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Monthly Archives: June 2018

The Future of San Antonio Transit

By | | Transportation, Urban areas
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Someone asked the Antiplanner to briefly review the prospects for public transit in San Antonio. Much of my answer would apply to many other urban areas as well.

1. Transit Is About Downtown

A century ago, most urban jobs were downtown and people walked or rode transit to those jobs from dense residential areas. Today, only about 7.5 percent of urban jobs are located downtown; in San Antonio it’s about 6.2 percent.

Source: Wendell Cox, United States Central Business Districts for downtown jobs; 2010 American Community Survey table B08301 for percent of transit commuters. Continue reading →

Portland Has Too Many Loose Screws

By | | Transportation
3 Comments

A loose screw caused the Portland streetcar crash that took place a couple of weeks ago, reports TriMet. The screw jammed up the streetcar throttle, making it difficult to impossible to slow the streetcar down.

Of course, this invites all sorts of invidious jokes that the Antiplanner can’t resist making, mainly because it’s nearly midnight and I’ve been working on too many other projects to have written a more incisive blog post for Thursday.

Anyone who watches Portlandia, which some consider to be more of a documentary than a comedy, knows there are a lot of loose screws in Portland. One of the first real examples of loose screws was the decision to build the streetcar line that opened in 2001. There was some plausible justification for light rail, at least at first glance, but streetcars made no sense at all when buses were better at everything streetcars could do except spending lots of money. Continue reading →

Hoverboards in Subways

By | | Transportation
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Someone suggested that New York City subways be replaced with hoverboards, and the internet went nuts. Or at least some people on the internet went nuts.

The normally pro-transit Atlantic Monthly published an article by Peter Wayner — author of Future Ride: 80 Ways the Self-Driving Car Will Change Everything — suggesting that the projected $19 billion cost of fixing the New York City subway was too much. Instead, he proposed something “radically different”: to tear out the rails and open up the subways to private operators of shared, autonomous vehicles. Instead of full-sized cars, he predicted that the market would lead private companies to use what he called “hoverboards,” by which I think he meant electric scooters and Segway-like vehicles.

“This is the stupidest thing I’ve ever read about the NYC Subway,” responded my friend (frenemy?) Charles Marohn. “Makes Randal O’Toole’s idea to just run buses in the tunnels look reasonable.” Continue reading →

Calthorpe: Driverless Cars Will Kill Cities

By | | Regional planning, Transportation
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New urbanist architect Peter Calthorpe predicts that “autonomous vehicles will mean death for cities.” To which the Antiplanner responds, “good,” as in “good bye and good riddance.”

But wait — Calthorpe seems to think this is a bad thing. “AVs will only increase sprawl as private vehicles travel farther,” he warns. The reason why people will be able to drive further is because autonomous vehicles will reduce congestion. They will reduce congestion so much, he fears, that “vehicle miles traveled will double and roads will become impassable.” So which is it: will driverless cars promote sprawl by reducing congestion or will they gridlock roads? (The answer is that driverless cars will double road capacities.)

Cities are a means to an end: a place for people to meet, to bring resources together for manufacturing or transshipments, to reduce living costs. But new means of transportation and communication have steadily reduced the need for dense cities to achieve those ends. Continue reading →

Why Rethink Single-Family Homes?

By | | Housing, Regional planning
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“We are in a new century where we need to rethink single-family zoning,” says Robert Liberty, the man who is more responsible than anyone else for Portland’s unaffordable housing. The question any sensible person should ask is just what is behind Liberty’s obsession with and objection to single-family homes?

As of 1989, Oregon law required that Metro, Portland’s regional planning agency, maintain housing affordability by regularly expanding Portland’s urban-growth boundary. In that year, Liberty — then head of 1000 Friends of Oregon — conceived of the “land use-transportation-air quality” (LUTRAQ) project. Based on analyses by pro-density consultants, LUTRAQ purported to show that increasing urban densities would lead people to drive less and help clean up the air.

In fact, as USC planning professor Genevieve Giuliani pointed out in 1995, LUTRAQ really showed that density had very little to do with driving. Instead, the LUTRAQ model reduced driving by assuming that every business in the Portland area would charge parking fees at their offices or shopping areas equal to at least one third of downtown parking charges. Of course, the region still has free parking almost everywhere except in downtown Portland. Continue reading →

Broward County Fails to Learn from History

By | | Transportation
4 Comments

The Broward County commission voted six to one to put a measure on the ballot to raise sales taxes by a penny to pay for transportation improvements. This tax, which is expected to raise about $350 million a year, will do such things as “enhance traffic signal synchronization, develop safe sidewalks and bicycle pathways, expand and operate bus and special needs transportation, [and] implement rail along approved corridors.”

