Fighting the Hackers
This web site was infected with some type of virus a few days ago. I’ll try to fix it today; in the meantime, comments and other features may not work. I hope to have more posts Monday.
Will They Ever Learn?
Arizona Shuttle offers 19 buses a day between Tucson and Phoenix. Greyhound offers at least eight. But that’s not good enough for some people, so the state is spending $6.3 million studying the idea of running passenger trains between the two cities. The state’s first guess is that the start-up cost would be a mere […]
Private Buses or Public Boondoggles
A team of graphics artists has attempted to map the private buses that carry workers from San Francisco to Silicon Valley, reports the Wall Street Journal. At least six employers–Apple, ebay, Electronic Arts, Facebook, Google, and Yahoo–offer such services, but they are very secretive about where they go and how many people they carry. Click […]
“Just One-Seventh of Capacity”
The San Francisco Chronicle is aghast that new 140-seat ferry boats between South San Francisco and Oakland/Alameda are filling an average of just 20 of their seats (scroll down to “On the line”). The service, which cost $42 million to start up, was expensive enough at projected ridership rates, but actual ridership so far is […]
More on the European Transport Myth
While many people believe that European travel modes are quite different from those of the United States, a close look at the data reveals two main points. First, Europeans travel a lot less than Americans: including flying, the average American travels about 85 percent more miles per year than the average Western European. Second, the […]
European Housing Disasters
Land-use planning has made British housing so expensive that more than half of all homeowners expect to have to downsize the next time they move while only 22 percent expect to upsize. Home prices in Britain and other European countries with lots of land-use regulation tend to bubble as much as prices in California and […]
Renationalization or True Privatization?
United Kingdom’s Department for Transportation is in trouble over a plan to transfer the franchise to run passenger trains over the London-Glasgow West Coast route from Virgin Trains (which is 49 percent owned by Stagecoach) to rival First Group. After fifteen years, Virgin Trains’ franchise is set to expire in December, and when the government […]
Congress Still Perplexed by Wildfire
“U.S. runs out of funds to battle wildfires,” misstates a Washington Post headline. “In the worst wildfire season on record, the U.S. Department of Agriculture Forest Service ran out of money to pay for firefighters, fire trucks and aircraft that dump retardant on monstrous flames,” continues the article, making two more errors. Smoke from the […]
The European Transport Myth
An article in Transport Reviews compares U.S. and European transit usage and argues that Europeans use transit more because they have better transit service, low fares, multi-modal integration, high taxes and restrictions on driving, and land-use policies that promote compact, mixed-use developments–all things that American planners want to do here. One obvious problem with the […]
Streetcar Woes
Portland opened its new east side streetcar line a couple of weeks ago, but the real story is in the Lake Oswego plant that is supposed to be making streetcars to run on the new line. In 2011, the company, United Streetcar, announced that its first streetcars would be several months late and it would […]
How Does Amtrak Determine Fares?
A transit advocate who calls himself Captain Transit asks, “How can Amtrak charge so much for the Northeast Corridor?” His answer, which he claims to have arrived at with the Antiplanner’s assistance, is that buses carry the low-income passengers in this corridor, so Amtrak can get away with charging first-class rates for high-end passengers. That’s […]
Amtrak President Exaggerates
Amtrak President Joseph Boardman scored a point when he announced that Amtrak operates the Rocky Mountaineer, a cruise train that takes passengers from Vancouver to Whistler and the Canadian Rockies. He made this announcement at the September 20 House Transportation Committee hearing about 41 years of Amtrak deficits. The Antiplanner had offered the Rocky Mountaineer […]
