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Monthly Archives: June 2018

VTA’s Transit-Superiority Complex

By | | Transportation
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San Jose light-rail ridership is declining, so the Santa Clara Valley Transportation Authority (VTA) wants to speed up light-rail trains to make them more attractive to riders. To do this, the agency wants to give light rail the priority over cars, bicycles, and pedestrians at all intersections.

Having to “slow down to avoid hitting somebody that may be crossing the tracks,” says a VTA board member, “slows [the light-rail trains] down quite a bit.” Light-rail trains in downtown San Jose are “possibly some of the slowest in the country,” says a news report. “People are beating transit on their e-scooters,” frets San Jose’s mayor, who also happens to chair VTA’s board. “We’ve got to speed up the light rail trains, so that way, folks will be motivated to use them.”

San Jose light rail is far from the slowest in the country. According to the National Transit Database, it averaged 15.9 miles per hour in 2016, slightly better than the national average of 15.3. While they (along with all other light-rail lines) are slower in downtown, it’s the average speed that counts for attracting riders. Continue reading →

The Declining Benefits of Density

By | | Housing
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The housing affordability issue has become a debate between those who believe the solution is to impose more density on cities and those who believe the solution is to eliminate urban-growth boundaries and let people live at the densities they prefer. An op-ed in yesterday’s The Hill endorses the latter view.

Cities exist because people benefit from having resources and jobs in close proximity. But the benefits of that close proximity have decline in the past century with increasing transportation and telecommunications speeds. Nevertheless, many density advocates point to Harvard urban economist Edward Glaeser, who argues that face-to-face contacts are always more valuable than audio or video communications and so there continues to be a need for dense cities like New York. This is supposedly especially true in the finance industry, where New York excels.

If that were true, however, then why are so many finance industry jobs moving out of New York? In the 1990s, 30 percent of all jobs in the securities industry were in New York; today it is less than 20 percent. As Joel Kotkin recently noted, most of those jobs are moving to low-density sunbelt cities. Of course, face-to-face communications are still possible in cities even if they have only 3,000 people per square mile instead of the 70,000 found in Manhattan. Continue reading →

Brightline Prospects May Not Be So Bright

By | | Transportation
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The last time we looked at Brightline, Florida’s private moderate-speed rail line from Miami to West Palm Beach, it had killed three people before even opening for business. Since then it has killed five more. While you might think that people will learn not to cross the tracks in front of fast passenger trains, it turns out that freight trains on the Florida East Coast Railway (which owns Brightline) have consistently killed about two people per month for the last several years.

This helps explain why some Florida residents are vehemently opposed to Brightline’s plans to extend service to Orlando. So far, opponents have been unable to stop the train in the courts.

They appear to be doing better, however, in the court of financial opinion. Brightline hoped to fund the extension to Orlando (which will require the construction of new tracks between Cocoa and Orlando) with $1.15 billion worth of tax-exempt private activity bonds. The tax exemption would allow Brightline to pay lower interest rates. But Brightline was unable to convince investors to buy the bonds by its deadline of May 31. The U.S. Department of Transportation generously extended the deadline to the end of the year, but Brightline still has to find buyers. Continue reading →

$530/Square Foot for Affordable Housing?

By | | Housing
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A lot of federal money for housing is funneled through non-profit organizations, and those non-profits become lobbyists for continued federal funding. Yet it isn’t clear that they actually do much to make housing affordable. This can be seen from a blog post by Roger Valdez, who says he “was a non-profit housing director for about three years.”

His post analyzes an affordable housing development in the Seattle area being planned by a non-profit called the Plymouth Housing Group, whose purpose (according to its 2016 IRS form 990) is to “develop and manage affordable housing for homeless and very low income individuals.”

Valdez notes that, from 2008 through 2017, non-profits produced 5,576 units of housing. Someone miscalculated to be 620 units a year (they divided by nine when in fact there were ten years from 2008 to 2017). Obviously, that’s more like 558 units per year. Continue reading →

Amtrak’s Real Problem

By | | Transportation
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Amtrak’s dream of restoring passenger service between New Orleans and Jacksonville — service disrupted by Hurricane Katrina — died, at least for the foreseeable future, when the governors of Alabama and Mississippi refused to provide funds to subsidize this train. Meanwhile, Amtrak CEO Richard Anderson incurred the wrath of his predecessors last week when he tried to explain to state legislators why Amtrak should end the Southwest Chief service between Newton, Kansas and Gallup, New Mexico.

“This is the first time that a management team has ever come out against continuing services Amtrak currently provides,” worried former Amtrak president David Gunn, as reported by Trains magazine (paywall). “It’s dishonorable and dishonest,” chided Joseph Boardman, another former Amtrak president.

