The Antiplanner is taking a fall trip into eastern Oregon wildlands and will be out of cell phone and internet range during most of that time. As a result, there won’t be any postings here at least until late next week.
Aspen grove in the Malheur National Forest.
I hope you enjoy your weekend.
St. Louis has more miles of light rail than any other Midwestern urban area, yet fewer people rode St. Louis transit in 2019 than in 1991, before the region opened its first mile of light rail. According to a new report from the Show-Me Institute, this is because Metro, the region’s transit agency, has planned its transit system for the 1910s, not the 2020s.
Click image to download a 4.3-MB PDF of this report.
That means that Metro has built a system that assumes that most people work downtown, live in dense residential neighborhoods close to light-rail stops, and don’t have access to automobiles. None of those conditions have been true for at least 50 years, and Metro’s system is especially unsuited to the post-pandemic world. Continue reading
Were it not for the 2021 infrastructure bill, the Antiplanner would probably be enjoying high-speed internet now. But thanks to the bill, which included $65 billion to extend broadband internet to underserved areas, I probably won’t get it until 2028.
Camp Sherman is in a rural area that is mostly out of cell phone range. CenturyLink, the local phone company, provides DSL service that is slow and unreliable. An internet speed test reports download speed of less than a megabit per second, about 1/250th of what I could get elsewhere and for less money. Continue reading
Kansas City voters sensibly rejected spending money on light rail at least seven times. But that common sense apparently didn’t extent to streetcars, which are an even dumber idea than light rail as streetcars are slower than buses, far more expensive, and can’t get out of their own way if one breaks down.
Photo by Jason Doss.
Despite these disadvantages, Kansas City opened a 2.2-mile streetcar line in 2016 that it declared to be a great success. It carried almost 4,800 weekday riders in its first full year of operation, which is about as many as a mediocre bus route but more than streetcar lines in Atlanta, Charlotte, Cincinnati, Dallas, Little Rock, Seattle, Tucson, and Washington. Continue reading
As one of the comments to last week’s post noted, a Brightline train killed a pedestrian on the first day of service to Orlando. To be fair, the train that was involved in the accident wasn’t going to Orlando and the accident took place on the old part of the rail line, not the newly built line from Cocoa to Orlando.
But why should we be fair? Brightline has killed around 70 people so far, including 28 in Palm Beach County alone. I don’t have exact month-by-month data, but my sense is that the fatality rate has not been declining. The company says it plans to use government funds to make its line safer, but why should taxpayers have to pay for a supposedly private rail operation? Continue reading
Brightline will begin killing people carrying passengers between Miami and Orlando today. I hope the new line will be safe, but Brightline trains began killing people even before they went into revenue service and again when they resumed service after the pandemic. Brightline says it is willing to spend $45 million making its route safer for pedestrians and auto drivers — on the condition that taxpayers put up $35 million of it (so much for it being unsubsidized).
I’ve previously predicted that Brightline’s Miami-Orlando line is quite possibly the only higher-than-normal-speed passenger train route in American that could earn a profit. That’s because the route connects Orlando theme parks with the three busiest cruise ship ports in the United States: Miami, Fort Lauderdale, and Port Canaveral. Together, they saw 11.9 million cruise ship passengers last year, which is about 15 percent less than before the pandemic, but still quite a lot. If only 40 percent of those passengers take a round-trip to Orlando on Brightline, the line would carry more passengers than Amtrak’s Northeast Corridor carried in 2022. Continue reading
Here’s a fun new game you can buy. It’s called Transform Transit and the goal of the game is to complete new transit projects such as building new stations or replacing the vehicle fleet. While attempting to manage projects, players have to keep employee morale up and get stooges transit bloggers to write glowing reviews of the projects.
One thing that is missing is actually getting people to ride transit, but that’s perfectly realistic as that no longer seems to be a goal of transit agencies. Related to that is increasing fare revenues, but again that’s no longer a goal of transit agencies. Instead, the goal is to keep politicians and political allies happy so the transit agency can get a continuous stream of subsidies to fund more projects. Continue reading
The share of homes owned by their occupants grew from 64.1 percent in 2019 to 65.2 percent in 2022, according to data from the American Community Survey. The share of homes that were single-family increased slightly from 68.6 percent to 68.6 percent.
The share of people living in owner-occupied homes grew from 66.4 percent in 2019 to 68.4 percent in 2022, while the share of people living in single-family homes grew from 73.6 percent in 2019 to 74.2 percent in 2022. Continue reading
The median home value of homes in the United States was $320,900 in 2022 while the median family income was $92,148 according to the 2022 American Community Survey. This means that the median home cost less than 3.5 times median family income, which is pretty affordable. Even at today’s relatively high interest rates, someone getting a mortgage that is 3.5 times their income should be able to pay it off in well under 30 years while paying less than 30 percent of their income on the mortgage.
Value-to-income ratios ranged from well over 10 in Los Angeles and several other California cities to under 1.5 in Decatur Illinois and several Illinois counties. The states with the least affordable housing are Hawaii and California followed by Washington and Oregon — all states with urban-growth boundaries and other rural land-use restrictions. The most affordable states are Indiana, Ohio, Kansas, Iowa, West Virginia, and Mississippi. Continue reading
About 5.0 million Americans relied on transit to get to work in 2022, according to American Community Survey data released by the Census Bureau last week. This is more than the 3.8 million people who took transit to work in 2021, but far less than the 7.8 million to used transit in 2019. People who used transit represented 3.1 percent of the workforce, up from 2.5 percent in 2021 but down from 5.0 percent in 2019.
There was about 6 percent more commuter traffic on the roads in 2022 than 2021, but still about 7 percent less than 2019. Photo by Tomi Knuutila.
Transit’s share is strongly skewed by New York City, which housed 2.5 percent of the nation’s workers but 34.6 percent of the nation’s transit commuters in 2022. Outside of New York City, only 2.1 percent of workers relied on transit to get to work in 2022. That’s just the city: the New York urban area had 45.4 percent of the nation’s transit commuters, and outside of that area only 1.8 percent of workers relied on transit. Continue reading
.jpg){kind=link}