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Monthly Archives: September 2021

The Ruinous French War on Sprawl

By | | Regional planning
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Like many U.S. states, France has conducted a war on sprawl that has had economically ruinous and socially harmful consequences, yet produced no real benefits, according to a new paper from the Institut de recherches économiques et fiscales (Institute for Fiscal and Economic Research). Written by engineer Vincent Bénard, The War on Sprawl: An Irrational Political Obsession shows that anti-sprawl policies have caused a six-fold increase in land prices and significantly increased housing prices. This represents a transfer of wealth from low-income people who rent and/or have recently purchased homes to high-income people who have long owned their homes and may be landlords of rented homes.

Periurbanization (urban sprawl) in Paris suburbs. Photo by Medy Sejai.

The amount of rural development that is taking place in France is greatly exaggerated, says Bénard, and none of the supposed costs of sprawl “stand up to in-depth analysis.” Sprawling areas “do not cost more for public budgets, nor are they unfavorable to biodiversity,” while “forced urban density is not a good lever for controlling greenhouse gas emissions.” Continue reading →

End Planners’ Obsession with Ending Driving

By | | Transportation
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Planners and planning advocates are obsessed with manipulating people’s behavior, and in particular with reducing the amount of driving we do. One dictionary defines “obsess” as “Preoccupy or fill the mind of (someone) continually, intrusively, and to a troubling extent,” and it is certainly troubling that so many planners believe their goal is to destroy one of the major engines of our economy and spend much of the effort towards achieving that goal.

One simple trick improves the fuel economy of this minivan by almost 50 percent, but planners ignore such improvements in favor of simply demonizing auto driving. Photo by Kevauto.

A case in point is an article in Vox titled, “How to end the American obsession with driving.” The article was written by journalism student Gabrielle Birenbaum, who believes that driving is destroying the planet. Wildfires and hurricanes (which seems to think never happened before) prove that global warming is happening; transportation is “the biggest sector of pollution”; and automobiles produce 58 percent of that pollution. Therefore, she reasons, we must reduce driving. Continue reading →

National Obsolete Transportation Month

By | | Policy brief, Transportation
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From San Francisco to North Carolina, transit agencies have declared September to be “Transit Month.” “This month is all about celebrating the vital role of public transit for our communities,” says one transit agency, which means “getting elected leaders to make transit a priority issue.”

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

From a transportation viewpoint, agencies don’t have much to celebrate this year. Cities have proven they can get along quite well without transit. With more than half of all American employees working at home at the beginning of this year, roads are less congested so people who continue to work outside of their homes can more easily drive to work. While driving recovered to 100 percent of pre-pandemic levels by June 2021, transit remained stuck at 50 percent in June and July. Continue reading →

Housing Markets Are Going Crazy

By | | Housing
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In Boston, a ten-foot-wide “skinny house” went on the market two weeks ago for $1.2 million, a 33 percent gain over the last time it sold four years ago. That’s more than $1,000 a square foot for what the realtor says is a 1,165-square-foot home (though Zillow says it is only 800 square feet). The house sold in one weekend for an undisclosed amount.

Sold for at least $1.2 million. Photo by Rhododendrites.

Bidding wars in San Francisco suburbs are setting records for premium prices above the asking price. Nearly 7.5 percent of homes are sold for more than 30 percent of the list price. Continue reading →

Mag-Lev May Be Dead; TX HSR on Life Support

By | | Follow up, Transportation
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A Maryland circuit court judge ruled last week that the Baltimore-Washington Rapid Rail Company did not have the power of eminent domain and could not stop a development on land that the maglev promoter needed to use for its proposed line. The judge rejected the company’s argument that its purchase of a franchise previously granted to the long-defunct Washington, Baltimore and Annapolis Electric Railway gave it the power to condemn other people’s land.

The maglev promoter didn’t actually have the money to buy the land in question, but it wanted to halt a developer from building a mixed-use development on the property, which would have made condemnation a lot more expensive when and if it has the power and money to do so. The judge said that the company’s argument contained “a lot of factual inaccuracies.”

