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Affordable Housing Debate

By | | Housing
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The Divided We Fall web site has posted a debate over the housing crisis between the Antiplanner and former U.S. Ambassador Charles Ray. The debate covers some important issues, but I had hoped that my opponent would be a card-carrying member of the Affordable Housing Industrial Complex. Instead, Ray and I ended up agreeing on more issues that we disagreed about.

Affordable housing project in Salt Lake City. Source: Google street view.

I wanted to make the debate about the billions of tax dollars being spent building not very much housing. But it turned into a debate over housing affordability in general, which is both a completely different issue and too broad to cover in 1,000 words. Continue reading →

November Driving 1.2% More Than in 2019

By | | Transportation
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Americans drove 1.2 percent more miles in November of 2023 than in the same month in 2019, according to data released by the Federal Highway Administration yesterday. Rural driving was 6 percent greater than in 2019, while urban driving was 0.9 percent less. This may partially be due to a movement of people from urban to rural areas.

For a discussion of airline, Amtrak, and transit numbers, see the post from earlier this week.

A few states are still seeing major shortfalls in driving. West Virginia is 31 percent below 2019; California is down 21 percent; and the District of Columbia remains 29 percent less than in 2019. Missouri and Washington are also below 2019 levels, but only by 5 to 6 percent. Continue reading →

Another Rail Cost Overrun

By | | Transportation
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Metro Transit has raised the projected cost of the Twin Cities’ Southwest light-rail line to $2.86 billion, or $197 million per mile for the 14.5 mile line. The news stories say this is up from $2.0 billion, but the original projected cost was $1.25 billion for 15.8 miles or less than $80 million a mile (which is still outrageous for an inflexible, low-capacity system).

Light-rail trains pass through a half-empty downtown Minneapolis. Photo by Andrew Ciscel.

Considering that downtown Minneapolis is ranked as having the third-slowest recovery of the nation’s 56 largest urban areas, and Twin Cities light rail carried only 52 percent of pre-pandemic riders in November, this would be a good time for the region to scrap the project. As I’ve suggested before, it would cost a lot less to turn it into a rapid bus route than to complete the rail project. Continue reading →

Transit Carried 74.9% of 2019 Riders in November

By | | Transportation, Useful Data
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America’s transit systems carried nearly 75 percent as many riders in November 2023 as the same month in 2019, according to data released on Friday by the Federal Transit Administration. This is the most riders transit has attracted, as a share of pre-pandemic levels, since the pandemic began in March 2020.

Transit’s failure to carry even three-fourths of its pre-pandemic passengers stands in contrast to Amtrak, which carried 3.1 percent more passenger-miles in November 2023 than 2019, and the airlines, which carried 4.3 percent more riders in November than in 2019. Release of airline passenger-mile data tends to be more than a month later than passenger numbers, but in September domestic air routes carried 6.0 percent more passenger-miles than the same month in 2019. November highway data are not yet available but an update will be posted here when they are. Continue reading →

Life Is Joyous; Life Is Cruel

By | | Housekeeping
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When I included a photo of Smokey on my Christmas post last month, I knew he was sick, but I didn’t know how bad it was. In fact, beneath that gorgeous coat of his he had lost 20 percent of his body weight in two months. We were desperately trying to feed him anything he would eat but it turned out his digestive system had simply shut down and he died the day after New Years.

Smokey was born on April 1 2011 and saw his first snow in May 2011.

Having gone through this before, I thought it would be easier, but it’s not. I’m not religious, but the best way I can describe it is I feel like I’ve lost part of my soul. Continue reading →

Pulling the Pin

By | | Housekeeping
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I started this blog 17 years ago today and since then have put up nearly 4,000 posts. Today, I’m taking the next step towards retirement by ending my practice of posting nearly every weekday.

Is this the origin of the phrase “pulling the pin”? Maybe not but as a railfan it is nice to think so. Photo by Ben Franske.

I still have more posts planned. I’ve written two more major reports that I hope will be published soon and will post them here. I expect to continue monitoring new releases of transportation, housing, and census data and report on them here. I also need to write at least one more chapter in The Education of an Iconoclast. Continue reading →

BRT “Faster and Cheaper” Than Rail

By | | Transportation
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The World Bank is promoting bus-rapid transit as “green” and “sustainable transportation” that is “faster and cheaper to build than Metros,” meaning heavy rail. When operated with all-electric buses, says the agency, BRT will “cut life-threatening air pollutants” as well as greenhouse gas emissions.

A bus-rapid transit station in Dakar, Senegal. Photo courtesy of CETUD.

The World Bank is absolutely correct about the faster and cheaper part. However, it is overpromising when it comes to taking cars off the road. “Developing country cities that have not yet fully developed their land use and transportation infrastructure around cars can leapfrog car-centered culture and prioritize efficient, low-carbon urban transport that focuses on people rather than vehicles,” says a World Bank official. This is pure rhetoric that consigns developing cities to economic stagnation. Continue reading →

Curbsides: The Salvation of Intercity Buses

By | | Transportation
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In order to better compete with Megabus and Flixbus, Greyhound (which is owned by Flixbus) is selling or moving out of many of its downtown bus stations and loading and unloading passengers at curbsides. This is being derided as “taking mobility away from low-income people” and that moving stations from downtowns to suburban locations was a major hardship for passengers. But the alternative would probably be worse.

A modern Greyhound bus near Toronto. Photo by Secondarywaltz.

In 2007, FirstGroup, a British transit company, bought Greyhound for $2.8 billion plus $800 million in assumed debt for a total of $3.6 billion. Admittedly, this price included Laidlaw school buses, but Greyhound — the largest bus company in America — was the plum. Greyhound lost so much money over the next 14 years that, in 2021, FirstGroup sold Greyhound to Flix for a mere $172 million. This didn’t include the school buses or the real estate under many Greyhound bus stations, but FirstGroup remained responsible for $320 million in pension and other liabilities. Clearly, FirstGroup lost a lot of money on Greyhound. Continue reading →

Even in Oregon, Agencies Must Follow the Law

By | | News commentary
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The Oregon State Court of Appeals invalidated rules written by the state Environmental Quality Commission for implementing the state’s Climate Protection Program. The state legislation creating this program required the EQC to explain “Any alternatives the commission considered and the reasons that the alternatives were not pursued.” In response, the agency claimed that it “considered many alternatives” but didn’t describe a single one or explain why it was rejected.

Smokey, the Antiplanner dog, checks out the environmental quality of an Oregon stream.

This is entirely typical of government planning today. I’ve reviewed many plans that didn’t bother to identify and evaluate any alternatives because planners were so certain they knew what was right and anything else was wrong. What is atypical is that a state court has enforced the law requiring identification and evaluation of alternatives. Continue reading →

Pandemic Migration Patterns Continue

By | | News commentary
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A net 338,000 people who resided in California on July 1, 2022 had left the state by July 1, 2023, according to population estimates released by the Census Bureau last week. This follows a loss of 625,000 residents in the two years prior to July 1 2022, indicating that the pandemic-related forces that led to this migration out of the state are still at work.

More U.S. residents moved to green and yellow states than left those states, with darker colors representing greater in-migration. More residents moved out of red and orange states than moved to those states, with darker colors representing greater out-migration.

International migration plus net birth rates (births minus deaths) meant that California’s overall population declined by only 75,000 people in 2023. This was exceeded by New York, which lost 102,000 people. A net of only about 217,000 New York residents migrated out of the state in 2023, but New York didn’t have as many international immigrants to make up for this loss, so its overall population decline was bigger than California’s. Continue reading →