The Antiplanner »

Monthly Archives: April 2021

If You Can’t Beat ’Em, Ban ’Em

By | | Transportation
3 Comments

Rail advocates like to claim that the introduction of high-speed trains has led to a cessation of airline service, apparently to show that high-speed trains can compete against faster planes. While this may have happened on a few routes, European air travel before the pandemic was growing far faster than rail travel. For example, in France, Germany, Italy, and Spain — the main European countries with high-speed rail — rail travel between 2011 and 2019 grew by 14 percent while air travel grew by 34 percent. No European country saw rail travel grow faster than air travel.

The government of France has found a solution to for-profit airlines outcompeting government-subsidized trains: ban the competing air travel. Under a law passed earlier this month, airlines will not be allowed to operate on routes that trains can serve in less than two-and-a-half hours. If high-speed trains were able to compete on their own, they wouldn’t need such a law.

Of course, French politicians justified this law based on the supposed savings in carbon emissions. But conventional trains are only a little more energy efficient than planes, and high-speed trains require well over 50 percent more energy, per train-car-mile, than conventional trains. Passenger occupancies also tend to be much higher on planes than trains — typically 85 percent vs. 50 percent — because planes usually operate in non-stop service while trains make many stops, so the size of planes can be set to demand while trains must be sized to fit the portion of the journey where demand is highest. Continue reading →

Did Ride Hailing Increase Congestion?

By | | Transportation
Leave a comment

“A new MIT study found that not only do rideshares increase congestion, but they also made traffic jams longer, led to a significant decline in people taking public transit, and haven’t really impacted car ownership,” reports Gizmodo. As noted here previously, transit advocates blame ride hailing for all sorts of problems in order to justify taxes and other restrictions to limit competition.

The new study from MIT is frankly unpersuasive. First of all, it says very little about the methodology used to come up with its results: page 1 of the study is an introduction and page 2 immediately begins to present the results. It appears the writers compared data in 44 urban areas before and after the introduction of ride hailing into those areas between 2012 and 2016.

Second, the writers appear to have made no effort to correct for or even consider any other variables. Although Uber began operating in San Francisco in 2010, ride hailing didn’t really begin growing until 2014. But the other thing that happened in 2014 was a huge drop in gasoline prices — prices fell by 50 percent in some areas. This isn’t even mentioned in the paper even though that drop could have most of the same effects the paper attributes to ride hailing. Continue reading →

Housing and Homelessness

By | | Housing
Leave a comment

“A provision in President Biden’s American Jobs Plan to make housing more affordable by giving cities incentives to abolish single-family zoning has a number of flaws,” says an op-ed published by Real Clear Policy on Monday. “Most important, single-family zoning didn’t make housing expensive and abolishing single-family zoning won’t make it more affordable.”

Homeless tents in Los Angeles’ Skid Row. Photo by Russ Allison Loar.

Urban planners are so eager to impose higher densities on American cities so badly that they are willing to ignore the costs, whether those costs are unaffordable housing or the truth about densities. Unfortunately, almost every city in America has urban planners on its staff while almost no city has an antiplanner on its staff. The result is that no one looks seriously at the unintended consequences that result from their programs and policies, which are usually layered on top of (and supposedly remedies to) the unintended consequences of previous programs and policies. Continue reading →

Can U.S. Power Plants Support Electric Cars?

By | | Policy brief, Transportation
1 Comment

Will electric cars completely replace internal-combustion vehicles anytime soon? Are electric vehicles, whether rail or highway vehicles, truly cleaner, especially in states where most electric power comes from burning fossil fuels? Does the United States electric grid have the capacity to power the nation’s automotive fleet? A detailed look at America’s energy budgets and electrical power supply systems will help answer questions like these.

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

Today’s Electrical Grid

The Department of Energy’s Monthly Energy Review shows that the leading source of electricity in the United States is natural gas, which produced 40 percent of the nation’s electricity in 2020, while coal produced 19 percent. This is a turnaround from just 15 years ago, when coal produced half of our electricity and natural gas just 19 percent. Some people blame coal’s decline on the Obama administration’s hostility to fossil fuels, but much of the credit is due to the development and widespread use of hydraulic fracturing and the low-cost natural gases it produced. Continue reading →

Post-COVID: More Driving, Less AM Congestion

By | | Transportation
5 Comments

A recent survey from PriceWaterhouseCooper found that the majority of office workers want to continue working at home at least three days a week after the pandemic, and most employers are likely to let them do so. In fact, a higher percentage of employers — 83 percent vs. only 71 percent of workers — think that remote working during the pandemic has proven successful.

Data collected by Streetlight, which tracks people’s cell phones, reveals that the large numbers of people working at home has nearly eliminated the morning rush hour. However, the afternoon rush hour remains and is in many places worse than before. Before the pandemic, San Francisco had an afternoon peak that lasted from 4 to 6 pm. By June, 2020, the peak began around noon and lasted until 5.

Notice that these graphs show the percentage of daily travel, not total travel. Since total travel in June 2020 was less than June 2019, the afternoon peak period was not as severe in 2020 as it had been before the pandemic. But that could change as the economy recovers if total miles of travel return to close to 100 percent of what they were in 2019. Continue reading →

Forum on Competing Infrastructure Plans

By | | Transportation
2 Comments

On Monday, April 26, the Antiplanner will join the Reason Foundation’s Bob Poole and Cato Institute’s Chris Edwards in a forum discussing infrastructure plans now before Congress. The forum will start at noon, Eastern Time, and last one hour. To register, click here.

