Search Results for: driving in europe

Driving, Transit, Cycling Down

By | | News commentary, Transportation
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Any smart-growther enjoying a moment of schadenfreude over recent reports of a decline in driving have to recognize that transit ridership is also down. Moreover, the city of Portland, which likes to think of itself as the bicycle capital of the United States, reports that cycling is down as well.

The actual numbers are revealing. Portland estimates that cycling in 2009 was 5 percent less than in 2008. The American Public Transportation Association says that transit ridership in the first nine months of 2009 was 3.8 percent less than the same period in 2008. Meanwhile, driving the first nine months of 2009 is actually 0.2 percent greater than the same period in 2008.

If it is greater, then why the reports of a decline in driving? They are based on a rolling twelve-month average, and the twelve months ending in October, 2009 included the months immediately following the panic and crash of 2008. But thanks to lower fuel prices, 2009 beat 2008 in five of the first nine months of each year despite unemployment.

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Europe vs. the U.S.

By | | Transportation, Useful Data
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Here are some numbers to think about. The European numbers are from Panorama of Transport, published by the European Union. The U.S. numbers are from the National Transit Database and National Transportation Statistics.

As of 2004, page 23 of Panorama says that 137 cities in the EU-25 had light rail or streetcars (trams), compared with just 27 in the U.S. (including vintage trolleys). Thirty EU-25 cities had what the Europeans call “metros,” including what we would call subways, elevateds, and commuter rail, compared with 14 in the U.S.

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High-Speed Rail Part 2: Europe

By | | Planning Disasters, Transportation
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Many Americans who visit Europe return gushing over the high-speed rail lines. If only our country had the foresight to build such wonderful trains! It is too bad that America is being left behind the high-speed rail revolution.

A German InterCity Express (ICE) train in Leipzig station.

Fast, frequent rail service may be a boon to tourists. But it does not play a significant role in overall European travel. Eurostat’s Panorama of Transport says that, as of 2004, rails in the 25-member European Union carried just 5.8% of passenger travel — down from 6.2% in 2000 — while automobiles (including motorcycles) carried 76.0%, up from 75.5% in 2000 (see p. 102).

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Time to Sell the Postal Service

By | | News commentary
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Why do we still have a postal service? In 2021, the agency cost federal taxpayers around $18 billion in operating and capital subsidies. Plus, in 2022, Congress bailed it out from having to pay $56 billion of employee health care obligations, meaning federal taxpayers are now obligated to cover those costs.

Around 250 years ago, mail was the closest thing the prospective nation had to the internet. When the Continental Congress was forming the fledging U.S. government, it decided in 1775 that America’s mail should be carried by a federal agency, not the states or private enterprise. One reason for creating a federal post office was to bring the country closer together, as distances would be less important if it cost the same to mail a letter across the country as across the street. This was critical as the land area of the original 13 states was far bigger than any European country other than Russia. Continue reading →

Three Questions about EVs

By | | Transportation
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Judging from the headlines, the electric vehicle market is booming. Tesla is now the second-highest selling auto in California. General Motors, Ford, VW, and other companies claim to have set targets to largely transition from petroleum-powered vehicles in a few years. Each week, it seems, new models are being introduced, including everything from subcompacts to giant SUVs and pickups.

Will electric vehicles free us or tie us down?

Still, the closer I look the more questions I have. In particular, are auto manufacturers (other than Tesla) really serious about making EVs? Will electric vehicles ever be more than a niche product? And are they really a cost-effective way of reducing greenhouse gas emissions? Continue reading →

Railroad Land Grants: Boon or Boondoggle?

By | | Transportation
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I wrote several posts for my other blog, Streamliner Memories, that are relevant here as well. Recent news stories have asked why projects like the California high-speed rail and Honolulu rail line are so expensive. The answer is that the politicians who support these projects don’t care about the cost because someone else will have to pay it. Or rather they do care but for them the cost is the benefit — the more they spend, the more might be turned into contributions to their future political campaigns from grateful contractors.

This 1939 report from the Department of the Interior lists 105 railroad, wagon road, canal, and river improvement land grants made by Congress in the 19th century and how many acres various transportation companies ended up receiving for those grants. A few of the grants, including the massive Northern Pacific grant, were still open with the grantees hoping to get several million more acres. Click image to download a 4.7-MB PDF of the report.

We saw an early example of this in the First Transcontinental Railroad and later railroads supported by large federal land grants. Railroads weren’t the only transportation projects supported by federal land grants: there were also canals, wagon roads, and river improvements. As it happens, I live near one of the wagon road projects that turned out to be a giant scam in which a few people got more than 860,000 acres of federal land for doing little more than driving a wagon across the state of Oregon. Continue reading →

The Automobile Won

By | | Policy brief, Transportation
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Last month, anti-automobile activists led by the Congress for the New Urbanism announced the formation of a national Freeway Fighters Network. The network opposes new freeways and freeway expansions and wants to shift freeway money to other forms of transportation. Among other things, they object to new freeway capacity because it induces more highway travel.

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

I have a message for these anti-auto activists: The war on the automobile is over. The automobile won. More accurately, auto drivers and users won. It is time for those engaged in this war to stop wasting their time, and everyone else’s, and start doing something productive. People concerned about the impacts of the automobile should give up trying to reduce driving, which has never worked, and instead encourage new automobiles and highways that are safer, cleaner, and more energy efficient.

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Property Rights and the New Feudalism

By | | Regional planning
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The war in Ukraine has forced people of the “West”—a term that has come to mean most of Europe, the United States, Canada, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Australia, and New Zealand—to confront a social system that we have pretended went extinct hundreds of years ago: feudalism. While feudalism has mostly disappeared from the above-named nations, it is thriving in Putin’s Russia, as well as many other places around the world.

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

“Broadly defined,” says Wikipedia, feudalism “was a way of structuring society around relationships that were derived from the holding of land in exchange for service or labor.” A classic example is when William, the Duke of Normandy, conquered England in 1066. Prior to the conquest, people in England could buy and sell land, a system left over from when the Roman Empire ruled Britain.

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Twelve Ways to Destroy Cities

By | | City planning, Transportation
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Kimberly Nicholas, an associate professor of sustainability at Sweden’s Lund University, says that automobiles are killers and offers twelve ways to get them out of our cities. Typically for sustainability advocates, she completely ignores the benefits provided by automobiles as well as ways in which the costs of automobiles could be reduced without reducing driving.

A typical street in sustainable Stockholm. Photo by European Institute for Sustainable Transport.

Her twelve ways include reducing the amount of parking, charging more for parking, closing parts of cities to automobiles, and charge a fee to drive automobiles into city centers. All revenues from such fees, parking, fines, etc., should, in her opinion, go to fund “sustainable transport,” which means any kind of transportation other than automobiles. Continue reading →