The Antiplanner » Home Page

Your Taxes Pay for Transit Agency Joy Rides

By | | Transportation
1 Comment

An investigation by WREG news has revealed that executives of the Memphis Area Transit Authority spend well over $100,000 a year on plane fares and hotel charges to attend various transit conferences in such cities as Atlanta, Chicago, Dallas, Detroit, Las Vegas, Phoenix, Orlando, Portland, San Francisco, Seattle, and Washington. As many as 10 MATA staff members attend some of these conferences. In one case, MATA’s CEO spent more than $11,400 on just one round-trip flight to Aukland, New Zealand, no doubt flying first class.

Reporters documented that MATA had spent more than $276,000 on travel and nearly $440,000 on hotels in the eight years between 2017 and 2024. Since travel would have been restricted by the pandemic for at least one of those years, the annual amount must have been more than $100,000. Meanwhile, MATA is currently looking at a $60 million deficit for its next fiscal year. Continue reading →

California HSR Costs May Exceed $200 Billion

By | | Transportation
7 Comments

If someone doesn’t put a stop to pouring money down the high-speed rail drain soon, the California project could end up costing well over $200 billion, according to a new report by Wendell Cox. Cox made this estimate, which is about twice the current official estimate, by applying the average of the cost overruns of the portions built so far to the current cost projections of the remaining parts of the project.

Even if the costs don’t reach quite that high, Cox says, it is likely that a full high-speed rail line between San Francisco and Los Angeles will not be ready to ride before 2045. Cox bolsters these projections with statements from the state’s own peer reviewers who have been monitoring the project since 2009. Continue reading →

Is Transit Safer Than Driving?

By | | Transportation
7 Comments

“Is public transit really safer than driving?” asks Unscientific American. I call it “unscientific” because the magazine’s methodology was to ask Todd Litman, a Victoria BC transit advocate who has done work for the American Public Transportation Association — not exactly an unbiased observer.

Six people died in this 2016 collision between a school bus and a transit bus in Baltimore. Photo by National Transportation Safety Board.

Litman compared auto fatality rates per billion passenger-miles on all urban roads in 2022 with those on all rail transit in 2013 and all transit buses in 2021. The first problem with this approach is the differences in years: transit carried 40 percent fewer passenger-miles yet killed about 40 percent more people in 2022 than in 2013, so the fatality rate for rail transit was much higher in 2022. Continue reading →

February Driving 4.6% Greater Than in 2019

By | | Transportation, Useful Data
Leave a comment

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 →

Slightly Higher Speed Rail

By | | Transportation
3 Comments

New York University’s Marron Institute just released a report saying that Amtrak and commuter-rail lines could improve their service by making what the institute believes are low-cost changes to their operations. Specifically, the report suggests that railroads replace Diesel locomotives with electric, place platforms at all stops so passengers don’t have to go up and down stairs, and widen the doors on their cars so multiple passengers can board at one time. Based on this report, Bloomberg concludes that “America’s railroads are losing ground when it comes to infrastructural innovation, especially compared to other countries.”

Click image to download a 32.4-MB PDF of this 146-page report.

Because wider doors and level platforms would allow people to board more quickly and electric locomotives accelerate faster than Diesels, the report estimates that making these changes would save an average of 2 minutes per commuter stop and 4 minutes per intercity rail stop. This means that Amtrak’s trains between, for example, Seattle and Portland, which have six intermediate stops, could go the distance in 24 fewer minutes. Continue reading →

They Don’t Care

By | | Transportation
2 Comments

Minnesota legislators are not only considering shutting down the Northstar commuter train, they are raging at the Metropolitan Council, which is the Twin Cities’ regional planning agency which also runs its transit agency, for its light-rail cost overruns. At issue is the Southwest light-rail line, which when Metro first asked the federal government for funding was supposed to cost $1.25 billion but now, according to a state legislative audit, is costing $2.86 billion.

Twin Cities light rail: overbudget and underperforming. Photo by Central Corridor.

Even after adjusting for inflation, that’s roughly a 100 percent cost overrun. By the time the federal government agreed to share half the costs, the projected cost had risen to $2 billion. From that point on, the state or local government is responsible for all cost overruns, so what they thought was going to cost state and local taxpayers $1 billion is ending up costing them almost $2 billion. Continue reading →

“Independent” Journalists Depend on Bureaucrats

By | | News commentary, Transportation
1 Comment

I remember when journalists tried to get both sides of a story. Now they are content to get the side of the poor, beleaguered bureaucrats and ignore the taxpayers who have to fund them. Case in point: a recent article in the “independent” Texas Tribune reads more like a transit agency press release than a news article.

An expensive station on the Dallas light-rail line. Photo by Mbrstooge.

The article reports on a bill in the state legislature that would redirect 25 percent of sales tax funds that are now going to transit to “general mobility” programs instead. Such programs could go for bike paths, new traffic signals, roads, and even transit. According to the lead paragraphs in the “news” article, this bill “could imperil the future of public transportation” by “sap[ping] hundreds of millions of dollars” from transit agencies. Continue reading →

Transit Carries 80.1% of 2019 Riders in February

By | | Transportation, Useful Data
4 Comments

America’s public transit systems carried 80.1 percent as many riders in February 2025 as in the same month of 2019, according to data released by the Federal Transit Administration on Friday. This is the first month since the pandemic that ridership exceeded 80 percent of pre-pandemic riders.

Highway data are not yet available but will be reported here soon.

It might seem a bit picky to point it out, but the pandemic didn’t begin to have an effect on transportation until March, 2020, so February numbers should really be compared with February 2020. In that case, transit carried only 77.4 percent of pre-pandemic numbers in February 2025 (after adjusting for the fact that February had 29 days in 2020). The lines in the chart, however, are based on 2019. Continue reading →

Amtrak, Air Travel Each Grow 8 Percent

By | | Transportation
2 Comments

Amtrak and the airlines each carried about 8 percent more passengers in February 2025 as the same month in 2019. According to Amtrak’s monthly performance report, the state-owned railroad carried 8.2 percent more passenger-miles, while Transportation Security Administration boarding data indicate that airlines carried 8.1 percent more passengers.

Transit and highway data are not yet available but will be reported here soon.

Airline passenger-mile data for February won’t be available for several more weeks. However, as of December, the latest month for which data are available, domestic air passenger-miles were 5.1 percent greater than in December 2019. Domestic airlines carried Americans 108 times as many passenger-miles as Amtrak in December 2024. Continue reading →

Maine Needs Less Transit, Not More

By | | Transportation
1 Comment

Transit agencies and supporters arrogantly believe that we should be dependent on them, thus justifying their gigantic subsidies, rather than being dependent on (meaning liberated by) automobiles. A case in point is the Maine Public Transit Advisory Council (PTAC), whose latest report claims that Maine transit is falling 89 percent short of meeting transit “needs.”

Click image to download a 5.8-MB PDF of this 66-page report.

The report counts “need” by estimating the number of trips that zero-car households would have taken if they had cars, based on how many trips people who have cars take per day, and assuming that all of those trips would be taken by mass transit. This completely ignores such facts as people who don’t have cars often don’t have the same mobility needs as people who do and they meet what needs they do have with other ways of travel that usually don’t involve mass transit. Continue reading →