The Antiplanner »

Monthly Archives: April 2023

Transit Carries 70% of 2019 Riders in February

By | | Transportation, Useful Data
Leave a comment

Public transit carried 70.2 percent as many riders in February 2023 as it did in the same month in 2019, according to data released by the Federal Transit Administration late last week. This is the first time ridership has exceeded 70 percent of 2019 numbers since February 2020.

The transit line on this chart has been updated to reflect the latest adjustments to the National Transit Database going back to late 2020.

Amtrak, meanwhile, reports that it carried close to 89 percent as many passenger-miles and the Transportation Security Administration reports that airlines carried more than 100 percent as many passengers in February 2023 as in February 2019. February highway data will be released later this month. Continue reading →

More Planning Means Less Housing

By | | Housing
3 Comments

A new paper from the Urban Institute and the University of California, Berkeley, is further proof, if anyone needs it, that more planning means less housing. Unfortunately, the authors of this paper failed to get this, as the paper praises states that have the most supposedly pro-housing laws even though those are the very states that have least affordable housing.

Click image to download a 1.6-MB PDF of this 30-page report.

A map on page 6 of the report shows how many laws various states have passed that “incentivize housing.” California, Oregon, and Washington lead the way with more than 10 such laws each. In fact, appendix A reveals that California has passed 56 such laws, far more than any other state. Needless to say, California has the least-affordable housing in the nation. Continue reading →

Pouring Fuel on the Fire

By | | Public lands, Wildfire
4 Comments

The Forest Service today seems to believe that its main mission is to reduce hazardous fuels. The agency was spending close to half a billion dollars a year on this program, an amount that was doubled by the 2021 infrastructure bill. Yet there is a huge debate among fire ecologists over whether this program makes any sense.

Would any amount of prescribed burning prevented this 2020 fire from burning thousands of acres?

The latest volley in this debate was published earlier this week in a peer-reviewed journal called Fire. Representing those who disagree with the Forest Service’s fire policy, the paper charges that supporters of the policy have deliberately overlooked evidence that it won’t work. Continue reading →

Good News for the Transit Industry

By | | Transportation
3 Comments

“The public transportation market is forecasted to grow by $90.07 bn during 2022-2027,” says a new report from someone called Infiniti Research. That represents an annual growth rate of 5.84 percent per year.

For a mere $2,500 ($4,000 for the “enterprise” version), you can read this fairy tale about how the transit market is going to grow once we install multi-billion-dollar hyperloops in every city.

“The development of hyperloop transportation systems [is] one of the prime reasons driving the public transportation market growth during the next few years,” claims the report, putting it in the world of pure fantasy land. Actually, 5.84 percent annual growth seems pretty modest considering how diminished the transit industry is today: at that rate, it would take 8 years to fully recover to pre-pandemic levels. At the same time, unless most employers force employees to stop working at home, even 5.84 percent seems unlikely. Continue reading →

U.S. Per Capita Travel Was 18,000 Miles in 2021

By | | Transportation, Useful Data
3 Comments

Per capita travel in the United States was a little lower in 2021 than 2019, according to data recently released by the Bureau of Transportation Statistics (BTS). In 2021, the average American traveled 17,909 miles by air, auto, transit, and Amtrak, down 8 percent from 19,475 miles in 2019.

Photo by Ken Kistler.

To calculate that number, however, I had to correct an error in the recently released spreadsheet, which says that domestic airlines carried 172.8 billion passenger-miles in 2021, just 23 percent of the 754.5 billion miles they carried in 2019. This is an obvious typo, as another BTS table says that domestic airline flights carried 571.8 billion passenger-miles. (To view passenger-miles on that web site, click on “Revenue Passenger-Miles” at the top of the table.) Continue reading →

Why Save Obsolete Transportation?

By | | Transportation
8 Comments

David Zipper, who has a master’s degree in urban planning, writes on Vox about how transit agencies need to save themselves from a fiscal cliff. To do so, he says, they must “secure new and reliable revenue streams from state and regional sources.” To convince skeptical members of the public they need to provide those revenue streams out of their taxes, agencies need to “demonstrate an ability to replace car trips, not just serve economically disadvantaged people,” because only by replacing car trips can they prove they are “curtailing congestion, reducing auto emissions, and boosting economic growth.”

BART’s plea for more subsidies falsely claims that “BART was self-sufficient before the pandemic” when its own data show that fares covered only 71 percent of operating costs and zero percent of capital costs.

Yet Zipper never really says why we need to save transit. He claims that transit has been “indispensable” for major metros, but what he really means is that it is indispensable for major downtowns such as Chicago, Philadelphia, and San Francisco. In reality, the only metro area for which transit is truly indispensable is New York, and if it is so indispensable there, then New Yorkers should be the ones to pay for it. Continue reading →