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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.

How to Kill a Country

By | | Housing
5 Comments

Much of Seoul is a sea of high-rises. And not just Seoul: Busan and other cities in South Korea have lots of high rises. More than half of all South Korean households live in high rises, and well over 60 percent live in some kind of multifamily housing.

Seoul: High rises as far as the eye can see. Photo by Francesco Anzola.

South Korea also has the lowest birthrate of any country in the world. The latest numbers say the average woman has just 0.70 children in her lifetime. Birthrates need to be 2.1 per woman for a population to remain constant; at 0.70, South Korea will be almost totally depopulated in just three generations. Seoul’s birthrate is 0.64 and, due to an aging population, it will likely fall to 0.30 in the next ten years. Continue reading →

Spending More to Get Less

By | | Housing
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Taxpayers are spending more to subsidize low-income housing and yet getting less. Since 1987, the biggest source of funds for affordable housing has been low-income housing tax credits, which offer billions of dollars in reduced taxes if they dedicate some of the housing they build to households earning less than 60 percent of the median incomes in their regions. These tax credits are given to state housing agencies based on each state’s population and the housing agencies grant them to developers through a competitive application process.

Source: LIHTC Database, Department of Housing and Urban Development, https://lihtc.huduser.gov.

As the above chart shows, the numbers of housing units built with such funds roughly kept pace with the annual subsidies until 2004. Then subsidies dramatically increased while the number of housing units built declined. Between the 2000s and 2010s, the average inflation-adjusted subsidy per housing unit grew by 125 percent. Since 1987, 30 states have created their own affordable housing tax credit programs as well as other housing subsidies, so when they are all added together it is likely that the subsidies per housing unit have grown even faster than shown in the chart. Continue reading →

Just Say No

By | | Transportation
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The city council of the town of Grimes, Iowa — a suburb of Des Moines — had voted to end support for the Des Moines Area Regional Transit Authority (DART). City council members noted that it is spending $646,000 a year to support the transit system and yet only 13 residents of Grimes rode transit in the last year. “When you look at the math,” commented Grimes Mayor Scott Mickelson, “you could buy everybody a couple of cars for that price.”

Des Moines has an impressive downtown, but not many people there use its transit system. Photo by Jason Mrachina.

Naturally, the transit agency was unhappy with this decision. “When you think about people who are our frontline workers, a lot of them are using DART to get to their jobs,” said DART’s CEO, Amanda Wanke. “A lot of them don’t have another option for a vehicle. During these economic times, public transit is more necessary than ever.” Continue reading →

Throwing Good Money After Bad

By | | Transportation
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The Federal Transit Administration has agreed to give Honolulu another $125 million to finish its insane rail transit line. Years ago, the FTA agreed to provide $1.55 billion for the rail line, but that was when the line was expected to cost $5.1 billion.

When projected costs exploded to $12 billion and the city proved to be an inept project manager, the FTA withheld about half of the promised money, saying that it didn’t believe the city would be able to complete the project. Now, after redesigning the system, negotiating with the FTA, and no doubt twisting some arms, the federal agency is handing over about 17 percent of the withheld funds. Continue reading →

2022 Household Transportation Data Released

By | | Transportation
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The average motor vehicle on the road carried 1.52 people in 2022, down from 1.67 in 2019, according to the 2022 National Household Travel Survey. The results of this survey, which is repeated about every five years, were recently released by the Federal Highway Administration.

The survey has lots of interesting data, including information on motor vehicles, vehicle trips, and passenger-miles of travel. Much of it, however, is not quite ready for prime time. For example, the data release indicates that households who earn less than $10,000 a year nevertheless own 6.3 million vehicles — but it doesn’t say how many households that represents or how many don’t own vehicles. Continue reading →

Will Reducing Parking Save the Planet?

By | | Transportation
10 Comments

As stated previously, I can’t take climate change seriously as long as people keep putting forward their wacko ideas that they had long before climate was an issue as “the solution.” The latest example is a claim that ending minimum parking requirements is “one solution to fight climate change.” I think the proponents of this idea are just totally confused.

The article credits Donald Shoup with the idea that eliminating minimum parking requirements “could pave the way for cities to build denser housing, increase public transit options, and reduce their carbon emissions.” Shoup is a decent researcher, but he has made parking the focus of his work since 1975, long before almost anyone was talking about global warming. It is one thing to note that minimum parking requirements might not be necessary. It is another to claim that eliminating them will do all the things listed above. Continue reading →

European Passenger Train Travel Declining

By | | Transportation, Useful Data
4 Comments

The media treat Americans to a constant drumbeat of how much better European passenger trains are and why we need to spend hundreds of billions or trillions improving our train system. The latest is a report that overnight trains are proving they can replace air travel by “play[ing] an important niche role on long-distance routes of between 500 and 1,000 miles.”

A look at the actual data reveal that, despite huge government subsidies to European passenger trains, rail was barely holding its own before the pandemic and has drastically declined since the pandemic. Between 2012 and 2019, the share of passenger travel carried by airlines grew from 11.6 to 15.0 percent while the share carried by trains grew only from 6.7 to 6.8 percent. Most of the growth of rail travel was at the expense of bus travel, which declined from 9.1 to 8.1 percent. Auto travel from 72.3 to 69.8 mostly because of low-cost airlines. Continue reading →

How Long Do Cars Last?

By | | Transportation
7 Comments

According to one web site, “you can expect a standard car to last around 12 years or about 200,000 miles.” Another site agrees, “The average car lasts around 12 years or around 200,000 miles.” Both of these web sites are wrong.

A 1957 Mercury Montclair, made during the gaudiest era of U.S. automotive design.

This caught my attention when I was reading the MBTA’s State-of-Good-Repair report, which tried to explain Boston transit’s state of poor repair simply as a function of age, and not the agency’s own incompetence. It did so by using cars as an example, claiming that the “useful life” of a car was eight years and anything older than that was in a “state of bad repair.” Continue reading →

MBTA’s State of Bad Repair

By | | Transportation
4 Comments

Back in 2003, the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority (MBTA) estimated it had a “state-of-good-repair” backlog of $2.3 billion (about $3.7 billion in today’s dollars). Proving that the people running the agency are incompetent, instead of fixing their backlog they decided to build a new 4.3-mile light-rail line that just happened to cost $2.3 billion.

One of MBTA’s light-rail trains. Although the MBTA operates several different light-rail lines, they are nearly all painted green and are known as the Green Line. Photo by Adam E. Moreira.

Congress became aware of the maintenance backlog for transit systems nationwide and since 2015 it has given out $26.65 billion in grants to fix tracks, vehicles, and stations. Problem solved, right? Continue reading →