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Amtrak & Flying Up, Driving Down in April

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Amtrak carried 9.0 percent more passenger-miles in April 2025 than in the same month before the pandemic, according to the state-owned company’s monthly performance report. The airlines did almost as well, carrying 5.8 percent more riders in April than in 2019. However, Americans drove only 98.5 percent as many vehicle miles in April as in 2019.

April transit data are not yet available and will be posted here as soon as possible after the FTA releases them.

It’s hard to guess why driving dropped, at least as a percentage of 2019. The economy was slowing, rail freight was declining (though still more than 2019), but perhaps truck freight had fallen. Continue reading →

Highway Safety Is Improving

By | | Transportation
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A CBS Sunday Morning report promoted driverless cars as a way of improving highway safety. I’ve been saying the same thing for years, but I was surprised when the report opened with the statement, “Every year, 1.2 million people die in car accidents.” Technically, that’s true, but only 3.6 percent of them are in the United States.

According to Wikipedia (which is probably the source of the 1.2 million number), China sees 250,000 traffic fatalities per year. India is number two at more than 155,000. Despite the fact that all of Africa has only about 30 percent as many vehicles as the United States, Africa suffers 322,000 fatalities per year, with particularly high numbers in the Congo, Ethiopia, and Nigeria. Other counties with high fatalities include Brazil, Indonesia, Pakistan, Thailand, and Viet Nam. Continue reading →

March 2025 Transport Results

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Amtrak boomed, carrying 21 percent more passenger-miles in March 2025 than the same month before the pandemic. The airlines carried 5.5 percent more passengers and highways carried 2.2 percent more vehicle-miles. As expected, transit continues to lag behind, carrying only 80.9 percent as many passengers as in March of 2019. That’s still the most since the beginning of the pandemic, but it is only 0.73 percent more (relative to 2019) than in February.

Amtrak data are from March monthly performance report; airline riders from Transportation Security Administration; highway vehicle-miles from the Federal Highway Administration, and transit data are from the Federal Transit Administration.

The transit industry is increasingly desperate to get more subsidies to offset the decline in ridership and the increase in operating expenses since 2019. Flush with Congressional COVID-relief funds, agencies increased salaries and wages and continued to operate nearly as many vehicle-miles of service despite the declines in ridership. Now the relief funds are running out and agencies that previously relied heavily on fares to fund their operations are getting panicky. Continue reading →

February Driving 4.6% Greater Than in 2019

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Americans drove 4.6 percent more miles in February 2025 than in the same month of 2019, according to data released yesterday by the Federal Highway Administration. Both urban and rural driving surpassed 2019 levels, as well as driving on all major types of roads: interstates, other arterials, and other roads. This is the first time since the pandemic that driving on all types of roads exceeded 2019 levels.

The February release presented some surprises. While February driving in Massachusetts was still less than 90 percent of pre-pandemic miles, Californians drove 5.5 percent more, Hawaiians 8.0 percent more, and Oregonians 7.0 percent more miles than in 2019. The only western states where driving fell short of 2019 miles were New Mexico, Washington, and Wyoming. Continue reading →

January Driving Up 1.2% from 2019

By | | Transportation, Useful Data
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Americans drove 1.2 percent more miles in January of 2025 than the same month in 2019, according to data released by the Federal Highway Administration yesterday. These data were posted less than a week after the agency released December traffic volume data, which for some reason were later than usual.

The data show that rural driving was up by 4.1 percent while urban driving was up by 0.1 percent. While driving on urban interstates and collector and local streets was up, driving on major urban arterials other than interstates was down. Some of this difference may be due to the way the Federal Highway Administration collects its data, which concentrates more on interstates and other arterials than on local streets. In other words, the driving numbers on local streets may be overestimated. Continue reading →

December Driving 96.6% of 2019

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I guess Musk didn’t fire everyone at the Federal Highway Administration, as the agency finally released its December traffic volume trends indicating that Americans drove 3.4 percent fewer miles in December of 2024 than the same month in 2019. Driving over the entire year of 2024 was 0.6 percent greater than in 2019.

This compares with transit, which carried 76.5 percent as many riders in 2024 as it did in 2019. Amtrak carried 2.8 percent more passenger-miles and the airlines carried 7.2 percent more passengers in 2024 as 2019. Continue reading →

Cordon Pricing Makes New York Congestion Worse

By | | Transportation
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Early reports claim that New York City’s so-called congestion pricing program is a great success, reducing the number of vehicles driving into lower Manhattan by 5 to 6 percent. However, because it really isn’t congestion pricing — that is, it doesn’t price roads by how much congestion there is but just charges people for crossing a line — it is likely that traffic will bounce back just as it did when London imposed a similar cordon pricing scheme.

Manhattan traffic before cordon pricing. Photo by Rachel Maddow, yes, that Rachel Maddow.

Worse, the traffic monitors at INRIX have found that cordon pricing effectively exported congestion out of lower Manhattan and into other parts of the New York urban area. The result has been a net overall slowdown of traffic. The region’s travel speeds were 3 percent slower during morning rush hour and 4 percent slower in the afternoon. People working downtown benefitted from the program; everyone else was hurt. Continue reading →

November 2024 Transportation Recovery

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Americans drove 2.2 percent more miles, flew 4.7 percent more trips, and took Amtrak 6.2 percent more passenger-miles in November 2024 than the same month before the pandemic, according to data recently released by federal agencies. Transit ridership, however, still lagged almost 22 percent behind pre-pandemic numbers.

For once, the Federal Highway Administration, Federal Transit Administration, and Amtrak all released their monthly data reports at about the same time, late last week. TSA passenger counts are available only a day or two after each day, but I generally wait for data from other agencies before posting the airline data. Continue reading →

Highways, Amtrak, Airlines Set Records in 2024

By | | Transportation
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Americans drove 2.8 percent more miles in October 2024 than the same month before the pandemic, according to data released by the Federal Highway Administration last Friday. Both urban and rural driving were greater in October 2024 than October 2019.

Meanwhile, Amtrak brags that it carried an all-time record number of passengers in its fiscal year 2024 (which ended September 30). In that year, it carried 32.8 million riders and 6.54 billion passenger-miles. That is only a small fraction of the number carried by passenger trains when they were private, as ridership peaked at 1.2 billion in 1920 and passenger-miles peaked at 89 billion in 1944. But 2024 was a record year since Amtrak began in 1971. Continue reading →

September Driving 2.25% More Than in 2019

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Americans drove 2.2 percent more miles in September 2024 than they did in the same month of 2019, according to data released by the Federal Highway Administration yesterday. September driving in rural areas was 7.9 percent greater but driving in urban areas was 0.2 percent less in 2024 than in 2019.

Amtrak has yet to release its September results, possibly because September is the last month of its fiscal year and it wants to get the year-end results right. When it does, I’ll post an update here.

Meanwhile, I discovered that I accidentally left the greenhouse gas emissions from some electric transit lines off of the enhanced spreadsheet I prepared of the 2023 National Transit Database. In going through the data, I also discovered some duplicate entries, which I deleted. If you downloaded my spreadsheet, which summarizes the 25-spreadsheet database into one worksheet, please download the corrected version now.