The prospects for building a maglev in the corridor have been further hurt by announcements from local officials such as Baltimore Mayor Brandon Scott and Prince George’s County executive Angela Alsobrooks that they oppose the project. The mayor’s office suggested that, since the Senate just authorized $2.4 billion to improve the Northeast Corridor, it would be foolish to back a project that threatened to take customers away from Amtrak. Continue reading →

Biden to STB: Screw the Environment

By | | Transportation
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President Biden and Democrats in Congress want to spend trillions of dollars on a green new deal. But their true colors are revealed when it comes to railroad re-regulation: the needs of the environment are less important than the needs of labor unions and shippers who want the federal government to exercise more control over the railroads.

This container train is saving thousands of tons of greenhouse gas emissions, savings that will be lost if regulation allows trucks to capture some or all of this traffic. Photo by David Jordan.

This is made clear in a report that was released yesterday by the Reason Foundation. Written by the Antiplanner’s faithful ally, Marc Scribner, Pathways and Policy for 21st Century Freight Rail points out that railroads produce less than 10 percent as much carbon dioxide per ton-mile as trucks. As the Antiplanner observed a few weeks ago, the railroads have become more competitive with trucks since deregulation took place in 1980. Continue reading →

Transit Loses Steam in July

By | | Transportation, Useful Data
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When measured as a percentage of pre-pandemic (2019) levels, Amtrak ridership grew from 63 percent in June to 68 percent in July while air travel grew from 74 percent to 80 percent. Transit ridership, however, fell slightly from 50.3 percent in June to 49.1 percent in July, according to data released yesterday by the Federal Transit Administration.

Airline numbers from the Transportation Security Administration; Amtrak numbers from July, 2021 and July, 2020 monthly performance reports; transit numbers from the National Transit Database; highway numbers for July are estimated but will be published soon by the Federal Highway Administration.

Part of the decline of transit can be attributed to the fact that June had more business days in 2021 than in 2019 while July had fewer, which will probably also make driving’s percentage slightly lower in July than the 100.5 percent it experienced in June. But transit’s stunted recovery from the pandemic also reveals its lack of resiliency and its declining utility to urban residents. Continue reading →

San Jose Light-Rail Service Resumes

By | | Follow up, Transportation
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Last week, the Santa Clara Valley Transportation Authority (VTA) resumed “limited” light-rail service for the first time since the May 26 shooting at VTA’s maintenance center. Service began on the Orange Line and part of the Green Line. A week later, part of the Blue Line opened along with another segment of the Green Line. VTA has to test tracks on each segment before it can open; some lines were lower priorities, said the agency, because they carried few riders, providing further support for the Antiplanner’s belief that light rail was the wrong technology for San Jose in the first place.

VTA closed its light-rail system for more than three months and part of the system will be closed for even longer. Photo by Minh Nguyen.

VTA claims it closed down the light-rail operations “to give employees time to heal from the traumatic experience” of the May 26 shooting. But transit advocate Eugene Bradley pointed out “that other major cities that experienced violent disruptions of transit, such as New York and London, managed to restore service within hours.” Not only did VTA not run light-rail trains for three months, for much of that time it didn’t provide light-rail riders with alternative bus services. “VTA is showing the world how to not recover from a tragedy,” said Bradley. Continue reading →

Have a Safe and Enjoyable Holiday

By | | Mission
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Somewhere in those hills is the Spring Basin Wilderness, which I hope to hike in this weekend.

Biden’s Smoke-and-Mirrors Housing Plan

By | | Housing
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On Wednesday, the White House introduced a four-point plan to “increase affordable housing supply” nationwide:

  1. Increase rental housing with various low-interest loan and tax credit programs;
  2. Increase federal loan programs for manufactured housing and two- to four-unit homes;
  3. Focusing existing home loan programs on individual homebuyers rather than investors; and
  4. Encouraging state and local governments to use American Rescue Plan funds to build affordable housing and to reduce exclusionary zoning.

Most of these points do nothing to increase housing supply. The first two mainly redeploy funds that are already being spent on housing into slightly different housing programs. The third assumes that speculators are driving up housing prices and denying homeownership to families when in fact the “large investors” that Biden proposes to exclude from federal home loan programs are merely responding to rising prices. Almost no new homes would be built as a result of any of these three points.

Only the last point has the potential to increase housing supply, but will do so in the most expensive ways possible. Government construction of so-called “affordable housing” is usually anything but affordable, with cities and states often spending twice as much per square foot as private builders on new homes. Continue reading →