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About The Antiplanner

The Antiplanner is a forester and economist with more than fifty years of experience critiquing government land-use and transportation plans.

January Air Travel 109.6% of 2019

By | | Transportation, Useful Data
9 Comments

The airlines carried nearly 10 percent more travelers in January 2024 than in the same month of 2019, according to checkpoint counts made by the Transportation Security Administration. Meanwhile, Amtrak carried 98.2 percent as many passenger-miles in January as in 2019, according to its monthly performance report released early this week.

Transit and highway data for January 2024 should be available soon.

Don’t let the closeness of the airline and Amtrak lines fool you. Airline passenger-miles are not yet available for December and January, but in the 12 months ending in November 2023, the airlines carried 128 times as many passenger-miles as Amtrak. And that’s just counting domestic air travel; when international travel is counted, airlines carried 232 times as many passenger-miles as Amtrak. Continue reading →

Transit Use Shrinks to Insignificance

By | | Transportation, Useful Data
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Transit in 2022 carried less than 1 percent of passenger travel in 461 out of the nation’s 487 urban areas and less than half a percent of passenger travel in 426 of those urban areas. It carried more than 2 percent in only 7 urban areas and more than 3 percent in just two: New York and San Francisco-Oakland. These numbers are calculated from the 2022 National Transit Database released last October and the 2022 Highway Statistics released last month, specifically table HM-72, which has driving data by urban area.

Highways were a little less congested in 2022 than before the pandemic. Oregon Department of Transportation photo.

In 2019, transit carried 11.6 percent of motorized passenger travel in the New York urban area, a share that fell to 8.5 percent in 2022. Transit carried 6.8 percent in the San Francisco-Oakland area in 2019, which fell to 3.6 percent in 2022. Transit carried around 3.5 percent in Chicago, Honolulu, Seattle, and Washington urban areas, which fell to 2.5 percent in Honolulu, 2.1 percent in Seattle, and less than 1.8 percent in Chicago and Washington in 2022. Anchorage, Ithaca, and State College PA are the only other urban areas where transit carried more than 2 percent of travel in 2022. Continue reading →

Density and Fertility

By | | Follow up
12 Comments

Nearly three months ago, I suggested that trying to get people to live in high-density housing projects was a good way to “kill a country” by reducing fertility rates. Not everyone was persuaded; one comment stated that there is “Not a shred of evidence other than his bald assertion that people in Korea have no room for kids.”

A Twitter user calling itself “More Births” has reached the same conclusion as the Antiplanner. After noting that South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, and Thailand all have very low fertility rates, More Births asked what these regions have in common. The number 1 factor listed: ultra-dense housing policies. Continue reading →

Kill-Switch Rule Under Consideration

By | | Transportation
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Section 24220 of the 2021 infrastructure law directs the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) to require that automakers include a device in new cars that will passively detect whether the driver is drunk and keep them from operating the car. NHTSA has until November of this year to write the rule and then new cars made beginning two years after that must comply. The law specifically states that if NHTSA can’t find a device that will accomplish this, then it doesn’t have to require one.

U.S. Navy photo by Photographer’s Mate 2nd Class Nathanael T. Miller.

This law has led to fears that the government will require automobiles to have “kill switches” that the government can remotely control, thus shutting down people’s freedom of mobility at any time. Defenders of the policy argue that these fears are overblown. Last month, NHTSA issued its advance notice of proposed rule making on the subject and it’s worth looking at it before comments are due next Tuesday, March 5. Continue reading →

The Antiplanner’s Library
Transit’s Growth, Decline, and Pending Demise

By | | Transportation
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Who said the following? “The basic objective of our Nation’s transportation system must be to assure the availability of the fast, safe, and economical transportation services needed in a growing and changing economy. . . . This basic objective can and must be achieved primarily by continued reliance on unsubsidized privately owned facilities, operating under the incentives of private profit and the checks of competition to the maximum extent practicable. . . . This means . . . equality of opportunity for all forms of transportation and their users and undue preference to none. It means greater reliance on the forces of competition and less reliance on the restraints of regulation. And it means that, to the extent possible, the users of transportation services should bear the full costs of the services they use, whether those services are provided privately or publicly.”

Click image to go to Bookfinder.com to find the lowest current price for this book.