Actually, Anderson was being perfectly honest. His presentation noted that only about 175 people a day ride that segment of the Chicago-Los Angeles train, which gets most of its ridership in the Chicago-Kansas City segment followed by the segment between Los Angeles and Albuquerque. Because BNSF, which owns the tracks, no longer runs freight trains on this route, it is the only private rail route in the country that sees only Amtrak trains, making all capital and maintenance costs the sole responsibility of Amtrak. Continue reading →

The Raleigh Transit Miracle

By | | Transportation
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While transit ridership declined in April 2018 vs. 2017 in the vast majority of urban areas, it grew in Raleigh. Not only did it grow there, it grew by a miraculous 20 percent, more than any other of the nation’s fifty largest urban areas. The first four months of 2018 saw a more modest but still trend-bucking 9 percent growth over the same months in 2017.

What is responsible for this rapid growth? According to the TransitCenter, it resulted from a boost to transit service that came after voters approved a half-cent sales tax for transit in November, 2016. This was a sales tax increase that opponents called a “transit plan to nowhere.”

FTA data show that GoRaleigh, Raleigh’s main transit agency, offered 10.0 percent more bus service in April 2018 than 2017, and carried 26.5 percent more riders. Bus service for the first four months of 2018 was 6.8 percent greater, and riders 11.7 percent more numerous, than in 2017. So it seems plausible that service increases are responsible for the growth in ridership. Continue reading →

A SORTA Dilemma

By | | Transportation
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Cincinnati’s transit agency, the Southwest Ohio Regional Transit Authority (SORTA), is facing a dilemma common to many other transit agencies. Transit ridership is dropping, and fare revenue is dropping even more. Should it raise fares, which will accelerate ridership declines, or ask voters to approve more taxes to cover a $6.4 million budget deficit in order to maintain transit service?

SORTA’s problems have been worsened by the city’s decision to build an idiotic streetcar line. The city claimed the streetcar was built under budget, but that’s a distortion of reality. It was supposed to cost $110 million for 4.5 miles and ended up costing $148 million for 3.6 miles. Of course, the last approved budget before completion was $149.5 million, but it still cost far more than was projected when the city decided to build the line.

In any case, that’s $148 million that could have been used to ease SORTA’s budgetary woes today. On top of that, operating the streetcar costs SORTA more than $2 million a year, and fares cover only 14 percent of that. Counting some capital costs, the streetcar added $2 million to SORTA’s expenses in 2016, and probably even more in 2017. In short, the operating expense plus 10 percent of the cost overrun for the streetcar would have been enough to make up SORTA’s projected deficit. Continue reading →

Are the Koch Brothers Killing Transit?

By | | Transportation
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Transit supporters have a new explanation for transit’s decline: the Koch brothers are killing new transit projects. At least, that’s what the New York Times says, and since that is the nation’s newspaper of record, it must be true.

According to the article published yesterday, Americans for Prosperity have combined with the Cato Institute to fight light rail all over the country. Since both of these groups were initially funded by the Koch brothers, it must be some sort of conspiracy.

Speaking for myself, I don’t mind being associated with the Koch brothers. After all, they support gay marriage, marijuana legalization, and ending Middle East military interventions. They oppose tax-increment financing, the use of eminent domain to take private property to give to other private developers, and NSA surveillance of American citizens. What’s not to love? Continue reading →

Which Downzoning Is Evil?

By | | Mission
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Another day, another story about how evil single-family zoning makes housing expensive. This one is from Seattle, whose urban-growth boundary was drawn more than 30 years ago and, as far as I know, has never been changed.

This article starts from the premise that someone said that families want single-family homes so turning single-family neighborhoods into multifamily housing is “anti-family.” The writer’s response is that most of the city’s new residents are single, not families. Of course that’s true: thanks to the urban-growth boundary, most families with children can’t afford to live in the city and so choose to live in the suburbs.

Another article, this one from Los Angeles, blames affordability problems on downzoning. Only the writer doesn’t mean downzoning of rural land to prevent urban development but downzoning that took place forty years ago that took existing neighborhoods of single-family homes that had been zoned for higher densities and rezoned them for the single-family uses that were there.

None of these writers ask what kind of housing people want. They assume that people will accept the housing that is available, and if planners create an artificial land shortage, that means more multifamily housing. Continue reading →

Transit Makes You Short

By | | Transportation
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The Antiplanner’s faithful ally and frequent commenter, C.P. Zilliacus, alerted me to a recent paper published in the Journal of Transport and Health that proves that transit makes people short. Or, at least, it proves this in the same way that other studies have proven that transit makes people healthier or less obese.

The authors of the recent article, University of Minnesota engineers Alireza Ermagun and David Levinson (now at the University of Sydney) review data that “indicate transit use and accessibility by transit are significantly associated with general health.” However, “they are practically insignificant.” In other words, just because something is statistically significant doesn’t mean it is important.

To show this, they compared heights with transit use and show “that transit use and transit accessibility to jobs are negatively correlated with height.” In other words, transit riders are shorter than other people. “We could further engage in data-mining and test other seemingly unrelated phenomenon, and then cherry pick results,” they say. “We prefer not to do that.” Continue reading →