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The Future of Driving

By | | Transportation
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A new study from accounting firm KPMG predicts that auto travel in the United States will be 9 to 10 percent less after the pandemic than it was before. Telecommuting, says the report, will lead to a 10 to 20 percent reduction in commuting by car while on-line shopping will lead to a 10 to 30 percent reduction in shopping trips.

This is good news to the transit-loving, auto-hating folks at Streetsblog, who celebrate “14 million cars off the road forever” but warn that “if we don’t act fast, they’ll come back” (which makes “forever” somewhat dubious). The “actions” they advocate call for giving the transit industry another $32 billion right away so it can keep its empty transit vehicles clean and even more money after that so it can increase the frequencies of those empty buses and trains.

If you believe the KPMG report, however, that’s not going to work. The report also found that 43 percent of former transit riders don’t plan to go back to riding transit after the pandemic, and most of them will substitute autos for transit. If true, that will increase driving by about 5 billion vehicle miles. KPMG admitted that transit’s loss would somewhat offset the decrease in auto travel, but did not include that in its calculations. Continue reading →

Rebuild the Interstate Highway System?

By | | Transportation
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A new report from The Road Information Project (TRIP) estimates that rebuilding and expanding the Interstate Highway System to meet twenty-first century needs will require increasing annual expenditures on the system from $23 billion to $57 billion per year. The report says that the highways “are wearing out and showing signs of their advanced age, often heavily congested, and in need of significant reconstruction, modernization and expansion.”

However, the numbers in the report don’t necessarily support this. The report admits that only 3 percent of interstate highway pavements are in poor condition, while another 8 percent is considered mediocre and 9 percent fair. That leaves the vast majority of the system, 79 percent, in good condition. Similarly, only 3 percent of interstate highway bridges are in poor condition or considered structurally deficient.

Congestion is a problem, but it is confined mainly to urban roads. Only 18 percent of interstate highway miles are considered congested, says the report. Continue reading →

Freeways: The Egalitarian Transportation

By | | Transportation
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In the past month or so, we’ve seen the destruction or defacement of statues of Confederate generals, the Father of our Country who was also a slaveowner, the Great Emancipationist, the Great Reconstructionist, and an Abolitionist. So it’s not exactly surprising that someone has proposed to bulldoze urban freeways because of the myth that they were located by racists through black neighborhoods.

There are a lot of institutions associated with American racism that I would abolish long before worrying about freeways. Start with public schools, many of which used to be segregated by law and many of which are still segregated, even in (perhaps especially in) the North.

Second would be public transit. Remember Rosa Parks and the Montgomery bus boycott? Many state laws used to require that people of color sit only in the back of the bus and give up their seats if a white person wanted them. Many transit systems, including those in Atlanta, Dallas, Los Angeles, and San Francisco-Oakland, are still semi-segregated today, with rail lines built to serve white neighborhoods while buses serving black and Hispanic neighborhoods are cut back to pay for the trains. Continue reading →

Spending Money We Don’t Have on Projects We Don’t Need

By | | News commentary, Transportation
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House Transportation & Infrastructure Committee Chair Peter DeFazio yesterday released a proposal to spend tens of billions of dollars the federal government doesn’t have on projects we don’t need. Congressional authorization for federal spending on highways and transit expires this year, and DeFazio proposes to renew this with a program that will increase spending by 62 percent without increasing the taxes that support it.

Whereas the previous law spent an average of $61 billion per year over the last five years, DeFazio’s proposal would spend almost $99 billion a year over five years. At one time, federal spending on highways and most transit came out of gas taxes and other highway user fees and Congress didn’t spend more than came in. Since the mid-2000s, however, Congress has ignored actual revenues and spent billions of dollars a year out of general funds. The 2015 law, for example, simply appropriated $51 billion of general funds into the Highway Trust Fund (which despite the name spends money on both highways and transit).

DeFazio’s bill would not only increase this deficit spending, it includes a poison pill for highways while it unleashes spending increases on transit. For highways, the bill would include a “fix it first” provisions that says that states cannot increase highway capacity until they get existing roads in a state of good repair. No similar provision is made for transit even though transit is in a much poorer state of repair. Continue reading →

Traffic Fatalities in 2019 and 2020

By | | Transportation
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Traffic fatalities declined by 1.2 percent in 2019 despite a 0.9 percent increase in driving. Preliminary data released by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration indicates that pedestrian deaths declined by 2 percent and cyclist deaths by 3 percent. The only increase was from accidents involving heavy trucks.

You might think that the great decrease in travel in 2020 would result in a parallel decrease in traffic fatalities. But Massachusetts reports that fatalities have slightly increased despite a 50 percent decrease in driving. The state had 28 fatalities in April 2020 compared with 27 in April 2019. Of course, that’s a small sample compared with the nation as a whole.

