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Monthly Archives: April 2019

1. Transit’s Growing Costs Harm the Poor

By | | Policy brief
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The Census Bureau’s 2017 American Community Survey revealed that, for the first time since the Census Bureau began keeping track of such data in 1960, the median income of transit commuters has risen above the median income of all American workers.

One reason transit commuter incomes have risen is that low-income transit riders are giving up on transit. Thanks to a growing economy, the number of people who earn less than $15,000 a year has declined, but the number of transit commuters who are in that income bracket has declined even faster, so that low-income commuters are 8 percent less likely to use transit than they were a decade ago. Meanwhile, people earning more than $75,000 a year were 10 percent more likely to commute by transit in 2017 than in 2007. Continue reading →

The Antiplanner Is Going Bi-Weekly

By | | Housekeeping
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The world is changing and the Antiplanner needs to change with it. I started the Antiplanner more than twelve years ago as a way to both advertise and regularly update my then soon-to-be-published book, The Best-Laid Plans. Now, three more books, dozens of policy papers, and more than 3,000 Antiplanner posts later, this format no longer seems to serve a vital purpose.

One symptom is that I accidentally turned the commenting option off a couple of weeks ago and none of the people who regularly comment thought to send me an email telling me about it. Commenting is back on now, but I’ve been feeling for some time that the Antiplanner has been repetitive and reactionary rather than proactive.

At the same time, my other favored medium, the policy paper, is too long for most readers. Attention spans today are shorter, so I want to stop writing policy papers of 10,000 words and start writing chart-heavy briefing papers of 1,000 to 2,000 words. Blog posts of 600 words are too short to capture the interest of those who are seriously concerned about the issues, yet too long to get broad public attention in this Twitter-dominated world. Continue reading →

An Affordable Housing Boondoggle

By | | Housing
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Thanks to its urban-growth boundary, Denver has a housing affordability problem. Apartment rents have increased by 65 percent in the last decade, while the nationwide cost of living in that time rose by just 18 percent and rents nationwide increased by an average of 28 percent.

One of the city’s responses was to create a housing voucher program for people who earn too much to qualify for federal housing vouchers but still can’t afford rents in the city. Last July, it allocated $1 million to the program which was supposed to help 125 families.

So far just three households have been able to use it. Out of the million dollars, $180,000 went for administrative overhead, which is a lot of money for just three renters. Continue reading →

An Abundance of Caution

By | | Transportation
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Illinois contractors and unions are lobbying hard for a gas tax increase, claiming that highway infrastructure is crumbling and killing people. Last week, the Antiplanner told Illinois that its highway infrastructure is actually doing fine, but the infrastructure that was in trouble was rail transit. Increasing gas taxes to repair Chicago transit would unfairly take money from low-income downstate auto commuters to subsidize higher-income Chicago transit commuters.

The day after I returned from Chicago, two local commuters woke up to discover a bridge had shed some concrete that crushed their cars in the night. Does that mean the unions were right about crumbling highway infrastructure?

No, the concrete, it turns out, came from a Chicago Transit Authority Red Line elevated line. CTA didn’t even seem too concerned about it, finding no evidence of “larger deterioration issues.” However, a spokesperson said, “out of an abundance of caution crews are performing a complete inspection of the area.” Continue reading →

Americans on the Move

By | | News commentary, Useful Data
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Maricopa County (Phoenix) was the nation’s fastest-growing county in 2018, gaining more than 81,000 new residents from 2017, according to population estimates just released by the Census Bureau. A distant second was Clark County (Las Vegas), at 48,000 new residents; followed by Harris County (Houston), 34,000; Riverside County (California), 33,500; and King County (Seattle), 29,000. Since 2010, Maricopa gained 593,000 residents and was just edged for the number one spot by Harris County, which grew by 605,000.

Just as significant are the counties that lost population, led by Cook County (Chicago), which lost 24,000 people. Three New York City boroughs are in the bottom five: Queens (-18,000), Brooklyn (-13,500), and the Bronx (-7,500). Los Angeles County is also in the bottom five, having lost 13,000. Baltimore, Honolulu, St. Louis, Cuyahoga (Cleveland), and Sonoma Counties are also big losers, the latter due to wildfire issues.

As a result of these county changes, the nation’s three largest metropolitan areas all lost population: New York (-25,000), Chicago (-22,000), and Los Angeles (-7,000). The declines in the central counties of these regions were partly offset by gains in suburban counties. The metro areas with the biggest gains were Dallas-Ft. Worth (132,000), Phoenix (96,000), Houston (92,000), Atlanta (76,000), Orlando (60,000), and Seattle (55,000). Continue reading →

Has the Day Come for Electric Vehicles?

