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Transit Safety: A Matter of Design

By | | Policy brief, Transportation
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Light rail is safe to ride, but it is one of the most dangerous forms of travel in the United States. That’s because most of the people who are killed by light-rail trains aren’t riding them; they are people struck by the trains. According to Federal Transit Administration (FTA) data, 657 fatalities have been associated with light rail since 2002, but only 20 of them were passengers on board the trains.

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Counting all fatalities, light rail was associated with 15.9 deaths for every billion passenger-miles that it carried. This is much higher than most other transit modes: buses were 4.9; heavy rail was 5.6; commuter rail was 7.6; and streetcars were 11.6. The only mode more dangerous than light rail was what the FTA calls hybrid rail, which is really light rail but powered by Diesels instead of electricity. It was associated with 20.6 deaths per billion passenger-miles. Continue reading →

Transit Crime Rates on the Rise

By | | Policy brief, Transportation
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After a woman died when she was shoved in front of a subway train in January, New York Mayor Eric Adams announced a major action plan aimed at reducing transit crimes. The weekend following his announcement, at least six people were stabbed on the subway system. A few days after that, a woman was robbed and her skull fractured after being struck with a hammer in a New York subway station. A few hours later, a man was stabbed in the neck at a Brooklyn subway station and someone set fire to a shopping cart in a station in the Bronx.

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New York is not the only transit system to be suffering from violent crimes. Last month, a man was shot to death on the San Francisco BART system. BART had seen violent crimes more than double in the years before the pandemic, and crime numbers remained high after the pandemic began. Continue reading →

State & Local Highway Subsidies in 2019 and 2020

By | | Policy brief, Transportation
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Americans drove 14 percent fewer miles in 2020 than in 2019, but state and local highway agencies continued to spend as much money on road improvements and maintenance. State and local highway subsidies increased only slightly, however, as the decline in miles of driving was partly offset by increases in fuel taxes and other user fees.

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Two years ago, an Antiplanner policy brief looked at 2018 state and local highway subsidies. Today’s update compares 2020 data with 2019 results based on data published in the Federal Highway Administration’s annual Highway Statistics reports. In these reports, highway user fees, and how much of them are actually spent on highways as opposed to mass transit or other programs, are shown in tables SDF for the states and LDF for local governments. The sources of highway funds, including user fees, general funds, and other taxes, are shown in tables SF-3 and LGF-1. The actual amounts of money spent on roads are shown in SF-2 and LGF-2. Continue reading →

Truckers, Congestion, and Class Conflict

By | | Policy brief, Transportation
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“During the pandemic lockdowns, the email jobs caste [meaning remote workers] loved to talk about essential workers,” observes Marxist writer Malcom Kyeyune, but they now regard those workers with “outright hatred.” His fellow leftists claim to speak for the working class, charges Kyeyune, but in fact the leftist movement and the working-class movement have “divorced.”

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Kyeyune was writing about the Canadian truckers who object to mandatory vaccinations, but he also mentioned European truckers who protested high fuel taxes a few years ago. In the United States, middle-class progressives have come to depend on truckers to deliver all the stuff they order from Amazon but do everything they can to make the daily lives of those truckers miserable. Continue reading →

2021: The Year Transit Failed to Recover

By | | Policy brief, Transportation, Useful Data
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Despite receiving tens of billions of dollars in support from Congress, the transit industry in 2021 failed to recover most of the riders it lost to the pandemic in 2020. Ridership in 2020 had fallen by 54 percent from 2019 due to the pandemic, and was only 3 percent greater, or 52 percent below 2019 numbers, in 2021, according to data released by the Federal Transit Administration last week.