  1. Ronald Reagan;
  2. Milton Friedman;
  3. Ayn Rand; or
  4. The Antiplanner?

In fact, the answer is 5. John F. Kennedy. Or at least this statement was contained in Kennedy’s April 2, 1962 message to Congress on having an “efficient transportation system.” This means it was probably written by staffers in the Department of Commerce, as the Department of Transportation did not yet exist. Whoever wrote it was at least willing to talk the talk of free markets and fiscal conservatism. Continue reading →

FRA Dreams Up Amtrak Schemes

By | | Transportation
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Ever been in Billings, Montana and wanted to go to El Paso? Or have you been in New York and wanted to spend 36 hours traveling to Dallas? How about going from Minneapolis to Denver via Pierre, South Dakota? Or Detroit to New Orleans? These are just some of the 15 new long-distance trains that the Federal Railroad Administration has tentatively proposed to add to Amtrak’s network.

Click image for a larger view. Click here to download the full draft proposal that was released last week.

Some of the proposals would restore Amtrak routes that have been discontinued, including trains from Salt Lake City to Seattle, Salt Lake City to Los Angeles, Chicago to Florida, and Chicago to Seattle on the former Northern Pacific route through southern Montana. Other proposals would restore trains that were discontinued even before Amtrak, such as New York to New Orleans via Chattanooga and Montgomery, which would be in addition to Amtrak’s current New York-New Orleans route via Charlotte and Birmingham. Continue reading →

New Panic Over Farmlands

By | | News commentary, Useful Data
6 Comments

The Department of Agriculture’s latest Census of Agriculture has generated new fears about “disappearing farm lands.” The census found that the United States had 22 million (2.8 percent) fewer acres of farm lands in 2022 than in 2017 and 40 million (4.3 percent) fewer acres than in 2012. The census is conducted every five years in years ending in a 2 or a 7.

Oregon Public Broadcasting responded to the release by reporting that “Oregon continues to lose farmlands” which “raises red flags for some agricultural land conservation advocates.” However, a closer look at available data is needed before panicking. Continue reading →

December Driving 96.9% of 2019

By | | Transportation, Useful Data
12 Comments

U.S. residents drove 96.88 percent as many miles in December of 2023 as in the same month in 2019, according to estimates released yesterday by the Federal Highway Administration. Though this is down from 104.3 percent in November, driving has been hovering around 100 percent of 2019 levels all year.

In fact, the estimates indicate, Americans drove 100.1 percent as many miles in 2023 as they did in 2019 and 102.0 percent as many miles in 2023 as in 2022. I would judge that driving has completely recovered from the pandemic and is now growing at pre-pandemic levels. Decreases in rush-hour driving due to remote work are made up for by increases in non-rush-hour driving by remote workers running errands, going out for coffee, or attending meetings as well as by people moving from urban to rural areas or from some states to others. Continue reading →

Transit Carried 73.7% in December

By | | Transportation, Useful Data
4 Comments

Transit carried 73.7 percent as many riders in December 2023 as the same month in 2019, according to data released by the Federal Transit Administration yesterday. As I predicted last month, this was a slight decline from the 74.9 percent reported for November because November had one more business day in 2023 than 2019 while December had one fewer.

Amtrak ridership, as a share of 2019 levels, declined from 103.1 percent in November to 93.6 percent in December according to Amtrak’s monthly performance report released last week. This may suggest that holiday travelers are still wary of taking trains. It also raises questions about why Amtrak numbers have been bouncing up and down so much over the past several months. Air travel has not been so bouncy: according to TSA passenger counts, air travel grew from 101.2 of 2019 levels in November to 103.1 percent in December. Continue reading →

Do More Subsidies Increase Efficiency?

By | | Transportation
10 Comments

Streetsblog posted an article yesterday that quotes and attempts to refute the Antiplanner by claiming that increasing subsidies to transit agencies actually makes them more efficient. The article, written by former Strong Towns staffer Kea Wilson, misinterprets both the Antiplanner’s quote and the meaning of efficiency.

Does reducing the share of transit costs that are covered by farebox revenues increase efficiency? Photo by AgentAkit.

Transit systems get more efficient when they are more heavily subsidized, Wilson asserts. How can this be true? Efficiency is economically defined as “when all goods and factors of production in an economy are distributed or allocated to their most valuable uses and waste is eliminated or minimized.” Before the pandemic, transit agencies were typically spending four times as much money moving someone a passenger-mile as automobiles. That sounds pretty inefficient to me and increasing subsidies even more is likely to be even more inefficient. Continue reading →