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Monthly Archives: September 2015

Housing Prices Reach New Highs

By | | Housing
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Housing has once again become a big issue in many cities. No wonder: as the spreadsheet posted last week by the Antiplanner shows, non-inflation-adjusted prices in many urban areas have reached or exceeded what they were at the peak of the housing bubble last decade.

Portland prices have reached the point where a home will go on the market and sell in a few days for significantly more than the asking price because so many people bid on it. More controversially, Portland and Seattle builders are buying homes, replacing them with several skinny homes, townhomes, or condos.

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State Home Price Indices

By | | Housing, Useful Data
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Last week, the Antiplanner posted a spreadsheet with metropolitan area home price indices and graphs. To complete the set, here is a similar spreadsheet for state. One difference is that the graph only shows inflation-adjusted indices, which are more useful anyway.


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To graph different states, simply enter the two-letter abbreviation of up to six states (in caps) in cells BH167 through BM167. If you have autocalculation turned on, the graph should update automatically. If you want to change the years shown in the chart, click on the chart to select it, then scroll down to see the years selected (currently cells BG248 through BM329). Drag the upper right corner up or down to change the beginning year and the bottom right corner up to change the ending year. I hope you find these data useful.

Maryland DOT Cooked the Books

By | | Transportation
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You may want to sit down for this, but it is finally becoming obvious to everyone that the Maryland Department of Transportation and its consultants overestimated ridership on the proposed Purple light-rail line. Even the pro-Purple Line Washington Post is skeptical of the numbers. Of course, this is only after Governor Hogan appears to have signed off on the line.

As the Antiplanner pointed out in a review of the proposed low-capacity rail line, the projected first-year ridership of 58,800 people per weekday is more than any single light-rail line outside of Los Angeles and Boston–and rail lines in those cities serve centers with far more jobs than are found on the entire Purple Line. The line that is most comparable to the 16-mile Purple Line is New Jersey’s 17-mile Hudson-Bergen line, which serves an area whose population density is four times greater and has far more jobs than that along the Purple Line, yet the Hudson-Bergen line carries just 44,000 riders per weekday (p. 9). The Antiplanner also pointed out that light-rail planners almost always overestimate ridership, and Maryland in particular has a poor track record with its lines in Baltimore (p. 8).

Hogan’s Secretary of Transportation, Peter Rahn, apparently didn’t read the Antiplanner’s report, as he told the Post that he was “comfortable” with the numbers because “the FTA was involved, and they were acceptable to them.” Of course, the FTA rarely questions any numbers given to them by transit agencies. What Rahn was really doing, of course, was shifting the blame to someone else for not doing the job he should have done.

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Home Price Indices Through 2nd Quarter 2015

By | | Housing, Useful Data
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After the Antiplanner posted recent housing data on Wednesday, a reader asked for home price trends. These data are available for states and metropolitan areas from the Federal Housing Finance Agency. For some purposes, I prefer urbanized areas instead of metropolitan areas, for numbers like these the differences will be small.

Naturally, the FHFA’s raw data are not easy to visualize, so I’ve supplemented the agency’s metropolitan area data with a spreadsheet that automatically makes charts showing price indices in up to six urban areas. For example, the above chart shows indices for six areas with minimal land-use regulation.

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2014 Commuting Data

By | | Transportation, Useful Data
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In 1960, 12.1 percent of American workers went to work by transit, which was then largely privately owned. Despite (or because of) public takeover of almost every transit system in the country, transit’s share steadily declined to 4.7 percent in 2000. Then, in 2010, it crept up to 4.9 percent. The 2014 American Community Survey found that it has increased still further to 5.2 percent.

Since 2000, the increase in transit’s share has come at the expense of carpooling, which fell from 12.6 percent to 9.2 percent in 2014. Biking and walking also fell slightly from 3.4 to 3.3 percent. Driving alone, however, grew from 73.2 to 76.5 percent. So the increase in transit’s share did not translate to a reduction in the number of cars on the road. Indeed, using census carpool data and assuming that “5- or 6-person carpools” have an average of 5.5 people and “7-or-more-person carpools” have 7 people, there were 104.2 million cars commuting to work in 2000, 110.8 million in 2010, and 117.6 million in 2014.

One intriguing table (B08141) shows commuting data by the number of cars in the household. Nationally, about 4.5 percent of workers live in households with no cars. Of these, about 41.5 percent took transit to work, 20.4 percent drove alone, and 11.3 percent carpooled.

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These Are a Few of My Favorite Data

By | | Useful Data
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The Census Bureau released data from the 2014 American Community Survey last week, including estimates for how people get to work, how expensive housing is, and how much money people earn. I’ll get to commuting data later this week, but today I’ll look at home prices and incomes. The 2014 American Community Survey is based on reports from more than 2.3 million households.

