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Monthly Archives: June 2014

Uncompetitive Transit

By | | Transportation
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A web site called You Are Here has put together an intriguing series of maps showing the best mode of transportation from any point in various cites to any other part of those cities. So far, the maps cover Manhattan, Brooklyn, Chicago, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Portland, Salt Lake City, Cambridge, Boulder, and Santa Monica.


Click image to go to the “Best Mode” Portland map.

Select any of the above cities (or click here to see if more cities have been added), wait for the map to load, then click anywhere on the map. Instantly, the map is color coded to show the fastest mode of transportation from the point you selected to anywhere else in the city. Modes include walking, cycling, public transit, and driving.

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Ignoring the Law of Supply & Demand

By | | Housing, Regional planning
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The Twin Cities Metropolitan Council is currently writing the Thrive Plan, which–like so many other urban plans today–aims to cram most new development into high-density transit centers. To justify this policy, the council naturally hired Arthur Nelson, the University of Utah urban planning professor who has predicted that the U.S. will soon have 22 million surplus single-family homes on large lots.


Click image to download a copy of the report.

“Demand for attached and multifamily housing in the Twin Cities will continue to grow,” trumpets the Met Council’s press release about Nelson’s report on Twin Cities housing. That, of course, is what the Met Council wanted Nelson to “prove,” which is why they hired him. However, his report can’t really justify the Met Council’s plans.

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There’s an App for Disruption

By | | News commentary, Transportation
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A former limousine driver and current editor of Limo Insider Report has written a persuasive letter of complaint about Uber to the U.S. Attorney General, accusing the ride-sharing company of circumventing all sorts of laws and regulations. Similarly, the Taxicab, Limousine, and Paratransit Association argues that Uber and Lyft are risky for consumers to use. These are both good points.

At the same time, at least some of those regulations are in place for the specific purpose of limiting competition within the taxi industry. As a result, as the Washington Post observes, taxi medallions “have been the best investment in America for years.”

When regulations are in place to protect the providers of a good or service, the consumers usually are the losers. Politicians, policy makers, and opinion leaders need to understand that the true value of a policy must be judged from the point of view of consumers, not providers.

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Congress Should Get Out of the Transportation Business

By | | Transportation
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Oregon Senator Ron Wyden has bravely proposed to pass a three-month transportation bill. Three more months, he says, will give Congress a chance to figure out a long-term solution. The only problem is that Congress had three months three months ago and did nothing.


Would you buy a used transportation system from these people?

Meanwhile, Senators Chris Murphy (D-CT) and Bob Corker (R-TN) have proposed to increase gas taxes by 12 cents a gallon. Considering that the gas tax hasn’t been increased in more than 20 inflation-filled years, this would seem to make sense.

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So Much for Baby Boomers Downsizing

By | | Housing
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Smart-growth planners justify their preoccupation with multifamily housing on the notion that, not only do Millennials prefer such housing, but as Baby Boomers become Empty Nesters, they too will prefer such housing. This is based on a logical fallacy:

  1. Most people in multifamily housing have no children
  2. When their children leave home, Baby Boomers will no longer have children
  3. Therefore, most Baby Boomers will prefer multifamily housing.

The reality, of course, is that even most Millennials live in suburbs, not dense inner cities–and even more aspire to eventually own their own home. So to presume that Baby Boomers will suddenly move to multifamily housing, out of possible nostalgia for their younger years, is absurd.

This is confirmed by a recent analysis of census data published by Fannie Mae. The share of Baby Boomers with children living at home declined from more than 24 percent in 2006 to 12 percent in 2012. Yet the share of Baby Boomers who live in single-family homes has fallen by just 0.3 percent from their peak, and remain today above the share before the financial crisis.

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Premature Celebration

By | | Transportation
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The Atlantic may be a bit premature in heralding “the triumphant return” of private passenger trains. This claim is based on the Florida East Coast (FEC) Railway’s All Aboard Florida plan to build and operate for-profit passenger trains from Miami to Orlando.

The success of this supposedly unsubsidized train depends on, among other things, the willingness of the federal government to loan the company $1.6 billion to start the service. The plan is to improve 195 miles of existing track and build 40 miles of new track, plus passenger stations, all of which is expected to cost around $2.5 billion.

