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Category Archives: Urban areas

Stupid Responses to Collapsed Ridership

By | | Transportation, Urban areas
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San Francisco Bay Area transit agencies are “struggling” as a result of the coronavirus, says one reporter. “Flailing about” would be a more accurate term. As noted yesterday, Bay Area transit agencies carried 86 percent fewer riders in May 2020 than May 2019. They basically have no idea how to cope with this other than to demand more subsidies from taxpayers and concessions from cities.

CalTrain, which offers commuter trains from San Francisco to San Jose, says it is carrying twice as many riders per day as at the low point of the pandemic. That means weekday ridership is up from 1,500 to 3,000. That’s still less than 5 percent of the usual number, which in 2018 was 64,000.

AC Transit, which serves Alameda and Contra Costa counties, warns that it may have to cut dozens of bus routes and reduce service on many more. But that’s an appropriate response when no one is riding transit. Continue reading →

HART Now Makes Video Games

By | | Transportation, Urban areas
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KHON News discovered that the Honolulu Authority for Rapid Transit (HART), which has yet to operate any transit (and will never operate truly rapid transit), has a link to a video game on its website called “Outrun Da Train.” HART apparently paid $190,000 to create this video game.

When asked why it spent so much on something that has so little to do with completing what is likely to be the most expensive above-ground rail line in the world, HART responded that the price was cost-effective since it was developed in Hawaii rather than on the mainland. Yes, but why a video game? Continue reading →

The Car Is Still King in DC

By | | Transportation, Urban areas
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In a report that will not surprise any Antiplanner reader, a Washington Post survey reveals that “the car is still king in the Washington area.” The survey of 1,507 DC-area residents found that 85 percent frequently drive for their travel needs, a number that ranges from 64 percent in DC itself to 92 percent in Virginia suburbs. The article notes that these numbers are confirmed by the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey, adding that the survey’s results haven’t changed much in the past decade.

Unfortunately, the writers have been infected with anti-auto planner rhetoric, referring to people’s preferences for auto driving as “car dependency.” Are the writers themselves computer-dependent because they no longer use manual typewriters (or ink and quill)? Are they Starbucks-dependent if they no longer brew their own coffee each morning? What’s so bad about being “dependent” on something that is faster, cheaper, and more convenient than the alternatives?

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What If We Free San Francisco?

By | | Housing, Regional planning, Urban areas
13 Comments

Someone recently alerted me to a 2017 article in Forbes in which my friend Scott Beyer, who considers himself a market urbanist, asks, “How would San Francisco develop under an open market?” His incorrect answer is that it would be even denser than today.

He bases that on the fact that in parts of the Bay Area where housing prices are highest, population growth is low. The latter, he says, is due to NIMBYism preventing construction of new housing. Get rid of NIMBYism (by getting rid of zoning), and new housing would spring up denser than ever before.

Beyers is correct that NIMBYism is a real problem. But it is not the main reason why Bay Area housing is expensive. As Bay Area developer Nicolas Arenson pointed out in a presentation to the Metropolitan Transportation Commission in May, 2015, high-density housing costs more to build per square foot than low-density housing — up to 650 percent more depending on the density. Land also costs more in areas that are already developed. As if that’s not enough, Arenson adds that dense housing “sells at a discount” to single-family homes. Continue reading →

BART: The Bay Area Transit Disaster

By | | Transportation, Urban areas
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Ridership on the $1.2 billion Bay Area Rapid Transit line to San Francisco Airport — which was never very high in the first place — has declined by 10 percent since 2013, which translates to a $4 million annual loss in fare revenues. Ridership on the $500 million BART-funded cable car to the Oakland Airport, which was also well below expectations, declined by 6 percent in the past two years, equal to about $620,000 in lost revenues.

BART blames ride hailing services for the loss in business, claiming that no one could have predicted the rise in such services when the agency planned these lines. Ride hailing is very predictable now (hindsight being 20:20), yet BART is still planning new lines, including an extension to Livermore, a second transbay crossing, and of course the line to downtown San Jose.

To pay for these new lines, as well as reconstruction of existing lines, BART asked voters to approve $3.5 billion in new funding in 2016 — and spent two years and an unknown amount of tax dollars promoting the ballot measure (without actually mentioning the measure) with the slogan “it’s time to rebuild.” It also failed to report these expenditures in a campaign filing statement, for which it was fined a whopping $7,500 by the state Fair Political Practices Commission. As one voter noted, “that’s not a fine; that’s a fantastic investment.” Continue reading →

VTA Faces $25 Million Deficit

By | | Transportation, Urban areas
2 Comments

The Santa Clara Valley Transportation Authority (VTA), which the Antiplanner has sometimes called the nation’s worst-managed transit agency, is facing a $25 million deficit next year, which will probably lead to service cuts. As the Friends of Caltrain (the commuter rail line that connects San Jose to San Francisco) note, the elephant in the room is whether VTA should go forward with its plans for billions of dollars of capital projects when it can’t afford to run the system it already has.

