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Monthly Archives: March 2020

Light-Rail Disasters

By | | Policy brief
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Now that the COVID-19 pandemic has reduced ridership in many transit systems by as much as 90 percent, it almost seems nostalgic to look back to a time when transit ridership was only dropping because of low gas prices, ride hailing, and inept transit agency management. Among those ineptitudes documented in recent Antiplanner policy briefs were Los Angeles Metro’s insistence on building light rail despite its proven track record of losing five bus riders for every rail rider gained and Portland’s insistence on sticking with light rail despite the fact that doing so reduced the capacity of the transit system to move people through downtown Portland.

Click image to download a four-page PDF of this policy brief.

This raises the question of whether light rail has worked anywhere in the country. Transit agencies in seventeen urban areas that had no rail transit in 1980 have built light rail lines since then. This paper will look at each of these systems to see whether they have contributed to or detracted from their regions’ transit systems. I’ll also include Cleveland and Pittsburgh, both of which upgraded older streetcar lines to light-rail standards after 1980. Continue reading →

48. Disparate Impact

By | | Iconoclast
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In 2000, Dartmouth University economist William Fischel coined the term homevoter to describe the fact that, in most of the United States, a majority of voters were also homeowners and that they would tend to support policies that boosted the value of their homes. In particular, Fischel argued that homevoter preferences were responsible for the rise of no-growth and slow-growth laws that became popular on the West Coast and in the Northeast after Earth Day, 1970.

This suggested that efforts to abolish urban-growth boundaries were doomed to failure. Why would Portland or San Jose homeowners ever vote to get rid of boundaries when doing so would reduce the value of their homes by 50 percent (in Portland) to 75 percent (in San Jose)? Even in places where a majority of people were renters, renters are less likely to vote than homeowners, so getting rid of the boundaries appeared to be impossible.

However, a new rule published by the Department of Housing and Urban Development in 2013 offered an alternative solution, one that by-passed voters and their elected representatives. This solution was called disparate impact, and it said that land-use regulations that made it more difficult for low-income minorities to live in an area were effectively the same as putting up a sign saying “No Blacks Allowed.” Continue reading →

March Madness

By | | Transportation
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Transit agencies are now demanding that Congress give them at least $25 billion so they can continue infecting people with COVID-19. Restaurants, bars, shopping malls, amusement parks, and barber shops are all supposed to shut down, but let’s keep transit running even though one study has found that “mass transportation systems offer an effective way of accelerating the spread of infectious diseases within communities.”

At least one transit agency, Portland’s TriMet, is now admitting that it’s too dangerous for people to ride transit and that they should stay at home (or drive) instead. But it is still running its buses and trains. Why? For “medical staff, first responders and other essential workers.” So we’re encouraging health care and other “essential” people to use the form of transportation whose riders are nearly six times more likely to suffer from upper respiratory infections. That’s smart!

Speaking of smart (as in smart growth), the New York Times is blaming the high incidence of coronavirus in New York City on the city’s dense population. The newspaper-of-record noted that the nation’s largest and densest major city has 26 times as many cases and 18 times as many fatalities as the nation’s second-largest city, Los Angeles. Continue reading →

Dude, Where’s My Driverless Car?

By | | Policy brief
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A minor footnote in the history of the COVID-19 pandemic is that this may be the first major crisis in history that was assisted by driverless vehicles. A Chinese company named Neolix is using its driverless delivery vans to transport medical supplies and sterilize streets in Wuhan.

Click image to download a four-page PDF of this brief.

I’ve been promoting the idea that the advent of driverless cars means we shouldn’t be wasting money building archaic rail transit projects since 2010. Now, a decade later, seems an appropriate time to see how far the industry has come and how far it has to go to make widespread use of driverless cars a reality. Some say that the task of creating a fully driverless car is more difficult than anticipated and we won’t have them for many more years. Continue reading →

47. Challenging Growth Management

By | | Iconoclast
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British Columbia is big. It’s really big. It’s bigger than Texas. It’s 40 percent bigger than Texas. And while Texas has four major urban areas with a combined population of more than 15 million people, British Columbia has only one major urban area with fewer than 2.3 million people.

So, naturally, Vancouver regional planners fear that urban sprawl might overrun the entire province. The plans and regulations they have written to preserve British Columbia’s supposedly scarce open space have made Vancouver the least-affordable housing market in North America, according to Wendell Cox’s latest review of housing prices. In the rest of the English-speaking world, only Hong Kong is more expensive.