To partly fund the project, FEC recently stunned the bond market by selling $405 million worth of bonds promising to pay an incredible 12 percent return. Of course, at rates like that the bonds sold quickly, but at a time when comparable bonds are offering to pay just 6 percent, this raises questions about why the railway is offering to pay twice as much.

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East Portland: Another Planning Failure

By | | City planning, Urban areas
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Planning of outer southeast Portland has failed so badly that even the planners are recommending that the city slow densification of the area. As reported in the Oregonian late last year, the city upzoned the area to much higher densities but failed to install basic urban services to support those densities. The result is just one more disaster in the model of urban planning called Portland.

Some background: In 1994, Metro, Portland’s regional planning agency, gave every city in the region a population target and told them to upzone neighborhoods to reach that target so they wouldn’t have to make large expansions of the region’s urban-growth boundary. Metro specifically targeted 36 neighborhoods for densification, including outer southeast Portland and the Portland suburb of Oak Grove.

At the time, the Antiplanner lived in Oak Grove, the only targeted neighborhood that successfully fought densification. In 1996, I met someone from outer southeast Portland whose neighborhood was not so lucky. The planners came to their neighborhood and proposed upzoning to as high as 65 housing units per acre. The residents strenuously objected, and after much haggling, the planners agreed to a modest amount of upzoning, but warned that if the neighborhood failed to add enough new housing, even more upzoning would take place later.

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Wired Gets It Wrong Again

By | | Transportation
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“Building bigger roads actually makes traffic worse,” asserts Wired magazine. “The reason you’re stuck in traffic isn’t all these jerks around you who don’t know how to drive,” says writer Adam Mann; “it’s just the road that you’re all driving on.” If only we had fewer roads, he implies, we would have less congestion. This “roads-induce-demand” claim is as wrong as Wired‘s previous claim that Tennessee fiscal conservatives were increasing Nashville congestion by banning bus-rapid transit, when actually they were preventing congestion by banning dedicated bus lanes.

In support of the induced-demand claim, Mann cites research by economists Matthew Turner of the University of Toronto and Gilles Duranton of the University of Pennsylvania. “We found that there’s this perfect one-to-one relationship,” Mann quotes Turner as saying. Mann describes this relationship as, “If a city had increased its road capacity by 10 percent between 1980 and 1990, then the amount of driving in that city went up by 10 percent. If the amount of roads in the same city then went up by 11 percent between 1990 and 2000, the total number of miles driven also went up by 11 percent. It’s like the two figures were moving in perfect lockstep, changing at the same exact rate.” If this were true, then building more roads doesn’t make traffic worse, as the Wired headline claims; it just won’t make it any better.

However, this is simply not true. Nor is it what Duranton & Turner’s paper actually said. The paper compared daily kilometers of interstate highway driving with lane kilometers of interstates in the urbanized portions of 228 metropolitan areas. In the average metropolitan area, it found that between 1983 and 1993 lane miles grew by 32 percent while driving grew by 77 percent. Between 1993 and 2003, lane miles grew by 18 percent, and driving grew by 46 percent.

That’s hardly a “perfect one-to-one relationship.”

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Millennials, Children, and Urban Life

By | | Housing
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The Washington Post reports that millennials living in walkable DC neighborhoods are growing up, getting married, having children, and (as the Antiplanner would expect) moving to the suburbs.

What wimps! They should be like these Toronto millennials who have had kids but are “learning to survive in 700 square feet.” Of course, unlike the Post, which actually quantifies (sort of) the number of millennials moving out of DC, Toronto Life relies strictly on anecdotes.
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Of course, somewhere there is a planner saying, “the problem is affordability. If we just subsidized inner-city housing, more people would move/stay there.” To the Antiplanner, the definition of a socialist is someone who doesn’t understand that subsidizing something is not the same thing as making it affordable.

Polarization and Freedom

By | | News commentary
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A new Pew poll finds that three out of four “consistent liberals” would rather live in a community “where the houses are smaller and closer to each other” but within walking distance of schools, stores, and restaurants. Conversely, three out of four “consistent conservatives” would rather live in a larger home on a large lot even if it means driving to schools, stores, and restaurants.


Source: Pew Research Center. Click chart to download Pew’s 121-page (3.5-MB) report on polarization in America.

Pew says this shows that “differences between right and left go beyond politics,” which Pew claims is one of the seven most important things to know about polarization in America. Yet the left has turned the choice between a traditional suburb and a so-called walkable community into a political issue, so it is no wonder that people’s views on this choice are polarized.

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