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Vision Zero Isn’t Working

By | | Follow up, Transportation
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An article posted on the Atlantic‘s CityLab last week documented that many of the cities that have adopted “vision zero” policies have seen pedestrian fatalities sharply increase. These cities, notes the article, have “spent hundreds of millions of dollars in the process, rebuilding streets to calm traffic and reduce driving, lobbying for speed limit reductions, launching public awareness campaigns, and retraining police departments.” Yet Chicago, Los Angeles, and Washington, among others, saw sharp increases in pedestrian and/or bicycle fatalities after adopting Vision Zero policies.

This won’t be a surprise to Antiplanner readers. As described in Policy Brief #25, Vision Zero is an overly simplistic strategy that fails to solve the real problems that are causing pedestrian fatalities to rise.

Vision Zero is based on the observation that pedestrians hit by cars traveling at high speeds are more likely to die than if the cars are traveling at low speeds. So Vision Zero’s primary tactic is to reduce driving speeds. Vision Zero’s secondary goal is to reduce driving period by making auto travel slower and less desirable compared to the alternatives. Neither of these are working very well. Continue reading →

Amtrak Report Refutes Press Release

By | | Follow up, Transportation
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A couple of weeks ago, I noted that, if Amtrak were a publicly traded company, it would have been guilty of securities fraud for misrepresenting its 2019 financial results in a press release before those results were officially published. Now Amtrak has published an unaudited edition of its 2019 returns and it verifies everything I said.

The document is the company’s monthly performance report for September, 2019, which also reports on year-to-date results. Since September 30 is the end of Amtrak’s fiscal year, this is in effect a preliminary annual report.

Page 3 of the report notes that Amtrak collected $2,288.5 million in ticket revenues, $143.9 million in food and beverage revenues, and $234.2 million in subsidies from the states. All of these are counted as “passenger related revenue.” Of course, subsidies from the states are not really passenger revenues, but they were portrayed that way in the press release. Continue reading →

Traffic Safety Data for 2018, First Half 2019

By | | Follow up, Transportation
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I should have waited a few days before posting my policy brief on pedestrian and cyclist safety. The day after I posted it, the Department of Transportation released its 2018 data as well as data for the first half of 2019.

As I expected, fatalities declined in 2018, and from the first half report it appears they will decline again in 2019. What I didn’t expect was that, despite the overall decline in traffic fatalities, pedestrian fatalities would increase by 3.4 percent and bicycle fatalities would increase by 6.3 percent.
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My previous analysis of the data found that a disproportionate number of pedestrian and cyclist fatalities took place at night and many involved pedestrians and cyclists who were impaired by alcohol. The 2018 report shows that most of the increase in fatalities took place at night and that cyclist fatalities involving alcohol (on the part of the cyclist) grew faster than the total. I’ll take a more detailed look at the data and post my findings soon.

Solar Conways, Five Years Later

By | | Follow up
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Five years ago, the Antiplanner looked skeptically on a proposal to build solar roadways. This idea received nearly $2.3 million in pledges through crowdsourcing plus $850,000 from the federal government.

A couple of years later, France installed a one-lane-wide solar roadway that was one kilometer long at a cost of $5.2 million. (Normally paving such a road would cost well under $1 million.) Now, after running this roadway for three years, the results are in: it’s a flop.

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Can’t Take the Heat? Attack Your Opponents

By | | Follow up, Transportation
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What do you do if you are an associate professor of law looking to bolster your resume by writing papers that make bold assertions and someone challenges you on those assertions? If you are Greg Shill, you call them names.

Shill, as noted here before, has written articles claiming that Americans didn’t choose to drive; they were “forced” to do so by the law. The Antiplanner responded to that, and Shill’s reply was to call me a “climate denier.” When asked to respond to my article point by point, Shill said, “There’s no point arguing with climate deniers (or anti-vaxxers, for that matter).”

I thought the question was whether the law forced people to drive, not climate. For what it’s worth, far from being a “climate denier,” whatever that is, I am not a climatologist and so I’ve never expressed a strong opinion on the issue of climate change. Apparently, Shill has no qualms about expressing opinions on subjects outside his area of expertise (which is business law). Continue reading →

The Feebleness of Twitter

By | | Follow up, Transportation
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Twitter is great. The strict limits on the length of your tweet means you can say anything you want and no one expects you to back it up because you don’t have room. Or, you can do what the Antiplanner does, and include a link to a fuller statement.

Greg Shill, whose Atlantic article I critiqued in this week’s policy brief, responded with a tweet: “Randal O’Toole, prominent Cato advisor & climate denier, has published on his site Antiplanner—motto: ‘Dedicated to the Sunset of Government Planning’—what he styles a ‘policy brief’ denouncing my Atlantic article. It’s full of falsehoods, but also irony.” He was nice enough to include a link to my brief, but he must have forgotten to include a link to any statement of what falsehoods or ironies were in my brief.

