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Hoodwinking Reporters

By | | News commentary, Transportation
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Nearly two weeks after the American Public Transportation Association issued its deceptive press release about 2013 transit ridership, some reporters are still being fooled. Just two days ago, for example, NPR did a story claiming commuters are “ditching cars for transit in record numbers.”

Ironically, NPR begins its story in Chicago, where (APTA data reveals) 2013 transit ridership declined by 2.7 percent from the year before. “Throughout the entire country, just about every public transportation system saw hikes in ridership,” the story incorrectly claims. In addition to Chicago, transit systems in Albuquerque, Atlanta, Austin, Baltimore, Boston, Charlotte, Dallas, Kansas City, Louisville, Memphis, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Portland, San Antonio, and Washington DC all lost riders in 2013. Don’t NPR reporters check their facts?

While reporters might be fooled, three urban planning professors writing in the Washington Post weren’t. “The association’s numbers are deceptive,” they say, and any claims that the nation is “moving away from driving” is “misguided optimism.” In fact, they continue, “transit is a small and stagnant part of the transportation system.”

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Eliminating the Carbon Emissions of 3 Million Cars

By | | News commentary
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Indoor marijuana production uses 1 percent of U.S. electricity, enough to produce the carbon emissions of three million cars. Meanwhile, the federal government is working hard to eradicate marijuana production from national forests. Reports suggest that such production is harmful to wildlife.

So how about a win-win solution? First, legalize marijuana at both the state and federal levels. Second, let the Forest Service pick some national forest locations where marijuana cultivation won’t harm wildlife or other values, then collect royalties on that cultivation, with 25 percent being kept by the Forest Service and the rest going to the federal treasury. Marijuana users win. Wildlife wins. The Forest Service and federal taxpayers win. The climate wins, or at least carbon dioxide emissions are reduced. Who could object to that?
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Of course, marijuana doesn’t have to be grown on national forest lands. People grow it there for the same reason they grow it indoors: it’s illegal and they hope for some secrecy. This nation has a billion acres of agricultural lands, only 400 million of which are used for growing crops. When marijuana is completely legalized, most will be grown outdoors on private farms just like any other crop. So if you want to blame marijuana smokers for contributing to climate change, blame the prohibitionists instead.

Interpreting the Data

By | | News commentary, Transportation
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At nearly 10.7 billion trips, transit ridership in 2013 reached its highest level in 57 years, says the American Public Transportation Association. This increase shows that people are “saying we want these (transit) investments made,” APTA’s president, Michael Melaniphy, told USA Today. Needless to say, by “investments” he means building new rail transit lines.


Any century now, transit is bound to overtake driving. Source: Transit data from APTA, urban driving from the Federal Highway Administration, and urban population from the Census Bureau. Click image for a larger view.

However, a close look at the data shows something entirely different. It turns out that New York City subways alone were responsible for more than 92 percent of the increase in transit ridership. Nationally, ridership grew by 115 million trips; New York City subway ridership grew by 106 million trips. According to the New York Times, the growth in subway ridership resulted from “falling unemployment.”

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Taxing Commuters Living Abroad

By | | News commentary
29 Comments

Governing magazine has a great idea for cities that are hard up for cash: tax suburban commuters. After all, those leeches live outside the city but depend on the city to provide them with jobs. Thus, they should pay a tax for a privilege of working in the city.

Just to make sure they get people coming and going, cities like Detroit also want to tax reverse commuters. That is, they want suburban employers to deduct taxes from the pay of their employees who happen to live in Detroit.

These are both great ideas if the goal is to hasten the fiscal demise of the cities. After all, think how well the cities would be doing if all the employers in the cities moved to the suburbs. The cities wouldn’t have to pay to provide urban services to those employers, but they also wouldn’t collect any property or other taxes from the businesses. Would they be better or worse off? If you think they would be worse off losing those jobs, then a commuter tax is redundant since the city is better off having the jobs without the commuter tax. (The same rationale applies to a reverse commuter tax on city residents who work in the suburbs.)

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Obama’s Transportation Plan

By | | News commentary, Transportation
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President Obama’s latest transportation “vision” is as unrealistic as Governor Brown’s plan to pay for high-speed rail with cap-and-trade revenues. Obama proposes that Congress spend $302 billion on surface transportation over the next four years, or $75.5 billion a year. This is nearly $25 billion more per year than Congress is spending today, which is already $10 billion more per year than federal surface transportation revenues.

In the 2012 round of transportation reauthorization, the debate was whether to limit spending to actual revenues of about $40 billion a year or continue spending at historic rates of about $50 billion a year. Senate Democrats prevailed at the $50 billion rate, but only by agreeing to limit the bill to just two years instead of the usual six. That compromise expires this year just before the Highway Trust Fund runs out of money due to overspending.

