The Antiplanner »

Author Archives: The Antiplanner

About The Antiplanner

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

The Future of Cities

By | | Regional planning
6 Comments

“America’s treasured cities,” writes semi-libertarian Jeffrey Tucker, are in “grave danger.” He believes that people are leaving cities to get away from “forced closures and then vaccine mandates and compulsory segregation by vaccine status” due to the pandemic. He doesn’t consider the possibility that people didn’t want to be in cities in the first place and were all too happy to use the pandemic as an excuse to leave.

Do we treasure living in the cities or the suburbs? Photo by Andreas Praefcke.

Before the pandemic, urbanists were chortling about the “triumph of the city.” World population data showed that urban areas were growing while rural numbers were shrinking. In citing these data, urbanists conflated “urban areas” and “cities” to make their case, effectively arguing that more people moving to the suburban parts of urban areas meant that more people wanted to live in the dense central cities. Continue reading →

Turning Colorado into Greenwich Village

By | | Regional planning, Transportation
2 Comments

The state of Colorado will celebrate its 150th birthday in 2026, and to celebrate the state’s Democratic governor, Jared Polis, has proposed what he thinks is a “visionary” land-use and transportation plan. In fact, it is just a tired old rehash of recent urban planning fads that are based on obsolete views of how people want to live.

Click image to download a 9.2-MB PDF of this 34-page report.

The plan is partly a repackaging of a bill the governor promoted in the last session of the state legislature that would have given cities housing targets and required them to build more multifamily housing to meet those targets. The bill was defeated thanks to strong opposition from city governments that didn’t want the state to preempt their zoning powers, but that didn’t sway Polis. Continue reading →

Infrastructure Guidelines

By | | Transportation
Leave a comment

With President Biden handing out $6 billion for California high-speed rail projects and $2.2 billion more for other passenger-rail projects, it seems important to review some basic guidelines for infrastructure spending. Nobel-prize-winning economist Elinor Ostrom, whose work focused on incentives and institutions, once offered the following evaluation criteria:

Elinor Ostrom. Photo by Holger Motzkau.

  • Efficiency: How well are inputs translated into outputs?
  • Fiscal equivalence – Do those who benefit from a system pay at a level
    commensurate with their benefit?
  • Redistribution – Does the system take from the rich and give to the poor or from rich areas to poor areas or rich groups to poor groups?
  • Accountability – Do decisions reflect the desires of final users and other stakeholders?
  • Adaptability – Can infrastructure providers respond to ever-changing
    Environments?

Continue reading →

Why More Pedestrians Are Dying at Night

By | | Transportation
7 Comments

Just a few days after the excellent New York Times article about the Bogotá rapid buses, the Times published a data-heavy article about increasing pedestrian fatalities and that fact that most of them take place at night. While the article makes several important points, it also misses two key points that leads it to make some wrong conclusions.

Seeing through the data. Photo by emre0614.

A 2019 Antiplanner policy brief made many of the points found in the Times article: Pedestrian fatalities are up, most of the increase is at night and has taken place on arterial streets, and distractions from cell phone usage may be a part of the problem. All of this information can be dredged out of federal accident databases. Almost two years ago, I noted that Portland and San Jose had released data indicating that a high percentage of fatalities were homeless, which was also mentioned by the Times. Continue reading →

The Rise and Fall of Bogotá’s Rapid Buses

By | | Transportation
2 Comments

The New York Times reviewed (non-paywall version) the ground-breaking bus-rapid transit system in Bogotá Columbia 23 years after it opened. The TransMilenio bus system first opened in December 2000 under fiscally conservative mayor Enrique Peñalosa and each route-mile is capable of moving more people per hour than New York City subways.

A high-capacity TransMilenio bus. Photo by Felipe Restrepo Acosta.

