The Antiplanner » Home Page

April Transit Ridership 80.6% of April 2019

By | | Transportation, Useful Data
24 Comments

America’s transit systems provided 96.3 percent as much service in April 2025 as they did in the same month of 2019, yet carried only 80.6 percent as many riders, according to data released late last week by the Federal Transit Administration. This is slightly less than the percentage of 2019 riders they carried in March.

Transit ridership as a share of pre-pandemic riders dipped slightly in April.

Rather than scale back service to meet reduced ridership demand, transit agencies complain that they are suffering “deficits” that need to be made up for by taxpayers. While I would define “deficits” as “fares minus costs,” transit agencies define them as “fares plus existing tax revenues minus costs.” Continue reading →

Amtrak & Flying Up, Driving Down in April

By | | Transportation, Useful Data
22 Comments

Amtrak carried 9.0 percent more passenger-miles in April 2025 than in the same month before the pandemic, according to the state-owned company’s monthly performance report. The airlines did almost as well, carrying 5.8 percent more riders in April than in 2019. However, Americans drove only 98.5 percent as many vehicle miles in April as in 2019.

April transit data are not yet available and will be posted here as soon as possible after the FTA releases them.

It’s hard to guess why driving dropped, at least as a percentage of 2019. The economy was slowing, rail freight was declining (though still more than 2019), but perhaps truck freight had fallen. Continue reading →

Portland Has the “Worst Housing Crisis Outlook”

By | | Housing
69 Comments

Portland, Oregon is suffering from the “worst housing crisis outlook” in the country, according to a study published last week by LendingTree.com. The study compared housing prices with household incomes and current vacancy rates to conclude that Portland and three other cities in the Northwest — Boise, Spokane, and Salt Lake — are four of the five worst housing markets out of the top 100 metro areas.

While I appreciate anything that knocks Portland, I have a lot of quibbles with this study. The researcher used data for metropolitan areas, which are political units (being drawn on county boundaries), instead of urban areas, which are economic units (being drawn based on population densities). The researcher compared median housing prices with median household incomes, while median family incomes make more sense because non-family households (such as college housemates) rarely buy homes. Continue reading →

Give It to Brightline

By | | Mission
39 Comments

“High-speed rail is a global disaster,” says one YouTuber, “but we must build it anyway.” “I don’t care about the cost,” says another, “California high-speed rail is fine.”

Are these people on the payroll of the companies earning millions in profits building rail lines that few people will ever use? Or are they just train lovers with no conscience who think everyone else owes them a heavily subsidized ride on trains that will travel less than half as fast as and cost more to ride than airliners? Continue reading →

Looking for Someone to Blame

By | | Housing
13 Comments

Oregon housing prices are “soaring.” Homelessness is increasing. Not having anything else to do, homeless people turn to drugs, aided by city and county programs giving them free syringes and other paraphernalia.

This map shows homeless camps identified by the city of Portland. Colors indicate the risk of crime each camp supposedly poses to nearby neighborhoods.

This leads to conflicts as people who actually have homes find their neighborhoods invaded by homeless people and their tents (given to them by the county government), drug dealers, and associated problems. This has Progressives looking around for someone to blame for all this other than themselves. Continue reading →

A Low-Cost High-Speed Rail Plan?

By | | Transportation
25 Comments

New York University’s Transit Costs Project has been asking the question, “Why do U.S. transit projects cost so much more than similar projects in Europe, Asia, and South America?” A recent report from the project proposes to significantly speed up trains in Amtrak’s Northeast Corridor for only $12.5 billion (plus another $4.5 billion for new rolling stock), which is far less than Amtrak’s proposal to spend at least $110 billion in the same corridor.

Amtrak’s plan called for building a new line for the entire 457 miles between Boston and Washington. The Transit Cost Project’s plan instead proposes to fix specific bottlenecks on the current line. The result, says the project, would be trains that could travel between New York and either Boston or Washington in less than two hours, as opposed to 3 hours (New York-Washington) to 3-2/3 hours (New York-Boston) today. Continue reading →

Making Everyone Else Pay

By | | Transportation, Urban areas
33 Comments

Seattle is building the most expensive light-rail system in the world, yet Seattle Times writer Jon Talton defends it saying “the economic benefits are clear.” Those benefits, apparently, are that a handful of people are able to live without a car, yet it doesn’t occur to Talton that the came benefit could be obtained with a much lower-cost bus system.

Photo by wings777.

According to the American Community Survey, the Seattle urban area had 1.9 million workers in 2023 and fewer than 16,000 — that’s 0.8 percent — took light rail to work. The survey also found that only 28 percent of transit commuters didn’t have any motor vehicles in their households, and if that applies to light-rail riders, then fewer than 4,500 Seattleites live without cars due to light rail. Continue reading →

The Latest Affordability Numbers

By | | Housing
30 Comments

Housing in Canada, Hong Kong, New Zealand, and Singapore was slightly more affordable in 2024 than it had been in 2023. Wendell Cox’s latest assessment of housing affordability, when compared with last year’s assessment, shows that housing became slightly less affordable in Ireland and the United Kingdom, while affordability remained unchanged in Australia and the United States.

Click image to download this 3.0-MB report.

Of course, these country-wide trends hide changes, both up and down, in individual housing markets. Honolulu, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and San Jose all became slightly less affordable while Austin, Dallas, Houston, and San Antonio all became slightly more affordable between 2023 and 2024. In at least a few cases, including Portland, affordability probably improved mainly because people were moving out; certainly, Portland’s housing supply did not appreciably increase between 2023 and 2024. Continue reading →

Highway Safety Is Improving

By | | Transportation
19 Comments

A CBS Sunday Morning report promoted driverless cars as a way of improving highway safety. I’ve been saying the same thing for years, but I was surprised when the report opened with the statement, “Every year, 1.2 million people die in car accidents.” Technically, that’s true, but only 3.6 percent of them are in the United States.

According to Wikipedia (which is probably the source of the 1.2 million number), China sees 250,000 traffic fatalities per year. India is number two at more than 155,000. Despite the fact that all of Africa has only about 30 percent as many vehicles as the United States, Africa suffers 322,000 fatalities per year, with particularly high numbers in the Congo, Ethiopia, and Nigeria. Other counties with high fatalities include Brazil, Indonesia, Pakistan, Thailand, and Viet Nam. Continue reading →