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Cliff Slater: A Hawaiian Hero

By | | News commentary
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I was sad to learn that my friend, Cliff Slater, died earlier this week at the age of 92. Cliff was a genuine hero who worked hard to improve life for people in Hawaii and in particular devoted thousands of hours and lots of his own money fighting the Honolulu rail boondoggle.

Cliff Slater does battle with the rail transit cabal in this political cartoon by John Pritchett. Used with permission.

Born in England in June, 1933, Cliff grew up in Chingford, a suburb of London. After serving as an officer in the Royal Air Force, he moved to Hawaii in his 20s. In Maui, he met Jack Ackerman and Larry Windley, who had started a tourist diving company called Maui Divers. They had also discovered black coral beds and were making some of the coral into jewelry. Continue reading →

Will Trump’s Electric Vehicle Order Kill EVs?

By | | News commentary, Transportation
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One of the executive orders President Trump signed on Monday calls for ending federal subsidies to and preferences for electric vehicles. With numerous media reports that EV sales were already tanking, some think that Trump’s order will kill the market for electric vehicles. It won’t, but it will shift things around.

A Tesla Model S at a Supercharger station in Germany. Photo by Avda.

Curiously, Trump’s order is supported by Elon Musk. He claims he simply opposes all subsidies, but some think that he hopes an end to subsidies will benefit Tesla by discouraging other automakers from developing new electric vehicles. But there is a hidden cost to this order that could severely impact Tesla’s bottom line. Continue reading →

TriMet’s Definition of High-Tech

By | | Transportation
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Portland’s transit agency, TriMet, is introducing new “technologically advanced” light-rail trains to its system. Yet most of these “technological advancements” seem pretty lame to me. Among other things, the new cars have “Better temperature control for heating to keep trains warm in cold weather.” Is this an admission that past light-rail cars from the same builder were too hot in summer and too cold in winter?

The new cars also carry 168 people. That’s hardly a major “technological advance” over the previous cars, which carried 172 people. However, TriMet’s original light-rail cars, which the new ones will be replacing, only carried 164 people. They achieved this incredible technological advance by making the new cars four feet longer. Portland has the shortest city blocks in the country, and since light-rail trains can’t be longer than a city block, TriMet operates the lowest-capacity light-rail system in the country, yet it still calls its light rail “high capacity transit.” Continue reading →

Will LA Finally Learn Its Lesson?

By | | Wildfire
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It was the worst wildland-urban fire in California history up to that point. Hundreds of homes were incinerated despite every firefighter in Los Angeles being called up in an unsuccessful effort to fight the Santa Ana winds. Hydrants ran out of water as 50-mph “devil winds” drove fires fueled by “the fastest burning ground cover in the western hemisphere” across major highways that would normally provide sufficient fuel breaks. Famous movie stars, writers, and composers lost their homes and a former vice president of the United States was photographed spraying water from a garden hose on the cedar shake roof of his rented house to protect it from the flames.

Other than a ban on wooden roofs, little has changed since the Los Angeles Fire Department made this film after the Bel Air Fire of 1961.

Just two years before this fire, the National Fire Protection Association had studied Los Angeles and declared (according to the above film) that “combustible-roofed houses closely spaced in brush-covered canyons and ridges serviced by narrow roads” was a “design for disaster.” They were ignored, but the 1961 Bel Air Fire, which burned 6,000 acres and 484 homes, was something of a wake-up call. After the Los Angeles Fire Department made the above film, the city banned wood-shingled roofs and required some landowners to clear their properties of brush. Continue reading →

November 2024 Transportation Recovery

By | | Transportation, Useful Data
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Americans drove 2.2 percent more miles, flew 4.7 percent more trips, and took Amtrak 6.2 percent more passenger-miles in November 2024 than the same month before the pandemic, according to data recently released by federal agencies. Transit ridership, however, still lagged almost 22 percent behind pre-pandemic numbers.

