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Monthly Archives: August 2018

Demonizing Ride Hailing

By | | Transportation
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Lyft and Uber are increasing traffic by 180 percent, claims an arithmetically challenged study of ride hailing. As a result, reports NPR, ride hailing is adding to congestion. Moreover, says the study itself, ride hailing is inequitable and less sustainable than transit.

The study does have some useful numbers, but it was written by Bruce Schaller, a long-time transit advocate who obviously has a bone to pick about ride hailing. In reality, the study offers no real evidence that ride hailing is increasing congestion or that it is otherwise a serious problem for anyone but taxi companies and transit agencies. For them, it is a serious problem.

Schaller calculates that ride hailing grew from 1.90 billion trips in 2016 to 2.61 billion in 2017, for a net growth of 710 million rides. In those same years, transit ridership declined by 255 million rides. So, if only 36 percent of ride-hailing users would otherwise have taken transit, then ride hailing is responsible for 100 percent of the decline in transit ridership. Continue reading →

Trump’s New CAFE Proposal

By | | News commentary
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It is likely that, by the time you read this, the Department of Transportation and Environmental Protection Agency will have made a joint announcement about reforming the corporate average fuel economy (CAFE) standards. Originally adopted in 1978, when new cars were required to average all of 18 miles per gallon, the standards were increased by the Obama administration to a target of 54.5 mpg by 2025. (This 54.5 is actually an idealized number; as a practical matter, the real target for 2025 is about 39 mpg.)

As I am writing this, I don’t know exactly what today’s proposal will be, but an article in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal by DOT secretary Elaine Chao and acting EPA administrator Andrew Wheeler provides some hints. Most important, the article notes that the goal is “to create one national standard.” This means that California won’t be able to impose its own, stronger standards.

As the Competitive Enterprise Institute’s Marlo Lewis observes, when Congress created the CAFE program in 1975, it specially forbade states from adopting their own stronger rules, probably because this would greatly increase the costs of compliance to manufacturers. Despite that, the Obama administration decided to exempt California from the one-national-standard rule. The Trump administration is going back to the actual law. Continue reading →

Visualizing Land Use

By | | Regional planning, Useful Data
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The National Resources Inventory samples the nation’s lands to estimate how much is dedicated to farms, forests, cities, and other uses. Formerly called the natural resources inventory, it is conducted about every fives years by the Department of Agriculture’s Natural Resources Conservation Service, which itself was formerly called the Soils Conservation Service.

The Antiplanner previously reported on the results of the 2012 inventory, including a special spreadsheet showing urbanized lands that wasn’t included in the published documents. Now, for those people who prefer looking at maps over looking at spreadsheets, Bloomberg has published a series of maps attempting to show the relative amounts of forests, pasturelands, croplands, urban areas, and other land uses in the contiguous 48 states.

For the most part, the maps and explanations are fair and balanced. But there are some elements that can be misleading. First, the second map paints the nation with six vertical stripes, each representing a major land use: pasture/range, forest, cropland, special use, miscellaneous, and urban. Because urban is the eastern-most stripe, it ends up covering eight states — Connecticut, Delaware, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New Jersey, Rhode Island, and Vermont — as well as parts of New York and Pennsylvania. Continue reading →