In 2012, revenues (mainly from fuel taxes but also excise taxes on truck tires, trucks, buses, and trailers) in 2012 were $40.2 billion. By law, $5.0 billion of this was dedicated to transit. Congress actually spent $8.2 billion on transit while $41.1 billion nominally went to highways (but in fact some of this also went for transit and other non-highway programs). Spending increased by more than revenues in 2013 and 2014.

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No Obesity Epidemic After All

By | | News commentary
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“There is no childhood obesity epidemic,” writes Paul Campos in an article in the New Republic. Campos bases this on a recently published study that found that obesity rates have not increased in the last decade, and in some age classes they’ve actually declined.

This is vindication for Campos, whose 2004 book, The Obesity Myth, argued that claims of an obesity epidemic were not only overblown but could lead to policies that were hazardous to people’s health. Campos points to a more recent book, End of the Obesity Epidemic, by Michael Gard, that uses worldwide data to show that obesity rates are leveling off.

This doesn’t mean obesity isn’t a problem. But, Campos states, “No one knows why the average weight of Americans was relatively stable in the 1960s and 1970s, or why it went up significantly in the 1980s and 1990s.” If no one knows why these things happened, then any policies aimed at reducing obesity are no more than shots in the dark. Unfortunately, the collateral damage from the shots is likely to be far greater than any possible benefits.
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Shutting Down Businesses

By | | News commentary, Regional planning
28 Comments

When Oregon land-use laws and rules were written back in the 1970s, timber companies cut down trees, hauled them to the mill, cut them into boards, and sold them to homebuilders. Now, some homebuilders go into the forest, cut down trees, piece together a home on site, then carefully dismantle it to take to the homebuyer’s lot for final assembly.

The problem is that piecing together the home is considered secondary forest processing, which is illegal under Oregon land-use rules for land zoned “timber resource.” As a result, some log homebuilders are being regulated out of business.

The reasons for these rules are nonsensical. Oregon is not going to run out of forest land. According to the Department of Agriculture’s 2007 National Resources Inventory, all of the developed land in Oregon, including both urban and rural developments, amounts to just 2.2 percent of the state. The density of Oregon urban areas is only about 20 percent greater than the national average, so if those rules didn’t exist, the amount of developed land would probably only be about 2.6 percent of the state. Half the land is federal and most of it is never going to be developed.
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Killing High-Speed Rail Even Deader

By | | News commentary, Transportation
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Even as the prospects of stopping Honolulu’s $5 billion low-capacity rail project grow dim, the prospects for ever building the California high-speed rail system grow even dimmer. This week, California’s Lieutenant Governor, Gavin Newsom–once a strong rail supporter–has come out against the project. As theSan Diego Union-Tribune says, this is “another nail in the coffin of high-speed rail.”


At the 2010 groundbreaking ceremony for what was supposed to be San Francisco’s high-speed rail station, then-San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom (left) tells then-Secretary of Immobility Ray LaHood that he is “extraordinarily excited” about the future of the train. Flickr photo from Mayor Gavin Newson‘s photostream.

Asked about his former support for the project, he said it was “a $32 billion project then, and we were going to get roughly one-third [each] from the federal government and the private sector.” Now, “We’re not even close to the timeline, we’re not close to the total cost estimates, and the private sector money and the federal dollars are questionable.”

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Faith, Love, and Family

By | | News commentary, Public lands
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On Saturday morning, February 8, we awoke to find three feet of snow outside. Our delight ended the next day, when newspapers reported that 61-year-old Tim Lillebo had collapsed and died shoveling his driveway Saturday evening.

Tim helped lead an incredible group of people dedicated to saving Oregon wilderness in the late 1970s and 1980s and centered on an organization then known as the Oregon Wilderness Coalition (OWC). We were more like family than co-workers, putting in long hours for nearly no pay, sharing rooms, cars, meals, and just about everything else. In mourning Tim, I find myself mourning someone who was nearly a brother but also the loss of the family itself.

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Courts Approve High-Cost, Low-Capacity Transit

By | | News commentary, Transportation
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The Ninth Circuit Court dismissed objections to the plan for Honolulu’s 20-mile, $5 billion rail line. Though proponents call it a high-capacity rail line, in fact it uses trains whose capacity is actually lower than light-rail–which term really means “low-capacity rail.”

A line with three-car light-rail trains can move about 9,000 people per hour. The maker of the Alstom trains Honolulu wants to run claims they can move 15,000 people per hour, but that’s at crush-capacity. At crowding levels that Americans will accept, the capacity is probably less than 7,000 people per hour.

By comparison, the Antiplanner estimates double-decker buses can move 17,000 people per hour on a city street and more than 100,000 people per hour on a freeway lane. Buses are faster too: Alstom trains in other cities average just 20 mph.
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