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Monthly Archives: December 2018

Housing Market Cooling

By | | Housing
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Early signs indicate at least some housing markets are cooling off. Homes for sale in Seattle aren’t seeing as much intense bidding as a few months ago. Bidding wars are also becoming rare in Portland. The Case-Shiller index says that markets are weakening in other regions as well.

Unlike the 2008 financial crash, housing markets today appear to be the result of, not the cause of, an approaching recession. That recession, in turn, is likely the result of Trump’s trade war. The stock market, which boomed after Trump’s election, has been declining for the last three months as the trade war has increased the cost of manufacturing and consumer goods.

A major problem with relying on government planning for things like housing and transportation is that planning is too slow to keep up with the real world. One obvious sign of this is how road projects that used to take a few months to build now require years and even decades for planning and construction. For housing, the problem is even worse. Continue reading →

2017 Highway Statistics

By | | Transportation, Useful Data
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The Federal Highway Administration has begun posting Highway Statistics for 2017. Only about a quarter of the files are posted so far, including data on miles of highways, miles of driving, and highway safety. Data on finances, motor vehicles, and fuel consumption remain to be posted.

Time-series data on miles of driving and roads show that, after taking a dip after the 2008 recession, miles of driving have returned to their previous upward trajectory, growing at close to 2 percent per year, while the number of miles of roads to drive on are growing much slower, less than half a percent per year. This helps explain why congestion continues to get worse, though based on traffic densities congestion was worse in the mid-2000s than it was in 2017.

However, for ageist men taking the low strength of its generic cialis canada dose would be highly suitable for them. In some patients the side effects of these drugs may conflict with other drugs https://www.unica-web.com/archive/2013/competition/franticjury.html order cheap viagra and do more harm to the user. Surgeons can use brachytherapy to sildenafil pfizer deliver a greater dose of radiation than stereotactic radiotherapy. Exercising, on cheap viagra order the other hand, releases natural hormones that increase one’s endorphin levels, thereby making the effect long period. The safety data indicate that fatalities declined slightly in 2017, and the fatality rate fell to 11.5 per billion vehicle miles. That’s higher than the 10.7 recorded in 2014 but much lower than the 48.5 fatalities per billion vehicle miles in 1970. Rural roads are more dangerous that urban roads, averaging 18 vs. 8 fatalities per billion vehicle miles. Continue reading →

How to Sell Forced Densification to Libertarians

By | | Housing
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When cities pass zoning rules (as Missoula, Portland, and many Portland suburbs have done) mandating minimum-density zoning — so that people are forced to either build high-density housing in existing low-density neighborhoods or build nothing at all — libertarians lead the charge against such rules. But urban planners have managed to achieve the same result, and gain the support of some who consider themselves libertarian, by:

  1. Drawing an urban-growth boundary or passing similar policies forbidding development outside the existing urban footprint;
  2. Waiting a few years for the resulting supply shorting to push up housing prices;
  3. Blaming high housing prices on residents of single-family neighborhoods who object to densification of their neighborhoods;
  4. Proposing a law or ordinance that effectively eliminates zoning in those single-family neighborhoods.

Thus, we have a writer for Reason magazine supporting a law that would eliminate much of the zoning in San Francisco and other unaffordable California cities. Another Reason writer endorses a new zoning ordinance in Minneapolis that allows multifamily housing in single-family neighborhoods. The Mercatus Center blames high housing prices on single-family zoning as does a report from the Cato Institute. Continue reading →

Transit Is Not a Human Right

By | | Book reviews, Transportation
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“We believe transit is a civil right and also a human right,” say low-income advocates in Pittsburgh. An article jointly published by the Huffington Post and The Incline claims that, “Six decades after the Montgomery bus boycott and the Freedom Rides, public transit isn’t just a platform for the civil rights struggle, it is the civil rights struggle.”

Sadly, this terribly misreads the real lesson of the Montgomery bus boycott. That boycott succeeded where previous efforts had failed because many blacks in Montgomery had their own automobiles and shared rides with those who had previously used the bus system. As Washington Post writer Warren Brown says, blacks used “their private automobiles to drive around Jim Crow.”

Similarly, complaints about poor transit service to low-income neighborhoods in Pittsburgh and elsewhere ignore the fact that transit is not the way to get out of poverty; the automobile is. As the latest Access Across America reports show, an hour-long transit trip by the average resident of Pittsburgh reaches less than 7 percent of the region’s jobs, but a 20-minute auto trip can reach 12 percent of the region’s jobs while 40 minutes in a car reaches nearly 50 percent. Continue reading →

The Antiplanner’s Library
Trains, BRT, People — But Don’t Count Costs

By | | Book reviews, Transportation
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Christof Spieler was on the Houston Metro board of directors for eight years, so he thinks he understands transit. Unlike many transit advocates, he is willing to admit that some transit projects, such as Nashville’s commuter train, Cincinnati’s streetcar, and even the St. Louis light-rail system, are failures. “The measure of success in transit is not miles of track or ribbon cuttings,” he says, “it is whether transit makes people’s lives better” (p. 1).

