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Towards Global Peace and Prosperity

By | | Policy brief
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Three years ago, it was easy to be optimistic about the future. World poverty was in rapid decline. Many major diseases had been nearly eradicated. Global trade tied nations together, limiting military conflicts in most of the world outside of the Middle East. Thanks to good old American innovation, energy prices were low. Most environmental problems, including air and water pollution, were either solved or proven solvable. While doomsayers made dire predictions about climate change, it was hard to take them seriously when their prescriptions were the same tired old central planning ideas they had always advocated even though most of those ideas would, in fact, increase greenhouse gas emissions.

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Today, it is much easier to be pessimistic. The COVID-19 pandemic not only killed at least 6 million people (with perhaps a third of them in the U.S.), it revealed several critical weaknesses in the global trading system. Congress’ response to the pandemic, which was to dump trillions of dollars into the economy without increasing economic productivity, caused the worst inflation America has seen in 40 years. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is leading to both energy and food shortages around the world that are bound to get worse as the war continues. On top of this, the conflict has revived fears of nuclear war.

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The Automobile Won

By | | Policy brief, Transportation
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Last month, anti-automobile activists led by the Congress for the New Urbanism announced the formation of a national Freeway Fighters Network. The network opposes new freeways and freeway expansions and wants to shift freeway money to other forms of transportation. Among other things, they object to new freeway capacity because it induces more highway travel.

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I have a message for these anti-auto activists: The war on the automobile is over. The automobile won. More accurately, auto drivers and users won. It is time for those engaged in this war to stop wasting their time, and everyone else’s, and start doing something productive. People concerned about the impacts of the automobile should give up trying to reduce driving, which has never worked, and instead encourage new automobiles and highways that are safer, cleaner, and more energy efficient.

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Transit’s Zombie Future

By | | Policy brief, Transportation, Useful Data
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March transit ridership pushed up above 60 percent of pre-pandemic numbers for the first time since the pandemic began, according to data released by the Federal Transit Administration last week. Ridership was boosted by the fact that March 2022 had two more weekdays than March 2019. Since April 2022 has one fewer weekday than April 2019, ridership is likely to dip back down below 60 percent in April.

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Transit is still lagging well behind other modes of travel. Amtrak carried 68 percent as many passenger-miles as in March 2019 while the airlines carried 88 percent. Domestic air travel was probably above 90 percent, but data sorting domestic from international travel won’t be available for a couple of months. Miles of driving in March will be available in about a week but are likely to be more than 100 percent of March 2019 miles.

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America’s Two Housing Markets

By | | Housing, Policy brief
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Imagine that, on top of all our other problems, the United States had a shortage of pickup trucks. While many pickups are purchased for recreational purposes, they also play vital roles in construction, farming, forestry, and other industries. The impacts of a shortage could reverberate throughout the economy.

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A California politician says he has a solution to the pickup shortage: Simply buy old pickups, scrap them, and use the materials to build subcompact cars such as the Chevrolet Spark or Mitsubishi Mirage. Full-sized pickups typically weigh twice as much as subcompacts, so this program could flood the market with two or more vehicles for every one that is scrapped. That would have to reduce the price of pickups, wouldn’t it? Continue reading →

America’s Volatile Housing Markets

By | | Housing, Policy brief
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After adjusting for inflation, the nationwide median price of housing exceeded median prices during the 2006 housing bubble for the first time in early 2021, according to home price index data published by the Federal Housing Finance Agency. Zillow agrees: though Zillow says its price index is for the “typical” house rather than the median home, its inflation-adjusted price for single-family homes peaked in November 2006 at $295,000, then fell below $200,000 in 2012. The typical price then crept above $295,000 in December 2020. As of March 2022, it had grown to $338,000, an inflation-adjusted increase of 22 percent since the beginning of the pandemic.

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Out of 660 metropolitan (areas with more than 50,000 people) and micropolitan (areas with populations of 2,500 to 50,000) areas tracked by Zillow, March 2022 housing prices exceeded the inflation-adjusted 2006-2008 peak in all but about 170. Major urban areas where prices had not yet reached the peak of the bubble include New York, Chicago, Washington, Baltimore, Minneapolis-St. Paul, and St. Louis. But prices in Atlanta, Charlotte, Dallas, Houston, and San Antonio are all well above their 2006-2008 peaks, not that any of these regions experienced much of a peak.

