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Monthly Archives: July 2021

VTA to Resume Running Light Rail — Someday

By | | Transportation
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The Santa Clara Valley Transportation Authority (VTA) announced that it is going to resume running its light-rail trains. It doesn’t know when it is going to do it, but it has a plan. The plan is pretty vague but it hints the trains might be accepting passengers again by the end of July, although the agency’s CEO admits that mid-August is more likely.

As Antiplanner readers will remember, on May 26, a disgruntled employee killed nine other VTA workers at the light-rail maintenance center and then shot himself. The shut-down of the maintenance center meant no light-rail trains could run while police were doing their investigation.

To make matters worse, VTA said it didn’t have enough bus drivers to replace light-rail service. What buses and drivers it had were dedicated to the “regular bus network that serves the majority of our riders who rely on public transit the most,” the agency said. Continue reading →

Why California Housing Is So Expensive

By | | Housing
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Although master-planned communities are quite common in Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona, they are few and far between in California thanks to strict land-use laws and an anti-development mentality. So it is good to learn that a 15,663-home master-planned community will be built near Hesperia, just a half-hour north of San Bernardino and a little more than an hour from downtown Los Angeles.

To be called Tapestry, the community will be built on 9,366 acres of former ranch lands, of which 4,933 acres will be set aside as open spaces and parks. The homes centering around a 700,000-square-foot commercial area will include all kinds of housing from condos and town homes to single-family homes on 18,000- and 21,500-square-foot lots. Continue reading →

May Driving Reaches 96% of Pre-Pandemic Levels

By | | Transportation, Useful Data
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Americans drove 95.6 percent as many miles in May 2021 as they did in May 2019, according to data released by the Federal Highway Administration yesterday. This is up from 91.9 percent in April but down from 97.2 percent in March. May’s record is pretty good considering that May had two fewer business days in 2021 than in 2019 while March had two more.

At 99.4 percent of pre-pandemic levels, rural driving is ahead of urban driving, which was just 93.9 percent in May. Drivers in 21 states drove more in rural areas in 2021 than in 2019; urban driving in May 2021 exceeded 2019 in just six states. Continue reading →

Reinventing Transit for a Post-COVID World

By | | Policy brief, Transportation
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As society rebuilds after the pandemic, the transit industry at a crossroads. It could totally reinvent itself to truly serve the residents of modern cities. Alternatively, it could come up with new reasons for ever larger subsidies despite continuing to be ineffective and wasteful. Since President Biden and Democrats in Congress seem eager to give it subsidies with few to no questions asked, it is likely to choose the latter course.

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

Transit ridership has declined steadily since 2014, losing 7.7 percent nationally between 2014 and 2019. During that time, transit ridership declined in about 85 percent of the nation’s major urban areas. On a larger scale, it has been declining for the last century, with per capita ridership falling from nearly 290 trips per urban resident in 1920 to just 37 in 2019. As of April, 2021, ridership was 60 percent lower than it had been before the pandemic, and it isn’t clear that ridership will ever recover to 2019’s already low levels. Continue reading →

Do New Roads Boost the Economy?

By | | Transportation
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“More highway spending won’t rev up the economy,” argues a recent article in the Wall Street Journal. However, the article’s writer, David Harrison, seems a little confused about how highway spending might help the economy.

“The U.S. already has an extensive system of roads, so building more wouldn’t add much to productivity, economists say,” writes Harrison. But this depends entirely on where roads are built. Continue reading →

Transit’s Post-COVID Recovery Is Slowest

By | | Transportation, Useful Data
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Amtrak’s May ridership surged to 45.2 percent of pre-COVID levels (as compared with May 2019), surpassing public transit, which reached only 42.3 percent of 2019 levels. Transit’s recovery was partly hurt by the fact that May 2021 had two fewer business days than May 2019, but the slow growth makes transit the least-recovered of the various modes of travel.

Shown are transit trips from the National Transit Database, and airline trips from Transportation Safety Administration, and Amtrak passenger miles from the May performance report. Driving is in vehicle miles from the Federal Highway Administration’s Traffic Volume Trends; May highway data won’t be out for another week or so.

As usual, rail transit is doing worse than bus transit when compared with 2019, but rail has also recovered more since 2020. Most of rail’s recovery is in heavy rail and commuter rail; light rail’s recovery is only slightly faster than transit buses and hybrid rail (meaning Diesel-powered light rail) isn’t even recovering as fast as buses. Continue reading →

First World, Second World, Third World

By | | Transportation
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Someone should teach The Hill‘s headline writers a little history. A recent article about why we should give more subsidies to Amtrak and high-speed rail was headed, “The US is a first-world nation with a third-world rail system.”

Actually, the United States is a first-world nation with a first-world rail system which is probably the best rail system in the world. The only other contender for the title would be Canada.

Few people seem to remember that “first-world” terminology grew out of the Cold War. At that time, the First World consisted of capitalist countries such as the United States and Canada while the Second World was socialist countries such as the Soviet Union and China. The Third World included developing countries that hadn’t really decided whether they were going to follow the capitalist or socialist model (with those that failed to choose capitalism remaining poor today). Continue reading →

House Passes Spending Bill

By | | News commentary, Transportation
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The House of Representatives passed a transportation reauthorization bill called the INVEST Act, but it really should be called the SPEND Act. Spending money is only an investment if the spender expects to get something in return for the cost, and much of the money in the INVEST Act will produce no real returns.

The bill, which has yet to be approved by the Senate, represents the normal reauthorization of the Highway Trust Fund, meaning federal spending on highways and transit, which happens about every six years. Normally this mainly deals with how the gas taxes and other federal highway user fees are spent. But this year, the House has gone overboard, agreeing to spend $715 billion over five years, which more than twice as much money as the Highway Trust Fund is likely to collect.

Admittedly, part of that $715 billion includes $168 billion for water infrastructure, which has never previously been a part of a transportation reauthorization bill. It also includes $95 billion for Amtrak, which is also not from the Highway Trust Fund. Spending on highways and transit would total to $452 billion, which is still more than twice as much as is likely to be collected in highway user fees. The federal government collected less than $45 billion in user fees in 2019 and, since collections in 2020 and 2021 will be smaller, total revenues are likely to be less than $220 billion over the five years of the bill. Continue reading →

Housing Affordability from 1950 through 2019

By | | Housing, Policy brief
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An article in Human Progress—a project of the Cato Institute—finds that, when interest rates are taken into account, housing is actually more affordable today than it was 40 years ago. A standard measure of housing affordability divides median home prices by median family incomes. At any given point in time, areas with lower price-to-income ratios are more affordable.

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

When comparing different time periods, however, mortgage interest rates must be considered. Those rates have varied in the last 40 years from under 3 percent to more than 18 percent. For a 30-year loan, the monthly payment at 18 percent is 3.5 times greater than at 3 percent. If housing really is more affordable today than it used to be, then the frequent claims that we are in a housing crisis may be as exaggerated as the claims of an infrastructure crisis. Continue reading →

Have a Safe & Happy Holiday

By | | Mission
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The Antiplanner hopes you are having a safe and enjoyable Fourth of July this year.