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Monthly Archives: March 2023

Population Falls in 18 States

By | | Useful Data
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Between 2021 and 2022, the populations of California, Illinois, and New York all declined by more than 100,000 people, according to estimates released yesterday by the Census Bureau. Louisiana, Oregon, Pennsylvania, and West Virginia all lost more than 10,000 residents, while 11 other states also declined in population.

Red, orange, and yellow states lost population, while green states gained. No state lost between 50,000 and 99,999, so there is no color for that group. Click image for a larger view.

The nation as a whole grew by 1.26 million, but clearly that gain was not evenly distributed. Instead, Texas grew by 470,000 residents, Florida by 416,000, North Carolina by 133,000, Georgia by 125,000, Arizona by 94,000, South Carolina by 89,000, and Tennessee by 83,000 (all these numbers are rounded to the nearest 1,000). Percentagewise, the fastest growing states were Florida (1.9%), Idaho (1.8%), South Carolina (1.7%), Texas (1.6%), South Dakota, and Montana (1.5% each). Arizona, Delaware, Georgia, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Utah all grew by more than 1 percent. The biggest losers were New York (-0.9%) Illinois (-0.8%), Louisiana (-0.8%), West Virginia (-0.6%), Hawaii (-0.5%), and Oregon (-0.4%). Continue reading →

Housing Doesn’t Need Government Planning

By | | Housing
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“Housing needs planning” is the opening line of Colorado Senate Bill 23-213, which was introduced into the legislature last week. By “planning” the bill means government planning, and the proposed law would require the state to determine housing needs and set housing targets and to interfere with local zoning to require more accessory dwelling units, multifamily housing, and transit-oriented developments.

Apartments in Boulder, Colorado, the most heavily planned and most expensive housing market in the state.

The basic premise of this law is wrong: housing and government planning go together like oil and water. A look at housing markets in Colorado and nationwide show that states and regions with more planning end up having less affordable housing. A secondary premise, that multifamily housing is more affordable than single-family homes, is also wrong. Continue reading →

Tax Netflix to Fund Transit?

By | | Transportation
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New York’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority will soon go off a fiscal cliff, partly due to reduced ridership but also due to bad management. But never fear: New York legislators have a solution. They propose to tax Netflix and Uber to raise money to keep the subways and buses running.

One of the most expensive transit projects in the world, the Second Avenue Subway is expensive partly because the MTA spent more on consultants than it did on actual construction. MTA Capital Construction photo by Rehema Trimiew.

Taxing Uber makes kind of a warped sense, like taxing jet airliners in order to subsidize Conestoga wagons. But taxing Netflix? Just what does Netflix have to do with urban transit? Next thing you know, someone will propose taxing people for working at home because, you know, homes are “stealing” riders away from transit. Continue reading →

Transit Agencies Go Insane

By | | Transportation
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Earlier this month, the Federal Transit Administration published its annual report on funding recommendations for transit capital improvement grants. Each year, I review the accompanying list of projects being planned or under construction to see how much construction costs have grown since the previous year. This year, however, transit agencies seem to have learned a lesson from the pandemic and have curtailed their wild spending on pointless projects.

Sound Transit is building light rail on what was once freeway lanes across Lake Washington. Photo by Sound Transit.

Just kidding. In fact, they are spending more than ever. In the 1990s, light-rail lines that cost $50 million a mile ($100 million in today’s dollars) were considered extravagantly expensive. A decade ago, the average light-rail line cost about $125 million a mile ($160 million in today’s dollars). Last year, average light-rail construction costs had risen to $278 million a mile (about $310 million today). Continue reading →

The Latest International Affordability Data

By | | Housing
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“Housing affordability in 2022 continued to reflect the huge price increases that occurred during the pandemic demand shock,” reports demographer Wendell Cox in his 2023 international housing affordability report. “Some housing affordability improvements have since occurred and more are likely as the demand shock is hopefully replaced by more normal market trends.”

Click image to download a 3.6-MB PDF of this 26-page report.

