If We Only Had a Few Billion Dollars . . .
If only New York officials had heeded the warnings by building levees and other storm barriers, they could have avoided much of the damage caused by Sandy–at least, according to the New York Times. Hindsight is 20-20 vision, but those warnings were about the sea-level rise that is supposed to accompany global warming, not the […]
Should New York Rebuild the Subways?
After Hurricane Katrina, some people argued that we shouldn’t rebuild New Orleans, not simply because it was below sea level but because the city was economically and politically dysfunctional. The same argument could be made for the New York City subway system, which was so heavily damaged by Sandy that repairing it could cost “tens […]
Playing the Numbers Game
Planners for Metro, Portland’s regional planning agency, are playing an interesting game. They did a travel survey in 1994, when gas prices were low and the economy was booming. Then they did another survey in 2011, when gas prices were high and the economy was in recession. They found that Portland travelers in 2011 are […]
Taken for a Ride
Here is a 20-minute news report on the California high-speed rail project in four parts. I can think of several lessons people should learn from this fiasco. First, don’t vote to partly fund a project. The government agency in charge will spend all of the money even if there is no chance to get the […]
Private Transit in Detroit
The Detroit Bus Company, a private operator, is offering $5 door-to-door service in inner Detroit. So far, the service only operated from 6:00 pm to 2:00 am on Fridays and Saturday nights, but if this is successful, it will no doubt expand. Service area for Detroit Bus’ door-to-door operation. Within a certain operating area, the […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
