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Monthly Archives: July 2020

Do Densities Matter?

By | | News commentary, Regional planning
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Do population densities influence the spread of coronavirus? A new study in the Journal of the American Planning Association says no: “after controlling for metropolitan population, county density is not significantly related to the infection rate.”

Co-authored by Reid Ewing, one of the nation’s loudest proponents of smart-growth (meaning density), the study made a crucial mistake: it measured the population density of entire counties. But most counties in urban areas are only partially urbanized.

San Bernardino County, for example, has 2 million people and covers 20,000 square miles, for an average density of about 100 people per square mile. But 1.8 million of those people live on just 2.6 percent of the land, meaning a density of 3,400 people per square mile. Obviously, using 100 instead of 3,400 would drastically change the results. Continue reading →

The Mystery of the Missing Motorcoach Miles

By | | Policy brief
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One source of data that I frequently cite is National Transportation Statistics, which is compiled and regularly updated by the Department of Transportation’s Bureau of Transportation Statistics. Table 1-40 in particular shows passenger-miles in the United States broken down by mode, with annual data going back as far as 1960 for at least some of the modes.

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

The table shows four general categories: air, highway, transit, and rail. Note that almost all of the modes listed under “transit” are also listed under either “highway” or “rail,” so the total is less than the sum of all of the categories. I also don’t count the passenger-miles shown for heavy trucks, as these represent drivers and truck drivers are no more “passengers” than airline pilots or Amtrak engineers. Continue reading →

Recent Opinions

By | | Transportation
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A couple of weeks ago, an article in the Orange County Register discussed transportation resiliency. “In spite of anti-auto policies, 80 percent of passenger travel and 90 percent of urban travel is by automobile,” concluded the article. “It’s time to take back cities for people and the automobiles that have liberated them to reach more productive jobs, better homes, lower-cost consumer goods, and greater recreation and social opportunities.”

Last week, Real Clear Policy published an article on a transportation bill recently passed by the House of Representatives. This bill, said the article, was perfect for the ’20s — the 1920s that is. The bill would effectively quintuple federal subsidies to intercity passenger trains and increase federal subsidies to urban transit by 50 percent, with a heavy emphasis on rail transit.
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The use of both rail transit and intercity passenger trains, the article notes, peaked in 1920. Tens of billions of dollars in annual subsidies to these modes since 1970 haven’t prevented the continuing decline of these obsolete technologies and businesses. The proposed law “was designed for a century ago,” concludes the article. “It’s time to let go of the past and write a bill for the future.”

Stupid Responses to Collapsed Ridership

By | | Transportation, Urban areas
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San Francisco Bay Area transit agencies are “struggling” as a result of the coronavirus, says one reporter. “Flailing about” would be a more accurate term. As noted yesterday, Bay Area transit agencies carried 86 percent fewer riders in May 2020 than May 2019. They basically have no idea how to cope with this other than to demand more subsidies from taxpayers and concessions from cities.

CalTrain, which offers commuter trains from San Francisco to San Jose, says it is carrying twice as many riders per day as at the low point of the pandemic. That means weekday ridership is up from 1,500 to 3,000. That’s still less than 5 percent of the usual number, which in 2018 was 64,000.

AC Transit, which serves Alameda and Contra Costa counties, warns that it may have to cut dozens of bus routes and reduce service on many more. But that’s an appropriate response when no one is riding transit. Continue reading →

May Transit Ridership Down 81 Percent

By | | Transportation, Useful Data
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The nation’s transit systems carried 81 percent fewer riders in May, 2020 than in May, 2019, according to data posted yesterday by the Federal Transit Administration. This drop is almost as great as the 84 percent decline reported for April.

Rail was hardest hit, with an 89 percent fall in ridership, while buses lost 74 percent of riders. For the year to date, nationwide ridership is down 41 percent, with rail losing 44 percent and bus 38 percent.

