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5. DOT Data Reveals Transit’s Irrelevance

By | | Policy brief
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As last week’s brief showed, census data reveal that the number of Austin-area commuters taking transit to work has declined by more than 10 percent in the last decade despite a 59 percent increase in the number of workers. Ignoring this decline, Austin city officials are seriously considering a $6 billion to $10.5 billion program to build dedicated bus lanes, light rail, or other transit improvements.

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

This week’s brief will look at Department of Transportation data to gather more information about how important transit is to the Austin urban area. The most important source of data is the National Transit Database, which has tracked ridership, costs, and other transit data since 1982. Continue reading →

Austin Wants High-Dollar Transit

By | | Transportation, Urban areas
4 Comments

Austin voters have twice rejected light rail at the polls, so naturally the region’s transit agency, Capital Metro, is eager to try again. Earlier this week, it presented a plan to the Austin city council for eleven transit corridors that could cost $6 billion to $8 billion. As if to underscore the agency’s inability to learn from history, it is calling this plan “Project Connect,” the same name it used for the plan that voters defeated by 57 to 43 in 2014.

While Cap Metro deceptively calls light rail “high-capacity transit,” the Austin American-Statesman more accurately calls it “high-dollar” transit. Light rail was rendered obsolete in 1927 when a company called Twin Coach started producing buses that could move more people for far less money than streetcars or light rail.

Bus or rail, now is not the time for Austin to spend a lot of money on transit. Capital Metro lost 20 percent of its riders between 2012 and 2016, and is down another 2.2 percent in the first six months of 2018. Continue reading →

Time to Pretend to Get Serious About Traffic

By | | Transportation, Urban areas
12 Comments

It’s “time to get serious about fixing Austin’s traffic,” says a headline at KVUE. However, no one quoted in the article is actually willing to get serious about fixing Austin’s traffic.

Instead, the article is exclusively about Project Connect, a front group that has promoted light rail for Capital Metro, Austin’s transit agency. All of the “solutions” discussed in the article involve transit, including light rail and dedicated bus lanes, both of which will actually increase congestion.

Here’s why transit won’t work to fix traffic in Austin, which by some measures is the nation’s fastest-growing urban area. Between 2010 and 2015, the Austin urban area grew by 220,000 people, or 3.0 percent per year. Transit passenger miles, meanwhile, grew by 3.5 percent per year. Sounds pretty good so far. Continue reading →

The Hidden Cost of Rail Transit

By | | Transportation, Urban areas
4 Comments

Pity Capital Metro, Austin’s transit agency. It has an opportunity to include bus-rapid transit stops on a freeway that is now under construction–but it doesn’t have the funds to pay for them.

The Texas Department of Transportation, which is building the freeway, needs $18 million from Capital Metro now to buy the extra land needed for the bus stops. But Capital Metro doesn’t have it. Nor does it have the $105 million more needed to actually build the bus stops.

Where could it get the money? The best way would be to shutter the agency’s pathetic, 32-mile commuter-rail line. In 2015, Capital Metro spent more than $20 million operating and maintaining this line, but received less than $2.5 million in fares. The trains carried fewer than 1,500 round trips per day, which means each daily round-trip rider cost taxpayers nearly $12,000.

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To BnB or Not to BnB

By | | Housing, News commentary
7 Comments

Last February, the Austin city council voted to stop licensing short-term rentals (via AirBnB or similar services) of homes that are not occupied by the homeowner. This has led the Texas Public Policy Foundation to sue, saying this violates people’s property rights.

Members of the city council argued that unoccupied short-term rental houses often get turned into noisy, “party houses” and that the use of those homes for short-term rentals made housing more expensive for everyone else. The first point might be legitimate, but no owner or renter wants to see their home trashed and so it is likely to be self-policed. The second point isn’t legitimate at all; it is Austin’s over regulated land-use rules that make housing there unaffordable.
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Austin-San Antonio Rail Insanity

By | | Transportation, Urban areas
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Interstate 35 between San Antonio and Austin is congested, so obviously (to some people, at least) the solution is to run passenger trains between the two cities. Existing tracks are crowded with freight trains, so the Lone Star Rail District proposes to build a brand-new line for the freight trains and run passenger trains on the existing tracks. The total capital cost would be about $3 billion, up from just $0.6 billion in 2004 (which probably didn’t include the freight re-route).