Cox measures housing affordability in more than 90 urban areas located in Australia, Canada, Hong Kong, Ireland, New Zealand, Singapore, the United Kingdom, and the United States by dividing median home prices with median household incomes. I use the same measure except I use median family incomes, which are readily available through 2021 using U.S. census data. Cox probably uses household incomes because they are more readily available for 2022 and in other countries. This is the latest update of a series of reports going back to 2005 (with data for 2004). Continue reading →

Promise Rapid Transit, Deliver Streetcars

By | | Transportation
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On November 2020, in the midst of the pandemic, Austin voters foolishly agreed to raise property taxes in order to build 28 miles of light rail at a projected cost of $5.8 billion. To avoid congestion, the downtown portion of light-rail lines would go through a four-mile-long tunnel.

Artist’s impression of light rail running near downtown Austin.

No one reading this blog will be surprised to know that, in the short amount of time since then, projected costs have nearly doubled to $10.3 billion. Early this week, the city’s transit planners announced a new plan that would build fewer than half as many miles of light rail. Continue reading →

January Driving 98.9% of 2019

By | | Transportation
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Americans drove 98.9 percent as many miles in January 2023 as they did in the same month of 2019, according to data released by the Federal Highway Administration yesterday. Driving in rural areas averaged 4.6 percent greater than in 2019, while driving in urban areas was about 3.4 percent less.

Amtrak numbers are from the company’s monthly performance report; see this post for a discussion of those numbers. Transit numbers are from the Federal Transit Administration and air travel numbers are from the Transportation Security Administration; see this post for a discussion of those numbers.

January’s urban driving exceeded 2019 miles in 20 states. The biggest gains were in Rhode Island (up 22%), Louisiana (10%), Idaho (8%), New Jersey (8%), Texas (7%), and Pennsylvania (5%). The biggest shortfalls in urban driving were in Michigan (down 16%), Colorado (-16%), Arkansas (-15%), North Dakota (-14%), and Hawaii (-13%). Continue reading →

Now the 20-Minute Suburb

By | | Regional planning
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As if the 15-minute city wasn’t bad enough, planners are now promoting what they call the 20-minute suburb. According to its supporters, suburbanites are fed up with driving everywhere and are demanding that the suburbs be rebuilt at higher densities with lots of “town centers” so that everyone can walk to a shop in 20 minutes.

Skidmore, Owings & Merrill concept for denser, 20-minute suburbs with lots of transit.

How do planners know this? Because during the height of the pandemic, a lot of people bought bicycles causing, for a brief time, a bicycle shortage. Based on this and similar anecdotal information, planners agree that the time is ripe to completely rebuilt the nation’s suburbs by eliminating single-family zoning and building lots of dense mixed-use developments. Continue reading →

Portland Bicycle Ridership Declining

By | | Transportation
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Portland, Oregon has 385 miles of bikeways, 121 of which have been built since 2014. But these bikeways have failed to boost the number of bicycle riders in the city. In fact, a report from the city of Portland says that, in the wake of COVID, the number is declining rapidly.

According to the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey, the share of Portland employees riding bicycles to work peaked at 7.2 percent in 2014. By 2019, it had fallen to 5.2 percent. The pandemic led to a surge in bicycle sales, and the share grew to 5.4 percent in 2020 but then fell dramatically to a measly 2.8 percent in 2021. Continue reading →

Metro Transit Spends Millions on Transit Security

By | | Transportation
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Minneapolis-St. Paul’s Metro Transit is going to spend $3 million a year hiring private security to deter crime at six of the region’s light-rail stations. As the Antiplanner recently documented, light rail attracts more crime than any other form of transit and the Twin Cities’ light rail attracts far more crime than any other light-rail system in the United States.

Patrons of the Twin Cities’ light-rail system suffer nearly twice as much crime as those of the next-highest system and at least six times as much as those of all but three other systems. Click image to download the Antiplanner’s report on Minnesota transportation in a post-COVID world.

Light rail attracts crime because fare enforcement is spotty and potential criminals figure that, if they can ride the trains for free, they can get away with other crimes as well. The Antiplanner recommended that Metro Transit install gates at every light-rail station, similar to those used for heavy-rail lines, but Metro Transit rejected this idea. Continue reading →