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Transit Not Yet Safe to Ride

By | | Transportation
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Earlier this week, I noted that a Washington Metro survey found that most of its former transit riders are unwilling to go back to riding transit until an effective COVID-19 vaccine is found. It appears they were right to say that, as a recent study by epidemiologists from Johns Hopkins University has concluded that, even after “adjusting for social distancing,” “public transit use . . . remained significantly associated with SARS-CoV-2 infection.”

The study found that “NPIs” (non-pharmaceutical interventions, e.g., masks & social distancing) “while visiting indoor and outdoor venues helps reduce SARS-CoV-2 transmission.” However, the two exceptions were public transport and places of worship. “Even NPIs may not be possible or sufficient” to prevent the virus’ spread on public transit, the study concludes. Although the study doesn’t say so, I suspect the problem is that transit vehicles are too small to permit true social distancing.

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It’s Not Climate Change, Stupid

By | | Wildfire
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Early this week, Oregon governor Kate Brown went on national television to call the Pacific Coast fires a “bellwether for climate change.” As UC Berkeley professor of sustainable development Maximilian Auffhammer writes, “It’s the climate change, stupid.”

This is one of four responses to the Pacific Coast fires. Brown and Auffhammer are warmers, people who believe the earth’s climate is changing and the fires must be due to that change. In the warmers’ minds, the fires themselves then become evidence that we need to change our lifestyles to cut back on greenhouse gas emissions.

A second group are the burners, people who believe that a century of fire suppression has led to a dangerous build-up of fuels in the forests. Oregon Senator Ron Wyden falls into this category. He wants to give the Forest Service and other agencies more money and more freedom to do prescribed burning. Continue reading →

DC Metro Should Just Shut Down

By | | Transportation, Urban areas
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With transit ridership off by 84 percent in July, what better time than now to simply stop running the expensive and failed DC Metro rail system? Apparently hardly anyone really depends on it, as driving was back to at least 80 percent of its pre-pandemic levels in July.

Based on a budget update provided to the Metro board, the Washington Metropolitan Area Transportation Authority (WMATA) may have to shut down, as it expects to run out of money around next January. WMATA says it needs at least $212 million to operate through June, 2021 (the end of its fiscal year), plus more, of course, for the following year.

To deal with this, WMATA is proposing to reduce rail and bus frequencies, cut back late-night service, cancel 39 bus routes, and defer some capital improvement projects to a later date. But even these cuts won’t completely close the gap between shrinking revenues and costs. Moreover, due to the need for public hearings and other requirements, WMATA won’t even be able to implement any changes until December, so it will continue to hemorrhage money for few riders for several more months. Continue reading →

Transit and the Mania for Density

By | | Policy brief
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When I was in high school—this would be about 1969—my social studies teacher asked the class to imagine we could design the city of Portland from scratch. What would it look like? I did a few calculations and realized that, if people were packed into higher densities, most of the city could be left as parks and open space. My vision called for a grid of high-rise clusters with a mixture of retail shops and apartments, accompanied by some single-family homes. Each cluster would be surrounded by forests and parks and connected with the others by rail transit so no one would have to drive. Industrial areas would be located in their own clusters.

Click image to download a four-page PDF of this policy brief.

It never occurred to me to ask whether people wanted to live in high rises, whether the cost of building housing in high rises would be more than the cost of single-family homes, or whether people would still need cars because they might want to go somewhere not reachable by train. In essence, I had designed the Ideal Communist City as described in a book by that name that was first published in English in 1971. That book was influenced by Swiss architect Le Corbusier’s Radiant City, which he proposed in the 1930s. Planning historian Peter Hall called Corbusier “the Rasputin of urban planning” for his authoritarian views and the ways in which he beguiled and misled generations of urban planners. Continue reading →

Wildfire Update

By | | Wildfire
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Wildfires continue to burn out of control in much of Oregon, California, and Washington, though they aren’t expanding as fast as they did during last Monday’s wind storm. Most of the Northwest is under a blanket of smoke that is hazardous to our health; the good news is the smoke is cooling temperatures by 10 degrees or so, thus reducing the rate of spread of the fires.

About 1.5 percent of Oregon has burned in the last week with an unusual number of fires burning nearly to the borders of cities such as Ashland, Medford, Oregon City, Roseburg, Salem, and Springfield. Click image for a larger view. Map from Firemappers.

Yesterday’s national situation report was the first I have seen this year in which the number of acres burned exceeded the ten-year average through this date. I downloaded the previous ten years of September 13 reports and found that the Pacific Coast states, central Rockies, and Southwest have all seen more acres burn than the ten-year average, but Alaska, the Northern Rockies, Great Basin, East, and South are well below average. Continue reading →

Save the Planet: Stop Riding Transit

By | | Transportation
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SUVs “ruined the environment,” says to a rather shrill article in the Guardian that was also reprinted in Mother Jones and other publications. It reached this conclusion based on a study showing they were the “second largest contributor to the increase in global carbon emissions from 2010 to 2018.”

