Search Results for: plan bay area

June Driving Exceeds Pre-Pandemic Levels

By | | Transportation, Useful Data
2 Comments

Americans drove more miles in June 2021 than June 2019, the first time since the pandemic began that driving exceeded pre-pandemic levels, according to data published yesterday by the Federal Highway Administration. We drove 282.5 billion vehicle miles in June 2021, almost half a percent more than the 281.2 billion driven in June 2019.

When compared with pre-pandemic levels, driving has effectively recovered from the pandemic, while other forms of travel have not.

To be fair, June 2021 had more business days than June 2019, which helped boost miles of driving. July 2021 had fewer business days that July 2019, so we’ll see next month how much of a difference this makes. Continue reading →

Poison Pills in the Senate Infrastructure Bill

By | | Transportation
7 Comments

The House-approved INVEST Act included a provision requiring states to insure that all existing roads were in a state-of-good-repair before building new roads. I called that a “poison pill” because it poisoned the idea of using federal funds to promote mobility. This is especially true because Amtrak and transit have far more severe maintenance backlogs than highways, yet the bill included no similar provisions for those modes.

Click image to download a 4.0-MB PDF of this bill.

I’ve read through the 2,702-page Senate infrastructure bill and the good news is that it doesn’t include the same fix-it-first provision for highways as the House bill. However, it does have several mobility poisons of its own. Continue reading →

Urban Sociopaths

By | | Housing
45 Comments

Sociopaths are people who “have no regard for others’ rights or feelings, lack empathy and remorse for wrongdoings, and have the need to exploit and manipulate others.” That definition perfectly fits New Urban planners and the environmentalists who support them.

I could be referring to planners eager to inflict congestion on commuters in order to persuade a few of them to take transit. But today I’m referring to planners eager to drive up housing prices in order to force more people to live in multifamily housing. Continue reading →

How San Jose Held Up Google for $200 Million

By | | City planning, Policy brief
7 Comments

Last month, the San Jose city council approved a plan for Google to practically double the size of downtown San Jose. The plan allows Google to build up to 7.3 million square feet of office space, 4,000 to 5,900 housing units, 1,100 hotel/extended stay units, and half a million square feet of retail or cultural space on 80 acres of land located just west of downtown. The site is immediately adjacent to the San Jose train station, which serves commuter trains, light rail, and Amtrak.

Click image to download a four-page PDF of this policy brief.

According to city planning documents, this is exactly the kind of development San Jose was looking for in this area, one which (according to a staff presentation) would “create a vibrant, welcoming, and accessible urban destination consisting of a mix of land uses and that are well-integrated with the intermodal transit station.” Yet in order to get the project approved, Google had to put up $200 million for various special interest groups who were protesting the plan. This may actually have the perverse effect of discouraging future development in the city. Continue reading →

Amtrak Won’t Connect Us

By | | Policy brief, Transportation
7 Comments

Biden’s American Jobs Plan proposes to spend $115 billion on highways that carry 87 percent of all passenger-miles in the United States and $80 billion on Amtrak that carries 0.1 percent of passenger-miles. That’s what rail advocates call “balanced transportation funding.”

Click image to download a six-page PDF of this policy brief.

Biden’s plan “is what this nation has been waiting for,” enthuses Amtrak’s CEO. It’s certainly what many railfans–the people who collect old railroad timetables and model trains–have been waiting for. But I’m not sure many other Americans care enough about an obsolete form of travel they never use to say they have been eagerly waiting to have more deficit dollars spent on it. Continue reading →

A Bus Driver’s Life Is Worth $16,200

By | | Transportation
3 Comments

The state of California has fined the Santa Clara Valley Transportation Authority (VTA) $16,200 for health and safety violations that may have led to the death of a bus driver, Audrey Lopez, from coronavirus last October. The state claims VTA failed to “require or ensure the use of face coverings at all times by employees at the facility and while operating the buses.” It also didn’t provide effective training instruction to employees on how to prevent the spread of the virus.

Naturally, VTA claims that Lopez didn’t catch the virus while on the job. But union president John Courtney says that Lopez had not been anywhere where she would have been exposed to the virus, other than work, in the days before she called in sick.

The transit industry insists that transit is safe to ride during the pandemic. However, the Centers for Disease Control says that air filtration systems must have a minimum efficiency reporting value (MERV) rating of 13 to filter out the virus. The filters used in VTA buses are rated 4, good enough to filter out pollen but not good enough to stop the virus. Continue reading →

Amtrak’s Money-Losing Vision

By | | Transportation
5 Comments

Amtrak responded to Biden’s “American Jobs Plan,” which would give Amtrak $80 billion (presumably over several years), with a “vision to grow rail service and connect new city pairs across America.” As shown in the map below, some of those city pairs might seem to make sense, such as Dallas-Houston and Los Angeles-Las Vegas.

Click image for a larger view.

But a lot of the terminal cities being added to the map are so small — places like Rockland, Maine (7,500 people), Christiansburg, Virginia (25,000), and Cheyenne, Wyoming (76,000) — that even Amtrak lovers are skeptical. Matthew Yglesias, for example, says “Amtrak’s big idea of what to do with extra funding is to create new low-performing extensions to places with very low demand.” Continue reading →

Housing Affordability and the Pandemic

By | | Housing, Policy brief
18 Comments

The median price of homes in Auckland, New Zealand’s largest city, grew by $100,000 in February, reports the Real Estate Institute of New Zealand. That means prices were growing by $25,000 a week. The good news is that these are New Zealand dollars, which are only worth about 72 cents U.S., which means prices grew by “only” US$18,000 a week. The bad news is Auckland’s median prices had already reached $1 million (U.S.$720,000) in January, so February’s price increase was only about 10 percent.

Click image to download a four-page PDF of this policy brief.

Like many American cities with sky-high housing prices, Auckland has an urban-growth boundary, locally known as the Metropolitan Urban Limit, which it adopted in 1998. Advocates claimed that this limit would reduce transportation, utilities, and other costs. Ten years later a former Auckland city planner could only say that the limit was successful because it contained growth within the limit. That’s like saying schools are successful because they contain children. Continue reading →

The Truth about Pelosi’s Subway

By | | Transportation
2 Comments

When the 2021 COVID-19 relief bill included funding for the BART expansion to San Jose, which didn’t have much to do with the coronavirus, Republicans labeled it Pelosi’s subway. Others disputed this description, saying that the BART line was 50 miles away from Speaker Pelosi’s district. Nevertheless, the earmark has apparently been removed from the bill.

$1.7 billion spent digging a hole and filling it up.

The bill still included $1.675 billion for transit capital improvement projects, which are not obviously vital considering that transit ridership is down by 65 percent. The American Public Transportation Association has created a list of 23 projects that are eligible for these funds. The San Jose BART line is not on the list. Continue reading →

Blaming the Messenger

By | | Transportation
1 Comment

Ridership on New York City subways is down by 67 percent from before the pandemic. Metropolitan Transportation Authority CEO Sarah Feinberg says it is all the media’s fault.

The MTA “was really ill-served by some of the early coverage of the pandemic,” she says. “People started thinking, ‘the last place I want to be is in a crowded subway car.'” She claims that “study after study” has found that transit was not “vectoring the virus.”

The New York Post article reporting on her statement snarks that she made it “without referencing specific studies.” But what do you expect? The Post, after all, is part of the media. Continue reading →