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Do Densities Matter?

By | | News commentary, Regional planning
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Do population densities influence the spread of coronavirus? A new study in the Journal of the American Planning Association says no: “after controlling for metropolitan population, county density is not significantly related to the infection rate.”

Co-authored by Reid Ewing, one of the nation’s loudest proponents of smart-growth (meaning density), the study made a crucial mistake: it measured the population density of entire counties. But most counties in urban areas are only partially urbanized.

San Bernardino County, for example, has 2 million people and covers 20,000 square miles, for an average density of about 100 people per square mile. But 1.8 million of those people live on just 2.6 percent of the land, meaning a density of 3,400 people per square mile. Obviously, using 100 instead of 3,400 would drastically change the results. Continue reading →

Mobs vs. Elites vs. Democracy

By | | News commentary
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This Independence Day weekend, I’ll take a stand and say that confederate statues erected during the Jim Crow era to celebrate slavery and intimidate blacks should be torn down. But the decision to tear down a statue should be made democratically, not by mob rule.

When mobs started tearing down Confederate statues, people asked what would come next: would statues of Jefferson and Washington be torn down as well? Then statues of Jefferson and Washington were toppled in Portland.

Washington and Jefferson probably contributed more to human freedom than all but a handful of other people in the history of the world. But they owned slaves, so their statutes probably deserved it, right? Continue reading →

Not the End of the World

By | | News commentary
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“Climate change is happening,” says environmentalist Michael Shellenberger. “It’s just not the end of the world. It’s not even our most serious environmental problem.”

Shellenberger makes these statements in an article “apologizing” for the “climate scare.” Although he himself used to call climate change an “existential crisis,” he no longer believes that. In fact, he hasn’t believed it for awhile, but didn’t say so publicly because he feared “losing friends and funding.”

Shellenberger says he has been an environmentalist for 30 years, which means he joined the movement just as it was being taken over by socialists. As I describe in The Education of an Iconoclast, the environmental movement in the 1980s was tolerant of a wide range of views. Continue reading →

Spending Money We Don’t Have on Projects We Don’t Need

By | | News commentary, Transportation
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House Transportation & Infrastructure Committee Chair Peter DeFazio yesterday released a proposal to spend tens of billions of dollars the federal government doesn’t have on projects we don’t need. Congressional authorization for federal spending on highways and transit expires this year, and DeFazio proposes to renew this with a program that will increase spending by 62 percent without increasing the taxes that support it.

Whereas the previous law spent an average of $61 billion per year over the last five years, DeFazio’s proposal would spend almost $99 billion a year over five years. At one time, federal spending on highways and most transit came out of gas taxes and other highway user fees and Congress didn’t spend more than came in. Since the mid-2000s, however, Congress has ignored actual revenues and spent billions of dollars a year out of general funds. The 2015 law, for example, simply appropriated $51 billion of general funds into the Highway Trust Fund (which despite the name spends money on both highways and transit).

DeFazio’s bill would not only increase this deficit spending, it includes a poison pill for highways while it unleashes spending increases on transit. For highways, the bill would include a “fix it first” provisions that says that states cannot increase highway capacity until they get existing roads in a state of good repair. No similar provision is made for transit even though transit is in a much poorer state of repair. Continue reading →

Americans on the Move

By | | News commentary, Useful Data
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Maricopa County (Phoenix) was the nation’s fastest-growing county in 2018, gaining more than 81,000 new residents from 2017, according to population estimates just released by the Census Bureau. A distant second was Clark County (Las Vegas), at 48,000 new residents; followed by Harris County (Houston), 34,000; Riverside County (California), 33,500; and King County (Seattle), 29,000. Since 2010, Maricopa gained 593,000 residents and was just edged for the number one spot by Harris County, which grew by 605,000.

Just as significant are the counties that lost population, led by Cook County (Chicago), which lost 24,000 people. Three New York City boroughs are in the bottom five: Queens (-18,000), Brooklyn (-13,500), and the Bronx (-7,500). Los Angeles County is also in the bottom five, having lost 13,000. Baltimore, Honolulu, St. Louis, Cuyahoga (Cleveland), and Sonoma Counties are also big losers, the latter due to wildfire issues.

As a result of these county changes, the nation’s three largest metropolitan areas all lost population: New York (-25,000), Chicago (-22,000), and Los Angeles (-7,000). The declines in the central counties of these regions were partly offset by gains in suburban counties. The metro areas with the biggest gains were Dallas-Ft. Worth (132,000), Phoenix (96,000), Houston (92,000), Atlanta (76,000), Orlando (60,000), and Seattle (55,000). Continue reading →

She’s No Alexander Hamilton

By | | News commentary, Transportation
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The Antiplanner might be behind the times, but has anyone else noticed that it is the Democrats who are playing the role of Alexander Hamilton — the conservative who wanted to centralize government and concentrate power in New York banks — while the Republicans are playing the role of Thomas Jefferson — the civil libertarian who wanted to keep economic and political power decentralized? I always wondered why Lin-Manuel Miranda picked such a conservative historical figure to be the hero of his left-leaning musical.