The system almost immediately doubled transit ridership, partly because the rapid buses were much faster than the buses they replaced but also because Bogota has a lot of low-income people who don’t own cars whose mobility was greatly enhanced by faster transit. Columbia had well under 200 motor vehicles per thousand people in 2000 (compared with more than 800 in the U.S.) and even today Columbia has fewer than 300 vehicles per thousand (compared with more than 900 in the U.S.). Whatever the reason, the rapid bus system carries up to 2 million riders a day, which is more than some U.S. light-rail lines carry in a year. Continue reading →

Amtrak Up 1.1% in October

By | | Transportation
2 Comments

Amtrak carried 101.1 percent as many passenger-miles in October 2023 as in the same month of 2019, according to Amtrak’s monthly performance report. This is the second time in three months that Amtrak carried more than 100 percent of pre-COVID numbers. I’m not sure why it fell to less than 90 percent in September, but August and October numbers suggest that the state-owned company has mostly recovered from the pandemic.

See last week’s post for a review of transit and air travel. October highway data are not yet available but will be posted here when it comes out.

Amtrak divides its trains into the Northeast Corridor, long-distance trains, and state-supported trains mostly operate within a state or between two states. Of these, the Boston-Washington trains are doing best, carrying 11.3 percent more riders than in 2019, and long-distance trains are next at 4.2 percent. However, the state-supported trains carried just 92.5 percent as many riders as in 2019. Continue reading →

More California High-Speed Spending

By | | Transportation
11 Comments

Remember DesertXpress, later known as Xpress West? It was going to be a high-speed train between the Los Angeles area and Las Vegas. Projected to cost under $5 billion, the company said it would build and operate it without any subsidies. The Antiplanner was skeptical.

Brightline’s image of its high-speed train across the desert.

The project is now owned by Brightline, the company that runs the moderate-speed trains in Florida that are unsubsidized if you don’t count all the people they are killing and the government-funded safety improvements aimed at reducing those deaths. Projected costs of the Vegas line have risen to $12 billion, partly because Brightline sensibly decided that it would have to build into Los Angeles to get any riders. Far from not needing any subsidies, Brightline was overjoyed to receive a $3 billion grant from the federal government. One news report calls this a bet, but it’t not really betting if you are using other people’s money. Continue reading →

October Transit Ridership Levels Off

By | | Transportation, Useful Data
Leave a comment

Transit carried 73.90 percent as many riders in October 2023 as in the same month in 2019, according to data released by the Federal Transit Administration yesterday. This is just a couple of hairs less than the 73.92 percent carried in September. Rail ridership was 71.0 percent of 2019 while bus ridership was 76.6 percent. Actual October ridership was more than September’s, which is the case for most years.

As with last month, New York, Los Angeles, Miami, and Houston transit systems are much better than average, carrying 78 to 85 percent of 2019 levels. Washington seems to have caught up with the average, carrying 73.7 percent. Atlanta, Boston, Phoenix, and San Francisco are all doing worse than average, carrying less than 70 percent and, in Phoenix’s case, less than 56 percent of 2019 numbers. Continue reading →

More on High Rises and Fertility Rates

By | | Follow up, Housing
4 Comments

The Antiplanner was first alerted to a tweet about South Korea’s low birth rate from Marginal Revolution, a blog from George Mason economists Tyler Cowen and Alex Tabarrok. Being from George Mason, they lean libertarian, but haven’t learned enough about housing economics to realize that YIMBYism isn’t about housing affordability or property rights but about forcing more Americans to live in multi-family housing.

The ideal American city under YIMBYism. Photo of Seoul by Gerhard Huber.

So I appreciated it when Cowen mentioned my post on birth rates and high-rise housing in Marginal Revolution. They get a lot more readers than this blog, so it led to lots of comments. Continue reading →

Building Rail It Can’t Afford to Operate

By | | Transportation
Leave a comment

Washington Metro is facing a $750 million shortfall in its 2025 budget and may have to cut service as soon as next spring. Meanwhile, its board of directors will be asked to approve an expansion of its Blue Line that will cost at least $30 billion and probably much more.

As the Antiplanner noted last July, the new line is supposedly needed because the existing Blue, Orange, and Silver lines all use the same tunnel under the Potomac River and the line can only handle 26 trains per hour. The Blue Line trains were running at capacity when the Silver Line opened, so Metro lost more Blue Line riders than it gained Silver Line riders when Blue Line trains were cut to make room for Silver Line trains. Continue reading →