Tag Archives: transit

A recent op-ed in the Baltimore Sun written by several elected officials proposes to “re-imagine public transit” in the Baltimore area. In particular, they want to revive the Red Line, a light-rail line that was cancelled in 2015. Among the strikes against it were that it would increase congestion and would carry so few passengers that, under FTA rules at the time, it wasn’t cost-effective and therefore wasn’t eligible for federal funding. (The rules have since been changed, but that doesn’t make it any more cost effective.)

Imagining the Baltimore Red Line.

The fact that Maryland’s governor approved the DC-area Purple Line at the same time as he cancelled the Red Line has stuck in the craw of Baltimore transit officials. Since then, the Purple Line has suffered numerous delays and cost overruns, but that doesn’t worry Baltimore’s mayor and the county executives who wrote this op-ed. Heck, they probably see cost overruns as a good thing as they would bring more money into their communities. Continue reading →

New York University’s Transit Costs Project has issued its final report on why it costs so much to build transit infrastructure in the United States. While some of the answers appear reasonable at first glance, the report suffers from the researchers not asking the right questions.

Click image to download a 26.4-MB PDF of this report.

In its review of Boston’s Green Line, the report notes that “Understaffed agencies lacking experience with large capital construction projects struggle to manage consultants.” One result is less than half the costs of the project went into construction; the rest went to pay consultants. We’ve seen that happen with Honolulu and other rail projects as well. Continue reading →

As illustrated by the tweet from Stanford economics professor Nick Bloom, it’s beginning to sink in that transit ridership is not going to recover to more than about 65 percent of what it was before the pandemic. However, instead of raising “concerns over the survival of public transit systems,” we should see this as an opportunity to reinvent an industry that was already obsolete years before the pandemic.

The 2021 National Transit Database reveals that many transit agencies are spending as much per rider as it would cost to send those riders in taxis, Uber, or Lyft. Counting both operating and capital costs, the average cost per light-rail trip was more than $40. Even just counting operating costs, the average cost per light-rail rider in San Jose was more than $53 and in Pittsburgh was almost $49. Continue reading →

A recent staff presentation to the Washington Metro board’s finance committee revealed that the agency is expecting to run out of federal COVID relief funds in 2024 and anticipates a $187.5 million shortfall in funding that year. From then on, it anticipates funding shortfalls of more than $500 million a year, rising to more than $700 million by 2030.

With half of DC employees working at home, Washington Metro trains have been running nearly empty since the pandemic began. Photo by Elvert Barnes.

That’s if ridership recovers to 100 percent of pre-pandemic levels. If only 75 percent of riders return, shortfalls will range from more than $700 million in 2025 to more than $900 million in 2030. In fact, as of July, ridership was still less than 50 percent of pre-pandemic numbers. Continue reading →

The Antiplanner is back from Wheeler County where I happened to meet some Portland transportation consultants who were cycling through the area. If you are reading this, I hope you had a good trip with no more mechanical problems.

I promised I would take a closer look at the transit data that the FTA released last week. The data continue to show that rail transit is lagging behind bus ridership, with rail at 57 percent and bus at 61 percent of pre-pandemic levels. Yet worst off is commuter bus, at a mere 36 percent of July 2019 numbers. Rapid bus is 64 percent, and hybrid rail is at 82 percent — though that’s because a new line opened in North San Diego County since the pandemic began. Continue reading →

Colorado transit agencies convinced the state legislature to subsidize free transit for the month of August based on the flimsy claim that doing so would reduce air pollution. At the end of the money, the Colorado Association of Transit Agencies claimed the program was a great success, with many agencies seeing 30 to 50 percent increases in ridership compared with August, 2021.

Transit buses in Pueblo saw a 59 percent increase in ridership in August, but Pueblo’s transit system normally carries less than 0.75 percent of all transit riders in the state, so this increase wasn’t very important. Photo from Pueblo Transit.

The problem with this claim is that Colorado transit agencies were already seeing 30 to 50 percent increases in ridership compared with 2021 before they offered free transit. Colorado transit ridership in the first half of 2022 was 37 percent greater than the first half of 2021. Most of the increase in August was due to the recovery from the pandemic, not to free transit. Continue reading →