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Americans Fleeing Dense Cities & Suburbs

By | | Housing, Policy brief, Regional planning
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Americans are leaving the cities. Between July 1, 2020 and July 1, 2021, New York City lost 305,000 residents. Los Angeles County lost nearly 160,000. Cook County, home of Chicago, lost nearly 90,000. San Francisco lost nearly 55,000. The counties in which Boston, Dallas, Miami, Philadelphia, San Jose, Seattle, and Washington are located each lost well over 20,000. Collectively, the counties containing 26 of the nation’s 33 largest cities lost nearly 900,000 residents.

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Changes in population in 2021 are particularly revealing because the nation’s overall population hardly grew that year. The Census Bureau estimates that 2021 numbers were only 0.1 percent greater than in 2020, the slowest growth rate since the nation began. Thus, local population changes mainly reflect people’s preferences about where they want to live, not birth rates or foreign immigration. Continue reading →

Old Technologies for New Starts

By | | Policy brief, Transportation
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As part of the president’s proposed 2023 budget, the Federal Transit Administration plans to give out an unprecedented $4.45 billion on new transit capital projects, sometimes called New Starts and Small Starts. For comparison, in 2022 it gave away less than $2.5 billion. The difference, of course, is due to passage of the infrastructure law, which massively increased federal subsidies to transit.

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This increase in spending and the projects that the FTA proposes to fund demonstrate that neither the transit industry nor the legislators funding it are responding to changes resulting from the recent pandemic. Transit was already declining before the pandemic, and the pandemic led to a much larger decline, much of which is likely to be permanent. Transit’s response to the decentralization of downtowns and cities should be to rely on smaller vehicles. Yet the New Starts proposals all presume that downtown job numbers and transit ridership will rapidly grow and thus more spending and larger vehicles are needed to accommodate that growth. Continue reading →

The Myth of Rail Mobility

By | | Policy brief, Transportation
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Now that the war in Ukraine has revealed that Europe is even more dependent on foreign oil than the United States, Americans can smugly sit back and say, “If only those Europeans acted more like, you know, Europeans, they wouldn’t be in this fix.” Because, as everyone knows, Europeans travel mostly by electric public transit and high-speed trains, so they aren’t dependent on oil to get around by car or airplane.

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The myth that rail transit and intercity passenger trains are dominant forms of transportation in Europe is one that I’ve addressed before, but it is repeated so often that it is worth examining again using the latest data. These data show that passenger trains are not an important source of mobility in most developed and developing nations, where rail travel is heavily outweighed by highway travel and, in most countries, air travel. Continue reading →

Airlines: Our #2 Source of Mobility

By | | Policy brief, Transportation
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Airlines carried Americans 77 percent as many miles of domestic travel in 2021 as they did in 2019, according to data recently released by the Bureau of Transportation Statistics. International air travel was still far short of pre-pandemic levels, being just 29 percent of 2019 numbers. The 578 billion miles of domestic air travel was about the same as in 2013, while the 1,743 miles per capita was slightly more than in 2003.

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U.S. airlines are, or should be, the envy of the world. They carry Americans far more miles per capita than airlines (or, for that matter, railroads) of almost any other country. Airport infrastructure is in excellent condition: as of 2020, 85 percent of commercial airport runways were in good condition, 13 percent in fair condition, and only 1 percent in poor condition. U.S. airlines’ safety record is second to none, experiencing just 14 fatalities while carrying more than 7 trillion passenger-miles since 2010. And airlines do all this at a profit: while some companies have lost money in some years, the domestic airline industry as a whole earned a profit in every year since 2010. Continue reading →

A Century-Old Love of Rail Monopolies

By | | Policy brief, Transportation
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In the mid-1990s, the United Kingdom privatized its government-owned railroads. That privatization proved to be a disaster, and now the country is renationalizing the trains.

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Except none of these things are true. Britain didn’t really privatize its railroads in the 1990s. What it did do turned out to be pretty successful but, like many transportation systems, failed to survive the pandemic. What it’s doing now isn’t really nationalization but merely rebranding of the system—in effect, rearranging the deck chairs. Continue reading →