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Monthly Archives: October 2018

Driverless Cars Threaten Guru’s Vision

By | | Regional planning
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“Urban planning guru says driverless cars won’t fix congestion,” says the New York Times. Naturally, the Times is referring to Peter Calthorpe, one of the few people who might be considered an urban planning guru and the one who has the most to lose if driverless cars are successful.

In the 1980s, Calthorpe developed a vision of what cities should be like. That vision combined the five-story apartments in Greenwich Village, which was built in the 1890s and praised in Jane Jacobs’ 1961 book, the Death and Life of Great American Cities, with the idea of jobs and dense housing being located in regional and town centers scattered around the urban area, which was the way cities were built in the 1920s. Each of the centers, Calthorpe thought, would be walkable like Greenwich Village and the centers would be connected with one another by mass transit such as light rail.

In other words, Calthorpe’s vision was already 60 to 90 years out of date when he thought it up. It is even more out of date today. In most urban areas, only about 30 percent of jobs are located in various centers, with the other 70 percent scattered finely across the landscape and virtually inaccessible to mass transit. Continue reading →

Aussie Housing Bubble Deflating

By | | Housing
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When America’s housing bubble burst in 2006, housing prices in Australia hesitated only briefly before continuing to rise. Prices since then have risen to extreme levels, but now the Australian housing bubble seems to have reached its peak and is rapidly deflating. This is having dire implications for Australian banks, its currency, and its economy as a whole.

With the support of urban planners and “sustainability” advocates such as Peter Newman, most Australian states began imposing strict growth limits around major cities in the 1990s. The result was a rapid decline in housing affordability. In Melbourne, for example, median home prices rose from about 3.5 times median incomes in 1997 to 7.0 times in 2004.

According to Wendell Cox, who has been keeping track of housing affordability since 2004, prices in all major Australian housing markets were unaffordable by that year, with median home prices being at least five times median household incomes. While prices in some markets briefly dipped in parallel with those in the United States, prices in Sydney and Melbourne have risen dramatically. By 2015, Cox ranked Sydney second only to Hong Kong as the least-affordable housing market in the urban areas he studied (which are mainly in English-speaking nations). Continue reading →

Paying for New York’s Transit System

By | | Transportation
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Last week, the Antiplanner observed that the New York City subway system has a $40 billion maintenance backlog, a $40 billion debt, and a $20 billion shortfall in pension and health care funds. On top of this, CBS News reports that the Metro North and Long Island Railroad commuter-rail systems have a $20 billion maintenance backlog. As I read MTA’s budgets, it is paying off its debt at the rate of about $2.8 billion a year ($1.5 blllion of which is interest).

If the debt service is funded, MTA still needs another $80 billion as soon as possible; call it $4 billion a year. As noted in the CBS News story above, New York politicians are diligently looking for the funds using the time-honored principle of taxing the powerless. The problem with that is that the powerless usually have little money to tax. Continue reading →

Turning Off Life Support

By | | Transportation
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“Degradation of the U.S. passenger railroad system was not a natural development — it was a result of national transportation policies that invested billions of dollars into highways and air transportation,” argued Vukan Vuchic in his advocacy piece for high-speed rail. “Meanwhile, Amtrak is supported at the survival level.”

There is some truth to that. The billions of dollars spent on interstate highways virtually all came from highway user fees, so can’t really be considered an unfair competition with passenger rail. However, in the 1940s and 1950s, Congress spent about half a billion dollars — several billion in today’s dollars — on airport construction. Subsidies to airports continued on a large scale until 1970, when Congress allowed local airports to fund themselves out of ticket fees.

At the same time, the airlines were throttled by regulation. In 1960, domestic airlines carried only about 31 billion passenger miles. Today, when they have been deregulated but receive relatively minimal subsidies, they carry more than twenty times that many. There is little reason to think passenger railroads could have competed with deregulated and unsubsidized airlines. Continue reading →

What We Know About High-Speed Rail

By | | Transportation
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In early 2016, the Transportation Research Board (TRB) published a 187-page report on interregional travel, which it defined as trips between 100 and 500 miles. To help publicize the report, the federally funded TRB placed a five-page summary in the May-June, 2016 TR News.

In response, rail advocate Vukan Vuchic, who is an emeritus professor of urban planning at the University of Pennsylvania, wrote a lengthy diatribe, published as a letter to the editor in the September-October 2018 TR News, complaining that the TRB report had a “negative tone” about high-speed rail. Vuchic’s case is weakened by the fact that he appears to have only read the five-page summary, not the entire 187-page report. Yet even that summary had plenty to say about high-speed rail, and much of it in the Antiplanner’s opinion was far too optimistic.

Vuchic charges that the report makes an “incorrect claim that HSR might only be feasible for the Boston-Washington.D.C., corridor.” In fact, neither the summary nor the full report made that claim, but the report did conclude, after many pages of lengthy analysis, that “In the United States, the NEC is unique in having many of the geographic, demographic, and demand conditions that European and Japanese experience suggests are favorable to public investments in intercity rail” and thus “presents far less uncertainty [than other corridors] with regard to the potential for passenger rail investments, including investments in high-speed service.” “Uncertainty” and “feasibility” are two completely different things.

Contrary to Vuchic’s heated letter, the Antiplanner would argue that the interregional transportation report spends far more pages on high-speed rail than makes sense for the United States. By the modern definition of high-speed rail — trains with top speeds faster than 150 mph — high-speed rail has zero market share in this country. Based on what we know about high-speed rail in other countries, it is fair to say that it will never be relevant here outside of the Boston-Washington corridor, and even there it is only “feasible” if we ignore capital and maintenance costs. Continue reading →

$1 Billion for What?

