The Antiplanner » Home Page

January Transit Ridership Reaches 79.8% of 2029

By | | Transportation, Useful Data
Leave a comment

January transit ridership in 2024 was 79.8 percent as much as in 2019, according to data released late last week by the Federal Transit Administration. That’s the highest level since the beginning of the pandemic and may be due to an increased number of people returning to workplaces in Manhattan.

While transit in the New York urban area carried 88.2 percent of 2019 levels and the New York Metropolitan Transportation Authority carried 90.5 percent, transit in the rest of the country carried only 73.1 percent. Transit ridership continued to be particularly dismal in Chicago (66.7%), Atlanta (48.0%), Phoenix (50.2%), San Francisco (65.7%), Minneapolis-St. Paul (64.5%), Tampa-St. Petersburg (59.7%), and St. Louis (55.4%). Continue reading →

Privatizing Amtrak and Cutting Transit

By | | Transportation
7 Comments

Every line item in the federal budget has at least one special interest group advocating for its growth and ready to cry bloody murder if anyone proposes to reduce it. So it is no surprise that Trains magazine is shocked that Elon Musk would propose to privatize Amtrak.

Amtrak received a $7.3 billion federal grant to buy 83 new trains from Siemens that will be used in the Northeast Corridor and on state-subsidized day trains.

“Amtrak’s business performance is strong,” Trains quotes an Amtrak spokesperson. “Ridership and revenue are at all-time highs.” But a “strong” performance didn’t prevent Amtrak from losing well over $2 billion on operating costs alone in 2024, and Amtrak’s all-time highs are still pretty low: in 2024, Amtrak carried the average American just 19.6 miles. Americans ride bicycles far more than they ride Amtrak, they fly more than 100 times as many miles, and they travel more than 700 times as many miles by car as they ride Amtrak. Continue reading →

December Driving 96.6% of 2019

By | | Transportation, Useful Data
Leave a comment

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 →

January Air Travel 11.7%, Amtrak 7.8% Above 2019

By | | Transportation, Useful Data
1 Comment

The airlines carried 11.7 percent more passengers in January 2025, while Amtrak carried 7.8 percent more passenger-miles, than in the same month in 2019. The air travel data are based on passenger counts from the Transportation Security Administration, while the Amtrak data are based on its monthly performance report.

The big question is where are the highway data? The Federal Highway Administration usually releases traffic volume trends about 45 days after the end of any given month. In other words, December data should have been out in the middle of February, but here we are in March and it hasn’t yet been posted. Did Elon Musk fire the people in the Federal Highway Administration who keep track of this data? If so, it would be hypocritical for me to complain as I believe the federal government is too big, but I still hope the data appear soon. Continue reading →

Climate Change Will Reduce Transit Ridership

By | | Transportation
5 Comments

Here’s the latest breathtaking finding from University of Oregon researchers: Fewer people (the article says “less people,” but it was written by journalists) ride transit during extreme weather events. As if we needed a university research study to tell us that.

There’s a flood, forest fire, tornado, or hurricane near your home today. Why aren’t you out riding transit? Photo by Howard Pelling.

Scholars at the University of Oregon Planning School wanted to know how climate change will affect transit ridership. Since everyone knows that climate change is going to increase severe weather events, they examined how such events affected ridership over the last 17 years. No one should be surprised to learn that ridership fell during such events. Continue reading →

Houston Transit: Back to Basics Not Enough

By | | Transportation
4 Comments

Houston’s Metro transit is going back to basics, focusing on public safety and giving up its expensive light-rail and bus rapid transit plans. This follows the election of a new mayor, John Whitmire, who took office on January 1, 2024 and quickly replaced several members of the Metro board. Though Whitmire is a Democrat, he took office at a time when Houston was facing serious financial problems and so he is taking a fiscally conservative approach to spending.

By many measures, Houston’s Metro is doing better than most U.S. transit agencies. At the end of 2015, it implemented new bus routes, changing from a downtown-centric system to a grid system, as recommended by Jarrett Walker. Partly as a result, ridership grew by 5 percent between 2019 and 2019, a period during which ridership declined in most other urban areas. As of December 2024, ridership has recovered to nearly 88 percent of pre-pandemic levels, compared with a national average of 76 percent. Continue reading →

Charlotte Shows Why Transit Is a Waste

By | | Transportation
5 Comments

I suspect it has begun to dawn on transit agency officials that the Trump administration is not going to shovel money their way as the Biden administration did. That means many of the larger agencies are going to have to put some of their rail plans on the shelf for at least four years or until a more sympathetic administration takes power. Unfortunately, I doubt that many will seriously consider altering their long-term dreams of building rail lines all over whatever urban areas they serve.

Light-rail train in Charlotte. Photo by James Willamor.

A case in point is the Charlotte Area Transit System (CATS), whose ridership (as of December) is still less than two-thirds what it was before the pandemic. Despite this, CATS has grandiose plans for its future. Central to those plans are the development and operation of a 25-mile Red Line commuter train from downtown Charlotte to the suburb of Mount Mourne. This line is such a loser that the Federal Transit Administration refused to fund it back in 2011, so CATS tried and failed to get local communities to find half while the state would fund the other half. Continue reading →

Twin Cities Metro Transit Gets Real

By | | Transportation
1 Comment

The Antiplanner called Minnesota’s Northstar commuter train a “flop” in 2016. It took the pandemic to do it, but it looks like the state has finally agreed and is now considering plans to shut the line down.

Minnesota’s commuter train was a failure before the pandemic and an even bigger failure after. Photo by Jerry Huddleston.

The line, which cost more than $300 million to start up, was supposed to carry 4,100 riders per weekday, which seems absurdly small for the price. Yet it peaked in 2017 at just 2,800 riders and fell to 2,700 riders in 2019. Since the pandemic, it hasn’t recovered to more than about a sixth of that. The state estimates that the costs of running this service would fall from $12 million a year to $2 million a year if it replaced the trains with buses. In 2023, fares covered less than $325,000 of that $12 million in operating costs. Continue reading →

DOGE Is Failing

By | | News commentary
7 Comments

Last November, I wrote that Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency ran the risk of following in the Clinton administration’s Reinventing Government footsteps. That program evaluated all sorts of ways to make government work better, but ended up doing almost nothing but laying off employees. The layoffs lasted only a few years, after which Congress restored the number of employees and agency budgets.

Gallatin National Forest; Forest Service photo.

Instead of simply cutting employees, I wrote, Musk should focus on creating new incentives for agencies to operate more efficiently and more effectively. “Such new incentives would focus agencies on the people they are supposed to serve rather than on simply increasing their budgets,” I added. “More important, if properly designed these would be lasting changes, not ones that would disappear as soon as the next administration takes office.” Continue reading →

Mayhem in Maumee

By | | City planning
30 Comments

In 2024, Strong Towns declared Maumee, Ohio to be the nation’s “strongest town,” largely because the city rebuilt its main street to favor pedestrians over cars. It removed two of the four lanes and reduced the amount of parking on the street.

Google Street View of Conant Street before it was rebuilt.

Strong Towns believes that suburbs are not fiscally sustainable. Its goal is to “replace” traditional suburbs with a different kind of development that is supposedly “financially strong and resilient.” This new kind of development includes denser housing, an end to new road construction, and redesigning existing streets to be more walkable and less auto friendly. In other words, New Urbanism. Continue reading →