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Ridership did improve over the pandemic months of 2020, but not by much. The year 2020 ended with ridership at 38 percent of pre-pandemic levels. It reached 50 percent for the first time in July 2021, slowly climbed to 55 percent in September, and hovered around 55 to 57 percent for the rest of the year. Continue reading →

America’s Rising Housing Prices

By | | Housing, Policy brief
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Now is a great time to sell a home, but a terrible time to buy one. According to the St. Louis Fed, median home prices in the United States have risen by 25 percent since the pandemic began in December 2019, which is probably more than any two-year period in history. Even after adjusting for inflation, prices in many markets are higher today than they were at the peak of the mid-2000s housing bubble.

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This increase is due to a combination of labor shortages and supply-chain issues. Unlike the housing bubble, these issues are affecting all housing markets, not just those beset by anti-sprawl growth-management planning. Indeed, prices in some places without any growth management have risen more than in some places with strict growth-management regulations. Continue reading →

How Cato Sold Out California Property Owners

By | | Housing, Policy brief
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In September, 2021, California Governor Gavin Newsom signed a bill abolishing single-family zoning. This bill was a victory for the Yes in Other People’s Back Yards (YIOPBY) movement, as well as for urban planners who sought to densify California urban areas, which are already the densest in the nation.

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It was also a victory for the Cato Institute, which was proud of the fact that it was working hand-in-hand with left-wing groups that sought to force Californians to live in ways in which they didn’t want to live. Cato’s work was led by Michael Tanner, whose previous experience with housing issues was nearly nil. In supporting this movement, Cato and Tanner ignored everything I had written in two books and seven policy papers for Cato over the previous fourteen years. Continue reading →

Boulder’s Open Space and the Marshall Fire

By | | Policy brief, Regional planning, Wildfire
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At 11 am on December 30, 2021, a small fire was reported near the intersection of state highway 93 and Marshall Road in Boulder County, Colorado. Though driven by high winds, it took a full hour for the fire to creep across three miles of grasslands to the town of Superior, where it proceeded to burn 533 homes to the ground. It also crossed U.S. 36 into the city of Louisville where it burned another 332 homes, as well as 106 homes in unincorporated areas outside the two cities. In addition to killing at least one and possibly three people, the fire also destroyed about 100 other structures, including a hotel, and damaged 150 or so more. In all, it burned more than 6,000 acres in 30 or so hours before snowfall the evening of December 31 put it out.

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As it happens, I had given a presentation on wildfire to the Independence Institute, Colorado’s free-market think tank, just two months before the fire. The presentation noted that state and local land-use regulations that require compact development make cities more vulnerable to fire. The Tubbs fire in 2017 destroyed nearly 3,000 homes in Santa Rosa, California and nearby communities while the Camp Fire in 2018 destroyed more than 14,000 homes in Paradise, California and nearby communities. Continue reading →

Killed by the Pandemic: Virginia Railway Express

By | | Policy brief, Transportation
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Transit was hit hard by the pandemic, and one of the hardest-hit agencies was the Virginia Railway Express (VRE). Ridership in April and May 2020 was only 2.5 percent of what it had been the year before. By November 2021, ridership was still only 17.5 percent of pre-pandemic numbers.

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VRE operates commuter trains from northern Virginia to Washington DC’s Union Station. It has two lines, one heading west to Manassas and the other heading south to Fredericksburg and Spotsylvania. It is a true commuter-rail operation, with trains heading into Washington in the morning and heading out in the afternoon but not providing on weekends or other times of the day. Continue reading →

U.S. Road Conditions and Performance in 2020

By | | Policy brief, Transportation
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While Americans drove their cars only 84 percent as many miles in 2020 as in 2019, according to data recently published by the Federal Highway Administration, they drove semi-trucks 101 percent as many miles. These and other data are from the 2020 Highway Statistics, an annual compilation of data on the condition, use, and financial status of the nation’s highway network.

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Unlike the annual National Transit Database, which the Federal Transit Administration releases as a group of two dozen or so tables together each fall, the Federal Highway Administration releases Highway Statistics incrementally. To date, it has released most of the 2020 tables relating to the extent and performance of highways, but very few financial tables. This policy brief will review some of the non-financial tables that have been released. Continue reading →