A soldier in the War on Cars named Aaron Naperstek replied to his tweet saying, “An attorney friend of mine just deposed O’Toole. He’d been hired as an expert on demography. My buddy slapped him around so badly and O’Toole’s arguments were so weak that he had to ask to withdraw his opinion instead of answering more questions.” Continue reading →

The Year in Review

By | | Follow up, Housing, Transportation
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The Antiplanner tends to agree with Dilbert that New Year’s is a random calendar date, but everyone else is looking back at 2018, probably because it provides a good excuse for a blog post. From my point of view, the two most important events of 2018 were the continuing decline of transit ridership and urban planners’ latest victory in their battles against single-family homes.

November ridership data will be out in a few days, and December a month after that, but October data show that year-over-year ridership fell in eleven of the last twelve months, the exception being July when New York subways were recovering from major delays due to repairs in July 2017. Over the last decade, annual ridership in some urban areas has fallen by nearly 50 percent, and it has fallen by more than 15 percent in more than half of the nation’s 50 largest urban areas.

While some of the decline is due to increasingly unreliable rail systems in New York, Washington, and a few other cities, most of it is due to factors beyond transit agency control: the growth of ride hailing, the growth of other alternatives such as electric scooters, and the growing affordability of driving as oil prices remain low. The question isn’t whether transit will recover; it is whether it will be able to survive at all, especially outside of New York City and the six other cities (Boston, Chicago, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Seattle, and Washington) where transit still makes a difference in the day-to-day life of the average resident. Continue reading →

Confusion about Infrastructure

By | | Follow up, News commentary, Transportation
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The Christian Science Monitor thinks that the Democrats wrote their infrastructure plan as a “political bridge to President Trump.” Fox News thinks that Trump might “get on board” the Democrats’ plan. Statements like these show that many reporters–and by extension members of the public–haven’t yet figured out the real issues behind the infrastructure debate.

As Business Insider points out, there’s a bigger difference between the two sides over “how it’s paid for” than “what gets built.” The Democrats want the federal government to spend a trillion dollars, money it would have to borrow. Trump wants private investors to spend their own money. Never the twain shall meet.

But Business Insider doesn’t understand how Trump’s idea will work. If Trump is going to rely on the private sector, it says, then only projects that generate revenue will be built because “projects that don’t generate revenue for the private sector generally don’t get financed.” But there are two kinds of public-private partnerships. The kind that Business Insider is writing about is called demand risk because the private partner takes the risk that tolls, fares, or other user fees won’t repay the cost.

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Antiplanner’s Library: Who Owns the World

By | | Book reviews, Follow up
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While doing research for my map of the New Feudalism, I found this 2010 book by Irish journalist Kevin Cahill. Despite the shrill cover rhetoric, the book is basically a nation-by-nation (and, in the United States, state-by-state) inventory of land ownership patterns. There are a lot of question marks about some countries, but it helps to fill in some of the blanks in Eastern Europe on my map.

Click image to find booksellers offering this book through abebooks.com.

Cahill’s thesis is that “the main cause of most remaining poverty in the world is an excess of landownership in too few hands.” The book is a follow-up to Cahill’s 2002 book, Who Owns Britain? Cahill makes much of Britain’s claim that the crown is the ultimate owner of all the land in the United Kingdom, and goes further and claims the Queen owns all of the land in Canada, Australia, and two-thirds of Antarctica. In fact, 60 to 70 percent of families in Australia, Britain, and Canada have fee-simple title to their land, which is just as valid as the titles Americans have to the land they own.

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APTA Tinkers with the Deck Chairs

By | | Follow up, News commentary, Transportation
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Your largest member has just quit, complaining that your organization doesn’t do enough to help it and other large members and that they are underrepresented on your organization’s executive committee. And, oh, by the way, you’re paying your chief executive officer too much.

So what do you do? If you are the American Public Transportation Association, you fire the CEO. That’s not really going to solve any problems, but after 4-1/2 years of getting paid nearly $900,000 per year (see page 17), he probably has enough to retire on. There’s no word yet on whether his replacement will get a similar salary.

A salary and benefits of close to a million dollars a year might make sense for a company that earns billions of dollars in annual revenues. It makes a little less sense for APTA, which uses its $20 million in annual revenues to lobby Congress to get billions of federal dollars funneled to its members. It makes even less sense since the federal funds going to APTA members did not significantly increase during the reign of the newly retired CEO, part of whose qualifications are that he once drove the bus for the Indiana University basketball team coached by Bobby Knight. It is particularly galling to outsiders since taxpayers are the ultimate source of the funds used to pay him.

Continue reading →