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Driving Is About to Explode

By | | Transportation
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Per capita driving in the United States grew from 1 mile per year in 1900 to more than 10,000 miles per year in 2006. During that time, it grew in almost every year except for a few recession years (1932, 1933, 1938, 1974, 1979, and 1980) and two years of World War II (1942 and 1943).

In 2007, however, growth flattened and after that per capita driving fell below 9,400 miles per year. Some have argued that this is evidence that Americans are turning away from cars and to transit, cycling, and walking. Others say that the decline can be completely explained by the recession; although the financial crisis took place in 2008, the housing bubble that led to that crisis actually began collapsing in 2006.

The latest traffic data from the Federal Highway Administration suggests that people are picking up where they left off in 2006. Total miles of driving in the first quarter of 2015 set a new record and was nearly 4 percent greater than the same period in 2014. The Census Bureau estimates that the population is growing at less than 1 percent per year, so per capita driving is once again growing.

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Taking a Wrong Turn to Radburn

By | | Transportation
12 Comments

The Antiplanner has a rule of thumb: Any transportation proposal that requires a whole new infrastructure system in parallel with the infrastructure we already have is automatically a bad idea. Such infrastructure would be expensive to build, take decades to complete, and will be obsolete long before it could make a major contribution to the nation’s mobility. This is true for high-speed rail, personal-rapid transit, light rail, and even plans to build bike path networks for commuters in urban areas (as opposed to recreation paths that have an entirely different market).

Such is the case for a proposal by University of California engineers Mark DeLucchi and Kenneth Kurani. They start by asking a reasonable question: “Can we have sustainable transportation without making people drive less or give up suburban living?”

Antiplanner readers know that I think the answer is “Yes,” simply by using existing, low-cost technologies to make single-family homes and automobiles more energy efficient. That means more insulation and passive solar and cooling systems in new homes; lighter weight materials such as aluminum and perhaps Diesel engines instead of gasoline in new cars. Existing homes can be retrofitted with insulation and low-energy lighting; existing cars will be quickly replaced as the auto fleet turns over every 18 or so years.

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Sacramento Voters Reject Streetcar

By | | Transportation, Urban areas
12 Comments

Sacramento wants to build a streetcar, and since everyone knows that streetcars increase property values, the city asked property owners to agree to pay a tax to help pay for it. Under California law, two-thirds of voters must agree, but the city must have believed that everyone loves streetcars so much that they would overwhelmingly agree to pay the tax.

Not so much. In fact, they couldn’t even get half to support it. The final vote count was something like 48 percent in favor.

Not to worry. Even though a nineteenth-century technology makes no sense in a twenty-first-century city; even though the people don’t want to pay for it; even though it has so far taken ten years to plan something that was obsolete a hundred years ago and certainly can’t respond to the almost daily changes in tastes, technologies, and travel patterns we experience today; they’re going to try to find a way to build it anyway. “We’ll look for other sources of funds,” said one city councillor. “We’re really committed to keep the project on track.” In other words, committed to stupidity.
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The Uberization of Transit

By | | Transportation
18 Comments

A few weeks ago, Uber’s Travis Kalanick predicted that it would soon replace its drivers with self-driving cars. Now, he’s putting his investors’ money where his mouth is by poaching 40 self-driving auto engineers from Carnegie-Mellon University.

“Uber offered some scientists bonuses of hundreds of thousands of dollars and a doubling of salaries to staff the company’s new tech center in Pittsburgh, according to one researcher at NREC.” Although Google has gotten most of the headlines lately, it was Carnegie-Mellon’s entry that won the $2 million DARPA urban challenge in 2007. Unfortunately, its biggest sponsor, General Motors, went bankrupt soon after that, and it probably hoped that a partnership with Uber would help. Instead, the partnership just allowed Uber to decide which of its engineers it would steal.

Meanwhile, Denver graduate student August Ruhnka has suggested that public bus systems be “uberized.” It was a unfortunate choice of terms as he didn’t mean allowing people to call buses to their homes using a smart-phone app. Instead, he proposed to let private companies operate Denver buses (he didn’t seem to be aware that they already operate half of them) and, more significantly, to let those private companies change routes in order to better serve riders. “Private-route contracts establish a sustainable procedure to constantly test the market to achieve the lowest cost,” he wrote.

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Big Government, Shrinking Cities

By | | City planning, Regional planning
6 Comments

The Economist laments that cities are shrinking all over the world. More than a third of the cities in Germany are losing population, as are nearly one in ten in the United States. What the Economist fails to note is that most of the cities it uses as examples–Detroit, cities in the former East Germany–were once dominated by strong governments that taxed people heavily and often tried to control how people lived.

American urban planners are no longer trying to make people live in high-rise housing that is so common in eastern Europe. Instead, they are trying to make people live in mixed-use, mid-rise housing, so-called transit-oriented developments. The type locale for this kind of housing is New York City’s West Village, where Jane Jacobs lived when she wrote The Death and Life of Great American Cities. Jacobs was convinced that the urban planners of her day didn’t understand how cities worked, but she was just as convinced that she did understand how cities worked, and in her mind the West Village was the model.

Her book, in turn, became the model for New Urbanists. Indeed, some call her the mother of what passes today for urban design. Unfortunately, she was as wrong about how cities work as the planners she criticized.

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Does Las Vegas Need High-Cost, Low-Capacity Transit?