Now we know. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Green New Deal is going to cost tens of trillions of dollars, but she just blithely says we’ll pay for it “the same way we paid for World War II”: “The Federal Reserve can extend credit to power these projects and investments and new public banks can be created to extend credit.”

That’s not how we paid for World War II. Instead, we borrowed money from banks and people that had money. Alexander Hamilton knew just creating a bank doesn’t suddenly give it credit; instead, there has to be assets or income backing up that credit. Continue reading →

The New Transportation Intelligence Test

By | | News commentary, Transportation
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The Antiplanner has called streetcars an intelligence test: anyone who thinks they are a good idea is not smart enough to make decisions about urban transportation. Now Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has revealed a new intelligence test, this one dealing with high-speed rail.

Obama’s high-speed rail plan might have replaces 5 percent of American air travel and was projected to cost at least half a trillion dollars. Replacing all air travel would cost much more.

In a description of her Green New Deal released yesterday, Ocasio-Cortez advocates that we “build out high-speed rail at a scale where air travel stops becoming necessary.” This is far more ambitious than Obama’s high-speed rail plan, which was only about 12,000 route miles in five separate, disconnected systems. Continue reading →

Is There an Urban-Rural Divide?

By | | News commentary
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Political commentators have observed that Americans have increasingly sorted themselves into Red and Blue areas, with blue dominating the cities, red dominating rural areas, and the suburbs still being a mix sometimes referred to as purple. A new study takes a close look at this sort in Oregon.

As an Associated Press article notes in discussing this study, in 1966, the Democratic Party had a majority of voters in every region of Oregon, yet the state elected a Republican governor who won 33 out of 36 counties. By contrast, in 2018 ruralites were 30 percent more likely to be Republican than urbanites, and the winner of the governorship won only seven counties, namely those that were the most urbanized.

The study itself says changes resulted partly from the decline in federal land timber cutting. This left rural areas with high unemployment and resentment against the urban areas that supported the reduced cutting. Continue reading →

Freedom in the Fifty States

By | | News commentary, Regional planning
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The Cato Institute released its assessment of freedom in each of the fifty states last week, and it generally does a good job of distinguishing between states that heavily restrict people’s lives and ones that allow more freedom. But the Antiplanner has been concerned that the many different indices of freedom published by various groups don’t seriously consider property rights, which most libertarians believe are the fundamental basis of freedom.

This year’s report attributes about 11 percent of the score for each state to property rights. Most of that 11 percent comes from two factors: rent control (5.3 percent) and zoning (4.8 percent). Rent control is easy to identify but it is not a very good indicator of freedom because most states don’t allow it or allow it only under special circumstances. Only four states allow it outright, and not surprisingly given the weighting these make up four of the five lowest-scoring states on property rights.

Zoning is much more difficult. The fifty-states report relies on the Wharton Business School’s index of zoning, but that is more than a decade old and fails to accurately assess just how flexible zoning is in some states and inflexible in others. Even more than Wharton’s index, the report relies on an index of court decisions on land-use issues, which seems more reliable as a guide to how litigious people are than to how restrictive their land-use rules are. Continue reading →

Tampa Petition: Forward into the Past

By | | News commentary, Transportation
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Anti-auto activists in Tampa say they have gathered enough signatures to put a measure on November’s ballot increasing sales taxes for Hillsborough County transportation. The news report about the measure claims that 55 percent will be used for roads while 45 percent will be used for transit, but that is only one of the major deceptions behind the measure.

The petition itself lists “improve roads and bridges” as the first goal of the sales tax. But in fact, only a small share of the money would be used to improve (which in transportation parlance means increase the capacity of) roads and none would be used to improve bridges. In fact, the petition specifically states that none of the money can be used to build new roads or bridges or add new lanes to existing roads or bridges. Some money — 14 percent — can be used to improve intersections, increasing their capacity, but that’s it.

The supposed 55-45 split is also wrong. First, it is really only a 54-45 split, as one percent of the money goes to the Hillsborough metropolitan planning organization to do all of its brilliant planning. The remaining 54 percent goes to Hillsborough County and cities within that county (proportional to population), but it won’t all be spent on roads either. In fact, the petition says it can be spent on “roads, bridges, sidewalks, intersections, and public transportation.” Continue reading →