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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.

Electric Buses Not a Panacea

By | | Transportation
6 Comments

Last week, the city of Seneca, South Carolina decided to shut down the Clemson Area Transit System, which served Seneca and nearby Clemson University. Once touted as owning the world’s first all-electric bus fleet, just a few years later two thirds of its expensive electric buses had broken down, the company that made them went bankrupt, parts were no longer available, and the city can’t afford to buy replacement buses.

Seneca is not exactly a major metropolis. But Clemson Area Transit isn’t the only transit agency to have trouble with electric buses. Just the day before Seneca decided to shut down its transit system, Austin’s Capital Metro announced that it was giving up on its plan to electrify its bus fleet by 2030. Electric bus technology, said the agency, simply hasn’t progressed far enough to replace Diesels. Continue reading →

Welcome to Grizzly

By | | Housekeeping
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The Antiplanning family has a new member: Grizzly, a ten-week-old Belgian Tervuren puppy. He is our fifth dog of this breed and we look forward to many miles of hikes with him.

After we lost Smokey in January, I didn’t want to get another dog right away. But I was still grieving six months later when a breeder we admire contacted us and said she had a puppy for us. Suddenly, I found myself looking towards the future and not the past. I’ll never forget Smokey, but everything I wanted to do with him I’ll be able to do with Grizzly. Continue reading →

Hopes Dim for Brightline

By | | Transportation
8 Comments

Ridership on Florida’s Brightline passenger trains has more than tripled since the company opened its extension to Orlando last September. However, that increase hasn’t been enough to cover costs, as the company reported losing $116 million in the first three months of 2024. This is more than double the $53 million it lost in the first quarter of 2023, indicating that expenses increased by nearly three times as much as revenues.

Brightline’s station at Orlando International Airport. Photo by elisfkc.

When the Orlando line opened, Brightline predicted that it would carry 7.0 million passengers in 2024. However, it has recently reduced that estimate to 5.5 million. One problem is that Brightline has had to turn away passengers in the “short-distance” Miami-West Palm Beach segment of its route in order to keep seats available for the “more profitable long-distance” travelers to or from Orlando. As of May, year-to-date revenue in the short-distance segment declined from $18.8 million in 2023 to $17.2 million in 2024. Continue reading →

BART: Give Us More $ So We Can Do Less

By | | Transportation
43 Comments

Before the pandemic, the San Francisco Bay Area Rapid Transit District (BART) earned more than 70 percent of its operating costs out of fare revenues, more than any transit agency in the nation other than CalTrain. Ironically, this also made it most vulnerable to a ridership downturn, while agencies like San Jose’s Valley Transportation Authority, which covered only 9 percent of its operating costs out of fares (the fourth worst among the nation’s transit agencies), were relatively immune. Now BART is pleading for more money so it won’t have to dramatically reduce service as it exhausts federal COVID relief funds.

Click image to download a 12.6-MB PDF of this report.

As part of that plea, BART published a report on its role in the Bay Area earlier this week. The report admits that BART’s ridership has dropped — as of May, it carried less than 45 percent as many riders as before the pandemic — due to increases in remote work. “BART ridership is closely linked to office occupancy rates,” says the report, with an accompanying graphic showing that ridership has moved in almost exact parallel to San Francisco-Berkeley-Oakland office occupancies. Continue reading →

FRA Puts Price Tag on Overnight Amtrak Routes

By | | Transportation
20 Comments

The Federal Railroad Administration (FRA) estimates that adding 15 new overnight routes to Amtrak’s system will cost taxpayers $46 billion to $59 billion (see pages 80 to 159 of this 18.8-MB file) plus increase Amtrak’s annual operating costs by $1.1 billion to $1.6 billion. The FRA did not estimate ridership or fare revenues, but it did estimate that adding these routes would reduce driving by 0.014 percent and the annual number of highway accidents by 0.016 percent.

Click image for a larger view.

