Amtrak does high speed rail

Damn Arbor notes Amtrak's performance on the Ann Arbor to Detroit run.

I sometimes think about taking the train rather than flying when going to Chicago, but it is always statistics like this that get in my way. Perhaps Amtrak should focus on being on time with their current schedule first, then try to go faster.

D. B. Cooper

According to the Daily Mail, the FBI thinks it may have finally found D.B. Cooper, the early 70s hijacker who parachuted out of a Northwest Orient (as they were back then) plane over southern Washington State and was never found.

Cooper became a bit of a folk hero; wikipedia has a whole separate page about his appearances in popular culture. There is even a song, the "Ballad of D.B. Cooper," that received some radio attention, at least in the Pacific Northwest. And, particularly in the wake of 9/11, his antics do have an innocence to them. No one was hurt, he didn't take all that much money, and he was pushing no political or religious agenda other than the enrichment of D.B. Cooper. There are worse things.

I have a very slight personal connection to old D.B. Cooper as my father, who had just been working at the Seattle-Tacoma airport for a year or so at the time of the hijacking, was called out to the airport that night, though as I recall he ended up doing nothing other than standing around and watching the proceedings.

And, what are we to make of the Daily Mail calling it the Tacoma International Airport? Not hardly. At the time, Tacoma was best known locally for the awful smell that emitted from a large smelter.

Hat tip: Charlie Brown

Appropriate bus attire

You have to pull your pants up on buses in Fort Worth,Texas these days, lest some passenger be offended by the sight of your boxers.

Yes, to be sure, the saggy trouser "look" looks pretty stupid - more like a failure to reach the bathroom in time than a style statement - but that is hardly sufficient reason to ban it. Big earrings from the 70s look stupid too and, oftentimes, those spandex pants are a big (pun intended) sartorial mistake as well. Part of being a grown up in public spaces is putting up with the misguided style choices of others.

Surely the people who manage the transit system in Fort Worth have something more useful, and less racially tinged, to do with their time?

Hat tip: Charlie Brown

World's best airline complaint letter?

In keeping with today's theme of "transport" here is a reprint from the Daily Telegraph of a truly impressive (illustrated) complaint letter to Virgin Atlantic airlines.

Hat tip: Economist Gulliver blog

Selection into transport mode

The Reason Foundation usually gets things right, and their heart is always in the right place, but once in a while they produce a howler like this:

A policy that focuses largely on shifting travelers out of cars and into transit will reduce mobility. An examination of work trip travel times in 276 metropolitan areas found that the length of public transit trips exceeded those for private automobiles in 272 of those areas. On average, public transit riders spend about 36 minutes traveling to work while private automobile travelers commute about 21 minutes. This does not have to be the case. The innovative use of HOT Lanes, such as the networks being built in Northern Virginia and discussed in Atlanta, Houston, the San Francisco Bay Area, and Miami can finance critically needed road capacity while also providing viable bus rapid transit alternatives.

The reasoning in this paragraph, which comes from this testimony here (about which I learned from a Reason Foundation email updating me on their doings) seems to assume that individuals choose between cras and transit at random, so that the mean difference in travel times represents a causal effect, of an odd sort, of taking transit. An alternative model would suggest that higher income individuals, who are likely to have higher values of time, drive, while lower income individuals, who tend to have lower values of time, take transit. In that case, the difference is partly or even entirely selection.

On a more rarified note, one might also consider the variance of travel times, which is likely to be lower for transit in some contexts. When I was at Maryland, I quickly learned that one accident could turn a 30 minute beltway journal into a 90 minute one; as a result I took back rounds from Chevy Chase to College Park. This raised the mean a bit but lowered the variance. When you need to get to class at a specific time, variance matters.