I’ve downloaded the tables showing median home values (B25077) and median family incomes (B19113) for states, urbanized areas, and the nation as a whole. To save you time, I’ve combined them into two spreadsheets: one showing both values and incomes for urban areas, and one for states and the nation.

Median home value divide by median family income is a standard measure of housing affordability, which has become an important issue again in Portland, San Francisco, and other cities. A value-to-income ratio of less than 3 is fairly affordable, as someone with a median income can buy a median home and pay off the mortgage in less than 20 years. Ratios above 3.5 are becoming unaffordable and above 5 are quite unaffordable.

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Volkwagen’s Disgrace

By | | News commentary, Transportation
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The Environmental Protection Agency says Volkswagen programmed the emissions control systems on 482,000 cars it sold in the U.S. to work only when they were being tested by air quality regulators. Included are Diesel versions of the Jetta, Golf, Passat, Beetle, and Audi A3 sold between 2009 and 2015. When they weren’t being tested, the cars got better fuel mileage but spewed nearly 40 times more nitrogen oxides into the air. (There’s no reports that other pollutants increased.) Far from denying the accusation, Volkswagen has apologized and halted sales of the offending cars.

Volkswagen (which also makes Audi, Bentley, Bugatti, Lamborghini, Porsche, and several other brands that are not sold in the U.S.) had hopes of dramatically increasing its market share in the United States. But this news is a black mark on the company, both from a public relations view and a penalty view, as fines could be as high as $18 billion. As one industry observer says, “this is a disaster of monumental proportions” for the company, whose share price has fallen more than 20 percent since the EPA announcement.

While the Antiplanner has admired Volkswagen for its pioneering work with self-driving cars, the truly sad part is that this may perpetuate American resistance to Diesel power. Based on research by MIT scientists, it is likely that three simple technologies will allow auto manufacturers to cost-effectively meet Obama’s 54.5 mpg target by 2025: streamlining, use of aluminum in place of steel (carbon does even better but is far more costly), and Diesel engines, which are popular in Europe but not so well regarded here. While Diesels aren’t absolutely critical to meeting the fuel-economy targets, they are more cost-effective than most alternatives.

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Congressional Update

By | | News commentary, Transportation
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The law that authorizes the federal government to collect gas taxes and spend them on highways and transit last expired in July. Normally, Congress extends the law for six years, but it is currently gridlocked and so in July it extended it through the end of October.

The Senate offered a six-year bill, but only had enough money to fund it for three years. Lacking a similar bill, the House passed the three-month extension and the Senate went along.

Now, the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee is rumored to have a six-year bill, or possibly a three-year bill. A minor stumbling block is that Republicans were proposing to cut spending for bicycles, which left Democrats incensed. A bigger stumbling block is that there is still no consensus about where the money is going to come from to cover the $12 billion to $15 billion annual deficits in the bill, as Congress is not willing to either raise gas taxes or reduce spending.

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Utterly Impractical or Practically Unutterable?

By | | City planning, Regional planning
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In his reflections on the debate we had last week, Charles Marohn’s main comment is that he found my ideas “utterly impractical.” What were those ideas? Privatizing local streets. Privatizing utilities. Privatizing other common goods.

Just how impractical are these ideas? Most utilities in this country are, after all private. Many streets are private–I live on one. St. Louis has privatized some of its streets.

During the debate, Marohn called himself a libertarian, but his response reveals him to be a progressive. Progressives believe that commonly owned resources are a good thing because they value the tragedy of the commons. Without the tragedy, there is no need for government intervention. Without a need for government intervention, the role of progressives is greatly diminished.

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Union Pacific Plays Hardball

By | | Transportation
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The big news in the railroad industry is that no one expects the railroads can meet the Congressionally imposed December 31 deadline to install positive train control, yet Congress has so far been unwilling to extend the deadline. Unless it does so, Union Pacific says it will stop allowing any passenger trains on its rails starting January 1. That means an end to many Amtrak trains as well as some commuter trains in California, Illinois, and elsewhere.

Positive train control would force trains to stop to prevent collisions if the train driver failed to act. Congress passed this law in 2008 after a horrific crash between a commuter train and a Union Pacific freight train in Los Angeles. The commuter train operator was apparently text messaging and missed a red light, resulting in the crash. The law requires the use of positive train control on all rail lines that carry passenger trains and/or toxic gases.

Unfortunately, says transportation expert Steve Ditmeyer, the problems that beset the railroads are partly their own fault. Ditmeyer points out that Burlington Northern installed positive train control on 250 miles of its track in the late 1980s and found that, if positive train control were designed to completely replace existing signal technologies, the costs would be partly offset by the reduction in signal costs while the benefits would not only include safety but a 25 percent increase in the capacity of single-track rail lines. The result was a three-to-one benefit-cost ratio. Unfortunately, rather than installing the technology over its entire railroads, a new BN president decided to focus his attention on merging with the Santa Fe.

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