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Monthly Archives: January 2018

Is Transit the Only Answer? Is It Even an Answer?

By | | Transportation, Urban areas
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“Forget self-driving cars,” argues Rod Diridon, the former chair of one of the worst-managed transit agencies in the country. “Mass transit is the only answer to gridlock.” Writing in the San Jose Mercury-News, Diridon presents what he considers to be alarming statistics about job growth and then asserts that only huge subsidies to transit will allow those people to get to work.

“Well over 100,000 new primary jobs will be added to Silicon Valley in the next decade,” he estimates, and each primary job will be supported by seven to thirteen secondary jobs. Since Silicon Valley (which I equate to the San Jose urbanized area) only had 873,000 jobs in 2016, he is essentially predicting that jobs (and therefore population) will more than double in a decade. Considering that the region’s population has only been growing at about 1 percent per year, that’s impossible.

At no matter what rate the region is growing, transit–or at least the Santa Clara Valley Transit Authority (VTA) that Diridon once led–has proven itself incapable of dealing with this growth. Back in 2000, VTA carried 55.6 million transit riders. By 2016, the region’s population had grown 16 percent, yet ridership was down to 44.0 million. In the first ten months of 2017, ridership fell another 8.5 percent below the same period in 2016. As a result, annual transit trips per capita have fallen by more than a third since 2000. Continue reading →

Brightline Opens to Tragedy

By | | Transportation
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Brightline passenger trains began operating between Fort Lauderdale and West Palm Beach on Saturday, just one day after a VIP preview run killed a pedestrian. This was an inauspicious beginning for what is supposed to be the first new private intercity rail service in the United States in at least four decades.

The first test run of Brightline equipment took place nearly a year ago on January 18, 2017. Flickr photo by BBT609.

The fatality took place when a woman walked around the crossing gates that had lowered in advance of the train. Hers was the third death resulting from the trains before they collected a single revenue fare. One of them was ruled a suicide, but even it might have been prevented if Brightline had fenced its right of way. Brightline says it has implemented positive train control, but positive train control cannot prevent pedestrian or grade-crossing accidents. Continue reading →

A Post-Racial Era?

By | | News commentary
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Five years ago, on the fiftieth anniversary of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “I have a dream” speech, the Antiplanner noted that blacks had made a lot of political progress since then, but hadn’t made much economic progress. For example, black per capita incomes as a percent of white incomes had grown from 55 percent in 1963 to 58 percent in 2011, the last year for which data were available at the time I was writing. (According to tables B19301B and B19301H of the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey, the actual percentage in 2011 was 56 percent.)

There have been some improvements in the last five years, but they are small. Black per capita incomes in 2016 — the last year for which numbers are available now and five years after the 2011 data I cited in 2013 — are 2 percent greater, as a share of of non-Hispanic white incomes (58 percent in 2016), than they were in 2011. According to tables B19013B and B19013H, black household incomes have grown from 60 percent to 61 percent of non-Hispanic white incomes. (The ratio is a little higher because black households have more people.)

Black wealth took a big hit in the Great Recession. Unlike incomes, this doesn’t appear to have improved since 2011. Continue reading →

Expressing Opposition After It Is Too Late

By | | Transportation
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Perhaps encouraged by the Trump administration’s opposition to wasteful transit projects, it has now become popular for politicians to come out in opposition to those projects when it is clear they are boondoggles. Some of them, however, are expressing their opposition only after it is too late to stop the projects.

For example, Broward County wants to build an inane streetcar line in downtown Fort Lauderdale. Someone twisted Secretary of Transportation Chao’s arm to actually provide federal funding for the project. But when bids were opened to build it, they came in much higher than projected.

Now, all three candidates to be the next mayor of Fort Lauderdale say they oppose the streetcar. But the decision to build is in the hands of the county commission, not the city council, and the county is going to have another bid process. So it is safe for the mayor and council candidates to oppose something they can’t actually stop. Continue reading →

Bill Would Eliminate San Francisco Zoning

By | | Housing
7 Comments

California state senator Scott Wiener, who represents San Francisco, has introduced Senate Bill 827, which would effectively void all local zoning rules in “transit-rich” areas, meaning areas within a half mile of a rail station or a quarter mile of a stop on a frequent bus route. Wiener’s goal is to allow the construction of high-density housing in those transit-rich areas, thus simultaneously providing more affordable housing and encouraging more people to ride transit.

This bill would severely disrupt neighborhoods throughout San Francisco, Oakland, Berkeley, and many other cities that currently have frequent transit service, as maps reveal that it would virtually eliminate zoning in most of the land area of those cities. While some people consider zoning to be an unfair (and possibly unconstitutional) restriction of property rights, most people who live in zoned urban neighborhoods appreciate the benefits of such zoning. By limiting the maximum density of housing, zoning minimizes traffic congestion, noise, and other problems.