The author of the article, who frets that people with SUVs also have a hard time finding a place “to park the things,” obviously hasn’t looked at an SUV lately. No more are all SUVs Chevy Suburbans or Ford Excursions. Most of them are about the same size as regular cars, just a little taller. Nor are they all four-wheel drive gas guzzlers; in fact, they only use a little more energy than regular cars.

It’s the extra height that makes them attractive to people. A taller car allows drivers to see further down the road. Occupants also sit higher, like at a dining table, rather than low with their legs sticking out in front of them, like a sports car. Thus, they are both more comfortable and easier to drive. Continue reading →

Burning 3 Acres Per Second

By | | Wildfire
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On Monday morning, September 7, the Beachie Creek Fire had burned 776 acres in the Opal Creek Wilderness of the Willamette National Forest. The fire was in a steep, inaccessible landscape, so the Forest Service had been fighting it mainly by dropping water from helicopters.

Dropping water on the Beachie fire on September 2, when it was supposed to be only 23 acres in size. Click image for a larger view. Forest Service photo.

Monday afternoon saw winds as high as 75 miles per hour blowing burning embers from the fire miles to the west. Over the next ten or so hours, the fire burned an average of three acres per second, growing to 132,450 acres. Residents of Gates, Mill City, and Mehama who had gone to sleep knowing they were comfortably 4 to 7 miles from the fire front were awakened and hastily evacuated in the middle of the night. The now-renamed Santiam Fire destroyed hundreds of homes and killed at least two people. Continue reading →

Rapid Bus: Finding the Right Model

By | | Policy brief
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In 2005, Kansas City opened its Main Street bus-rapid transit line, one of the first of its kind in the nation. The buses were “branded’ with distinctive paint jobs and, like light rail, stopped less frequently than regular buses, increasing their average speeds. They also ran four times per hour instead of the twice-per-hour schedules of many local buses.

Click image to download a six-page PDF of this policy brief.

Sharing lanes with other traffic, the buses didn’t have a dedicated right of way, didn’t require people to pay before they board, didn’t have priority at traffic signals, and didn’t use other advanced technologies. Despite this, the increased frequencies and speeds generated a 50 percent increase in ridership on the route. Continue reading →

July Transit Ridership Down Almost 65 Percent

By | | Transportation, Useful Data
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Transit ridership in July 2020 was 64.9 percent less than it had been in July 2019, according to data released last Friday by the Federal Transit Administration. This is only a slight improvement from June, when ridership was down by 69 percent from June 2019. July bus ridership was down by 52 percent (vs. 56% in June) while rail ridership was down by 77 percent (vs. 83% in June).

Worst off was Washington DC, whose July ridership was still down by 82 percent, about the same as in June. At the other extreme was Richmond, Virginia, where July ridership was down by only 21 percent. Many urban areas in Florida and Texas were down by less than 50 percent. Apparently, the South has risen again, or at least transit ridership in the South has risen faster than in the north.

As usual, I’ve uploaded an enhanced version of the FTA’s spreadsheet, which has month-by-month data for each transit agency and mode. My enhanced version has annual totals in columns HY to IQ, mode totals in rows 2190 through 2211, agency totals in rows 2220 through 3219, and urban area totals for the nation’s 200 largest urban areas in rows 3220 through 3424. These enhancements are made on both the ridership (UPT for unlinked passenger trips) and service (VRM for vehicle revenue miles) pages. Continue reading →

Something in New York Is Dying

By | | News commentary
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A recent blog post by investor and stand-up comedian James Altucher (mentioned here) arguing that New York is dead forever attracted the hostility of many New Yorkers. Fellow comedian Jerry Seinfeld wrote a New York Times op-ed calling Altucher a “whimpering putz.” Mayor De Blasio, naturally, agrees with Seinfeld.

The New York Post told Altucher to “drop dead,” noting that, if he really loved the city as he claims (he co-owns a comedy club there), he would stay and do his part to revive it. Guardian columnist Arwa Mahdawi suggests that New York is not only not dying, “the rich are moving out and the city is being reborn.”

With all due respect to these people, they missed Altucher’s point. New York as a city will survive. But New York as an ideal, a place that builds wealth and fulfills dreams like nowhere else in America, will not. Not to put too many words in Altucher’s mouth, what is really dead is the idea that New York City or Manhattan densities are necessary have a healthy economy and diverse culture. Continue reading →