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Monthly Archives: February 2022

BART Outlook Grim Because Managers Dim

By | | Transportation
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The San Francisco Bay Area Rapid Transit District (BART) says that its financial outlook is “grim” and it may have to ask voters for a tax increase to keep running. As of December, BART was still carrying just 25 percent as many passengers as it carried before the pandemic.

BART spent nearly $2 million apiece on 775 of these railcars, which first went into service in 2018. In December 2020, BART halted delivery on the new cars because they were so unreliable.

In a presentation to the agency’s board of directors, staff noted that Congress had given $1.3 billion in COVID relief funds. It has used just about half of that and is burning through the rest at a rate of $25 million a month. At that rate, it has enough to keep going for about two more years. Continue reading →

A Great Opportunity to Spend Your Money

By | | Transportation
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The latest business plan for the California high-speed rail boondoggle estimates costs will be about $5 billion more than the last one, which were already 150 percent higher than the estimates in effect when voters approved the project in 2008. As noted in an AP news report, the latest estimates indicate that “it could take $105 billion to finish the route.”

Click image to download the plan.

Note the word “could.” The state report is actually estimating the cost will be $86.7 billion to $88.2 billion, but admits it could go as high as $105 billion. The previous (2020) plan projected the final cost would be $82.4 billion to $83.6 billion, with an upper limit of $99.9 billion. So the high-speed rail authority has basically added about $5 billion to all of the estimates. Continue reading →

The 15-Minute City: A Idiotic Dream

By | | Regional planning
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One of the arguments against single-family zoning is that separating housing from other uses forces people to drive to shops, work, and other destinations. Urban planners want to redesign cities so that people can walk to most of those destinations. They even have a name for it: the 15-minute city, meaning everyone can reach all of their primary destinations within a 15-minute walk.

Paris is such a walkable city with everything within 15 minutes of every resident, so no one there has to drive at all, right? Photo by Dr Bob Hall.

In a paper published last month, urban analyst Alain Bertaud has demolished this goal. Noting that Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo made this goal a part of her re-election campaign in 2020 and continues to promote it in office, he looked at the city to see what would need to be done to meet this goal. Continue reading →

A New View of Pedestrian Fatalities

By | | Transportation
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As previously discussed here, fatality rates among occupants of automobiles have gone down or stayed constant, but pedestrian fatality rates have alarmingly increased. The best explanation anyone could come up with for this is the rise of smart phones and distracted driving (and walking).

Is distracted driving the main cause of a spike in pedestrian fatalities since 2009?

New data published by the city of Portland suggests an alternative explanation, or at least a contributing factor: homelessness. According to a report issued last week by the Portland Bureau of Transportation, 70 percent of pedestrian fatalities in 2021 were homeless people. San Jose also reports that 20 percent of all 2021 traffic fatalities (which probably means over half of pedestrian fatalities) were homeless. Continue reading →

2021: The Year Transit Failed to Recover

By | | Policy brief, Transportation, Useful Data
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Despite receiving tens of billions of dollars in support from Congress, the transit industry in 2021 failed to recover most of the riders it lost to the pandemic in 2020. Ridership in 2020 had fallen by 54 percent from 2019 due to the pandemic, and was only 3 percent greater, or 52 percent below 2019 numbers, in 2021, according to data released by the Federal Transit Administration last week.

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

Ridership did improve over the pandemic months of 2020, but not by much. The year 2020 ended with ridership at 38 percent of pre-pandemic levels. It reached 50 percent for the first time in July 2021, slowly climbed to 55 percent in September, and hovered around 55 to 57 percent for the rest of the year. Continue reading →

December Transit Is 56.4% of Pre-COVID Ridership

By | | Transportation, Useful Data
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When measured as a percent of pre-pandemic numbers, transit in December carried 56.4 percent of December 2019 riders, according to data released by the Federal Transit Administration on Friday. This compared with 56.2 percent reported last month for November. These numbers are preliminary as some transit agencies may have been late in reporting ridership totals; the December report revised November ridership upwards by about a percent. This and other corrections are reflected in the chart below, so if December numbers are corrected by similar amounts, the final number may be closer to 58 percent.

Amtrak numbers from its Monthly Performance Report; airline numbers from the Transportation Security Administration. December highway numbers will be available in a week or so.

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Funding Obsolete Transportation

By | | Transportation
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Urban transit carried less than half a percent of passenger-miles during the pandemic, yet received 65 percent of the COVID relief funds given by Congress to the Department of Transportation, says an article published last week by the American Institute of Economic Research. Similarly, Amtrak carried less than 0.05 percent of passenger-miles yet received 4.4 percent of DOT’s COVID relief funds. Meanwhile, zero COVID relief funds went to freight supply-chain systems, which proved to be the real transportation problem resulting from the pandemic.

The North Star commuter train. Photo by Jerry Huddleston.

Thanks to the influx of COVID relief funds, plus $40 billion more for transit in the infrastructure bill, transit agencies are seriously considering expansions of transit services that should be considered failures. For example, Minnesota’s North Star commuter train was expected to carry 3,600 riders per weekday in its first year of operation. It carried only 2,200 weekday riders in 2010, its first full year. By 2019, it was still only carrying 2,700 riders per weekday. Continue reading →

Portland Debate over Higher Densities

By | | Housing
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Portland’s housing prices aren’t as high as San Francisco’s, but they are still too high. As indicated Tuesday, median home prices are more than five times median family incomes, which makes housing unaffordable because under standard mortgage rules it’s not possible to get a loan for five times someone’s income.

This is the kind of home Portlanders aspired to in 1888.

Portland’s solution to this problem is densification, but Portland State University real estate professor Gerard Mildner says this won’t work. In an op-ed published on January 18, Mildner argues that Oregon’s land-use planning system “has been manipulated so that NIMBY objections are raised to a regional level.” Although the region’s population has doubled since 1979, the region’s urban-growth boundary has grown by only 15 percent. Continue reading →

Marxists for High-Speed Rail

By | | Transportation
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American high-speed rail advocates must be thrilled that Marxist-communists, as represented by The International magazine, have endorsed high-speed trains in the United States, which they describe as “trains against capitalism.” To build high-speed rail, the article says, we must “return to the path blazed by the Soviet Union, and make use of its tools: central planning and public spending.” Because these tools worked so well there!

This steam locomotive was built in the Soviet Union in 1956, a decade after most U.S. railroads stopped buying steam locomotives. American locomotive manufacturers built better and more powerful locomotives than this in the 1930s. Soviet locomotives tended to be smaller and less powerful than American ones because most Soviet rail infrastructure was lightly built and couldn’t take the weight of more powerful locomotives. Photo by Andrey Korchagin.

The article praises the Soviet Union for building “one of the greatest systems of railways the world has ever seen.” This reminds me of a statement by University of Washington Russian Studies professor Daniel Chirot,” who once said that, by 1980, the Soviet Union had built the “finest nineteenth-century industrial economy the world has ever seen” (I’m quoting from memory but you get the idea). Continue reading →

America’s Rising Housing Prices

By | | Housing, Policy brief
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Now is a great time to sell a home, but a terrible time to buy one. According to the St. Louis Fed, median home prices in the United States have risen by 25 percent since the pandemic began in December 2019, which is probably more than any two-year period in history. Even after adjusting for inflation, prices in many markets are higher today than they were at the peak of the mid-2000s housing bubble.

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

This increase is due to a combination of labor shortages and supply-chain issues. Unlike the housing bubble, these issues are affecting all housing markets, not just those beset by anti-sprawl growth-management planning. Indeed, prices in some places without any growth management have risen more than in some places with strict growth-management regulations. Continue reading →