By | | Transportation
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“Electric vehicles’ day will come,” argues Bloomberg, “and it might come suddenly.” California is pushing for electric vehicles, the article notes, and it projects that there will come an inflection point at which electric cars will suddenly become dominant.

Tiny electric cars gather around free recharging stations in Norway. Photo by Fiona Bradley.

As an example of such an inflection, it points to Norway, where electric cars grew from 1 percent of new car sales in 2011 to 47 percent by 2018. The article suggests such “explosive growth” of electric vehicles might happen in California. Continue reading →

Transit Commuters Up But Ridership Down

By | | Transportation
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Here’s a puzzle: between 2014 and 2017, the number of people who said they took transit to work in the San Jose urban area grew by 25 percent. Yet actual San Jose transit ridership fell by 15 percent. What accounts for this apparent discrepancy?

Similar but smaller discrepancies exist in a few other large urban areas. New York transit commuting is up 4% but ridership down 3%; Chicago commuting up 6% but ridership down 7%; Atlanta commuting up 12% but ridership down 8%. In some smaller urban areas, the discrepancies can be much larger: Cape Coral, Florida transit commuting is up 77% but ridership down 20%; Wichita commuting up 79% but ridership down 37%. In a few urban areas, the trends are reversed: Houston transit commuting is down 8% but ridership is up 4%; Greenville, SC commuting down 35% but ridership up 152%.

Of course, not all transit riders are commuters, so commuting can increase even as ridership drops if transit ridership for other purposes declines by more than the increase in commuting. This seems a likely explanation in many cases as most ride-hailing trips that substitute for transit are not commuter trips. Continue reading →

Ridership Is Down, But APTA Still Wants to Spend $232 Billion on Transit Infrastructure

By | | Transportation
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The American Public Transportation Association released its fourth quarter 2018 ridership report showing what Antiplanner readers already know: transit lost 2 percent of its riders last year. While admitting the decline, the accompanying press release focused on the few places where ridership grew, such as Columbus, the Long Island Railroad, and West Covina, California. You know they’re desperate when they have to go to West Covina — population 108,000 — to find good news.

Although APTA did issue a press release, it isn’t visible on the lobby group’s home page. Instead, the top “news update” is a March 18 press release demanding that taxpayers pony up $232 billion for transit infrastructure. As previously noted here, this is just a wish-list of transit project, most of which are new and don’t fix the $100 billion maintenance backlog with existing infrastructure.

The ridership press release barely hints at the really bad news, such as the 24 percent decline in Baltimore heavy-rail riders, the 20 percent decline in Boston light-rail riders, or the 12 percent decline in Atlanta bus riders. Unlike the few positive results APTA reported, these aren’t rare exceptions; more likely they are bellwethers of things to come for the few transit agencies that have seen ridership gains. Continue reading →

China’s Motorways

By | | Transportation
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We often hear about how China has the world’s longest high-speed rail network. But we hardly ever hear about how China has the world’s longest and fastest-growing freeway network. Jeremy Clarkson is changing that, noting that China has built 84,000 miles of motorways (the Britishism for limited-access highways), and the network is expanding by 6,000 miles a year — about six times the growth of its high-speed rail lines.

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In contrast, the United States had about 67,000 miles of freeways in 2017, an amount that has grown by less than 1,000 miles a year since 2010. To be fair, we built most of our freeways in the 1950s and 1960, so our freeway network shouldn’t expand as fast as China’s. But since the United States has far more motor vehicles than China (about 272 million vs. 240 million), we should have at least as many miles of freeways. So, next time you hear someone ask, “Why can’t we have high-speed trains like China?” ask back, “Why can’t we have freeways like China?”

No More Gas Taxes for Transit

By | | Transportation
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Taxpayers United is releasing a report today in opposition to raising Illinois gas taxes to fix supposedly crumbling infrastructure. Illinois highway infrastructure is actually in good shape, the report argues; the real infrastructure problems are with Chicago’s transit systems.

Over the past three years, nearly 30 percent of Illinois gas taxes have been diverted to transit, mostly in Chicago. The state’s remaining highway infrastructure problems could be solved by ending such diversions. Despite the subsidies, Chicago transit ridership declined by 9 percent since 2014 and is likely to continue to decline in the foreseeable future.

As noted here yesterday, a new report from Moody’s found that the Chicago Transit Authority had more debt and unfunded obligations than any other transit agency, which measured as a percent of each agency’s annual budgets. This doesn’t even count Chicago transit’s state-of-good-repair backlog, estimated to be $36 billion. Continue reading →