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Monthly Archives: May 2020

Reducing Poverty Through Auto Ownership

By | | Policy brief
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Michelle Corson is a woman on a mission. After a successful career in the finance and venture capital industries, she started a non-profit, On the Road Lending, whose goal is to provide mobility for low-income people with poor credit. She doesn’t improve people’s mobility by giving them transit passes or bicycles; instead, she offers affordable loans for new or reliable used cars that are still under warranty.

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

It doesn’t hurt that Corson herself loves to drive. But she also recognizes that transit doesn’t always reach the best jobs for low-income people and that single mothers are not going to be able to get their children to school on a bicycle. Continue reading →

Maybe 35 Percent Wasn’t Enough

By | | Transportation
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When I let associates know that I was projecting that transit ridership after the pandemic would be 25 to 35 percent lower than before, some of them suggested I was overestimating. Now Reuters reports that in China, “transit ridership in large cities remains down about 35% two months after lockdown restrictions were lifted.” At the same time, auto sales there have sharply increased.

Reuters also frets that a shift from transit to cars will lead to more congestion. In fact, in most cities not enough people ride transit to make a different in traffic congestion. Where there is a difference, I suspect there will be less congestion, not more, because the real switch will not be from transit to driving but from transit and driving to working at home.
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Transit agencies, of course, want people to feel like they can safely ride the obsolete transportation they are offering. New York’s MTA alone says it will cost $500 million more a year to keep everything from ticket machines to transit seats disinfected. That’s just one more reason to rethink whether we really need transit all that much.

Not the Best Timing

By | | Transportation
5 Comments

A group called the High-Speed Rail Alliance was pleased to announce that Massachusetts Representative Seth Moulton is proposing that the federal government spend $240 billion on high-speed rail lines. This is, says the Congressman, “a vision worthy of the moment.”

Is it worthy because ridership of Amtrak is down 95 percent? Or is it worthy because Americans are rethinking their use of mass transportation?

No, apparently it’s worthy because President Trump started a trade war with China that was exacerbated by accusations over COVID-19. China, says Representative Moulton, is expected to “invest” (meaning spend) $46 billion a year on high-speed rail between 2020 and 2030. So, since China is doing it, we have to do it too in order to stay “competitive.” Continue reading →

Another Reason to Drive a Car

By | | Mission
3 Comments

Not only is a private automobile the safest place to travel during a pandemic, it’s the safest place to be tested for the coronavirus. At least, so laments Eve Andrews, a writer for Grist who can easily afford a car but has been trying to live without one.

She notes that some people don’t have cars because “cars can be prohibitively expensive to purchase and maintain.” I don’t find that persuasive as owning a car is one of the best ways to boost one’s income. I am pretty sure that most of the 9 percent of households in American who don’t own cars can afford to do so, they just choose not to and then often rely other taxpayers to subsidize their transit rides.
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In any case, as Andrews notes, social distancing is causing at least some people to question the car-free lifestyle. Unfortunately, anti-car people have so demonized cars that people think they are being virtuous just by not owning one when in fact they maybe harming both themselves and others by making themselves more vulnerable to catching and spreading the virus.

Transportation After the Pandemic

By | | Policy brief
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Most people living through this pandemic have wondered, “What will change after COVID-19?” The transit industry in particular is worried about whether it will get back its lost riders, while airlines are just hoping to survive long enough to recover. While a lot of uncertainties remain, some things are less uncertain than others. This paper will focus on what is likely to happen in the first year or two after the various stay-at-home orders are lifted and the economy begins to recover.

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

  1. More People Will Work at Home

The most profound change will be number of people working at home. The American Community Survey reported that more than 8.2 million people, or 5.3 percent of the nation’s workforce, worked exclusively at home in 2018. The share was much greater in some areas: 8.6 percent of Colorado workers and 15.4 percent of Marin County, California workers worked at home. Continue reading →

NYers Say They’ll Use Transit Less or Not at All

By | | Transportation
10 Comments

As a result of the pandemic, 44 percent of New York City residents expect to “avoid public transit entirely” after stay-at-home orders end. Since, in 2018, 56 percent of New Yorkers rode transit to work, it may be that the 44 percent who weren’t riding transit are the ones who say they won’t ride it in the future.