But while his book is called Trains, Buses, People, it almost completely ignores bus service unless that service uses dedicated lanes. Instead, it reviews transit service only in the 47 cities that have or are building either rail transit or dedicated bus lanes. Cities that don’t have these things are ignored. For example, the book devotes several pages each to transit in Austin, Dallas-Ft. Worth, and Houston but leaves out San Antonio, even though San Antonio transit carried more trips per capita in 2017 than transit in any of the other three Texas urban complexes. Continue reading →

October Transit Ridership Declined 0.8%

By | | Transportation, Useful Data
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October 2018 transit ridership declined 0.8 percent from October 2017, according to the latest monthly data release by the Federal Transit Administration. This decline is in spite of the fact that October had one more work day in 2018 than in 2017. Ridership in the year to date (January-October) was 2.2 percent less than the same months of 2017.

Ridership declined for all major modes, including buses (-1.5%), commuter rail (-2.4%), heavy rail (-1.5%), and light rail (-2.1%). Streetcar and hybrid rail ridership grew due to the opening of new lines, but these modes are insignificant both nationally and locally. Nationally, ridership has declined in eleven of the last twelve months, the exception being July when New York City ridership had recovered from many maintenance-caused delays in 2017.

All a man has to do is take some pfizer viagra samples minutes and read over the price ticket. On the other hand, Moby Dick is known for its anti-stress properties and it can effectively work as buy tadalafil canada an organization.” 3. Some of them include garlic, goat weed, ginkgo biloba, and goat bud and pomegranate allergic acidity. cheap viagra from usa The tube is placed over your penis, and then the order will be filled. levitra without prescription Possibly due to the additional work day, October ridership grew in many urban areas, including Chicago, Miami, Washington, Detroit, San Francisco, Seattle, and San Diego. In most cases, the growth was less than 3 percent, while a dozen major urban areas saw ridership fall by 5 percent or more. The biggest losses were in Raleigh (-34%), Dallas-Ft. Worth (-18%), San Antonio (-13%), Louisville (-12%), Milwaukee (-11%), and Buffalo (-10%), Atlanta and Boston (-8% each). Continue reading →

Waymo Begins Driverless Ride-Hailing–Sort Of

By | | Transportation
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Waymo has been promising to start a commercial driverless ride-hailing service in the Phoenix area by the end of this year. With only a few weeks left in the year, the company announced that, starting yesterday, it will provide rides for hire over a 100-square-mile area that includes Chandler, Gilbert, Mesa, and Tempe, Arizona. The service will work like Uber or Lyft: potential users will launch an app on their smart phones, enquire about the cost of going to a particular destination, and then choose whether to hire the car.

Yet there are a couple of important caveats. First, Waymo will have a test driver behind the wheel ready to take over in case of an emergency. Second, only people who are pre-screened by Waymo will be eligible to hire a car for the service. Continue reading →

The Biggest Boondoggle?

By | | Transportation
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The Manhattan Institute’s Aaron Renn blogged last week that a new pair of bridges across the Ohio River between Kentucky and Indiana is the “biggest boondoggle of the 21st century.” Renn calls these $1.3 billion bridges a boondoggle because they doubled the capacity of the previous Interstate 65 bridge across the river, yet after they opened traffic declined by nearly 50 percent.

Traffic fell this much because the states decided to pay for the new bridges partly by tolling them. This pushed traffic to other nearby bridges that remain untolled. As a traffic survey makes clear — but Renn glosses over — overall cross-river traffic grew just as the states predicted when they decided new bridges were needed. So the problem is not that the bridges weren’t needed but that the other bridges remain unpriced.

The Manhattan Institute supports free markets, so it should also support tolling. It is possible that variable-priced tolling of all the Ohio River bridges near Louisville could have eliminated congestion without immediately adding to bridge capacity, but traffic would continue to grow and eventually the states might need to use the collected tolls to expand capacity. Continue reading →

Amtrak Ridership Declined in 2018

By | | Transportation
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Although Amtrak has posted its October, 2018 performance report, which includes the first month of FY 2019, it still has not released its September report, which would include year-end results for fiscal year 2018. However, data distributed by rail groups indicates that Amtrak passenger ridership was 0.1 percent lower in 2018 than in 2017.

All of the decline was among long-distance trains, which lost 3.9 percent of their riders. Amtrak’s Northeast Corridor saw a 0.8 percent ridership increase while state-subsidized short-distance trains gained 0.4 percent more riders.

Ridership fell for all but two long-distance trains, the exceptions being the Oakland-Chicago California Zephyr and the New York-New Orleans Crescent. The New York-Chicago Lake Shore Limited lost 13.1 percent of its riders, while the Chicago-Seattle Empire Builder lost 5.6 percent of its riders, while still managing to be Amtrak’s number one long-distance train. Continue reading →

Ride Hailing and Crime Depress Transit Numbers

By | | Transportation
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“Why have so many people quit taking public transit in St. Louis?” the St. Louis Post-Dispatch asks. “It’s not just crime,” the paper adds, but then it gives a long list of recent violent crimes, including a murder, beatings, gropings, and more.

It may not be “just crime,” but crime may be making it far worse in St. Louis than in some other cities. While the article points out that ridership is declining nationwide, the declines in St. Louis are much worse than average. St. Louis has lost 23 percent of its transit riders in the last four years and 36 percent in the last decade, compared with national declines of 8 percent in four years and 6 percent in 10 years. Among major urban areas, only Cleveland, Sacramento, Virginia Beach, Milwaukee, and Memphis are as bad as or worse off than St. Louis.

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