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HART Now Makes Video Games

By | | Transportation, Urban areas
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KHON News discovered that the Honolulu Authority for Rapid Transit (HART), which has yet to operate any transit (and will never operate truly rapid transit), has a link to a video game on its website called “Outrun Da Train.” HART apparently paid $190,000 to create this video game.

When asked why it spent so much on something that has so little to do with completing what is likely to be the most expensive above-ground rail line in the world, HART responded that the price was cost-effective since it was developed in Hawaii rather than on the mainland. Yes, but why a video game? Continue reading →

Is Density Worth the Price?

By | | Housing
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Should cities build more dense housing or sprawl out at the urban fringe? Scott Beyer, the Market Urbanist, wants to see more density while I want to allow more sprawl. Surprisingly, in a debate yesterday over which was the best way to make housing affordable again, Beyer conceded that low-density development was more affordable than high-density. Instead, he argued for high-density development for other reasons.

High-density development, he said, was more environmentally sound, fiscally sustainable, and led to greater worker productivity (which economists call “agglomerative economies”). He claimed that people would live a lot denser if they could but such density is outlawed. Continue reading →

Cruise Trains for Amtrak

By | | Transportation
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Amtrak plans to reduce all but one of its overnight trains to three-day-a-week service starting October 1. Doing so, says Amtrak, will save “as much as $150 million” a year. Amtrak doesn’t say so, but three-day-a-week trains offer almost as much political benefit to the agency as daily trains.

I have a better idea. Amtrak should double the routes served by its overnight trains, but run most of them just once a week. Add more lounge space to each train so that passengers have more places to go and the trains become cruise trains, not trains for getting from point A to point B. Amtrak is a slow and expensive way to get from point A to point B, but it is an excellent way to see parts of the country that can’t be seen from an interstate freeway.

Some routes Amtrak could add are the former North Coast Limited route from the Twin Cities to Seattle/Portland; the former City of Portland/Pioneer route from Ogden to Portland; the former City of Los Angeles/Desert Wind route from Salt Lake City to Los Angeles; the Golden State route from Chicago to Los Angeles via El Paso; the Gulf Wind route from New Orleans to Florida, and the Floridian route from Chicago to Florida. Continue reading →

Demand the Right to Pay for Your Own Transportation!

By | | Policy brief
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Sixty years ago, America had the finest transportation system in the world, and it was almost all unsubsidized. Congress had subsidized the construction of some railroads, but that included only about 7 percent of the nation’s rail mileage. Congress had also subsidized the construction of some airports, but by 1960 that was near an end. Most of America’s highways had been built and maintained out of highway user fees such as gasoline taxes and tolls. The nation’s transit systems were mostly private and even the public ones funded their operating costs and many of their capital costs exclusively out of transit fares.

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

That began to change in the 1960s. In 1964, Congress promised capital grants to cities and states that took over transit companies. Most of the government-owned transit agencies also used tax dollars to cover part of their operating costs. In 1970, Congress took over the nation’s intercity passenger trains and subsidies to Amtrak exceeded $1 billion a year. In 1981, Congress began diverting highway user fees to pay for transit. This led to such a political demand for those funds that, in 1998, Congress gave up on the idea that expenditures out of the highway transit fund should be limited to user fees paid into that fund. Today, Congress is transferring $10 billion per year of general funds into the highway trust fund to keep the money flowing without raising gas taxes. Continue reading →

2018 Transport Subsidies and Costs

By | | Transportation
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Last year, I published a policy brief that calculated 2017 transportation subsidies and costs for airlines, Amtrak, highways, and transit. When 2018 data for Amtrak, highways, and transit became available, I included an updated chart in a policy brief on transportation after the pandemic. But that wasn’t exactly prominent — I had a hard time finding it when someone asked me about it recently — and it didn’t have many details so I’m going to expand on it here.

The above chart is useful because it shows the disparities. Amtrak spends almost four times as much to move someone a passenger mile as the airlines. Transit agencies spend almost five times as much to move someone a passenger mile as personal automobiles. Continue reading →

Housing Crisis Debate

By | | Housekeeping
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Should cities address high housing costs by building denser or by allowing more low-density housing at the urban fringe? In other words, should American urban areas build up or build out? Wednesday, June 17, Cato will hold a webcast featuring a debate between these two views featuring Market Urbanist Scott Beyer, Cato Senior Fellow Randal O’Toole, and Cato Adjunct Scholar Scott Lincicome.

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The webcast will be from noon to 1 pm Eastern Time and will include an opportunity to question speakers by tweeting to #CatoEvents, using Facebook Live, or using the comment box on this page. You can register for the webcast here. I hope you will be able to join us.

Traffic Congestion After the Pandemic

By | | Transportation
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Some researchers from Vanderbilt University (and one from Cornell) asked what will happen to traffic congestion after the pandemic. If people reduced the use of transit for commuting, they concluded, congestion will get a lot worse, which is “detrimental to everyone’s commute.” Though they never say so explicitly, the implication is that we need to spend a lot of money supporting transit agencies to prevent that congestion.

Yet their paper is greatly oversimplified and ignores many things. Most importantly, people working at home are going to make a bigger difference to congestion than transit riders. Before the pandemic, more people worked at home than rode transit to work. If after the pandemic the number of people working at home on any given day is double what it was before the pandemic, then there would be less traffic even if no one rode transit.

In fact, the number of people working home is likely to much more than double. More than 40 percent of workers are working at home due to the pandemic, and at least a quarter of those say they expect to continue working at home after than pandemic. That would triple what it was before the pandemic. Moreover, half of those who expect to continue working at home say they will move to a different location, generally a suburb or smaller city. Continue reading →

Transit Lost 84 Percent of Riders in April

By | | Policy brief
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Transit ridership in April 2020 was 84 percent less than it had been in April 2019, according to data released last week by the Federal Transit Administration. The media has reported falling ridership due to the coronavirus and resulting quarantines, but these data reveal exactly how much it has fallen for each mode and urban area.

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

For example, ridership is down 92 percent in the New York urban area and 93 percent in Philadelphia but only 58 percent in Dallas-Ft. Worth and Las Vegas. The Bay Area Rapid Transit District saw a 94 percent decline, but ridership in Tucson fell by just 44 percent. Continue reading →

Kill the Purple Line

By | | Transportation
2 Comments

Anyone who carefully read the environmental impact statement for Maryland’s Purple Line would know that the proposed light-rail trains would be slow, would make congestion in the region worse, and that buses could move as many riders for a lot less money. It wouldn’t have taken much more research to learn that Maryland had a history of badly overestimating ridership and underestimating costs of its rail transit lines and that the ridership projections for this line had been particularly overinflated in order to make it eligible for federal funding.

Of course, most people didn’t read those documents or do the research, and many chose instead to believe the hype. So Maryland gave a $5.8 billion contract to a consortium of companies to build and operate the line. When, predictably, the line ran into delays and cost overruns, the companies withdrew from the project.

This naturally led opponents to urge Maryland to take this opportunity to cancel the project. Even if you believed the unrealistically high ridership estimates made before the contract was signed, the pandemic has probably decimated the market for transit. 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 →