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“Independent” Journalists Depend on Bureaucrats

By | | News commentary, Transportation
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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
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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
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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
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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 →

Tyranny, Thy Name is YIMBY

By | | Housing
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Californians are being subjected to some of the worst tyrannies found in the former Soviet Union, according to Los Angeles attorney Chris LeGras. His recent articles, California Tyranny Part 1 and Part 2, show that efforts to build high-density housing in cities is harming people and the neighborhoods they live in, all under the name of YIMBY.

See any similarities?

YIMBY advocates “could not care less about housing affordability, much less about quality of life,” says LeGras. Instead, they want dense housing and revile single-family housing. They claim that advocates of single-family housing are racists, even though 16 million Latinos and 2.2 million blacks live in their own homes in California, and millions more live in single-family homes that they rent. Continue reading →

Does Longmont Really Need a Train?

By | | Transportation
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When Denver’s Regional Transit District proposed a tax increase to build six new rail lines in 2004, it promised it would build the lines without cost overruns by 2014. But soon after the election, it “discovered” that the lines would cost far more than projected — ultimately, about 67 percent more. With the money it had available, it wouldn’t be able to finish all of the lines before 2042.

This commuter train in Westminster, Colorado goes 6 miles to downtown Denver. Longmont wants RTD to extend the train another 35 miles even though RTD’s analysis shows few people will ride it. Photo by Xnatedawgx.

Further analysis by RTD found that most of the lines would end up costing taxpayers about $6 to $10 per ride, but one line, which went northwest of Denver to Longmont, was extra expensive and projected to carry so few passengers that it would cost more than $60 per rider. RTD decided to defer that line and build the rest. Continue reading →

Fix the Subways in Hours?

By | | News commentary, Transportation
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Donald Trump famously said he could end the war in Ukraine in 24 hours, yet the war is still raging more than two months after he took office. In the same way, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy recently said that New York City could solve all of the problems with its subway system “in hours, not days” (he generously allowed the city 36 hours instead of just 24) if it just had the will to do so. Note that Trump promised to stop the war himself while Duffy is demanding that someone else save the subways.

Photo by EmperorOfNYC.

This is the level of naïveté that we’ve come to expect from the Trump administration. New York City subways have problems with fare evasion, homelessness, drugs, property crime, vandalism, and violent crime that stretch across 472 stations, 850 miles of track, and nearly 6,800 subway cars. The idea that it could solve all of these problems by simply flooding the system with police for 36 hours is so ludicrous it isn’t even funny. Continue reading →

Governor Targets More Apartment Construction, So of Course Fewer Are Built

By | | Housing
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On her first day in office, Oregon Governor Tina Kotek signed an executive order calling for the construction of 36,000 new homes per year. She was especially hoping for lots of new apartments because, as everyone knows, driving is evil and people who live in apartments drive less than people who live in single-family homes.

Source: CoStar via Willamette Week.

It should come as no surprise to anyone who understands how well central planning works that apartment construction in Portland, where close to half of Oregonians live, is now at its lowest level in more than a decade. There are several reasons for this, but among them are several idiotic government policies that have discouraged more construction. Continue reading →

Another New Urbanist Failure

By | | City planning
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The Baltimore Peninsula was supposed to be a $5.5 billion walkable city of residences, shops, and offices built on a former industrial site. Promoters convinced the city of Baltimore to put up well over $600 million in subsidies for the project. Now, most of the construction is done and it looks like one of China’s many ghost cities.

The creator of the above video suggests the project was supposed to be like Dubai but ended up being like a suburban community like Columbia, Maryland. But Columbia is a low-rise city of single-family homes, while Baltimore Peninsula is mostly a mid-rise complex of five- to seven-story condos, offices, and shops. In other words, the epitome of New Urbanism. Continue reading →

American Mobility in 2024

By | | Transportation, Useful Data
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Using recent Department of Transportation data, I estimate that the average American traveled close to 18,000 miles in 2024. This is down from nearly 20,000 miles before the pandemic, a change that I’ll go into below.

American Airlines carried Americans more passenger-miles than any other airline in 2024. Photo by N509FZ.

Last week, the Bureau of Transportation Statistics released December air travel data indicating that the domestic flights carried people 800 billion passenger-miles in 2024. Since the Census Bureau’s latest population estimates say that the U.S. had 340.1 million people in 2024, that’s an average of 2,350 miles per person. Continue reading →