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Monthly Archives: September 2023

A Polycentric Plan for Portland

By | | Transportation
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Portland’s TriMet transit agency is attempting to serve a 2020s urban area with a 1910 transit system, says a new report published by the Cascade Policy Institute. The agency’s infatuation with rail transit underscores this problem, as rail transit makes no sense for rapidly evolving regions with multiple economic centers. TriMet’s current route map works well only for downtown employees: while more than 40 percent of downtown workers took transit to work before the pandemic, less than 3.5 percent of workers in the rest of the urban area used transit.

The Cascade Policy Institute report proposes to replace TriMet’s current bus route map with a hub-and-spoke system using nine hubs. Yellow circles are the hubs. Blue lines represent non-stop buses from every hub to every other hub. Red lines represent local buses radiating away from each hub. The lines are not exact routes and only show the origins and (in the case of the red lines) approximate destinations of each route. Click image for a larger view.

All of these problems were made worse by the pandemic, which hit rail transit especially hard and which greatly reduced the importance of downtown Portland as an economic center. According to the latest report, Portland’s downtown has the second-worst recovery of any of the nation’s 50 largest downtowns, with less than 40 percent the economic activity of the pre-pandemic period. Yet TriMet still wants to build two new light-rail lines to downtown even though the last line it opened gained no net new riders for the transit system. Continue reading →

Transport and Economic Opportunity: 2020

By | | Transportation, Useful Data
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The nation’s fifty largest urban areas housed 82.5 million jobs in 2020, and auto drivers could reach 98 percent of them in an hour of travel. Transit riders, by comparison, could reach only 8 percent in an hour while bicycle riders could reach 7 percent, according to the University of Minnesota Accessibility Observatory.

The average resident of one of the nation’s fifty largest urban areas can reach 600,000 jobs in a 30-minute auto trip but only 85,000 jobs in a 50-minute transit trip and 92,000 jobs in a 50-minute bike ride.

I’ve previously cited the observatory’s 2019 data many times, but when writing yesterday’s post about travel speeds and productivity, I noticed that it has recently updated the data to 2020. The introduction says the data were collected before the pandemic so “the 2020 results may provide a useful baseline for evaluating the impact that COVID-19 had on access across America.” Continue reading →

Do Higher Speeds = Higher Incomes?

By | | Transportation
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A new study published by the National Bureau of Economic Research (ungated copy) finds that, whaddyknow, faster urban speeds are associated with richer countries. The study looked at urban travel speeds in 1,200 cities around the world to “find that improved urban mobility is an important and previously undocumented feature of economic development.”

Important yes, but hardly previously undocumented, as researchers such as Rémy Prud’Homme in France and Sam Staley and Adrian Moore in the United States have looked at the relationship between travel speeds and economic productivity. That has also been a consistent theme of the Antiplanner, especially when comparing the ability of fast cars vs. slow transit to help people out of poverty. Continue reading →

Biden’s Senior Rail Moment

By | | Transportation
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All during the debate over the 2021 infrastructure bill, President Biden kept talking about how much the country would benefit from high-speed rail even though there was no high-speed rail in his own version of the bill. He seems to be having another senior moment with his proposal to build a railroad from India to Europe via Saudi Arabia and United Arab Emirates.

The problem with this plan is there are 600 to 700 miles of Arabian Sea between India and United Arab Emirates. If you are shipping from India to Europe, once you transfer cargo from a train to a ship, you might as well run the ship all the way to Europe because it costs a lot less than transferring the cargo back to a train and running a train to Europe. Continue reading →

July 2023 Transit Ridership 65% of July 2019

By | | Transportation, Useful Data
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After reaching 70 percent of pre-pandemic numbers in June, transit ridership in July fell back to 65 percent of July 2019, according to data released last week by the Federal Transit Administration. Since July 2019 had 22 working days while July 2023 only had 20, this decline is not surprising.

Meanwhile, Americans drove 97.2 percent as many miles in July 2023 as in the same month of 2019, according to Federal Highway Administration data released last week as well. Amtrak’s monthly performance report indicates that the railroad carried 91.2 percent as many passenger-miles in July 2023 as July 2019, while the Transportation Security Administration says that 98.8 percent as many travelers passed through security in July as in 2019. Continue reading →

Thousands of NYC Rent-Controlled Apartments Sit Vacant

By | | Housing
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Here’s evidence, if anyone needs it, that rent control contributes to housing scarcity: a new report says that more than 13,000 rent-controlled apartments have been vacant for at least two years. Nearly 90,000 rent-controlled apartments were vacant in 2021 and more than 60,000 were still vacant in 2022.

Manhattan apartment building. Photo by David Merrett.

When people leave a New York City rent-controlled apartment, landlords are allowed to raise the rent for the next occupants by $89 a month. Too often, that’s not enough to pay for the repairs and other work needed to make the apartment attractive to new renters. As a result, the apartments sit vacant, waiting for the owners to sell or, less likely, for the rent control law to be repealed. Continue reading →

California Homes Still Sell Above the Asking Price

By | | Housing
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A math-challenged report finds that homes in the San Francisco Bay Area are still selling above their asking price despite census data showing that the region’s population is declining. The report says that Vallejo (which is part of the San Francisco Bay Area but the Census Bureau counts as a separate urban area) “is the number one metro area for selling homes over the list price,” followed by San Francisco and Rochester, New York.

This 1,020-square-foot house on a 4,800-square-foot lot is offered for sale in Vallejo for $499,000, but if recent experience is any guide it will actually sell for around $536,000.

The report says that homes in Vallejo typically sell for 1.07 percent more than their asking price and homes in San Francisco sell for 1.03 percent more than their asking price. However, this is wrong: what the report means is that homes in Vallejo sell for 1.07 times their asking price (which is 7 percent more) and homes in San Francisco (meaning the San Francisco-Oakland urban area) sell for 1.03 times their asking price (or 3 percent more). Continue reading →

U.S. Fertility Rates Lowest in History

By | | News commentary
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U.S. fertility rates have fallen to just 1.6 per woman. This has led some to fear that the United States may face the same kind of demographic collapse that is besetting Japan.

While some may cheer that this makes overpopulation less of a problem, low fertility rates translate to serious economic problems. As demographer Peter Zeihan notes, people in their 20s and 30s spend lots of money, people in their 40s through 60s save money that can then be used for investments in improved productivity, but older people large retire from the economy. The young consumers drive economic growth and the middle-aged savers fund that growth. If the ratio of younger people to older people falls too low, then the economy stops growing, which reduces economic mobility and security. Continue reading →

Housing Affordability in 2023

By | | Housing
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Due to the large number of people seeking to move during and after the pandemic, the number of severely unaffordable housing markets quintupled between 2019 and 2022, says a new report from demographer Wendell Cox that traces the changes in housing affordability in 174 major U.S. housing markets. Of those 174, Cox classified 44 as affordable in 2019, but only 11 were still affordable in 2022. The good news is that’s a slight improvement over 2021, when only 9 were affordable.

Click image to download a 3.1-MB PDF of this 28-page report.

Cox measures affordability by comparing median home prices with median household incomes. This is slightly different from the Antiplanner’s comparison of median home prices with median family incomes. Both of us consider housing to be affordable when median prices are less than three times median incomes and severely unaffordable when median prices are more than five times median incomes. Continue reading →