OpenMarket: Rail and Mass Transit

Today, the Federal Railroad Administration (FRA) published its long-awaited final rule to modernize passenger railcar crashworthiness standards. When it takes effect on January 22, 2019, the new rule will allow passenger rail agencies to adopt railcars designed with crash energy management (CEM) techniques.

CEM refers to crumple zones designed to absorb the energy of a collision. Until now, U.S. passenger railcars were required to meet “buff strength” crashworthiness standards related to railcar integrity, engineer seat integrity, and anticlimbing mechanisms to prevent telescoping—the deadly phenomenon in which a railcar “climbs” into the railcar in front of it when a crash suddenly halts a train’s...

In August 2017, I wrote about the municipal government cronyism and monopoly franchise agreements driving the controversy over unsubsidized dockless bikesharing companies. In the rapidly evolving world of privately financed urban micromobility, electric scooters have now joined dockless bikesharing at the center of the debate. Here, municipal cronyism also appears to have evolved from protecting subsidized monopoly providers into classic shakedown efforts.

In last year’s omnibus spending package, Congress allocated up to $1.5 million to the U.S. Department of Transportation (USDOT) to conduct a study on the workforce impacts of automated vehicles (AVs). USDOT recently requested comments on the scope of this study and I have submitted comments on behalf of the Competitive Enterprise Institute in response.

One of the most underappreciated drivers of the modern global economy is the humble shipping container. Widely adopted internationally in the second half of the 20^th century, intermodal containers largely supplanted break bulk cargo—the bags, barrels, pallets, and crates that must be individually loaded and unloaded onto ships, railcars, and trucks.

This morning, the White House released its long-anticipated, 53-page infrastructure proposal. It is an expansion of the leaked six-page summary that I commented on in late January. The proposal has some elements that will appeal to free market fiscal conservatives. Others, not so much.

Three seats currently sit empty on the Surface Transportation Board (STB) and the White House should move quickly to nominate cautious and judicious rail experts to bring the STB closer to full capacity.

Today, CEI and two dozen other organizations wrote to the chairs and ranking members of the Senate Commerce Committee and Surface Transportation and Merchant Marine Infrastructure, Safety, and Security Subcommittee regarding upcoming...

Bike-sharing has become all the rage in cities across America. With the twin goals of increasing “active transportation” and solving mass transit’s chronic first- and last-mile access problems, these cities have also lavished bike-share providers with generous public subsidies with extremely mixed results. New...

That is the question I sought to address at a meeting of Utah’s Transportation Governance and Funding Task Force earlier this week. My written testimony is here.

The fuel tax is becoming an increasingly unstable source of dedicated...

Yesterday, the Cato Institute’s Randal O’Toole was kind enough to invite me to participate in a panel discussion on...