For once, the Federal Highway Administration, Federal Transit Administration, and Amtrak all released their monthly data reports at about the same time, late last week. TSA passenger counts are available only a day or two after each day, but I generally wait for data from other agencies before posting the airline data. Continue reading →

Smart Growth Burns Thousands of Homes

By | | Regional planning, Wildfire
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Los Angeles city and regional planners are just as responsible for the Palisades, Eaton, and other fires that have burned in the past few days as if they had poured gasoline on the homes and lit the matches. The destruction of these homes, including, for what it is worth, homes owned by Jeff Bridges, Billy Crystal, and Paris Hilton, among other celebrities, is a direct result of so-called “smart-growth” policies that call for establishing greenbelts around cities and packing people in high-density housing within those cities.

Pacific Palisades is on the edge of the Santa Monica Mountains, most of which have been locked up from development in various regional parks, including 72,000 acres protected by the Santa Monica Conservancy, 157,700 acres in the Santa Monica National Recreation Area, and various smaller parks. These have severely limited the amount of land available for housing and other developments, driving up housing prices. Continue reading →

Transportation Subsidies in 2022

By | | Transportation
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Public transportation received $69 billion in subsidies in 2022, compared with $90 billion in subsidies to highways and $20 billion to airlines, according to data released by the Bureau of Transportation Statistics last week. These data include all government revenues and expenditures on these modes of travel, with the revenues broken out by “user-based” and non-user-based (meaning taxes or deficit spending).

Government Revenues and Expenses by Mode
(millions of dollars except passenger-miles in millions and Subsidies/PM in dollars)

ModeRevenueExpenditureNetPassenger-MilesSubsidy/PM
Transit11,18880,527-69,33830,082$2.300
Highways161,299251,777-90,4784,708,2700.019
Air37,66358,348-20,685992,2010.021
Amtrak2,5065,975-3,4704,8860.710

While these results are two years old, it takes awhile for data from many different sources to percolate through Department of Transportation channels. Since those sources include all state and local governments, collecting and verifying the data can be time consuming. Continue reading →

No, Blackrock Doesn’t Own 1/3 of U.S. Housing

By | | Housing
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Matthew Yglesias recently tweeted,

That’s a nice hypothesis, but it doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. As noted in this article, “Who Owns the U.S. Housing Market,” some 68 percent of the 146 million homes in the U.S. are single-family homes, and less than 4 percent of single-family homes are owned by “institutional investors” who own at least 100 homes. Those same investors own about 40 percent of multifamily housing. That means all institutional investors combined, of which Blackrock is only one, own about 20 million homes, or about 14 percent of housing. Continue reading →

Housing First Fails

By | | Housing
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The number of homeless people in the United States has grown by 33 percent since 2020, according to a report released last month by the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). A chart on page 2 of the report (shown below) indicates that the number of homeless people was gradually shrinking between 2007 (when the annual homeless census began) and 2016, but then started rapidly growing in 2019 and even more rapidly growing in 2022.

Click image to download a 5.0-MB PDF of the report from which this chart was taken.

In the 1980s, groups and agencies worried about homelessness began programs aimed at treating drug and alcohol abuse, mental illness, and other conditions that led people to become homeless. More recently, low-income housing groups have advocating increasing spending on housing subsidies to provide shelter for homeless people. These two alternatives are known as “Treatment First” and “Housing First.” Continue reading →

Happy New Year

By | | News commentary
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Last year was quite possibly the most politically tumultuous since at least 1884, when one presidential candidate was widely believed to have accepted bribes and the other was accused of rape. It seems predictable that, between DOGE, tariffs, immigration disputes, and international strife, 2025 will be even more politically fractious. Whether that’s a good thing may depend on your political persuasion.

Grizzly steps gingerly into the New Year.

Last year ended with the death of Jimmy Carter, who has often been described as a failed president but a great ex-president. Yet for the last few days we’ve been treated to a debate about just how bad a president he was and whether his post-presidency was all that was claimed. Continue reading →