Putting Transit Over People

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A southern California elected official is challenging the notion that the region can solve its congestion problems by putting more money into transit. Richard Bailey, the mayor of Coronado, has written an op ed titled “It’s time to put roads over transit.” Bailey argues that it is wasteful to put more than 50 percent of the San Diego region’s transportation dollars into transit when transit carries just 3.5 percent of the region’s commuters. He hopes to influence the urban area’s next regional transportation plan.

Bailey’s article caught the attention of a local news station that also interviewed transit advocate Colin Parent (starting at 1:05). Parent noted that there are 64,000 households in San Diego County that don’t have a car and cutting transit would hurt those people who use it as “their primary means of transportation.” Continue reading →

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High-Speed No

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It seems like every article about a ridiculous high-speed rail proposal starts out with something like, “Imagine stepping on a train in Portland at noon and stepping off about two hours later in Vancouver, British Columbia.” What a great imagination you have, Andrew Theen of the Oregonian!

How about this: imagine stepping aboard a plane at Portland International Airport at 10 am and landing in Vancouver a little more than an hour later. You don’t have to imagine it because you can do it! One-way fares are under $150, which is a lot less than it would cost to build a high-speed rail line between the two cities.

Of course, someone is going to say that the downtown-to-downtown time of the train will be competitive with flying. But most people don’t live downtown anymore, so that is really irrelevant. Those who do can take light rail to the Portland Airport and the Skytrain to downtown Vancouver. Driving would be quicker, but no one who lives in Portland ever drives anywhere, do they? Continue reading →

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Watch Romance of the Rails Live

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Today, the Cato Institute releases Romance of the Rails with a forum that starts at 11:30 am Eastern and continues to 1:30 pm. The Antiplanner will introduce the book, followed by comments on the book from Art Guzzetti of the American Public Transportation Association; Jim Mathews, of the Rail Passengers Association; and Marc Scribner, of the Competitive Enterprise Institute. If you can’t be in Washington DC this midday, watch it live here.

I don’t know if this is my best book yet, but it was the most fun to research and write. With so many railroad history books out there, I didn’t think I would be able to write something that hadn’t already been written a hundred times. In fact, I think a lot of the history in the book — and the book is more than half history, less than half policy analysis — will be new to even many ardent rail fans. Continue reading →

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Home Sizes and Housing Affordability

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The median number of rooms in an American home increased slightly from 5.4 in 2007 to 5.5 in 2017. Moreover, there seems to be some correlation between the median number of rooms and housing affordability.

The American Community Survey doesn’t ask people the size of their homes in square feet, probably because it assumes most people don’t know. But it does ask how many rooms are in their homes. Survey directions specify that “Rooms must be separated by built-in archways or walls that extend out at least 6 inches and go from floor to ceiling.” People are to “include bedrooms, kitchens, etc.” but “exclude bathrooms, porches, balconies, foyers, halls, or unfinished basements.”

This can be misleading because many homes built since World War II have open floorplans, which usually means the kitchen, dining room, and living room are all one big room. By census definitions, a three-bedroom, open-floorplan home would have four rooms, while a three-bedroom, traditional house would have six rooms even if both have the same number of square feet. The best we can hope for is that the ratio of open- to closed-floorplan homes is about the same in different parts of the country, which seems unlikely. Continue reading →

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August Transit Ridership Drops 1.7%

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Nationwide transit ridership in August 2018 was 1.7 percent below the same month in 2017. Heavy rail dropped by 1.5 percent; light rail by 2.3 percent; buses by 1.9 percent; and streetcars by 11.2 percent, according to monthly data released last Friday by the Federal Transit Administration. Commuter rail gained 0.5 percent and hybrid rail gained 34.1 percent, mainly due to the opening of a new line of that type in Oakland.

Transit ridership had grown slightly in July, mainly because of depressed 2017 ridership due to New York City’s “summer of Hell” (meaning the partial closure of New York City’s Penn Station) and Washington DC’s “SafeTrack” program, both of which caused many transit delays. Although the Penn Station closures continued through August, 2017, the improved conditions in August 2018 weren’t enough to prevent New York urban area August ridership from declining by 0.5 percent.

