Buttigieg “Forced” to Drive

Supporters of subsidies to Amtrak and mass transit often say that, due to the lack of such subsidies, Americans have been “forced to drive.” Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg experienced this earlier this week when his flight was cancelled and he was “forced to drive from Washington DC to New York.” If only the nation had spent billions of dollars subsidizing intercity passenger trains between DC and New York, he wouldn’t have been forced to drive.

Why didn’t Buttigieg take the train? Photo by Fan Railer.

Wait a minute: the nation has spent billions of dollars subsidizing passenger trains between DC and New York. So why was Buttigieg forced to drive? For that matter, why was he flying if Amtrak’s high-speed Acela is so good? Continue reading

Inflation Eats Infrastructure Bill

In addition to restoring allegedly crumbling highways and transit lines, the 2021 infrastructure bill was supposed to provide tens of billions of dollars for building new infrastructure. Now it appears that inflation will eat away most of the new money provided by the bill, leaving highway and transit agencies with no real increase in funding.

A city in Massachusetts reports that the price of asphalt has increased by 37 percent.

According to Jim Tyman, CEO of the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials, inflation in construction costs is “wiping out that increase [in funding] from the federal government that [state officials] were so excited about earlier in the year.” As a result, the increased dollars from the bill “are essentially evaporating.” Continue reading

Most Americans Don’t Believe Planners

A recent survey found that 93 percent of planning students oppose highway expansion because they believe that it won’t relieve congestion due to induced demand. However, the survey found, only 24 percent of the general public agrees. Similarly, 83 percent of planning students believe the government should try to reduce the amount of driving Americans do, but only 31 percent of the general public agrees.

When was the last time an urban planner lied to you? Photo from Seattle Municipal Archives.

It never occurs to planners that results like these might indicate that they are wrong. After all, they are the experts and the general public is not, so the public should let them do what they want. Continue reading

April 2022 Driving 94.3% of April 2019

Americans drove 263.1 billion miles in April 2022, according to data released last week by the Federal Highway Administration. This was a 5.7 percent decrease from the 279.1 billion they drove in April 2019.

See the June 8 post for discussion and sources of data for air travel, Amtrak, and transit.

I confess to being surprised that driving fell so far short of pre-pandemic levels, as driving had been more than 100 percent of March 2019-February 2020 numbers in all but one month since June 2021. The numbers released last week are considered preliminary, but the revisions made by the Federal Highway Administration are usually small. Continue reading

Smart Growth Minneapolis Conflicted over Density

A Minnesota judge has ordered the city of Minneapolis to do a more thorough environmental analysis before implementing its plan to densify the city by abolishing single-family zoning. Opponents of the plan argued that densification would reduce the amount of permeable land, leading to increased runoff of polluted waters, which would be harmful to, among other things, migratory birds.

Tearing down these Minneapolis homes and replacing them with duplexes or triplexes won’t make housing more affordable. Photo by Michael Comerford.

Those opponents included the Audubon Chapter of Minneapolis, Minnesota Citizens for the Protection of Migratory Birds, and Smart Growth Minneapolis. I can understand the first two, but why did Smart Growth Minneapolis sign on to this lawsuit? Smart-growth advocates are supposed to favor increased densities. Continue reading

Why Elephants Are Not People

In a controversial ruling, the New York Court of Appeals recently decided that elephants are not people with constitutional rights. While this would seem to be a no-brainer, animal rights advocates believe that giving animals more rights is a natural progression from a few hundred years ago when only the aristocracy had what we conventionally regard as human rights. Since then, rights were extended first to property owners, then all white men, then women, and then blacks and other minorities.

Elephants at the Bronx Zoo. Photo by Wally Gobetz.

