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Monthly Archives: May 2023

Density Mandates Won’t Help

By | | Housing
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Proponents of a bill winding its way through the Colorado legislature assume that increased housing densities will make housing more affordable and will reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Neither of these assumptions are valid, according to an article in Complete Colorado. And you know it’s true, because I wrote it.

This chart compared population densities and housing affordability in the nation’s top 100 urban areas.

You may have seen diagrams like the above here before, but I made this one using the latest density data from the 2020 census combined with housing affordability data from the 2020 American Community Survey. Counting the top 50 urban areas, the correlation was 0.85 (where 1 is perfect and anything close to 0 is completely random); for the top 100, it was 0.79; for the top 200 it was still a respectable 0.70. Continue reading →

Soaking the Rich Fails in Los Angeles

By | | Housing
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To help fund the $1.3 billion that Los Angeles’ city council believes it needs to house the homeless, the city decided to impose a “mansion tax” of 4 percent on the sales of any homes or commercial properties above $5 million and 5.5 percent on sales above $10 million. This was projected to bring in $900 million a year, funding most of the homeless program.

This home is currently on the market in Los Angeles for an asking price of $5.667 million. Many homes of this size are available for under $1 million in Houston and San Antonio and few are asking more than $2 million.

The reality is far different because planners, as usual, failed to take into account how their regulations and taxes would influence human behavior. In the month before the tax went into effect on April 1, 126 homes sold for more than $5 million. In the month since? Just two. Continue reading →

More Delays, Less Delays, But Always More Costs

By | | Transportation
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Maryland’s Purple Line, which was originally supposed to open more than a year ago, now won’t open until 2026. But that’s supposed to be good news, because two months ago the state said it wouldn’t open until 2027. The bad news, other than the news that it is being built at all, is that it is at least $1.46 billion over budget.

That’s kind of a breathtaking number — $1.46 billion — at least for those who understand how much money that really is. For one thing, this cost of this one light-rail line would have been more than enough to construct all of the light-rail lines built in Buffalo, Portland, Sacramento, San Diego, and San Jose during the 1980s. At that time, light rail construction was costing around $10 million to $15 million a mile, or about $30 million to $40 million in today’s dollars. The Purple Line is costing more than $210 per mile, or five to seven times as much. Continue reading →

The FasTracks Failure

By | | Transportation
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In 2004, Denver voters approved spending $4.8 billion building six new rail transit lines, and the first line opened ten years ago. This was soon followed by four more to the gushing praise of various outsiders.

Inside Denver, however, people are beginning to realize that the whole thing was a miserable failure, suffering massive cost overruns and never attaining its ridership projections. The West line, which had its tenth anniversary last week, never carried as many passengers as were projected in its first year. It’s too bad that the reporters who are questioning this now weren’t asking the same questions in 2004. Continue reading →

BRT Should Use Shared, Not Dedicated Lanes

By | | Transportation
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Dedicating two of the six lanes on major streets in Chandler, Mesa, Scottsdale, and Tempe exclusively to buses would be a complete waste, says a new report released last week by the Arizona Free Enterprise Club and two other groups in the Phoenix area. Each of the lanes that Valley Metro would take for buses typically move roughly three to four times as many people per day as would have taken the bus before the pandemic, and bus ridership has fallen by 50 percent since the pandemic.

Click image to download a 1.1-MB PDF of this 16-page report.

The report notes that bus rapid transit typically stops about once per mile compared with five or six times per mile for local buses. This allows the BRT buses to go faster, which along with higher frequencies makes them more attractive to riders. Giving the buses their own lanes does not significantly increase their speeds, but it does increase congestion for everyone else. Continue reading →

Transit Carries 70% of 2019 Riders in March

By | | Transportation, Useful Data
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America’s transit systems carried 70.3 percent as many riders in March 2023 as in the same month in 2019, according to data released yesterday by the Federal Transit Administration. I reported last month that transit also carried 70 percent in February as in 2019, but that was due to a minor error that crept into my spreadsheet. The actual number was 68.5 percent, so transit is still gaining slowly compared with the pre-pandemic era. However, March 2023 had two more business days than March 2019, while the two Februaries had the same number, which is probably responsible for some of March’s improvement.

The Transportation Security Administration reports that 97.8 percent as many passengers passed through airport security in March 2023 as in March 2019. That’s down from the 100.3 percent in February. The actual number of passengers increased from 58 million to 72 million, but that’s just seasonal variations. Continue reading →

Your Transit Money Pit Needs You

By | | Transportation
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Politico has just discovered that transit systems are still carrying “less than 70 percent of their pre-pandemic traffic.” As a result, “Public transit is facing a financial rut that’s spurred their CEOs to press city and state governments for new funding streams and taxes.”

Why subsidize empty transit vehicles? Photo by Ashton Emanuel.

I am continually appalled, though not surprised, that so many reporters take it for granted that transit should continue operating at existing or even expanded levels no matter what the cost to taxpayers. They take it as a given that transit doesn’t exist to serve cities or their residents; instead, urban residents exist as a funding source to keep transit running. If you aren’t riding transit, you should still be forced to pay taxes to keep it operating. Continue reading →

Nashville Transit Junkies Demand More Money

By | | Transportation
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Spending billions of dollars on on transit infrastructure, as proposed by a group called the Transit Alliance for Middle Tennessee, would be a complete waste. The group was formed to support the city’s 26-mile, $5-billion light-rail proposal that was rejected by voters five years ago. Now that the pandemic has proven that Nashville doesn’t need any transit infrastructure, the group is reemerging as an “advocate for action.”

The group wants “multimodal transportation,” which to them means bus-rapid transit on dedicated lanes, light rail, commuter rail, and maybe even heavy rail and monorail. For some reason, the group doesn’t mention cars, trucks, bicycles, pedestrians, scooters, and local buses, all of which make Nashville’s existing transportation infrastructure pretty multimodal. Continue reading →

A New Rideshare Business Model

By | | Transportation
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Alto is a rideshare company that was founded in Dallas and so far is also operating in Houston, Los Angeles, Miami, San Francisco, and Washington. The company differs from traditional rideshare operations like Uber and Lyft in that it owns all of its automobiles and all of its drivers are employees, not contractors. This is supposed to make it more attractive to passengers, especially women, who may be squeamish about riding in a stranger’s car.

Photo courtesy of Alto.

Alto claims that its rides are “elevated” above other ridesharers. Its fleet currently seems to consist of Buick Enclaves, a cross-over with three rows of seating. It has replaced the Buick logo on the grill with its own and added its logo to other parts of the vehicles as well. However, it plans to transition soon to all-electric vehicles. Continue reading →

When Is a Fee Not a Fee?

By | | Housing
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A month ago, I commented on Colorado Senate Bill 213, which would allow the state to give major cities housing targets that they would have to meet and require cities to rezone single-family neighborhoods to allow for more density. Some of the worst features of the bill have been deleted, but the bill is still bad.

A 736-square-foot apartment in this Denver mid-rise development costs more to rent than the mortgage on many 2,000-square-foot single-family homes in cities that don’t have urban-growth boundaries, yet the state wants to force cities to allow (and subsidize) more of these as “affordable housing.”

The reason why the rezoning requirement was dropped from the bill was that the cities themselves opposed it — not because they opposed density but because they said they were already imposing density on their residents and didn’t need to be told to do so by the state. Many cities in the Denver metro area are landlocked, so the only way for them to meet state housing targets would be to densify anyway. Continue reading →