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Airline Competition

By | | Transportation
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“President Obama promised to fight corporate concentration,” says public interest journalist Justin Elliott. “Eight years later, the airline industry is dominated by just four companies.” It’s true that what were seven major airlines in 2008 have merged into four today. The Antiplanner isn’t sure, however, that this is a bad thing.

According to Wikipedia, in 2008, those seven major airlines (American, Continental, Delta, Northwest, Southwest, U.S. Air, and United) had 88.0 percent of the domestic air market. As of fiscal 2016, that’s dropped to 84.5 percent.

Meanwhile, Alaska has increased its market share by 65 percent and JetBlue has increased its share by 43 percent. Hawaiian’s share has increased by 15 percent. Two major new airlines have appeared, Allegiant and Spirit, giving travelers more choices particularly since they have different pricing models.

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November 8 Ballot Measures to Watch

By | | Transportation
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If you think the presidential election is stupid, just get a look at all of the cities that are voting on stupid rail transit projects. Los Angeles wants $120 billion; Seattle $54 billion; San Diego, $7.5 billion; San Francisco, $3.5 billion; San Jose, $3 billion; Atlanta, $2.5 billion, Kansas City, $2 billion; Virginia Beach, $310 million; and Tigard, Oregon, which has the chance to kill a $2 billion project in Portland. That’s nearly $200 billion worth of stupidity that has rail contractors salivating.

Voters from these cities should look at the experiences other cities have had with rail. Portland opened a new light-rail project a year ago that was supposed to carry 17,000 people a day in its first year. Actual ridership is more like 11,000. Rail apologist Jarrett Walker says he isn’t surprised as rail lines “are designed to encourage denser and more sustainable development in addition to serving people who are there now,” so initial ridership is “almost always disappointing.” C’mon, Jarrett: planners took this into account when they made their projections (or if they didn’t they should have). By the way, the article also says the project came in “under budget,” but it doesn’t say that the budget was almost twice as much as the original projected cost, just one more way transit agencies lie about rail transit.

Speaking of cost overruns, Honolulu is the smallest urban area in America to be building rail transit, and its project, which was originally projected to cost less than $3 billion, is now up to $8 billion and possibly more than $10 billion, which would be more than $10,000 for every resident of Oahu. The city is stuck because it doesn’t have enough money to finish it, but if it doesn’t finish it, the Federal Transit Administration says it will demand that the city return the federal share of the cost.

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Growth Boundaries Must Go

By | | Housing
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Urban-growth boundaries and other forms of growth management make housing expensive, housing prices volatile, and particularly harm low-income people. They slow regional growth, are a primary if not the primary cause of wealth inequality, and cost the nation nearly $2 trillion a year in economic productivity. These and other problems are documented in a new paper that the Cato Institute will publish tomorrow. Antiplanner readers can get a preview of the paper today.

Titled The New Feudalism, the paper points out, as the Antiplanner has previously noted, that strict government control of land uses resembles feudalism in every way but whose names are on the land titles. You may own land in California, but your ability to use that land the way you see fit can be restricted just as heavily as faced by occupants of land in Africa or other places where the government or a few oligarchs hold title to most land.

The paper also argues that regions that practice strict growth management aren’t going to solve their housing affordability problems by building to higher densities. Higher land costs, higher construction costs (at least for mid-rise and high-rise housing), and higher permitting costs can all add hundreds of thousands of dollars to the cost of a single housing unit.

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Better Housing Policy

By | | Housing
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The Washington Post is publishing a series of opinion pieces on what housing policies the next president should adopt. The first, by Urban Institute fellow Erika Poethig, argues that federal rental assistance should target the most vulnerable populations instead of, as is done today, simply anyone who makes a certain percentage below median incomes. The second, by University of Virginia economist Edgar Olsen, goes further and argues that all low-income housing subsidies should be in the form of rental assistance, not construction of low-income housing, which he says is not cost effective.

The most recent article is by the Antiplanner, and readers of this blog will not be surprised to learn that it focuses on land-use regulation. One point that I didn’t make in the article for lack of room (I was given a 500-word limit) was that land-use restrictions that make housing more expensive impose higher costs on taxpayers who are expected to provide low-income housing.
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On the same day, Oregon’s Cascade Policy Institute published a paper arguing that Oregon land-use regulation violates the Fair Housing Act just as much as if Oregon put up a sign saying, “No blacks allowed.” This is similar to a paper previously published by Hawaii’s Grassroot Institute, but of course with more of a focus on Oregon law.

Stifling the Economy

By | | News commentary
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Sex scandals have drowned out the real scandal of 2016, which is the slow economic growth experienced since the 2008 financial crisis. This is the slowest recovery from a recession in history, and that has hurt tens of millions of Americans. Recent articles in the New York Times and Wall Street Journal have asked why the economy is growing so slowly, but neither answered the question.

The answer seems obvious to the Antiplanner: the economy is growing slowly because it is being stifled by a government doing the same thing the government did during the Great Depression (as described by Amity Shlaes), which is encumbering businesses with regulation while spending federal dollars on “stimulus” projects that aren’t very stimulating.

Here’s a true story. During the Depression, the railroads complained that they were heavily regulated by the Interstate Commerce Commission while the airlines, truckers, and bus companies were not. President Roosevelt named Joseph Eastman, a long-time member of the Interstate Commerce Commission, his “transportation czar” (formally, the “federal coordinator of transportation”). Eastman realized he had two alternatives: deregulate the railroads or overregulate everyone else. As someone comfortable with regulation, he choose the latter.