In the New York case, two elephants in the Bronx Zoo were forced to live together in a confined area even though they did not get along. A group called the Nonhuman Rights Project argued that such imprisonment violates the right of habeas corpus and the elephants should be allowed to sue so that they could be released into a larger sanctuary. Continue reading

The Antiplanner Has Been Hacked

Someone has inserted malicious code into some of the blog posts on the Antiplanner as well as my other blog, Streamliner Memories, plus a third blog that I haven’t posted to in several years. The code is mostly invisible to users, but I can find it in the WordPress editor. The code consists of some ramblings about cialis inserted into the middle of the post plus some random numbers — hexadecimal? — at the end of the post. So far, the code doesn’t seem to be dangerous to users, but that could change.

In the past, when this site was hacked, my web server would do a scan for malware and send me the results, allowing me to erase or replace malicious files. Now, my server says they won’t do anything unless I pay them $300 a year per web site. Various security companies on the web say they will scan the site for malicious files; when I do that, they all report there are no malicious files but if I pay them $300 to $500 a year they will guarantee to clean out the malicious file they couldn’t find.

I am uncertain what to do about this. Although I only plan to post to the Antiplanner once a week or so, I’d like to leave past posts for people who want access to the data and articles I’ve published. I’ve continued to post to Streamliner Memories every day and I’d hate to lose that.

So it seems I have to choose between paying someone hundreds of dollars to clean up the sites; shutting down the sites; moving the sites to a new web server that might not charge me as much to keep the site infection-free; or figuring out how to fix the sites myself. If any readers have any ideas or experience with this, please leave a note in the comments or send me an email.

April Transit Falls to 58.7% of Pre-Pandemic Levels

Transit ridership in April 2022 was 58.7 percent of April 2019, according to data released yesterday by the Federal Transit Administration. This is down from March, when ridership was 61.0 percent of March 2019. When I reported on March numbers, I predicted that April’s numbers would fall below 60 percent of pre-pandemic levels because April 2022 had one fewer business day than April 2019, while March had two more than in 2019.

While airline and Amtrak numbers grew in April (as a percent of 2019 levels), transit numbers fell.

For comparison, airline numbers exceeded 90 percent of pre-pandemic levels (which I also predicted) while Amtrak ridership grew to 73 percent (though that’s a drop from November, when ridership was more than 77 percent of November 2019). Driving numbers won’t be out for another week or so, but will probably be around 100 percent. Continue reading

Most Big Cities Lost Population in 2021

I announced yesterday I was retiring from daily blog posts, but I also said I would comment on new data when it was relevant. So I can hardly pass up noting that the Census Bureau just posted 2021 population data for the more than 800 American cities larger than 50,000 people. As I predicted in a recent policy brief, the new numbers show that most dense cities lost population while low-density cities grew.

Less than 2 percent of the jobs in the Phoenix area are in downtown Phoenix, making it one of the least downtown-dependent major cities in the country. Low-density housing throughout the region makes it attractive to people wanting to avoid crowded areas. Photo by Adam Fagen.

Of America’s largest cities, expensive ones such as Los Angeles and San Francisco lost residents (with the latter declining by 6.3 percent!), but affordable cities such as Dallas, Houston, and Atlanta also declined. The largest cities whose populations grew were Phoenix, San Antonio, Austin, and Jacksonville. With the exception of Austin, these are all low-density cities whose downtowns are tiny by traditional standards, each with well under 50,000 jobs before the pandemic. In other words, housing affordability was an issue, but more important was people were leaving dense areas for low-density areas. Continue reading

The World Turned Upside Down

Today marks 50 years of my work in public policy analysis. I began in June 1972 as an intern for the Oregon Student Public Interest Research Group. By July, I had written a lengthy paper on how Portland should make transportation improvements to reduce air pollution. Since then, I’ve written somewhere around 200 more papers, several books, and numerous op-eds and articles on topics ranging from endangered species to high-speed rail in geographic areas ranging from Georgia to Tasmania.

I started writing the Antiplanner in January, 2007, and have since written more than 3,700 posts, including 150 policy briefs. That’s enough; it’s time for me to retire. This is difficult because I feel I still have some unfinished business.

The first half of my career was helping environmentalists protect natural resources from corporations that wanted government subsidies to do harm to the environment. After two decades, I left the environmental movement when they began supporting government subsidies to corporations to do harm to the environment. Continue reading