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Remote Working Increases Productivity

By | | Transportation
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Last July, I noted that studies that claim that telecommuters are less productive than those in fixed workplaces were unpersuasive because they “mostly dealt with low-skilled jobs such as call centers and data entry.” I’m not the only one who thinks so. Writing in Business Insider, Ed Zitron noted last week that studies of call centers are inapplicable because they “are extremely controlled and heavily micromanaged environments — ones rife with labor abuse.” Bottom line, Zitron concludes, managers pressing workers to return to offices “have no data to justify it.”

Working at home can be more comfortable and less stressful than working in and commuting to an office or other workplace. Photo by Roberto Nickson.

A much more persuasive report came out earlier this week comparing flex-work policies and revenue growth at 554 companies. It found that revenue growth over the past three years at companies with more flexible policies was 16 percent greater than companies that ordered employees back to workplaces when the pandemic ended. While this isn’t absolute proof that remote workers are more productive, it certainly contradicts those who say they are not. Continue reading →

Evidence That Planners Are Dumb

By | | Transportation
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The United States is not the only country where transit agencies are wildly spending on questionable projects that suffer huge cost overruns. In Canada, Toronto opened its first subway in 1954 at a cost of just $11 million per mile — $90 million per mile in today‘s U.S. dollars. The city is currently building a subway line that was supposed to cost almost US$1.0 billion a mile, but with cost overruns is expected to cost as much as US$1.4 billion a mile.

Toronto subway. Photo by Tim Adams.

Light rail in Canada has also undergone huge price inflation. Edmonton opened North America’s first modern light-rail line in 1978 at a cost of US$47 million a mile in today’s money. Today, Calgary, Hamilton, Kitchener, and Toronto are all planning or building light-rail lines that are expected to cost at least US$300 million a mile, and several of these have had cost overruns of as much as 180 percent. Continue reading →

Who Benefits from Variable-Priced Road Tolls?

By | | Housing, Transportation
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The Oregon Department of Transportation is planning to toll all lanes of major freeway in the Portland area soon. The San Francisco Bay Area Metropolitan Transportation Commission is considering tolling all freeways in the region later this decade. Plans such as these always raise charges that they will heavily impact low-income drivers.

An electronic tollgate that collects tolls without slowing traffic. Photo by OnionBulb.

In response, the Antiplanner has argued that low-income people will greatly benefit from variable-priced tolling. While many taxes, including gas taxes, are regressive, tolling is not because people pay for only what they use. Congestion, however, is regressive because low-income people are less likely to be able to work at home or on flexible schedules that allow them to avoid rush hour. “If variable user fees can relieve that congestion, working-class people will be among the greatest beneficiaries.” Continue reading →

September VMT Continues to Exceed 2019

By | | Transportation, Useful Data
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Americans drove 1.4 percent more miles in September 2023 than in the same month in 2019, according to data released by the Federal Highway Administration yesterday. Vehicle miles of travel (VMT) have exceeded 2019 numbers in seven out of the last twelve months.

Most of the increase in driving was in rural areas. Although September’s rural driving was 4.6 percent greater in 2023 than 2019, urban driving was only 0.1 percent greater. The increase in urban driving was on collector and local streets; freeway and arterial driving were still a little short of 100 percent of 2019 miles. Continue reading →

No Amount of Money Is Too Much

By | | Transportation
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Is there any transit construction project that is so expensive that a transit agency will say, “Let’s not do this”? The Antiplanner has argued that the answer is “no”; instead, the only question agencies ask is, “Where are we going to get the money to do this?” Evidence for this view has recently come to light in San Francisco and Baltimore.

Architect’s model of the planned San Francisco transit center. Note the bottom level has commuter trains on the outer tracks and high-speed trains on the center tracks even though the prospects of high-speed rail ever reaching San Francisco are dimming every day.

