Category Archives: Policy brief

Did you know that a single gallon of fuel is enough to power an entire high-speed train to go from New York to Los Angeles and back? Neither did I, but the U.S. High-Speed Rail Association (US HSR) made this preposterous claim on its web site last week. Someone there apparently figured out that it is ridiculous and took it down, but below is the graphic that accompanied the claim.

US HSR’s claim that high-speed trains can go 6,600 miles on one gallon of fuel is absurd, and its claim that airliners can only go 400 feet on one gallon is also wrong.

Like the claim that one rail line can move as many people as an eight-lane freeway, this claim for energy efficiency is startling enough that we are likely to hear it again as Democrats attempt to spend a few trillion dollars building a high-speed rail system across the country. In preparation for that debate, here are ten reasons why the United States should not build high-speed rail. Continue reading →

Before Black Lives Mattered, the acronym BLM usually referred to the Bureau of Land Management, an agency in the Department of the Interior that manages more than 10 percent of the nation’s land as well as mineral resources located under another 19 percent of the nation. After the creation of the national forests, national parks, national monuments, and fish & wildlife refuges, the BLM was formed in 1946 to manage the remaining federal lands.

Click image to download a four-page PDF of this policy brief.

The BLM manages areas that were never claimed as a railroad land grant, under the Homestead Act, or under some other law, leading people to sometimes call them “the lands that no one wanted.” In some cases that is true, but in other cases someone might have wanted the lands but laws such as the Homestead Act restricted the number of acres that a settler could claim for themselves. Continue reading →

Transit advocates routinely make deceptive claims about the advantages of transit over cars or rail transit over buses. Often those claims deal with the capacity of different modes of transportation to move people. This policy brief will scrutinize some of these claims.

Click image to download a four-page PDF of this policy brief.

Deception #1: Buses vs. Cars

Transit advocates often use a particular photo set that purports to show the “space required to transport 60 people by car, bicycle, and bus.” The photo on the right shows a conventional 40-foot bus, which has about 40 seats in it and room for about 20 people standing. Next to the bus are the 60 passengers. Continue reading →

Voters in Austin and Portland will be asked to increase local taxes to pay for rail transit this November. Less than 8 percent of Portland-area workers and just 2.3 percent of Austin workers take transit to work, so why do transit agencies think that a majority of voters would support spending billions of tax dollars on rail transit?

Click image to download a four-page PDF of this policy brief.

The answer to this question is provided by a famous article in the Onion that claimed a survey by the American Public Transportation Association had found that “98 percent of Americans support the use of mass transit by others.” Congestion in many American urban areas has grown significantly and the Onion article quotes a commuter as saying, “It’s about time somebody did something to get some of these other cars off the road.” Continue reading →

The federal government has several programs aimed at making affordable housing available to low-income families, and people have found numerous ways to scam those programs.

Click image to download a five-page PDF of this policy brief.

• Local politicians may steer federal housing funds to developers who made large campaign contributions to those politicians.
• Contractors build low-income housing and then bill the federal government for inflated or unrelated costs;
• Staff at local housing agencies can accept bribes to bump people to the top of waiting lists to move into low-income housing;
• People can move into low-income housing when their incomes are low (such as right after they graduated from college) and then stay in the housing after their incomes rise to well above the average.

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As noted in last week’s policy brief, a pandemic is less likely to “change everything” than it is to accelerate and magnify existing trends. The Census Bureau’s recent release of 2019 American Community Survey data along with other housing data can help us predict what trends the COVID-19 pandemic is likely to accelerate.

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One unfortunate trend is the increasing cost of housing, which is a result of government regulation. However, this is one trend that the pandemic might reverse, as that increase is mainly taking place in particularly dense urban areas such as Los Angeles, New York, and San Francisco, and people’s responses to the pandemic are likely to reduce densities as they escape from such dense areas and move to places with less land-use regulation. Continue reading →

The United States had 2.3 million more workers in 2019 than in 2018, and more than 30 percent of the increase worked at home. This boosted the share of people who worked at home from 5.3 to 5.7 percent.

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Historian Stephen Davies observes that a major pandemic does not “introduce something novel.” Instead, “it accelerates and magnifies trends and processes that were already under way.” It can also bring “a final stop to processes that were already exhausted.” People working at home is an example of a trend that is being accelerated and magnified by the COVID-19 pandemic. Continue reading →

When I was in high school—this would be about 1969—my social studies teacher asked the class to imagine we could design the city of Portland from scratch. What would it look like? I did a few calculations and realized that, if people were packed into higher densities, most of the city could be left as parks and open space. My vision called for a grid of high-rise clusters with a mixture of retail shops and apartments, accompanied by some single-family homes. Each cluster would be surrounded by forests and parks and connected with the others by rail transit so no one would have to drive. Industrial areas would be located in their own clusters.

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It never occurred to me to ask whether people wanted to live in high rises, whether the cost of building housing in high rises would be more than the cost of single-family homes, or whether people would still need cars because they might want to go somewhere not reachable by train. In essence, I had designed the Ideal Communist City as described in a book by that name that was first published in English in 1971. That book was influenced by Swiss architect Le Corbusier’s Radiant City, which he proposed in the 1930s. Planning historian Peter Hall called Corbusier “the Rasputin of urban planning” for his authoritarian views and the ways in which he beguiled and misled generations of urban planners. Continue reading →

In 2005, Kansas City opened its Main Street bus-rapid transit line, one of the first of its kind in the nation. The buses were “branded’ with distinctive paint jobs and, like light rail, stopped less frequently than regular buses, increasing their average speeds. They also ran four times per hour instead of the twice-per-hour schedules of many local buses.

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Sharing lanes with other traffic, the buses didn’t have a dedicated right of way, didn’t require people to pay before they board, didn’t have priority at traffic signals, and didn’t use other advanced technologies. Despite this, the increased frequencies and speeds generated a 50 percent increase in ridership on the route. Continue reading →