By | | Transportation
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In anticipation of a Democratic takeover of Congress opening the floodgates of spending on rail boondoggles, the state of Oregon has written a draft environmental impact statement (DEIS) for more passenger trains between Portland and Eugene. The DEIS considered three alternatives in detail:

  • No action, which means continuing to run three trains a day (two of which are state-subsidized) taking 2 hours and 35 minutes (48 mph) between Eugene and Portland, all of which go on to Seattle;
  • Alternative 1, which would triple the frequency of state-subsidized trains and reduce travel times to 2 hours and 20 minutes (53 mph, the same time currently used by Bolt Bus);
  • Alternative 2, which would offer the same number of trains as alternative 1 but reduce travel times to 2 hours even.

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The DEIS briefly considered a true high-speed rail option of running trains as fast as 180 miles per hour on an entirely new rail line. This was rejected not because of its high cost but because it would require “substantial regulatory hurdles.” If I were a high-speed rail advocate, I would consider this a specious excuse, but at least the state isn’t currently contemplating a project that (given California’s experience in similar terrain) would cost at least $10 billion.

Yet alternatives 1 and 2 aren’t cheap. The state estimates alternative 1 would cost around $1 billion and alternative 2 would cost around $4 billion. The reason high-speed rail advocates should be upset is that none of the money spent on alternative 1, which is the state’s preference, would contribute to the cost of a true high-speed rail line, which would require all-new construction. Thus, a decision to go for alternative 1 effectively commits the state to not build a true high-speed rail line for a couple of decades at least. Continue reading →

Subway Ridership Decline Is Accelerating

By | | Transportation
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New York’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority revealed that August weekend numbers were nearly 9 percent below weekend ridership in August 2017 while weekday ridership dropped 2.5 percent. Since much of New York’s Penn Station was closed in August 2017, leading many riders to find other travel methods to avoid significant delays, the fact that ridership in 2018 was below 2017 shows that the system is in deep trouble. Worse, MTA says that ridership declines appear to be accelerating.

The problem is so bad that 60 Minutes devoted a segment to it yesterday, asking “Why has the New York City subway gone off the rails?” There’s really two possible answers to this question: 1. They haven’t spent the money needed to keep it going; or 2. It simply costs too much to keep it going. The first assumes the money is around but has been squandered on the wrong things (as Republican candidate for governor Marc Molinaro says, “ribbon-cutting projects”) while the second assumes that it is simply impossible to expect taxpayers to pay all of the costs of rehabilitating and maintaining the system.

Everyone from subway riders to politicians would like to believe that the first answer is right. But it is increasingly likely that the second answer is the truth. Continue reading →

Property Tax Time

By | | Regional planning
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Oregon property owners received their tax bills last week, which gives the Antiplanner the opportunity to rant about economic development. I divide my time between Bandon, which is in Coos County, and Camp Sherman, which is in Jefferson County but actually is tributary to Deschutes County. As I’ve noted before, Coos and Deschutes counties have very similar histories up until 1980, and then followed very different paths.

Before 1980, both counties were heavily dependent on resource extraction, chiefly timber but also minerals, agriculture, and in Coos County commercial fish. As of 1980, Coos County’s population of 64,000 was slightly ahead of Deschutes’ 62,000, and both had similar per capita incomes.

After 1980, the timber industry crashed, mining disappeared, agriculture declined in importance, and commercial fishing also declined. Deschutes County responded by becoming a recreation mecca, drawing in retirees and new businesses that wanted to locate in one of the West’s hot spots. Coos County, however, disdained recreation jobs and instead has attempted to bolster its resource industries with one get-rich-quick scheme after another. Continue reading →

California Feudalism

By | | Housing, Regional planning
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“Feudalism was about the concentration of wealth and power in a relative handful of people,” say New Geographer Joel Kotkin and big-data whiz Marshall Toplansky. By that definition, California is increasingly feudalistic, they argue in a new paper, California Feudalism.

“At its essence, feudalism was about hierarchy, and the domination of land ownership by a relative few,” says the paper. In contrast, “a strong, land-owning middle class” has played a central role in more egalitarian societies, ranging from ancient Greece to the United States of the 1960s. California’s land-use and energy policies run counter to such a land-owning middle class, which helps explain why California’s homeownership rate peaked in 1960 and today is one of the lowest in the country.

Kotkin and Toplansky are not the first to compare restrictive land-use policies with feudalism. The Antiplanner’s 2016 paper, The New Feudalism, noted that under the old feudalism the government or a small number of people owned nearly all of the land, while under the new feudalism, more people own land but the government strictly controls what they can do with it. More than 30 years before that, private property advocate and vice-president of the Ethan Allen Institute John McClaughry applied the same term to the same type of regulation in an environmental law review article. Continue reading →

Deconstructing Commuter- & Light-Rail Data

By | | Transportation
4 Comments

The American Public Transportation Association has posted its second quarter ridership report, showing a 2.0 percent decline in ridership in the second quarter and a 2.9 percent decline in the first half of the year. This isn’t really new information since the FTA issued its version of the data in early August. However, APTA’s numbers provide independent confirmation.

According to both APTA and the FTA, all major forms of transit are declining except commuter rail. So why is commuter rail increasing? A close look at the FTA data show that, between FY2014 and FY2018, commuter rail numbers declined in Boston, Chicago, Philadelphia, and Los Angeles, but increased in Seattle, New York, and Denver. The increases in New York and Denver, however, were more than offset by declines in bus ridership.

New York commuter trains (including New Jersey Transit) carried 10.4 million more trips in FY 2018 than 2014. However, New York MTA alone lost 72.6 million bus trips in the same time period. New Jersey Transit lost another 5.5 million. It is unlikely that people substituted commuter train trips for buses, so this suggests that ridership is dropping most in the urban core, which would be consistent with the idea that ride hailing is cutting into transit. Continue reading →