Last January, I observed that the price of a 1.3-mile commuter-rail extension that San Francisco was planning had increased from $5.0 billion to $6.7 billion, or more than $5 billion a mile. I pointed out that there were several viable alternatives to spending what would be a record amount of money per mile on a transit project, including replacing the trains with buses or terminating the trains at a different location just seven minutes away. Now comes the news that the cost of the project has increased again to $8.25 billion, or more than $6.3 billion a mile. Continue reading →

Transit Slowly Recovers

By | | Transportation, Useful Data
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U.S. transit systems carried 73.9 percent as many riders in September 2023 as the same month in 2019, according to data released earlier this week by the Federal Transit Administration. This is transit’s highest level, as a percent of 2019 numbers, since the pandemic began. This is particularly remarkable as September 2023 had one less business day than September 2019.

Highway data for September 2023 are not yet available. This chart and post will be updated when they are released.

Transit was aided by the fact that September ridership in the New York urban area, where 46 percent of all transit rides take place, reached 78.6 percent of pre-pandemic numbers. Transit is also doing better than average in Los Angeles (79.3%), Miami (83.4%), Dallas (78.4%), and Houston (87.2%). Washington reached 73.8 percent, just slightly below the national average. Ridership continues to be below average in Chicago (63.1%), Philadelphia (59.4%), Atlanta (60.6%), Boston (64.0%), Phoenix (55.8%), and San Francisco-Oakland (64.4%), to name a few. Although transit ridership is slowly recovering, it is still well behind driving, which first reached 100 percent of pre-pandemic miles in June, 2021. Continue reading →

Out for Growth

By | | Housing
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A new report on housing decries the fact that many unaffordable housing markets have gotten even less affordable in the last few years. The report’s solution is in the name of the organization that published it: Up for Growth, as in “grow up, not out.”

Click image to download a 24.0-MB PDF of this report.

The reports calls for cities to identify what neighborhoods to build in, “the appropriate increase in density for each location,” and the “optimal housing mix,” in other words, the mix of single-family vs. multifamily housing, for each neighborhood. Where people actually want to live and whether they prefer to live in single- or multifamily housing are not to be considered. Continue reading →

States Shouldn’t Try to Reduce Per-Capita Driving

By | | Transportation
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The most idiotic ideas come from articles written by anti-car writers. This isn’t recent, but a colleague from Washington let me know of a 2022 article from a “public interest” organization called the Frontier Group that reports that “less driving is possible.” Thanks to “compact neighborhoods” and “investments in infrastructure that supports walking, biking or riding transit,” some states have managed to reduce per-capita driving, which the Frontier Group regards as a victory.

To encourage transit while discouraging driving, Washington converted lanes on a bridge that had previously been open to all vehicles into light-rail lines. Image by Sound Transit.

As evidence, the author of the Frontier Group article, Elizabeth Redlington, compared miles of per capita driving by state in 1996 and 2021. Between those two years, some states increased but some declined and the biggest decline was in Washington state, which saw a 15.8 percent drop in per capita driving during that period. Continue reading →

Joe Biden’s Dysfunctional Family

By | | Transportation
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We’ve all heard of families where one person worked hard and made a lot of money, which attracted relatives eager to sponge off of that person’s wealth. Most would call such families dysfunctional because most of those family members should have been able to support themselves. Joe Biden’s family is like that.

An Amtrak train passes through Delaware. Photo by David Wilson.

I don’t mean Jill, Hunter, or any of his blood relatives. I mean Amtrak. As he himself has said, “The conductors, the engineers” on the trains then-Senator Joe Biden once regularly rode between Washington and Delaware “literally became my family.” Continue reading →

The Case Against Affordable Housing

By | | Housing
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Affordable housing projects aren’t making housing more affordable. In fact, says a new study by an MIT economist, construction of new subsidized housing displaces new unsubsidized housing for little net gain in the housing supply. Specifically, the study found, ten new subsidized housing units resulted in eight fewer unsubsidized units.

This is supposed to be an affordable housing project, yet it is already unaffordable because it is six stories high, which costs at least twice as much to build, per square foot, as two-story construction.

Between 1950 and 1986, most subsidized housing was built by government agencies. In 1986, a Republican Congress sought to “privatize” the construction of subsidized housing by giving developers tax credits if they promised to rent their housing at below-market prices for 30 years. Today, low-income housing tax credits worth around $10 billion a year are given to the states to hand out to developers. To see how well this program is working, economist Evan Soltas looked at hundreds of projects built with tax credits. Continue reading →