Smokey the Antiplanning dog joins the Antiplanner and other members of the Antiplanning family in wishing you a safe and happy holiday and a wonderful new year.
Smokey was born near Austin, Texas and was reliably judged to be the cutest dog in the world by some young girls I met in an Austin park in 2011. He is still pretty handsome and it is hard to believe he has been with us for 12 years. Continue reading
Last week, the Economist published an article about when the New York Times lost its way. The article traces it to a June 2020 opinion piece by conservative U.S. Senator Tom Cotton that provoked such outrage among Times staffers that the editorial page editor, James Bennet, was forced to resign. Since Bennet now writes for the Economist, and in fact was the author of this article, it is easy to see why he would consider that incident to be a turning point for the Gray Lady.
In 2020, the Economist argued that countries should take advantage of the pandemic to enact draconian policies aimed at reducing climate change.
While it is easy to argue that the New York Times lost its way long before that incident, I have a different question: When did the Economist lose its way? The weekly magazine that calls itself a newspaper was founded 180 years ago based on the principles of free trade and free markets. Yet it seems to have forgotten those principles today, advocating for more and more government control of the world and national economies. Continue reading
The Santa Clara Valley Transportation Authority (VTA) and its predecessors serving San Jose and Silicon Valley have spent more than $7 billion (in today’s dollars) on rail transit. Yet it carried fewer bus and rail riders in 2019 than buses alone carried in 1986, before San Jose’s first light-rail line opened.
Lines show only origins and approximate destinations, not exact routes. Click image for a larger view.
This failure can be blamed on the usual suspects: rail transit is designed to take lots of people to a central hub, but less than 4 percent of Silicon Valley jobs are in downtown San Jose. In such an urban area, rail transit just because an expensive bus that doesn’t serve many people but does take money from potentially better bus service in the rest of the region. Continue reading
Americans drove more than 99 percent as many miles in October of 2023 as they did in the same month in 2019, according to data released yesterday by the Federal Highway Administration. Miles of driving have been hovering around 100 percent of pre-pandemic levels since March of 2021.
Transit and airline performances in October were reviewed on December 7 and Amtrak’s on December 11.
Although driving has recovered, the places and times people drive have changed. Rural driving is 2 percent ahead of 2019 numbers while urban driving is 2 percent behind. Within both rural and urban areas, driving is greater on interstate freeways than on other arterials and greater on other arterials than on other roads and streets. Continue reading
More than 650,000 Americans, nearly 2 out of every 1,000, were homeless in January 2023, according to the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s Homeless Assessment Report, which was released last week. This is a 15 percent increase since 2019 — but less than a 1 percent increase since 2007, when HUD first attempted to count the homeless.
Homeless in Denver. Photo by Jeffrey Beall.
New York state has the highest rate of homelessness at 5.2 per 1,000 residents, followed by Oregon at 4.7 (using 2022 population estimates). At the other end of the scale, Mississippi has only 0.3 homeless per 1,000 residents. Continue reading
“America’s treasured cities,” writes semi-libertarian Jeffrey Tucker, are in “grave danger.” He believes that people are leaving cities to get away from “forced closures and then vaccine mandates and compulsory segregation by vaccine status” due to the pandemic. He doesn’t consider the possibility that people didn’t want to be in cities in the first place and were all too happy to use the pandemic as an excuse to leave.
Do we treasure living in the cities or the suburbs? Photo by Andreas Praefcke.
Before the pandemic, urbanists were chortling about the “triumph of the city.” World population data showed that urban areas were growing while rural numbers were shrinking. In citing these data, urbanists conflated “urban areas” and “cities” to make their case, effectively arguing that more people moving to the suburban parts of urban areas meant that more people wanted to live in the dense central cities. Continue reading
The state of Colorado will celebrate its 150th birthday in 2026, and to celebrate the state’s Democratic governor, Jared Polis, has proposed what he thinks is a “visionary” land-use and transportation plan. In fact, it is just a tired old rehash of recent urban planning fads that are based on obsolete views of how people want to live.
Click image to download a 9.2-MB PDF of this 34-page report.
The plan is partly a repackaging of a bill the governor promoted in the last session of the state legislature that would have given cities housing targets and required them to build more multifamily housing to meet those targets. The bill was defeated thanks to strong opposition from city governments that didn’t want the state to preempt their zoning powers, but that didn’t sway Polis. Continue reading
With President Biden handing out $6 billion for California high-speed rail projects and $2.2 billion more for other passenger-rail projects, it seems important to review some basic guidelines for infrastructure spending. Nobel-prize-winning economist Elinor Ostrom, whose work focused on incentives and institutions, once offered the following evaluation criteria:
Elinor Ostrom. Photo by Holger Motzkau.
Just a few days after the excellent New York Times article about the Bogotá rapid buses, the Times published a data-heavy article about increasing pedestrian fatalities and that fact that most of them take place at night. While the article makes several important points, it also misses two key points that leads it to make some wrong conclusions.
Seeing through the data. Photo by emre0614.
A 2019 Antiplanner policy brief made many of the points found in the Times article: Pedestrian fatalities are up, most of the increase is at night and has taken place on arterial streets, and distractions from cell phone usage may be a part of the problem. All of this information can be dredged out of federal accident databases. Almost two years ago, I noted that Portland and San Jose had released data indicating that a high percentage of fatalities were homeless, which was also mentioned by the Times. Continue reading
The New York Times reviewed (non-paywall version) the ground-breaking bus-rapid transit system in Bogotá Columbia 23 years after it opened. The TransMilenio bus system first opened in December 2000 under fiscally conservative mayor Enrique Peñalosa and each route-mile is capable of moving more people per hour than New York City subways.
A high-capacity TransMilenio bus. Photo by Felipe Restrepo Acosta.
The system almost immediately doubled transit ridership, partly because the rapid buses were much faster than the buses they replaced but also because Bogota has a lot of low-income people who don’t own cars whose mobility was greatly enhanced by faster transit. Columbia had well under 200 motor vehicles per thousand people in 2000 (compared with more than 800 in the U.S.) and even today Columbia has fewer than 300 vehicles per thousand (compared with more than 900 in the U.S.). Whatever the reason, the rapid bus system carries up to 2 million riders a day, which is more than some U.S. light-rail lines carry in a year. Continue reading