Friends of Caltrain doesn’t specifically say so, but the real elephant is VTA’s plans to extend the BART line to downtown San Jose. VTA is “97 percent complete” building a 10-mile line from Fremont to Berryessa (a neighborhood in north San Jose). This line, which is costing $2.3 billion, was supposed to be open at the beginning of 2018, but thanks in part to a scandal over a contractor’s use of used parts in construction, the opening has been delayed until late 2019. (An update from Friends of Caltrain says the VTA board was willing to look at capital projects, but still did not specifically mention BART.)

Extending the line another 6.5 miles to downtown San Jose is expected to cost another $4.7 billion, or more than $720 a mile, mainly because much of it will be underground. VTA expects to ask the Federal Transit Administration to cover $1.5 billion of this amount, leaving local taxpayers to cover the rest. If this project is ever completed, BART riders arriving in downtown San Jose are likely to find a stripped-down transit system that probably won’t take them where they want to go if it is more than a couple of blocks from the BART station. Continue reading →

DC Metro’s Regressive Transit System

By | | Transportation, Urban areas
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The sales and other taxes recently imposed to help restore the DC Metro rail systems are highly regressive, according to an op-ed in the Washington Post written by scholars from the Maryland Public Policy Institute. The op-ed didn’t say so, but Metro’s ridership is equally regressive in that the riders are increasingly wealthy.

As can be found in Census Bureau data posted by the Antiplanner a month ago, Metro ridership has been growing fastest among people whose incomes are $65,000 and up. In 2010, the median income of DC transit commuters was 94 percent of the median income of the DC region as a whole. By 2017, it had increased to 112 percent of the region’s median income. So poor people are being forced to subsidize rides taken by high-income people.

The tilt towards high-incomes among transit commuters is celebrated by transit advocates as a good thing because it makes it easier to convince high-income people — who tend to have more political power than poor people — to support transit boondoggles. But anyone who thinks that government transit is anything but a way to swindle taxpayers out of their money for the benefits of a few well-off people simply hasn’t been paying attention. Continue reading →

Putting Transit Over People

By | | Transportation, Urban areas
9 Comments

A southern California elected official is challenging the notion that the region can solve its congestion problems by putting more money into transit. Richard Bailey, the mayor of Coronado, has written an op ed titled “It’s time to put roads over transit.” Bailey argues that it is wasteful to put more than 50 percent of the San Diego region’s transportation dollars into transit when transit carries just 3.5 percent of the region’s commuters. He hopes to influence the urban area’s next regional transportation plan.

Bailey’s article caught the attention of a local news station that also interviewed transit advocate Colin Parent (starting at 1:05). Parent noted that there are 64,000 households in San Diego County that don’t have a car and cutting transit would hurt those people who use it as “their primary means of transportation.” Continue reading →

Agencies Respond to Transit Decline

By | | Transportation, Urban areas
5 Comments

Last May, Nashville voters rejected a proposed light-rail plan by nearly two to one. In 2014, the state stopped a plan to convert existing road lanes to dedicated bus lanes. But that hasn’t stopped the city from coming up with ridiculous new plans for transit.

Dickerson Pike today.

The city is proposing to convert two of the five lanes on Dickerson Pike into bus-rapid transit lanes. The city expects the corridor’s population to grow by 35 percent in the next two decades, which means any congestion today will be much worse in the future. That certainly won’t be helped by reducing the number of lanes by 40 percent. Continue reading →

Transit Is About Downtown

By | | Transportation, Urban areas
3 Comments

The Antiplanner’s faithful ally, Wendell Cox, likes to say that “transit is about downtown.” This is because most transit lines represent spokes focusing on a downtown hub, making it easy for people throughout an urban area to take transit downtown, but difficult for them to get from anywhere outside of downtown to somewhere else that is outside of downtown.

This can be seen in the above map of Denver’s 2004 rail transit plan known as FasTracks. All of the rail lines but one converge on downtown Denver, where about 20 percent of the 120,000 workers take transit to work. Even though downtown has less than 10 percent of the region’s jobs, 40 percent of all transit commuters in the region commute to downtown jobs. (All of these numbers are from Cox’s 2014 Central Business District report, which is based on 2006 data.) Continue reading →