Moreover, neighborhoods are built with streets, water, sewer, and other infrastructure to serve the needs of the density at which the neighborhoods were built. Major increases in density would require expensive improvements to water and sewer infrastructure–far more expensive than building new infrastructure on greenfields–and streets probably could not be redesigned to accommodate the density increases in any case. Continue reading →

Transit Commutes Twice as Long as Driving

By | | Transportation, Useful Data
1 Comment

Americans spent an average of 25.2 minutes to get to work in 2016, according to the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey. Average travel times are calculated by dividing aggregate travel times in table B08136 by the number of commuters in table B08301, and both tables break the data down by driving alone, carpooling, transit, and walking. Other modes, such as taxi, motorcycles, and bicycles, are lumped together, which isn’t very useful as there is no reason to think that the would take about the same amount of time.

People who commuted by transit took nearly twice as long as people who drove, spending an average of 50.1 minutes vs. 25.4 minutes for people driving alone. People who walked took just 12.3 minutes, suggesting that people who walk live well under a mile away from their work. Carpooling added about 2.6 minutes to the times required to drive alone.

One reason transit takes so long is because it is slow. According to the American Public Transportation Association’s 2016 Transit Fact Book, transit speeds average just 15.3 mph. Driving in most American cities is twice that fast. Continue reading →

Paying for a Tesla, Getting a Scion

By | | Housing, Urban areas
14 Comments

The city of Portland has agreed to contribute $6 million towards the cost of a high-rise, mixed-use complex because the building is supposed to include 60 units of “affordable housing.” “That’s like paying for a Toyota and getting a Tesla in return,” Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler enthused.

No, Mr. Mayor. It’s more like paying for a Tesla and getting a Toyota. A very small Toyota, also known as a Scion.

The building in question is supposed to make innovative use of cross-laminated wood to form one of the tallest wooden buildings in America. Normally wood is not allowed for high rises due to fire danger, but the Oregon wood products industry has been trying to boost the use of this material and claims it has overcome the fire problem. The project developers, coincidentally called Project (technically, Project^, but pronounced “project”), are so enthused that they are willing to put up $1.2 million of their own money towards the $29 million structure. Continue reading →

Denver Mayor Demonstrates Insanity

By | | City planning, Transportation, Urban areas
4 Comments

As Albert Einstein didn’t say, “the definition of insanity is doing the same thing and expecting different results.” Someone points out that this is actually the definition of perserveration. Whatever you call it, Denver Mayor Michael Hancock is doing it.

“Shockingly, 73 percent of Denver commuters drive to and from work in cars by themselves,” says Mayor Hancock. So, he plans to serve the people by working to “dedicate more travel lanes as transit only and make bus service more accessible to everyone.”

Hancock is behind the times, as the share of Denver commuters who drive alone to work hasn’t been 73 percent since the early 2000s. According to census data, it was 71 percent in 2000, but grew to 74 percent in 2006 and was 76 percent in 2016. Continue reading →

Will Taxing X Make X More Affordable?

By | | News commentary
13 Comments

This week, Oregon voters are receiving their mail-in ballots for a special election whose purpose is to see just how stupid Oregon voters really are. The election is on a ballot measure whose supposed goal is to make health insurance more affordable. To reach this goal, the measure calls for taxing health insurance.

This is right in line with the policy, popular in Portland, of making housing more affordable by taxing housing. Let’s see how well that’s working. Oh, my; it doesn’t seem to be working at all.
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I don’t want to influence any voters here with my use of the word “stupid.” Maybe you want to make health insurance more expensive by taxing it. But if you want to make it more affordable, Oregon’s ballot measure is the wrong way to go.

Economic Freedom & Property Rights

By | | Regional planning
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Libertarians and other free-market advocates agree that protection of private property rights is essential for economic liberty and prosperity. Yet none of the various freedom indices take property rights into account when comparing economic freedom in one country, state, or province to another.

For example, the only measure of property rights in the Fraser Institute’s index of world economic freedom is the “regulatory cost of the sale of real property.” But that doesn’t begin to scratch the surface of property rights. What about the regulatory cost of the use of real property? What about regulatory limits on such use? What about the ease with which government can take property by eminent domain? All of these are much more important than the cost of selling property, yet are ignored by the index.

Last month, the Fraser Institute released its latest index of economic freedom for North America, comparing U.S. and Mexican states and Canadian provinces. Like the world index, this one does not measure property rights. Instead, it focuses on the size of government, taxes, and labor markets. The results are sometimes very different from an index of property rights. Continue reading →