Click image to download a PDF version of this map.

By coincidence, that was the projected capital cost for the proposed high-speed rail line between Tampa and Orlando (cancelled by Florida Governor Rick Scott), which are about the same 80-miles apart as Austin and San Antonio. But, despite the cost, Lone Star wouldn’t be a high-speed rail line. According to a 2004 feasibility study, trains would take about 90 minutes between the two cities, with two stops in between. While express trains with no stops would be a bit faster, cars driving at Texas speeds could still be faster.

Continue reading →

Keeping Austin Weird

By | | Transportation, Urban areas
14 Comments

With Austin’s light-rail ballot measure going down in flames last November due to its high costs, rail transit advocates have conceded defeat, folded up their tents, and gone home. Ha, ha, just kidding; actually, now they are talking about subways.

Although someone prepared this map of an Austin subway system more as a joke than anything else, it has been used in news reports about proposals to build subways in the Texas capital.

“What do most major popular cities that continue to grow and be vibrant have in common?” asks Tom Meredith, former CEO of Dell Computer, which is headquartered in Austin. His answer? “Subways.”

Continue reading →

Facts vs. Insults and Innuendo

By | | Transportation
15 Comments

Rail transit is excessively expensive, inflexible, and incapable of moving as many people as buses. Yet when the Antiplanner points out these facts, rather than respond with factual arguments, rail supporters reply with insults and innuendo.

In Florida, for example, a Tampa Bay Times columnist named Daniel Ruth spent an entire column attacking my credibility apparently because someone paid me an honorarium of $500 to evaluate the St. Petersburg light-rail plan. Ruth did not make any factual arguments in favor of the plan; he merely contended that my opposition was a foregone conclusion and so should be ignored.

He even implied that I didn’t get paid enough for my conclusions to be credible. After all, the transit agency spent millions of dollars hiring consultants to write reports about the proposal, and those very reports were the sources of much of my information. Those same consultants are, of course, financially backing the election campaign in favor of light rail, and if voters approve, they stand to make tens if not hundreds of millions in profits. If the measure loses, neither I nor anyone at Cato will make a dime of profit. Yet somehow they are supposed to be more credible than I.

Continue reading →

More Light-Rail Critiques

By | | Transportation, Urban areas
2 Comments

Sorry about the light postings this week, but I’ve been pretty busy talking with people about light rail. Here is my presentation about light rail in Pinellas County (St. Petersburg), Florida, and here is my presentation about light rail in Austin, Texas.

These are large files–Pinellas is 18 MB, Austin is 24–and they don’t include the videos I used for those presentations. If you want the videos, which are self-driving cars, click here to download a 44-MB zip file with three videos that I used in both presentations.

Next week I go to Denver for the 2014 American Dream conference, so postings may be light then as well. The week after that I’ll be back in Minneapolis to debate Myron Orfield over land-use regulation and density. That should be fun.

Rapid Bus Failed, So Build Light Rail

By | | Transportation
13 Comments

One of the conclusions of the Antiplanner’s recent paper on rapid buses was that regions that had fewer than 40,000 downtown jobs didn’t need rapid buses, much less light rail. Austin has about 72,000 downtown jobs, but rapid bus isn’t working well there either.

One reason can be found in census numbers, specifically table B08141 of the American Community Survey. For 2012, this table reports that just 2.2 percent of Austin workers live in households that lack access to an automobile, yet 28 percent of them drive alone to work and 12 percent carpool, while only 25 percent take transit to work. In other words, as I’ve noted for other urban areas, transit is just not relevant to most people.

In March of this year, Austin’s MetroRapid bus attracted nearly 6,500 trips per day. This declined to 5,900 in April and 5,300 in April, rising slightly to just under 5,500 in June.

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