In 2007, the Fraser Institute asked me to visit Vancouver to review its regional plan–or plans, actually, since the first one was written in the 1960s and later, more-restrictive plans were written periodically after that. I spent several days in the offices of the Greater Vancouver Regional District (now known as Metro Vancouver), which were located not in Vancouver but in the suburb of Burnaby. Continue reading →

We Were Warned Not to Bunch Up

By | | Housing, Regional planning, Transportation
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We were warned. After September 11, 2001, historian Stephen Ambrose told us what to do.

“One of the first things you learn in the Army is that, when you and your fellow soldiers are within range of enemy artillery, rifle fire, or bombs, don’t bunch up,” wrote Ambrose in the Wall Street Journal. Now that the U.S. was under attack from terrorists, Ambrose urged the nation as a whole to learn the same lesson: “don’t bunch up.” “In this age of electronic revolution,” he noted, “it is no longer necessary to pack so many people and office into such small space as lower Manhattan.”

Ambrose’s advice was ignored. Manhattan’s population has grown by at least 100,000 people since 2001. Fitting 1.6 million people on a 23-square-mile island is only possible because of transit systems that force people to pack themselves into buses and railcars. Continue reading →

The Induced-Demand Con

By | | Policy brief
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Building new freeway lanes “has utterly failed to stop congestion,” says a new report from Transportation for America (T4A) titled The Congestion Con. “We have added 30,511 new freeway lane-miles of road in the largest 100 urbanized areas in the U.S. between 1993 and 2017, an increase of 42 percent,” continues the report, yet “congestion has grown by a staggering 144 percent” due to “induced demand.” The report concludes that the nation should stop building new roads and instead “bring jobs, housing, and other destinations closer together.”

Click image to download a four-page PDF of this brief.

This report makes several fundamental errors. First, at least a third of the “new freeway lane-miles” that the report claims were “added” between 1993 and 2017 already existed in 1993, and thus can’t be claimed to have been built since 1993 to reduce congestion. The authors of the report knew this but dismissed it as irrelevant. Continue reading →

46. More Rail Transit Disasters

By | | Iconoclast
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When Congress created the transit capital improvement grants or New Starts fund in 1991, it required that each proposed project be “justified based on a comprehensive review of its mobility improvements, environmental benefits, cost effectiveness, and operating efficiencies.” Initially, the Federal Transit Administration measured “cost effectiveness” in dollars per new rider: the annual operating cost of the project plus the amortized capital cost divided by the projected number of annual new riders.

While a useful measure, the FTA made no effort to enforce it. While transit agencies calculated that bus projects (such as bus-rapid transit) typically cost about $5 per new rider and rail projects typically cost $20 to $100 per new rider, the agencies routinely selected the rail projects even though they clearly weren’t cost effective.

In 2003, U.S. representative from Oregon, Earl Blumenauer, convinced Congress to carve out a portion of New Starts for what he called Small Starts: smaller transit projects that would only cost a couple of hundred million dollars. He specifically expected that the money would be used for streetcars. Continue reading →

Transit Agencies: Don’t Worry, Be Happy

By | | Transportation
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Entire universities are shutting down and telling their students to go home. The governor of Washington has banned all gatherings of 250 people or more. Entire countries are shutting down. Numerous airlines have offered worried travelers flexible cancellation policies.

So how is America’s transit industry responding to coronavirus? Denver’s RTD says it is “wiping down its handrails” once a day. That’s reassuring, so long as each bus and rail vehicle only carries one passenger a day.

Seattle’s Sound Transit’s trains presumably sometimes carry more than 250 people at a time, but Governor Inslee has exempted them from the 250 limit (of course; transit gets exemptions from all the rules everyone else has to follow). The agency is firmly responding to the crisis by “putting posters on vehicles reminding everyone to follow critical health guidelines.” That’ll stop the epidemic in its tracks! Continue reading →

The Futility of Trying to Reduce Driving

By | | Policy brief
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Nearly fifty years ago, a friend of mine named Ron Buel (who at the time was the chief of staff to Portland city commissioner Neil Goldschmidt) wrote a book titled Dead End: The Automobile in Mass Transportation. Buel argued that cars harmed cities and the people living in them, and at the time he and other critics of the automobile seemed to make a lot of sense.

Click image to download a four-page PDF of this brief.

After all, in 1965, Ralph Nader’s Unsafe at Any Speed had shown that cars were death traps, killing almost as many Americans each year as ten years of the Viet Nam war. A look out a Portland window on a sunny day showed that cars were pollutomobiles, putting a grey layer of unhealthy smog over the city that was so thick people couldn’t see Mt. Hood, 50 miles away. In 1973, the OPEC oil embargo would make Americans painfully aware that their automobiles were also gas hogs. Continue reading →