Amtrak currently has 15 overnight train routes that carried just over 2.0 billion passenger-miles in 2023 (see page 7). These routes cost $1.3 billion to operate in that year (not counting depreciation) and earned just under $600 million in fare revenues. Amtrak admits all of them except the Virginia-Florida Auto Train lost money, and when depreciation is counted that train probably lost money as well. Continue reading →

Driving, Air Travel Surge Above Pre-COVID Levels

By | | Transportation, Useful Data
8 Comments

Americans took 7.7 percent more airline trips in May 2024 than the same month in 2019, according to TSA passenger counts. While the release of airline passenger-mile data lags other data by a couple of months, March data indicate that domestic flying passenger-miles were 5.5 percent greater than in 2019 while international passenger-miles were 1.5 percent short of 2019. The number of international trips was 4.3 percent greater than in 2019, indicating that people who are traveling internationally are going to closer destinations.

Americans also drove 2.6 percent more miles in May 2024 than May 2019, according to data released last week by the Federal Highway Administration. Rural miles of driving were 8.8 percent greater than before the pandemic while urban miles were just 0.2 percent short of May 2019. Continue reading →

Is Bicycling Improving?

By | | Transportation
23 Comments

One of my many beefs with government planning advocates is that they tend to judge success by measuring inputs rather than outputs. A case in point is a group that calls itself People for Bikes that issued a report last week that claims that Bicycling Is Improving in Cities Across the U.S.

New bike lanes, but are they really safe?

Does it measure that improvement by the number of people cycling in those cities? Or by a reduction in bicycle fatalities and injuries from traffic accidents? No, it instead measure the miles of bike lanes, the reallocations of street space to dedicated bicycle use, reductions in automobile speed limits, and changes to intersections favoring bicyclists. The fact that these “improvements” have been accompanied by increased bicycle fatalities and reductions in bicycle commuting aren’t considered. Continue reading →

Good-Bye and Good Riddance to Chevron

By | | News commentary
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The harsh response of left-wing commentators to last week’s Supreme Court reversal of the Chevron decision reveals more about the Left than about the courts. “The Supreme Court just made a massive power grab,” blusters Ian Millhiser for Vox. “Supreme Court executes massive power grab from executive branch,” agrees Kate Riga for TPM.

“Fill her up with Chevron Supreme.” Photo by Joe Ravi.

In 1981, the Environmental Protection Agency under Ronald Reagan changed the definition of the word “source” (as in “source of pollution”) in one of its regulations, effectively allowing industries to pollute more with less oversight. In a case known as Chevron Oil v. the Natural Resources Defense Council, the NRDC challenged this definition and won at the district and appeals court levels. But the Supreme Court overturned this, ruling that courts should give “deference” to federal agencies in how they interpret the law. This became known as the Chevron decision and it has hampered citizen efforts to monitor bureaucracies ever since. Continue reading →

Schools Demand Continuance of Old Taxpayer Scam

By | | Public lands
4 Comments

“Rural schools in California already struggle with declining enrollment, staffing shortages and wildfires,” says Carolyn Jones, writing for Calmatters, a left-leaning policy web site. “Now they’re facing the possible loss of money they’ve relied on for more than a century.” What Jones doesn’t say is that the counties have been scamming federal taxpayers for that money for decades and they’d naturally rather continue the scam than have to raise the money locally.

No children live in the Trinity Alps Wilderness Area, which imposes no costs on the Trinity Alps School District. Yet the school district superintendent somehow finds it “mind boggling” that Congress might not force federal taxpayers to pay the district for every acre of wilderness area and other national forest lands that happens to be in Trinity County, California. Photo by Kee Yip.

Federal lands aren’t taxable by state or local governments. When Congress began setting aside national forests, it decided to make it up to local governments by giving them 25 percent of any revenues the forests earned. In some places, the counties got 50 percent. Congress specified that national forest payments to counties had to be spent on roads and schools. Continue reading →

Mid-Day Traffic Now Worse Than AM Rush Hour

By | | Transportation, Useful Data
7 Comments

Morning and afternoon rush-hour traffic has returned to pre-pandemic levels in many U.S. urban areas, according to INRIX’s 2023 Global Traffic Scorecard. However, what INRIX finds most “astonishing” is that mid-day traffic has grown by an average of 23 percent and is now much greater than during the morning rush hour, and almost as great at around noon as the afternoon rush hour.

U.S. Trips by Start Hour in 2019 and 2023

This will only be astonishing to people who haven’t read the several research studies finding that people who work at home drive more miles per day than people commute who work. As the above chart indicates, morning rush-hour traffic in U.S. urban areas is down 12 percent while afternoon rush-hour traffic is down 9 percent; but total traffic is up because of the 23 percent increase in mid-day traffic. Continue reading →