growth.”

BART’s plea for more subsidies falsely claims that “BART was self-sufficient before the pandemic” when its own data show that fares covered only 71 percent of operating costs and zero percent of capital costs.

Yet Zipper never really says why we need to save transit. He claims that transit has been “indispensable” for major metros, but what he really means is that it is indispensable for major downtowns such as Chicago, Philadelphia, and San Francisco. In reality, the only metro area for which transit is truly indispensable is New York, and if it is so indispensable there, then New Yorkers should be the ones to pay for it. Continue reading →

Earlier this month, the Federal Transit Administration published its annual report on funding recommendations for transit capital improvement grants. Each year, I review the accompanying list of projects being planned or under construction to see how much construction costs have grown since the previous year. This year, however, transit agencies seem to have learned a lesson from the pandemic and have curtailed their wild spending on pointless projects.

Sound Transit is building light rail on what was once freeway lanes across Lake Washington. Photo by Sound Transit.

Just kidding. In fact, they are spending more than ever. In the 1990s, light-rail lines that cost $50 million a mile ($100 million in today’s dollars) were considered extravagantly expensive. A decade ago, the average light-rail line cost about $125 million a mile ($160 million in today’s dollars). Last year, average light-rail construction costs had risen to $278 million a mile (about $310 million today). Continue reading →