In an earlier post, I mentioned that density increases congestion and was chastised for failing to prove it. So here is the evidence.
Start with data from the 2000 census that compares the percentage of commuters who drive to work with the population density of nearly 400 urbanized areas (areas with more than 50,000 people). If density reduced congestion, then increased densities would greatly reduce auto commuting.
In a previous post, I warned that the Eugene bus-rapid transit line may not live up to expectations. In particular, test runs indicated that it might go as fast as promised — an average 16-minute trip from downtown Springfield to downtown Eugene. Some people thought that it was just a matter of getting the bugs worked out.
The line has now been open for more than a week, and they still can’t meet the 16-minute schedule. Sometimes a bus has fallen so far behind its schedule that the transit agency has had to pull it from the line.
Urban planners have made housing unaffordable in places like San Jose and Portland. But planning has created affordability problems that are at least as serious in Australia, Britain, Canada, Ireland, and New Zealand.
That’s Wendell Cox’s conclusion in his third annual housing affordability survey, which looks at housing prices in 159 housing markets in the United States and British Commonwealth countries.
The myth-making has already begun. The Oregonian reports today about Portland city employee Rob Bernard, which it describes as the man “most responsible for opening” Portland’s new aerial trams “on schedule and on budget.”
On what budget? As Jim Karlock documents, the tram went more than 500 percent over the original projected cost, and its operating costs are at least 250 percent over projections. I’d like to have a budget like that!
About twenty-five urban areas had rail transit in 2005. Transit systems in five of these lost market share to the automobile, they gained in eight, and in eleven they held their own (when measured to the nearest tenth of a percent). Data for the twenty-fifth, New Orleans, are not available.
“Holding their own” may sound good for transit systems in our auto-oriented society. But it is a disappointment when so much more has been promised for the expensive rail lines being built in so many cities. This is especially true when all but seven of these transit systems — rail and bus — carry under 2 percent of total passenger travel in the regions they serve.
According to popular convention, General Motors and the oil industry bought up all the wonderful streetcars that used to efficiently move people around our cities and scrapped them, thereby forcing people to buy cars and become petroleum-dependent. If true, spending billions of dollars on rail transit merely restores the natural balance that was disrupted by monopolistic auto and oil companies.
In fact, this myth is totally bogus, and I am gratified to note that Googling general motors conspiracy actually produces more web sites debunking the myth than supporting it (at least on Google’s first page). Yet I still hear it raised time and again, so it is worth debunking one more time.
Commenter Dan says that my previous post on problems with long-range planning used “outdated examples,” so let’s look at a current example of long-range planning. The Denver Regional Council of Governments (DRCOG) published its Metro Vision 2030, a long-range land-use plan for the Denver metro area, in 2005. That makes it a twenty-five year plan.
Now that the U.S. DOT has published 2005 data for transit (1.9 mb download) and Highway Statistics, we can expect to soon hear APTA crowing about how transit is capturing market share from the automobile. This, however, is just another lie your transit lobbyist is telling you.
Rail transit continued to do poorly in many American cities in 2005, at least judging from transit data recently released by the FTA. The FTA publishes data in two different forms. The first has data in rather cryptic files that are easy to manipulate as spreadsheets. The second has almost identical data that are easier to read but harder to work on.
To simplify matters for you, I took the data I think are most important and put them in one downloadable spreadsheet. This file includes, for every transit agency and every mode of transit they operate: operating costs; capital costs; fares; trips; passenger miles; vehicle revenue miles; and vehicle revenue hours. The file also tells what urbanized area the agency operates in.
David Schoenbrod is an attorney who once worked for the Natural Resources Defense Council and now teaches at New York Law School. His 1993 book, Power Without Responsibility, argues that legislators often avoid responsibility for their actions by delegating power to bureaucracies. If the bureaucracies succeed, the legislators can take credit; if they fail, the legislators can blame the bureaucrats.
This explains why planning is so popular in a country that supposedly opposed central planning for most of the twentieth century. The planners gladly accept the power that legislators are so eager to delegate. Yet even the planners do not face any responsibility for their actions. If they screw up, their usual “punishment” will be more money and power to try to fix the problems they created.
