Is there a huge demand for high-density housing that is unmet due to oppressive land-use regulations such as single-family zoning? Do homeowners support single-family zoning in order to create a cartel boosting their home values? Can denser housing reduce housing prices in high-priced regions?

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Market urbanist Scott Beyer and I have been addressing these kinds of questions in our continuing debate over whether densification or sprawl are better solutions to housing affordability problems. This debate began in a Reason Foundation video called “Density or Sprawl? How to Solve the Urban Housing Crisis.” We met face-to-face, sort of, in a webcast last week titled “Build Up or Build Out: Solving the Housing Crisis,” in which we were joined by Cato scholar Scott Lincicome. The webcast generated a number of questions from the audience that weren’t answered during the event due to technical difficulties. I also posted a short article last week on the Antiplanner and Scott Beyer put up a post on his Facebook page. Continue reading →

Sixty years ago, America had the finest transportation system in the world, and it was almost all unsubsidized. Congress had subsidized the construction of some railroads, but that included only about 7 percent of the nation’s rail mileage. Congress had also subsidized the construction of some airports, but by 1960 that was near an end. Most of America’s highways had been built and maintained out of highway user fees such as gasoline taxes and tolls. The nation’s transit systems were mostly private and even the public ones funded their operating costs and many of their capital costs exclusively out of transit fares.

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That began to change in the 1960s. In 1964, Congress promised capital grants to cities and states that took over transit companies. Most of the government-owned transit agencies also used tax dollars to cover part of their operating costs. In 1970, Congress took over the nation’s intercity passenger trains and subsidies to Amtrak exceeded $1 billion a year. In 1981, Congress began diverting highway user fees to pay for transit. This led to such a political demand for those funds that, in 1998, Congress gave up on the idea that expenditures out of the highway transit fund should be limited to user fees paid into that fund. Today, Congress is transferring $10 billion per year of general funds into the highway trust fund to keep the money flowing without raising gas taxes. Continue reading →

Transit ridership in April 2020 was 84 percent less than it had been in April 2019, according to data released last week by the Federal Transit Administration. The media has reported falling ridership due to the coronavirus and resulting quarantines, but these data reveal exactly how much it has fallen for each mode and urban area.

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For example, ridership is down 92 percent in the New York urban area and 93 percent in Philadelphia but only 58 percent in Dallas-Ft. Worth and Las Vegas. The Bay Area Rapid Transit District saw a 94 percent decline, but ridership in Tucson fell by just 44 percent. Continue reading →

What do you think of when you hear the word “city”? Most people envision a downtown filled with skyscrapers surrounded by lower-rise developments. At least, that’s what appears in most photographs, and the first two dozen of them, in a Google image search for “city.” Some even argue that cities such as Phoenix that don’t have big, skyscraper-filled downtowns aren’t “real cities.”

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However, as Joel Garreau pointed out nearly thirty years ago in his great book, Edge City, cities like that are “abberations. We built cities that way for less than a century.” Before about 1840, cities had no defined central business districts as we know them today. The first skyscrapers weren’t built until the 1880s. Since 1920, the economic forces that led to the construction of dense downtowns have been largely replaced by decentralizing forces. Continue reading →

If light rail was once viewed as an inexpensive alternative to true rapid transit, some cities saw commuter rail as an even less-expensive way of reintroducing rail transit into their regions. After all, most commuter-rail lines used tracks that already existed, so how much could it cost to run passenger trains on those tracks?

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Beguiled by this reasoning, nearly twenty different transit agencies have built commuter rail in urban areas that didn’t have rail transit in 1980. Many of these proved to be absolute disasters, with fare revenues covering as little as 4 percent of operating costs despite having spent hundreds of millions of dollars on capital costs. This brief will look at various commuter-rail projects that have started since 1980 to see which proved total disasters and which were only partial disasters. Continue reading →

A minor footnote in the history of the COVID-19 pandemic is that this may be the first major crisis in history that was assisted by driverless vehicles. A Chinese company named Neolix is using its driverless delivery vans to transport medical supplies and sterilize streets in Wuhan.

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I’ve been promoting the idea that the advent of driverless cars means we shouldn’t be wasting money building archaic rail transit projects since 2010. Now, a decade later, seems an appropriate time to see how far the industry has come and how far it has to go to make widespread use of driverless cars a reality. Some say that the task of creating a fully driverless car is more difficult than anticipated and we won’t have them for many more years. Continue reading →