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Monthly Archives: September 2020

Giving Transit a Pass

By | | Transportation
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Everyone knows that transit is so morally superior to driving that we aren’t supposed to ask about how much it costs. Pay no attention to the fact that the next light-rail line Portland wants to build will cost nearly $3 billion; planners don’t mention the cost in their presentation of the proposal.

Nor are we supposed to ask whether anyone is actually riding transit. When Portland’s last light-rail line, which cost $1.5 billion, opened a few years ago, transit ridership declined. But that’s no reason to question the next line.

Now we have some new questions are we aren’t supposed to ask. A bill signed by California Governor Gavin Newsom on Monday has exempted transit projects from detailed environmental review, meaning we no longer get to find out that the rail project that’s supposed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions will actually increase them. Not surprisingly, the bill was written by state Senator Scott Wiener, who also wants to force single-family neighborhoods to accept high-density transit-oriented developments in their midst. Continue reading →

Recent & Long-Term Housing Trends

By | | Policy brief
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As noted in last week’s policy brief, a pandemic is less likely to “change everything” than it is to accelerate and magnify existing trends. The Census Bureau’s recent release of 2019 American Community Survey data along with other housing data can help us predict what trends the COVID-19 pandemic is likely to accelerate.

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

One unfortunate trend is the increasing cost of housing, which is a result of government regulation. However, this is one trend that the pandemic might reverse, as that increase is mainly taking place in particularly dense urban areas such as Los Angeles, New York, and San Francisco, and people’s responses to the pandemic are likely to reduce densities as they escape from such dense areas and move to places with less land-use regulation. Continue reading →

Home Sales Reveal Demographic Shift

By | | Housing, News commentary
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Last week, the Census Bureau reported a huge surge in July and August new home sales while the National Association of Realtors reported a parallel growth of existing home sales. Total homes sold is the greatest since the 2006 housing bubble while the year-on-year growth in sales was the greatest since 1983, when the economy was recovering from a recession.

The growth in sales in 2020, however, isn’t due to a bubble or an economic recovery. Instead, it represents a major demographic shift. Financial blogger Wolf Richter argues that it is more evidence of a movement “taking place from some densely populated cities, and especially city centers, and especially from rental apartments, to houses a little further out, or in more distant suburbs.”

The Census Bureau and Realtor data don’t indicate whether the sales are in cities or suburbs, but both agree that the greatest increases are in the South and Midwest, while increases in the Northeast and West are much smaller. This would fit Richter’s guess that people are leaving expensive apartments in New York City and San Francisco and buying homes in more affordable places in Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Minnesota, North Carolina, and Ohio, states that already had some of the fastest-growing urban areas before the pandemic. Continue reading →

Public Transit’s Last Stand

By | | Transportation
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As transit agencies run out of money running nearly empty buses and trains, the rhetoric for another Congressional bailout of transit has gotten even more shrill. Yet it is all just hot air.

“Without public transit, there will be no economic recovery,” says transit advocate Nick Sifuentes. In case Mr. Sifuentes hasn’t noticed, the economy is already recovering, thanks in part to driving recovering to 89 percent of pre-pandemic levels but no thanks to transit, whose ridership remains nearly 65 percent below last year’s.

“America faces a mobility crisis that will have ‘profound’ implications — especially for those on low incomes and people of color — if Congress does not step in to fill the nation’s $32bn public transport funding gap,” says the ever-Left Guardian. How serious can a mobility crisis be when only 5 percent of low-income workers rely on transit to get to work? Continue reading →

Tongass National Forest Still a Loser

By | | Public lands
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Alaska’s Tongass National Forest, the largest forest in the nation, is losing $15 million to $21 million a year on timber sales, according to a new report from Taxpayers for Common Sense. The forest plans to sell 300 million board feet of timber in the next five years, says the report, and will lose money on all of it.

The Tongass National Forest covers more land than the state of West Virginia and is five times larger than the next largest national forest.