The state didn’t say why it thought fatalities hadn’t declined. But it appears that some drivers have responded to the reduction in congestion by driving well above speed limits. Nebraska has cited 64 percent more drivers for speeding above 100 mph since March 18 than the same period in 2019. Utah reports numerous people driving 30 mph above posted speed limits. More data will be needed to find out of Massachusett’s experience is the exception or the rule and whether speeding is the cause of increased fatality rates.

When Is a Black Swan Not a Black Swan?

By | | Transportation
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According to Wikipedia, a black-swan event is “an event that comes as a surprise, has a major effect, and is often inappropriately rationalised after the fact with the benefit of hindsight.” The Antiplanner’s policy brief about black swans was condensed into an article in the Federalist this week.

Almost as if in response, Nassim Taleb, the person who coined the term “black-swan event,” says he doesn’t believe this pandemic is a black swan. Why not? Because he predicted it!

He might have predicted that a pandemic would eventually take place. Tom Clancy predicted that someone would fly an airplane into important buildings in the United States. The Weather Service predicted that Hurricane Katrina would hit the Gulf Coast. Many, including the Antiplanner, predicted that the housing bubble of 2006 would lead to a financial crisis. Continue reading →

A Little Victory

By | | Transportation
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According to both the 2009 and 2017 National Household Travel Survey, automobiles in the United States carry an average of 1.67 people (see page 58). Yet for table VM-1 of the Federal Highway Administration’s Highway Statistics annual reports, the Obama administration arbitrarily reduced this number to 1.38.

When this first appeared in the 2009 Highway Statistics report, I contacted the Federal Highway Administration to find out why they made the change. I was told that the lower number was based on then-latest 2009 National Household Travel Survey. When I pointed out that the survey found 1.67 people per vehicle, they said this number was “miles-weighted,” and if it were weighted by trips, it would be lower. When I expressed doubts that the difference would be that great, the person who I was communicating with insisted that he had a spreadsheet proving that the lower number was correct. When I asked him for a copy of that spreadsheet, he refused to give it to me, saying it was proprietary.

Since I used this number to calculate passenger miles, the mile-weighted method made more sense anyway. This meant that, whenever I wanted to quote passenger miles data, I would have to recalculate the numbers instead of relying on table VM-1, and then provide a justification for my recalculation. Continue reading →

The Car Is Still King in DC

By | | Transportation, Urban areas
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In a report that will not surprise any Antiplanner reader, a Washington Post survey reveals that “the car is still king in the Washington area.” The survey of 1,507 DC-area residents found that 85 percent frequently drive for their travel needs, a number that ranges from 64 percent in DC itself to 92 percent in Virginia suburbs. The article notes that these numbers are confirmed by the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey, adding that the survey’s results haven’t changed much in the past decade.

Unfortunately, the writers have been infected with anti-auto planner rhetoric, referring to people’s preferences for auto driving as “car dependency.” Are the writers themselves computer-dependent because they no longer use manual typewriters (or ink and quill)? Are they Starbucks-dependent if they no longer brew their own coffee each morning? What’s so bad about being “dependent” on something that is faster, cheaper, and more convenient than the alternatives?

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China’s Motorways

By | | Transportation
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We often hear about how China has the world’s longest high-speed rail network. But we hardly ever hear about how China has the world’s longest and fastest-growing freeway network. Jeremy Clarkson is changing that, noting that China has built 84,000 miles of motorways (the Britishism for limited-access highways), and the network is expanding by 6,000 miles a year — about six times the growth of its high-speed rail lines.

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In contrast, the United States had about 67,000 miles of freeways in 2017, an amount that has grown by less than 1,000 miles a year since 2010. To be fair, we built most of our freeways in the 1950s and 1960, so our freeway network shouldn’t expand as fast as China’s. But since the United States has far more motor vehicles than China (about 272 million vs. 240 million), we should have at least as many miles of freeways. So, next time you hear someone ask, “Why can’t we have high-speed trains like China?” ask back, “Why can’t we have freeways like China?”

No More Gas Taxes for Transit

By | | Transportation
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Taxpayers United is releasing a report today in opposition to raising Illinois gas taxes to fix supposedly crumbling infrastructure. Illinois highway infrastructure is actually in good shape, the report argues; the real infrastructure problems are with Chicago’s transit systems.

Over the past three years, nearly 30 percent of Illinois gas taxes have been diverted to transit, mostly in Chicago. The state’s remaining highway infrastructure problems could be solved by ending such diversions. Despite the subsidies, Chicago transit ridership declined by 9 percent since 2014 and is likely to continue to decline in the foreseeable future.

As noted here yesterday, a new report from Moody’s found that the Chicago Transit Authority had more debt and unfunded obligations than any other transit agency, which measured as a percent of each agency’s annual budgets. This doesn’t even count Chicago transit’s state-of-good-repair backlog, estimated to be $36 billion. Continue reading →