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Densification the Hammer; Cities the Nail

By | | News commentary, Urban areas
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With 560 murders this year and counting, Chicago has become known as the murder capital of the nation. Some take issue with this, noting that Chicago’s murder rate per 100,000 people is much lower than many other cities including Baltimore, New Orleans, and Newark. Yet the moniker has stuck, leading many to ask why Chicago violence is so bad.

According to Atlantic‘s CityLab and Chicago’s Metropolitan Planning Organization, the answer is urban sprawl. Both say there is a strong correlation between declining city populations and rising crime.

Of “the six U.S. cities that have earned the dubious distinction of official ‘murder capital'” over the past 30 years, says CityLab, four have had declining populations. The Metropolitan Planning Council points to a study that found, “almost all of the crime-related population decline is attributable to increased outmigration rather than a decrease in arrivals.” The solution, both CityLab and the MPO argue, is to promote gentrification and immigration.

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Negative on Positive Train Control

By | | Transportation
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The National Transportation Safety Board hasn’t made any final determinations, but it’s looking more like the September 29 New Jersey train crash could have been prevented by positive train control (PTC) systems that Congress has mandated but the railroads have failed to install. This is going to lead to a spate of articles accusing New Jersey Transit and other railroads and transit agencies of dragging their feet in installing PTC. Yet the Antiplanner isn’t positive that positive train control is the best way to make rail lines safer.

According to National Transportation Statistics table 2-39, since 1990 an average of 8 passengers and 26 railroad employees have been killed per year in accidents, many of which could have been prevented by positive train control. Meanwhile, an average of 416 people per year have been killed when struck by trains at grade crossings and another 354 have been killed when struck by trains because they were trespassing on tracks. None of those deaths could have been prevented by positive train control.

That suggests that positive train control, which the Association of American Railroads says is likely to cost $10 billion, may not be the most cost-effective way of making railroads safer. Every death is tragic, but if the $10 billion the railroads have to spend to save 34 lives a year could have been spent improving grade crossings and fencing off railroad rights of way, it might be able to save hundreds of lives per year instead.

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Combining MPOs Won’t Fix Planning Failures

By | | Regional planning
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In The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Jane Jacobs defined a “region” as “an area safely larger than the last one to whose problems we found no solution.” A proposed rule published by the Obama administration would take the next step in this process, demanding that planning organizations for what were once multiple regions combine or coordinate to produce single regional plans for their now enlarged regions.

The rule states that if multiple metropolitan planning organizations (MPOs) exist within a single urbanized area, they must merge or jointly prepare single transportation plans for their area. According to a DOT estimate, about a third of metropolitan planning organizations are affected by the proposed rule.

Congress requires that MPOs write and update two key plans: the long-range (20-year) transportation plan, which must be updated every five years; and the short-term (4-year) transportation improvement plan (TIP), a list of projects the MPO wants to fund, which must be updated every year. As defined by the Census Bureau, urbanized areas often cross state boundaries. However, since MPOs are designated by state governors, they generally do not cross state boundaries. This means the New York urbanized area has separate MPOs for the New York and New Jersey parts of the area, while the Philadelphia urbanized area has three separate MPOs. These would all have to work together to write single long-range plans and TIPs to submit to the federal government.

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Sorry, Mr. President, But the System Is Rigged

By | | News commentary
6 Comments

President Obama has a lengthy commentary in the Economist, which that magazine-that-calls-itself-a-newspaper says is an “open letter to his successor. The Economist also describes the essay as “centrist,” as it criticizes Bernie Sanders’ leftism as much as, if not more than it criticized Trump.

But the article isn’t really centrist. Instead, Obama is defending the liberal (in a classical sense of the term) consensus in favor of free trade, relatively open borders, and mostly free markets. That is what liberals believed in during the nineteenth century, and it is what both the liberal and conservative elites believe today, which is why neither Bill Clinton nor George Bush questioned these ideas.

This election year, in fact, is the first time in many decades–perhaps more than a century–that a candidate who challenged these ideas won a major party nomination for president. While Trump openly challenged the open borders ideas, Sanders gained a lot of votes by challenging the free-market ideas. Brexit and similar votes in Europe show this isn’t unique to the United States: many people are feeling disenchanted with the liberal consensus.

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A City Is Not a Fugue

By | | Book reviews
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If you want a book demonstrating that smart growth is based on mumbo-jumbo, half-truths, and outright fabrications, there are few better examples than The Well-Tempered City. Jonathan Rose is a real estate developer who happens to be married to the sister of New Urbanist architect Peter Calthorpe. Rose claims to have been at the 1996 meeting where the term “smart growth” was coined, though he doesn’t mention that one of the reasons for choosing the name was so its supporters could tar anyone who disagreed with them for favoring “dumb growth.”

Full disclosure: The publisher gave me a copy of this book on the condition that I write a review in my blog, so anything positive I say about the book should be taken with a grain of salt. I told the publisher my review might not be too positive, but they seemed to think a bad review was better than none at all. As it turned out, the book is far worse than I suspected, as I usually expect a semblance of reason from people I disagree with. I could find none in The Well-Tempered City.

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