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Monthly Archives: August 2018

Giving Back to the Community

By | | Transportation
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The Sacramento Regional Transit District is reducing its fares for the first time in its history. It says it is doing this to “give back to the community.” But the Antiplanner can’t help but think that fare reductions might have more to do with the 40 percent decline in ridership the district has experienced since 2008.

At least it isn’t responding to revenue declines by increasing fares. Oh, wait: it already did. Between 2008 and 2016, average bus fares grew by 38 percent and average light-rail fares grew by 17 percent, which probably contributed to but were not the primary cause of declining ridership.

The agency says it can decrease fares now because of the success it has had in controlling costs in the last couple of years, as evidenced by the fact that it has $10 million in the bank as a “reserve.” But why did it wait until the last couple of years to control its costs? Why hasn’t it been controlling its costs since it was created in 1973? Continue reading →

Sanity in the Valley of the Sun

By | | Transportation
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The Phoenix city council is considering delaying or even killing some planned light-rail lines because it is concerned that city streets are falling apart and too much money is being spent instead on an insignificant form of travel. The council considered but rejected a similar proposal a couple of months ago, but since then two councilors who opposed the proposal have been replaced and at least one of them is inclined to favor streets over rails.

As of 2016, light rail carries less than 0.2 percent of all travel in the Phoenix urban area. The 2016 American Community Survey says that the same tiny percentage of commuters take light rail to work, which is unusual as transit’s commuter share is usually much higher than its total share. Phoenix light-rail ridership in the twelve months ending in June, 2018 was down 4.4 percent from the previous twelve months. Transit ridership for Phoenix as a whole is down 5.6 percent for the same time period.

Phoenix is one of many Sunbelt urban areas in which rail transit makes no sense at all. Aside from the Antiplanner’s argument that buses can move more people than light rail, rail systems only make sense where there is a high concentration of downtown jobs that a hub-and-spoke transit system can serve. According to Wendell Cox’s calculations, downtown Phoenix has only about 26,000 jobs, which is just 1.4 percent of jobs in the metropolitan area. Continue reading →

Freedom in the Fifty States

By | | News commentary, Regional planning
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The Cato Institute released its assessment of freedom in each of the fifty states last week, and it generally does a good job of distinguishing between states that heavily restrict people’s lives and ones that allow more freedom. But the Antiplanner has been concerned that the many different indices of freedom published by various groups don’t seriously consider property rights, which most libertarians believe are the fundamental basis of freedom.

This year’s report attributes about 11 percent of the score for each state to property rights. Most of that 11 percent comes from two factors: rent control (5.3 percent) and zoning (4.8 percent). Rent control is easy to identify but it is not a very good indicator of freedom because most states don’t allow it or allow it only under special circumstances. Only four states allow it outright, and not surprisingly given the weighting these make up four of the five lowest-scoring states on property rights.

Zoning is much more difficult. The fifty-states report relies on the Wharton Business School’s index of zoning, but that is more than a decade old and fails to accurately assess just how flexible zoning is in some states and inflexible in others. Even more than Wharton’s index, the report relies on an index of court decisions on land-use issues, which seems more reliable as a guide to how litigious people are than to how restrictive their land-use rules are. Continue reading →

Maui Housing

By | | Housing
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The Antiplanner is in Maui today talking to the Grassroot Institute about housing costs. The Institute may also release a new report on this subject, and if so I’ll update this post or post a link to it tomorrow.

According to Zillow, the median home in Maui costs $519 a square foot (download the file called “Median Home Value Per Square Foot” for Metro & U.S. under “Home Values”). Honolulu is $545. A few metro areas in California are the only ones in the United States that are more expensive.

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A Matter of Trust

By | | Transportation
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Ford Motor Company issued a report last week explaining its self-driving car program and why it won’t kill pedestrians like the Uber car did in Arizona. Among other things, Ford has two people in its test cars at all times, one watching the road and the other monitoring the self-driving system (Uber’s car had only one person who was watching a video at the time of the accident).

Click image to download this 37.4-MB PDF.

The Antiplanner likes Ford and wishes it well, but I can’t help but think that this “go-slow-for-safety” approach is merely an excuse for being three years behind Waymo and two years behind General Motors in the race to put self-driving ride-hailing systems on the streets. Ford promises to mass produce self-driving cars by 2021, but GM says it will have them by 2019 and Waymo expects to put such cars in revenue service this year. Continue reading →

Do We Still Need an Economic Recovery Fund?