The biggest declines were in urban areas that see the most transit ridership: New York lost 90 percent of its riders, Washington 89 percent, Philadelphia 88 percent, and Boston and San Francisco-Oakland 85 percent. Falldowns were smallest in urban areas such as San Antonio (-45%) and Las Vegas (-54%) where transit plays a relatively insignificant role in the region’s transportation. Continue reading →

No Policy Brief This Week

By | | Housekeeping
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In accordance with a long-standing (i.e., one-year old) tradition of not having policy briefs the week after the Fourth prescription free tadalafil It is quickly absorbed by the bloodstream and dilates the vessels to allow more blood supply to regenerative area. And now it is free for sildenafil delivery all to be produced. However, severe bending can cause the erectile tissue to tear, leading to the formation of prescription viagra online scar tissue. The cialis 10 mg click here for more results suggested that there is no particular damage to retina if ED drugs are used regularly for a certain period of time. of July, I took this past weekend off. I hope to have a new policy brief next Tuesday.

Mobs vs. Elites vs. Democracy

By | | News commentary
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This Independence Day weekend, I’ll take a stand and say that confederate statues erected during the Jim Crow era to celebrate slavery and intimidate blacks should be torn down. But the decision to tear down a statue should be made democratically, not by mob rule.

When mobs started tearing down Confederate statues, people asked what would come next: would statues of Jefferson and Washington be torn down as well? Then statues of Jefferson and Washington were toppled in Portland.

Washington and Jefferson probably contributed more to human freedom than all but a handful of other people in the history of the world. But they owned slaves, so their statutes probably deserved it, right? Continue reading →

Not the End of the World

By | | News commentary
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“Climate change is happening,” says environmentalist Michael Shellenberger. “It’s just not the end of the world. It’s not even our most serious environmental problem.”

Shellenberger makes these statements in an article “apologizing” for the “climate scare.” Although he himself used to call climate change an “existential crisis,” he no longer believes that. In fact, he hasn’t believed it for awhile, but didn’t say so publicly because he feared “losing friends and funding.”

Shellenberger says he has been an environmentalist for 30 years, which means he joined the movement just as it was being taken over by socialists. As I describe in The Education of an Iconoclast, the environmental movement in the 1980s was tolerant of a wide range of views. Continue reading →

COVID-19 and Public Transit

By | | Transportation
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Two more studies published by the National Bureau of Economic Research associate increased cases of coronavirus with public transit. “A striking and robust relationship is found between death rates and public transit use,” according to a study by researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. People who worked at home were safest, the study found, but deaths correlated with people who drove to work only at the largest scale; the correlations weren’t statistically significant at the city or state level.

A second study by University of Virginia researcher John McLaren found that blacks and Native Americans were disproportionately likely to die from the virus. This was true even after controlling for income and education; the main factor that seemed to cause increased deaths in these groups was “the use of public transit.”
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My friend MSetty will remind us that there are places in the world that have lots of transit ridership but don’t seem to suffer high COVID-19 death rates, apparently because people in those countries are much more likely to wear masks. That may be true, but all things being equal, people are more likely to get sick if they use mass transportation than if they drive in their private automobiles. This will continue to be true after the current pandemic is over, so people who want to ride transit then will have a choice of continuing to wear masks or risk catching the flu or whatever is the disease of the week.

Five Reasons to Raise Subway Fares

By | | Transportation
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Some people at UC Berkeley published an article this week giving “five arguments for making subways free.” Yet it is more realistic to think that fares should be raised, not reduced.

The five arguments in the Berkeley article are:

  1. Marginal costs are low because capital costs have already been spent;
  2. Externalities are low especially if the subways get cars off the road;
  3. No more waiting in lines to pay;
  4. Subways help poor people and stimulate the economy;
  5. There are increasing returns to having more riders.

Some of these depend on the system, yet the Berkeley article makes no distinction between such extremes as the New York City subway, which is the heaviest-used transit system in the country, and the Baltimore subway, which is a joke. Other arguments are simply wrong. Continue reading →