Biden’s Infrastructure Plan and Alternatives from Cato Institute on Vimeo.

Yesterday, just in time for the forum, Republicans introduced their own infrastructure plan. This plan would spend almost 40 percent more money on transportation than Biden’s, but the funds are distributed differently. Except for broadband and water, the plan leaves out all of the non-transportation-related things that are in Biden’s plan, allowing for its total cost to be only about a quarter of Biden’s. Continue reading →

February Driving Down 12.1 Percent

By | | Transportation, Useful Data
2 Comments

When compared with the previous year, vehicle-miles of driving in February 2021 dropped by 12.1 percent, a slight dip from January which was only 11.3 percent lower than in 2020. Data released yesterday by the Federal Highway Administration indicate that changes by state ranged from -2.4 percent in Wyoming to -20.4 percent in Delaware. Driving in Texas and Oklahoma both were around 19 percent below 2020 levels while driving in California was down only 7 percent.

It was known as the best generic version of world’s first sildenafil citrate order viagra usa tablet that provides erections to men with mild, moderate or severe ED. Along with all certain concerns regarding men s erectile dysfunction, guys generally found battling to obtain difficult challenging on and somewhat notice drop in erections that isn t a good level for satisfying intercourse. canada viagra It was seen that Adiponectin-induced mitochondrial biogenesis was reduced when Adipo R1, CAMKK beta, PGC1 alpha and AMPK alpha1/alpha 2 generico levitra on line http://www.donssite.com/cotinus/Privacy_Policy.htm were inhibited. Ask a spokesperson for the pharmaceutical industry, cialis online from india and this is a severe case of andropause – that’s the new word Big Pharma has coined to stand in for the menopause (shame “men” are mentioned in an entirely female “complaint”). Transit trips from the National Transit Database; airline trips from the Transportation Security Administration; Amtrak passenger miles from Amtrak monthly performance reports.

Both driving and transit declined slightly in February while both air travel and Amtrak grew slightly. This could be coincidence or it could mean that intercity travel is growing while local travel is still inhibited by the pandemic. This is affirmed by TSA data showing that air travel in March had recovered to 53 percent of 2019 levels, a major gain considering February air travel was only 40 percent of 2020 and 43 percent of 2019 numbers. Amtrak is not likely to see similar gains.

Transit Is Not Resilient

By | | Transportation
3 Comments

“Transit is resilient,” claims transit industry consultant Paul Comfort, who is also executive director of the North American Transit Alliance, an association of private companies that earn money providing service to transit agencies. Comfort made this claim after visiting several transit agencies to see how they were spending the billions of dollars Congress gave them to compensate for the loss of ridership during the pandemic.

I don’t think that word means what Comfort wants us to think it means. The dictionary defines “resilient” as tending to recover from or adjust easily to misfortune or change. The panicky press releases sent out a year ago by transit agencies and advocates do not suggest that an industry that adjusts easily to change. Comfort’s examples of agency “resilience” are mostly about how they are spending the money Congress gave them on masks, sanitizers, and, for some reason, complete streets. He says nothing about actual ridership or other real performance measures. Here are a few tests that can be used to tell if an industry or institution is resilient.

1. Does the industry need a big bailout every time there is a downturn in the economy? Continue reading →

Quadruple the Cost Plus 11 Years of Delay

By | | Transportation, Urban areas
2 Comments

Today the Cato Institute is publishing a new report on high-speed rail. In consideration of the work that went into that report (which is partly based on past Antiplanner policy briefs), I am taking this week off of my usual Tuesday policy brief.

Honolulu buses could easily move the number of passengers likely to ride the train, for far less money. Photo by 123TheBusHonolulu6969.

Instead, behold the latest revelations about the Honolulu rail transit line, which is currently under construction. Originally projected to cost less than $3 billion, the Honolulu Authority for Rapid Transit (HART) now admits that it is expected to cost $11.3 billion, or “about $12 billion” when finance charges are included. This is after years of denying that the cost would rise above $10 billion. Continue reading →

A Shared Love for Obsolete Transportation

By | | Transportation
5 Comments

Transit ridership at the Santa Clara Valley Transportation Authority (VTA) has declined in every year since Nuria Fernandez was made CEO of San Jose’s principle transit agency at the end of 2013. By 2019, transit fares collected by VTA covered just 9 percent of operating costs, far lower than the national average of 32 percent. VTA light-rail cars carried an average of just 14 passengers, compared with a national average of 24. Most San Jose light-rail “trains” are just one car long, meaning they could easily be replaced by buses at a huge savings to taxpayers.

VTA light rail: a model of government waste. Notice the HOV lanes that could have supported buses carrying more people to more destinations than the light-rail line.

Before Fernandez arrived, VTA had spent billions of dollars building a light-rail system that did nothing but jeopardize the agency’s finances, which in turn contributed to the dramatic decline in ridership: Between 2002 and 2019, the region’s population grew by 15 percent yet transit ridership fell by 29 percent. While she didn’t make the decision to build those light-rail lines, she is proud that she was able to get federal funding to help build a subway line into downtown San Jose. Continue reading →