However, another 31.5 percent say they expect to use transit less. Just 18.5 percent say they expect to use transit as much as they did before the pandemic. If people do what they say they are going to do, New York City transit is going to lose a lot of riders. The survey also found that 5.5 percent say they expect to work at home, which is just 1 percentage point more than the 4.5 percent of New Yorkers who worked at home in 2018.
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Surveys are, at best, a first approximation of future behavior. Tomorrow’s Antiplanner policy brief will present my projections of transportation in the first year or two after the pandemic. They will rely less on what people say they are going to do and more on what we have learned during the pandemic. I’ll be interested in your comments.

Democrats Propose $15.75B More for Transit

By | | Transportation
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House Democrats have proposed a $3 trillion coronavirus relief bill that includes $15.75 billion for transit, $15.0 billion for highways, as well as more for Amtrak. Normally, Congress gives about $12.5 billion to transit agencies; this year, it has already tripled that and this bill would more than quadruple it.

I understand that some transit agencies are hurting because the local tax revenues they depend on have declined. But most of them have also cut service, which should have cut their costs. Everyone in the private sector is in financial pain; why should transit be exempt?
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Democrats say this bill is needed to deal with the highest unemployment rates since the Great Depression. But, unlike in the Depression, all of this unemployment is self-inflicted and it’s not going to be fixed by handing out funny money. The Democrats’ real goals appear to be to reward the public employee unions that support them even as they punish the private sector by keeping the economy shut down long enough to make it completely dependent on the government.

The Rise and Fall of Downtown, USA

By | | Policy brief
10 Comments

What do you think of when you hear the word “city”? Most people envision a downtown filled with skyscrapers surrounded by lower-rise developments. At least, that’s what appears in most photographs, and the first two dozen of them, in a Google image search for “city.” Some even argue that cities such as Phoenix that don’t have big, skyscraper-filled downtowns aren’t “real cities.”

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

However, as Joel Garreau pointed out nearly thirty years ago in his great book, Edge City, cities like that are “abberations. We built cities that way for less than a century.” Before about 1840, cities had no defined central business districts as we know them today. The first skyscrapers weren’t built until the 1880s. Since 1920, the economic forces that led to the construction of dense downtowns have been largely replaced by decentralizing forces. Continue reading →

Traffic Fatalities in 2019 and 2020

By | | Transportation
4 Comments

Traffic fatalities declined by 1.2 percent in 2019 despite a 0.9 percent increase in driving. Preliminary data released by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration indicates that pedestrian deaths declined by 2 percent and cyclist deaths by 3 percent. The only increase was from accidents involving heavy trucks.

You might think that the great decrease in travel in 2020 would result in a parallel decrease in traffic fatalities. But Massachusetts reports that fatalities have slightly increased despite a 50 percent decrease in driving. The state had 28 fatalities in April 2020 compared with 27 in April 2019. Of course, that’s a small sample compared with the nation as a whole.

The state didn’t say why it thought fatalities hadn’t declined. But it appears that some drivers have responded to the reduction in congestion by driving well above speed limits. Nebraska has cited 64 percent more drivers for speeding above 100 mph since March 18 than the same period in 2019. Utah reports numerous people driving 30 mph above posted speed limits. More data will be needed to find out of Massachusett’s experience is the exception or the rule and whether speeding is the cause of increased fatality rates.

COVID-19 Reduces March Ridership by 41.5%

By | | Transportation, Useful Data
2 Comments

It will come as absolutely no surprise to anyone that transit ridership in March 2020 was well below March 2019. April’s will be even lower, but for now we have just the data for March released earlier this week by the Federal Transit Administration.

Those data show that overall rail ridership declined by 46 percent while total bus ridership fell by 38 percent. Among the nation’s largest urban areas, the declines ranged from just 8 percent in Oklahoma City to 54 percent in Washington, DC. At the lower end of the range, Richmond — just a few miles from Washington — saw just a 12 percent drop; Raleigh was 18 percent; and San Antonio was 19 percent. At the upper end of the range, Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Cleveland, Kansas City, Memphis, New Orleans, New York, San Francisco-Oakland, and Seattle all lost between 40 and 47 percent of their riders. Continue reading →