By | | Transportation, Urban areas
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Las Vegas’ Regional Transportation Commission is considering the idea of building a light-rail subway under the Las Vegas strip. Unlike most roads, congestion on the strip does not happen during morning and afternoon rush hours but on weekends and evenings when tourists tire of gambling in their own hotels and decide to explore some of the other hotels on the strip.

The strip is already served by an expensive monorail that was privately funded by a firm that has since gone bankrupt. Plus there are numerous private and public buses that run up and down the strip.

Comments to this and other articles claim that the monorail failed because it didn’t go to the airport and because its route behind the hotels offers such pleasant scenery as blank walls and dumpsters. But the fact that hotels didn’t want to mar their public facades with an elevated train–and some hotels didn’t want the monorail at all because they didn’t want to encourage their guests to escape–explains some of the problems facing any potential rail line. Las Vegas has a thriving, for-profit airport shuttle system that avoids congestion by using back streets, so replacing that with a subsidized rail line is totally unnecessary.

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Low-Speed, Infrequent Rail

By | | Transportation
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Quentin Kopp, who once chaired the California High-Speed Rail Authority and led the effort to persuade voters to pass the 2008 law authorizing its construction, is speaking out against the project as currently planned. To succeed, he says, high-speed rail needs to run on dedicated tracks at high speeds and frequencies.

Instead, the current plan calls for California’s high-speed trains to run on the same tracks as slower Amtrak and commuter train. This will greatly reduce the average speeds because high-speed and conventional trains can’t be safely operated together. The current projected frequencies are two to four trains per hour (half in each direction), while Kopp says 10 to 20 trains per hour is needed for the trains to be “financially secure,” which presumably means that fares cover operating costs as required by the 2008 law.

When Kopp first proposed the project, it was supposed to cost $33 billion. Now it is expected to cost $68 billion for slower, less-frequent trains. Kopp has personally been involved in legal challenges against the project.

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Defining Suburbs

By | | Urban areas, Useful Data
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Based on surveys asking people whether they thought the lived in urban, suburban, or rural ares, Trulia economist Jed Kolko has defined the borderline between urban and suburban as 2,213 households per square mile (slightly less than 3.5 per acre), while the line between suburban and rural is 102 households per square mile (about 1 household every 6.3 acres). Based on this, Kolko concluded that less than half of many cities are truly urban.

Specifically, as shown in an article in Slate, 100 percent of New York, Chicago, San Francisco, Detroit, Washington, Boston, and Baltimore are urban. But less than half of Phoenix, San Antonio, Indianapolis, Columbus, Fort Worth, Charlotte, El Paso, Louisville, and Tucson are more than 70 percent suburban. Only 3 percent of Seattle, but 43 percent of Portland, are suburban.

Kolko isn’t the first to define urban and suburban using demographic rather than political criteria. The Antiplanner’s faithful ally, Wendell Cox, did a similar analysis last year. Looking at urban areas rather than cities, he defined areas as pre-auto, early auto, late auto, and exurban. The pre-auto areas included all areas with a median home construction date before 1945, areas with more than 7,500 people per square mile, and areas where non-auto commute shares exceeded 20 percent. The early auto areas were those remaining areas with median home construction dates before 1979; late auto had median home construction dates after 1980; and exurban was all land in the metropolitan statistical area but outside the urbanized area.

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Amtrak & Innumerate Liberals

By | | Transportation
21 Comments

A number of articles in National Review last week supported the Antiplanner’s view that more infrastructure spending wouldn’t have prevented the May 12 Amtrak crash in Philadelphia. Rich Lowry says Amtrak is a huge waste that carries so few passengers that it is “a rounding error of American transportation.”

John Fund shows that Congressional budget cutting wasn’t responsible for the crash. Ian Tuttle considers the “rush to blame the Amtrak crash on infrastructure” shortfalls to be “shameful.” And Charles Cooke points out that the ones who were quickest to jump on the infrastructure bandwagon were mainly from the left.

Of course, all of these writers are on the right and thus would be expected to decry Amtrak. (There are some conservatives who support Amtrak and rail transit, but they are social conservatives, not fiscal conservatives.) Similarly, Amtrak supporters generally come from the left.

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In Memoriam: the Fifth Amendment

By | | Regional planning, Urban areas
1 Comment

The Antiplanner spoke in Spokane last Friday at the annual meeting of Spokane chapter of Citizens Alliance for Property Rights. The focus of my presentation was how cities have eroded the property rights protections of the Fifth Amendment in order to promote the density schemes of urban planners.

The Fifth Amendment, which says that government may not take private property for public use without due compensation, was once interpreted to mean that government cannot take private property for private use at all and must pay compensation when it takes it for public use. But over time it has come to be reinterpreted to mean that government can take property rights through regulation without compensation and it can take private property from one owner and give it to another private party with compensation.
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Several Supreme Court decisions have led to this result, but three are probably the most important: The Euclid decision legalized zoning to prevent nuisances; the Penn Central decision approved takings of property rights through land-use regulation even when there was no danger of a nuisance; and the Kelo decision allowed cities to take peoples’ land by eminent domain to give to private developers even when the land wasn’t blighted. All of these rulings have one thing in common: the Court said that the cities involved could ignore the traditional interpretation of the Fifth Amendment because they had written an urban plan. No wonder urban planners have so much power: the Supreme Court has given any city that employs one a get-out-of-the-Fifth-Amendment-free card.