That all sounds so reasonable until you get to the last one. Then it becomes clear that nearly all of the money is going to be soaked up planning and building a east-west light-rail line to complement the north-south TriRail commuter rail line. Never mind that light rail was obsolete ninety years ago.

This is the same county commission that spent fourteen years and millions of dollars planning a Fort Lauderdale streetcar project that was finally abandoned when construction bids proved to be far higher than the county had expected. Clearly, most of the commissioners haven’t learned the most important lessons about rail transit: that it takes too long to plan and build, costs too much, and always costs more than planners claim. Continue reading →

Transit Death Watch: 2.3% Decline in April

By | | Transportation, Useful Data
10 Comments

Nationwide transit ridership in April 2018 was 2.3 percent lower than the same month in 2017, according to data released yesterday by the Federal Transit Administration. Commuter-rail ridership grew by 3.5 percent, but light-rail, heavy-rail, hybrid rail, streetcar, and bus ridership all declined. The biggest decline was light rail at 5.5 percent.

April’s drop was smaller than the 5.9 percent year-over-year decline experienced in March because April 2018 had one more work day (21 vs. 20) than April 2017, while March 2018 had one less work day. As a result, 16 of the fifty largest urban areas saw transit ridership grow in April 2018, compared with just four in March. Considering that most transit ridership takes place on work days, anything less than a 5 percent growth is not something to be proud of. Only Pittsburgh, Providence, Nashville, and Raleigh saw ridership grow by more than 5 percent.

The most catastrophic losses were in Boston (24.4%), Cleveland (14.4%), and Milwaukee (10.8%). Ridership fell by more than 5 percent in Miami-Ft. Lauderdale, Dallas-Ft. Worth, Atlanta, Tampa-St. Petersburg, St. Louis, Orlando, Charlotte, and Richmond. These losses follow steady declines since 2014 and, in some urban areas, as far back as 2009. Continue reading →

The Housing Bubble Continues to Inflate

By | | Housing, Useful Data
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Housing prices in Washington state grew by nearly 10 percent in the last year, more than in any other state in the country. Other states with rapid price growth include Arizona (7.1%), California (6.3%), Colorado (8.0%), Florida (7.3%), Idaho (8.6%), Nevada (9.3%), Oregon (6.8%), Texas (6.3%), and Utah (8.0%). These numbers compare average prices from April 2017 through March 2018 with averages from April 2016 through March 2017 from the Federal Housing Finance Agency’s home price index dataset, specifically the state quarterly all-transactions index.

After adjusting for inflation, prices in Colorado, DC, Montana, North Dakota, Nebraska, Oklahoma, Oregon, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, and Washington are higher today than they were at the peak of the mid-2000s housing bubble, but price increases show no real sign of slowing down. Inflation-adjusted prices grew faster in the last year than they did the year before in 36 out of 50 states (as well as DC), and they declined in only one state, North Dakota. Continue reading →

Waymo Gearing Up

By | | Transportation
4 Comments

Waymo will order up to 62,000 plug-in hybrid minivans from Chrysler for its driverless ride-hailing service. Waymo already has 600 such minivans that it is testing in Austin, Phoenix, and the San Francisco Bay Area.

The 62,000 Chryslers are on top of the 20,000 electric cars that Waymo announced in March that it was planning to buy from Jaguar. Waymo says it expects to have all of these vehicles fully deployed by 2022 at the latest. Continue reading →

Taking the Not-Stupid Option

By | | Transportation
10 Comments

The Puget Sound Transit board of directors considers themselves to be between a rock and a hard place. The projected cost of the eight-mile Northgate-Lynnwood light-rail line has risen from a low of $1.2 billion to $3.2 billion. The agency is counting on getting more than a billion of that from the Federal Transit Administration, but the Trump administration has been stingy about funding new projects.

So should the board commence construction now even if it means foregoing federal support? Or should it wait until federal support is assured and take the risk that costs will rise even more?

How about a third option: Don’t build it at all. It would have been a stupid idea if it cost just $200 million. It was a really stupid idea at $1.2 billion. It is an extremely stupid idea at $3.2 billion. It’s stupid because buses can do everything light rail can do, but do it more safely and at a much lower cost. Continue reading →