By | | Transportation
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Congress created the TIGER grant program in 2009 to help the economy recover: TIGER stands for “transportation investment generating economic recovery.” The economy has recovered — the United States is now enjoying what some call the “longest bull market in Wall Street history” — so President Trump called for ending TIGER.

The House agreed, but some in the Senate want to keep it going. Instead of killing it, Maine Senator Susan Collins, who claims to be a Republican, wants to expand it. Her justification is that the program received 585 applications from state and local governments last year but was able to fund just 44, which demonstrates “the need and popularity of this program.” I wonder if she knows of any programs that give away hundreds of millions of dollars a year that aren’t popular.

(She also opposes reform of the air traffic control system, which she calls “a solution in search of a problem.” Because airports aren’t congested in Maine, so she must imagine they aren’t congested anywhere else.) Continue reading →

Light Rail Is Criminogenic

By | | Transportation
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The Guardian reports that a movement has begun in Baltimore to shut down the city’s light-rail lines because of the crime they spread. The liberal Guardian makes this out to be a racial issue, but actually it is just a safety issue.

Architect Oscar Newman discovered several decades ago that some designs are criminogenic, meaning they attract crime, while other designs deter crime. While criminals are more likely to be poor, Newman showed that poor people of all races were much less likely to engage in or be victimized by crime if they lived in areas that were non-criminogenic.

Newman had noted that poor people living in some neighborhoods suffered from lots of crime while the same class of people living in other neighborhoods experienced almost no crime. To find out why, Newman compared design features with crime reports on thousands of city blocks. His work was successfully replicated on a much larger scale by later researchers. Continue reading →

California Bill Threatens Neighborhoods

By | | Housing
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Speaking of the San Francisco Bay Area, as the Antiplanner was doing yesterday, the California legislature may be on the verge of passing a bill that will make that crowded region even more congested. Assembly Bill 2923 would allow, even require, that the Bay Area Rapid Transit Authority to overrule local zoning and impose high-density housing on neighborhoods within a half-mile of BART stations.

Not surprisingly, many cities including Fremont, Hayward, Lafayette, and Pleasant Hill oppose this preemption of their local authority. More surprising is opposition from the California chapter of the American Planning Association. While the APA supports minimum-density zoning, it doesn’t believe that transit agencies should be allowed to preempt local cities. Apparently, more APA members work for cities than for BART.

The bill’s advocates argue that high-density housing will be more affordable, a myth the Antiplanner has addressed before. Mid-rise construction costs 50 percent more and high-rise costs 68 percent more per square foot than low-rise housing. Land in areas with urban growth boundaries can be hundreds of times more expensive per acre than areas without boundaries, so densities would have to be that many times greater to get land costs per unit of housing down to reasonable levels. Continue reading →

Let’s Be as Dense as Hong Kong

By | | Housing, Regional planning
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Vox‘s Johnny Harris looks at housing in Hong Kong, noting that it is rated the least-affordable housing market in the world. (At least the English-speaking world, China, Japan, and Singapore, which are the housing markets reviewed in Wendell Cox’s 14th International Housing Affordability Survey). Harris shows living conditions roughly similar to the 1890 tenements of New York City documented by Jacob Riis in How the Other Half Lives.

Harris reveals that housing prices aren’t high because Hong Kong has run out of land. Instead, he notes, “Flying over Hong Kong, you start to see that, while yes, there’s a very dense urban landscape, but there’s also a whole lot of green space. Government land-use data says that 75 percent of the land in Hong Kong is not developed.” Continue reading →

Portland Plots Its Next Light-Rail Line

By | | Transportation, Urban areas
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Transit ridership is declining and the Trump administration is refusing to giving away federal funds for new transit projects. But Portland’s TriMet transit agency is already buying properties for its new $3 billion light-rail line.

Metro’s Joint Policy Advisory Committee on Transportation — which is the real power at Metro, not the elected Metro council — has approved the route for the rail line that is supposed to go from downtown Portland to Bridgeport Village, a shopping mall on Interstate 5. The plan calls for bike paths, sidewalks, some new highway bridges (which aren’t included in the cost), as well as 12 miles of light-rail route.

The official projected cost for the project is $2.6 billion to $2.9 billion, but as an analysis by the Cascade Policy Institute shows, the final cost of previous light-rail projects all ended up being as much as 40 percent more than the estimates that had been made at the draft environmental impact statement stage. Metro issued a draft EIS for the project in June. Continue reading →