Forest Service timber sales dropped by more than 75 percent between 1990 and 2000, and since the agency lost money on much of the timber it sold, that saved taxpayers a lot of cash. However, it didn’t save as much as it should have, because the Forest Service didn’t reduce its timber staff by as much as the drop in sales. Instead, it relabeled them “vegetation managers” and kept most of them on the payroll. Continue reading →

Transport Policy in the Age of Coronavirus

By | | Transportation
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“The coronavirus pandemic is going to leave behind major changes in America’s transportation system, and those changes, in turn, call for changes in transportation policies today,” says a paper published by the Reason Foundation yesterday. “While the exact numbers are uncertain, the direction of trends is fairly certain, and these trends demand changes in existing transportation policies.”

Click image to download a PDF of the report. Click the link in the previous paragraph to go to an introduction to the report.

For example, “states and cities that are planning mega-transportation projects should at least pause and most likely cancel those projects, especially if they depend on assumptions that people will continue to live in dense cities and ride mass transportation instead of driving. Even projects that are in early construction stages should be reconsidered, as it isn’t worth throwing good money after bad if the project is going to fail to accomplish its goals.” The Maryland Purple Line, whose future is uncertain as the contractor quit in a dispute over cost overruns, is an example of a project that should be permanently halted. Continue reading →

The Last Pre-Pandemic Snapshot of the USA

By | | Policy brief
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The United States had 2.3 million more workers in 2019 than in 2018, and more than 30 percent of the increase worked at home. This boosted the share of people who worked at home from 5.3 to 5.7 percent.

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

Historian Stephen Davies observes that a major pandemic does not “introduce something novel.” Instead, “it accelerates and magnifies trends and processes that were already under way.” It can also bring “a final stop to processes that were already exhausted.” People working at home is an example of a trend that is being accelerated and magnified by the COVID-19 pandemic. Continue reading →

Years to Days

By | | Transportation
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In 1987, the Eno Transportation Foundation published a book called Commuting in America by transportation researcher Alan Pisarski. The book was based on 1980 census data, and included information about differences in vehicles per household and commuting habits by sex, age, race, incomes, and poverty status.

Last Thursday, the Census Bureau published data from the 2019 American Community Survey just 9-1/2 months after the end of the year. I downloaded much of the data related to transportation and wrote up my draft analysis by Saturday afternoon, sending it to Pisarski for review. My analysis looked at vehicles per household and commuting habits by sex, age, race, incomes, and poverty status.

“It’s almost comical,” he responded, recalling that that it took the Census Bureau several years to get the 1980 census data ready for him to use, and then it took him two years to analyze the data and write the book, whereas I was able to draft a mini-replication of his work in two days. “Years to days is nice,” he said. Continue reading →

Transit Not Yet Safe to Ride

By | | Transportation
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Earlier this week, I noted that a Washington Metro survey found that most of its former transit riders are unwilling to go back to riding transit until an effective COVID-19 vaccine is found. It appears they were right to say that, as a recent study by epidemiologists from Johns Hopkins University has concluded that, even after “adjusting for social distancing,” “public transit use . . . remained significantly associated with SARS-CoV-2 infection.”

The study found that “NPIs” (non-pharmaceutical interventions, e.g., masks & social distancing) “while visiting indoor and outdoor venues helps reduce SARS-CoV-2 transmission.” However, the two exceptions were public transport and places of worship. “Even NPIs may not be possible or sufficient” to prevent the virus’ spread on public transit, the study concludes. Although the study doesn’t say so, I suspect the problem is that transit vehicles are too small to permit true social distancing.

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It’s Not Climate Change, Stupid

By | | Wildfire
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Early this week, Oregon governor Kate Brown went on national television to call the Pacific Coast fires a “bellwether for climate change.” As UC Berkeley professor of sustainable development Maximilian Auffhammer writes, “It’s the climate change, stupid.”

This is one of four responses to the Pacific Coast fires. Brown and Auffhammer are warmers, people who believe the earth’s climate is changing and the fires must be due to that change. In the warmers’ minds, the fires themselves then become evidence that we need to change our lifestyles to cut back on greenhouse gas emissions.

A second group are the burners, people who believe that a century of fire suppression has led to a dangerous build-up of fuels in the forests. Oregon Senator Ron Wyden falls into this category. He wants to give the Forest Service and other agencies more money and more freedom to do prescribed burning. Continue reading →