August ridership declined in 36 of the nation’s top 50 urban areas. Ridership grew 27 percent in Houston, mainly because it had been depressed in August 2017 by Hurricane Harvey, which pretty much shut down the city for the last week of the month. It grew by a paltry 0.4 percent in Washington due to being depressed by the SafeTrack program in 2017. Continue reading →

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How Many Really Commute by Transit?

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According to the 2017 American Community Survey, about 7.6 million Americans, or 5.3 percent of commuters, take transit to work. However, the actual question on the survey asks, how do you “usually get to work last week.” If someone took transit three days and drove two, then transit gets checked. So how many really use transit on any given day?

Fortunately, table 26 in the 2017 Summary of Travel Trends from the National Household Travel Survey helps answer this question. This survey asked both how people usually got to work and how they actually got to work on a particular day. The above table is a crosswalk showing that people who say they usually drove to work actually drove about 98 percent of the time, but people who say the usually take transit actually took transit only about 71 percent of the time. Carpooling was the big winner because people who say they usually took another mode most often carpooled when they didn’t use that other mode. Continue reading →

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2017 National Transit Database Released

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Transit ridership dropped by 2.9 percent in 2017 despite a 0.7 percent increase in transit service (as measured in vehicle revenue miles). This isn’t big news to Antiplanner readers, but it’s a little more official with the release, earlier this week, of the 2017 National Transit Database. While we’ve previously looked at calendar year or July through June ridership numbers, the database uses the fiscal years of the individual transit agencies, which may range anywhere from July 2016 through June 2017 to January 2017 through December 2017, so the numbers won’t be exactly the same.

The full database also includes fares, costs, energy consumption, and other information not previously available for 2017. For example, transit used an average of 3,376 BTUs per passenger mile in 2017, a 2.3 percent increase from 2016. Greenhouse gas emissions per passenger mile also increased by about 1.0 percent. These increases, of course, are due to the increased vehicle miles combined with a 2.6 percent fall in passenger miles.

Transit’s 3,376 BTUs per passenger mile is just about tied with light trucks (pick ups, SUVs, full-sized vans), but well behind the average car. In 2015, cars used only about 3,030 BTUs per passenger mile and may have been even more energy efficient in 2017. Continue reading →

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BART Can’t Solve Bay Area Housing Crisis

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Last weekend, California Governor Jerry Brown signed Assembly Bill 2923, which gives BART the authority to ignore local zoning rules and build high-density housing on its own land in the Bay Area. This bill faced fierce opposition from mayors and city councils in Contra Costa County, but was supported by affordable housing advocates.

Ignoring the debate over density at the moment, what makes anyone think that BART, which can’t even effectively run a transit system, can suddenly become an expert housing developer? BART estimates that, with passage of this bill, it will be able to build 20,000 units of housing, about a third of which will be “affordable” (which in the Bay Area can mean affordable to people who earn $115,000 a year or less). While the region could use 20,000 housing units, there is no reason to think that BART can build them affordably or that high-density housing can even be affordable.

BART is well known for the cost overruns, maintenance problems, and crime problems on its transit system. It will be interesting to see how it applies these skills to housing. It’s hard to imagine the results will be very desirable. Continue reading →

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Blacks and Single-Family Housing

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Over the past decade, the share of American households who live in single-family detached homes has remained fairly constant at 61.5 percent plus or minus a couple of tenths of a percent. But the share of non-Hispanic whites who live in single-family detached homes has grown slowly but steadily from 68.4 percent in 2007 to 69.0 percent in 2017. At the same time, the share of blacks who live in single-family detached homes has declined from 48.3 percent in 2007 to 46.4 percent in 2017.

Some people think I’m imposing a cultural bias when I say that single-family detached homes are the most preferable type of housing recorded in table B25024 of the American Community Survey, which also includes single-family attached (row houses), duplexes, apartments of various sizes, mobile homes, boats, and recreation vehicles. Many urban planners believe that multifamily housing is superior, but many of those planners themselves live in single-family homes. It appears that planners’ eagerness to put other people in multifamily housing may have its greatest effect on low-income people, of whom blacks are disproportionately represented.

In fact, in some places it appears that blacks are losing out to non-Hispanic whites in the choice of housing stock. In sixteen states and a distressingly large number of counties, cities, and urban areas, the percentage of non-Hispanic whites living in single-family detached homes grew even as the percentage of blacks shrank. Continue reading →

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