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Letting Your Car Drive You from SFO to LA

By | | Transportation
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Someone instructed their Tesla to drive from San Francisco to Los Angeles, and it was able to do so without any driver intervention. The car even pulled off the highway and went to a charging station when its battery ran low.

I’ve noted before that Waymo and Tesla have two very different strategies for driverless cars. Waymo’s is basically to go into full-fledged driverless mode with the help of maps and remote monitors. Tesla’s is to incrementally improve their self-driving software until it can do everything by itself. Continue reading →

The Real Reason Downtowns Are Declining

By | | City planning
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Crime, on-line shopping, telecommuting and exorbitant rents are all contributing to the decline of downtowns, observes an article on CNN Business. But the real reason downtowns are declining, according to the article, is that people don’t live in dense enough neighborhoods.

If we just had more density, this wouldn’t be a problem, say the densimaniacs — except this boarded up pharmacy is in one of the densest neighborhoods in the country. Photo by thisisbossi.

“To reinvent downtown retail,” asserts the article without any room for debate or citation of evidence, cities need “denser neighborhoods with a broader mix of affordable housing, experiential retail, restaurants, entertainment, parks and other amenities.” Where have I heard that before? Continue reading →

Affordable Housing Is a Black Hole

By | | Housing
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Are we living in a black hole and I just passed through a wormhole into another universe? That’s the only explanation I can think of for a recent New York Times article (no paywall) by Ezra Klein praising a new mid rise in San Francisco “that might be the answer to San Francisco’s homelessness crisis.” Built in three years (half the normal time in the Bay Area) using modular construction methods, the building costs less than $400,000 per unit compared with $600,000 to $700,000 for other similar projects in San Francisco.

The reddish-brown color isn’t paint; it’s rust, or what the architect calls “weathered steel.” That’s just as well in San Francisco’s rainy, salty environment as I doubt many people will want to see this building last for very long. Photo by Bruce Damonte, David Baker Architects.

My first thought was “$400,000 still sounds pretty high for any kind of ‘affordable housing.'” My second thought was, “How big are those housing units anyway?” Continue reading →

March Driving 99.9% of 2019

By | | Transportation, Useful Data
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Americans drove 99.9 percent as many miles in March 2023 as in the same month in 2019, according to data released by the Federal Highway Administration on Friday. Rural driving was 4.1 percent greater than in 2019, and driving on urban interstates was 1.5 percent greater, but other urban driving was 3.1 percent less than in 2019, dragging down the overall average.

See May 5 post for discussion of transit, Amtrak, and airline travel.

I have to say I’m a little bit skeptical of these numbers. Throughout the pandemic, rural driving has been a bit ahead of urban, so that makes sense. However, urban interstate driving was generally behind other urban driving. Why is it suddenly ahead now? Continue reading →

Density Mandates Won’t Help

By | | Housing
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Proponents of a bill winding its way through the Colorado legislature assume that increased housing densities will make housing more affordable and will reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Neither of these assumptions are valid, according to an article in Complete Colorado. And you know it’s true, because I wrote it.

This chart compared population densities and housing affordability in the nation’s top 100 urban areas.

You may have seen diagrams like the above here before, but I made this one using the latest density data from the 2020 census combined with housing affordability data from the 2020 American Community Survey. Counting the top 50 urban areas, the correlation was 0.85 (where 1 is perfect and anything close to 0 is completely random); for the top 100, it was 0.79; for the top 200 it was still a respectable 0.70. Continue reading →

Soaking the Rich Fails in Los Angeles

By | | Housing
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To help fund the $1.3 billion that Los Angeles’ city council believes it needs to house the homeless, the city decided to impose a “mansion tax” of 4 percent on the sales of any homes or commercial properties above $5 million and 5.5 percent on sales above $10 million. This was projected to bring in $900 million a year, funding most of the homeless program.

This home is currently on the market in Los Angeles for an asking price of $5.667 million. Many homes of this size are available for under $1 million in Houston and San Antonio and few are asking more than $2 million.

The reality is far different because planners, as usual, failed to take into account how their regulations and taxes would influence human behavior. In the month before the tax went into effect on April 1, 126 homes sold for more than $5 million. In the month since? Just two. Continue reading →

More Delays, Less Delays, But Always More Costs

By | | Transportation
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Maryland’s Purple Line, which was originally supposed to open more than a year ago, now won’t open until 2026. But that’s supposed to be good news, because two months ago the state said it wouldn’t open until 2027. The bad news, other than the news that it is being built at all, is that it is at least $1.46 billion over budget.

That’s kind of a breathtaking number — $1.46 billion — at least for those who understand how much money that really is. For one thing, this cost of this one light-rail line would have been more than enough to construct all of the light-rail lines built in Buffalo, Portland, Sacramento, San Diego, and San Jose during the 1980s. At that time, light rail construction was costing around $10 million to $15 million a mile, or about $30 million to $40 million in today’s dollars. The Purple Line is costing more than $210 per mile, or five to seven times as much. Continue reading →

The FasTracks Failure

By | | Transportation
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In 2004, Denver voters approved spending $4.8 billion building six new rail transit lines, and the first line opened ten years ago. This was soon followed by four more to the gushing praise of various outsiders.

Inside Denver, however, people are beginning to realize that the whole thing was a miserable failure, suffering massive cost overruns and never attaining its ridership projections. The West line, which had its tenth anniversary last week, never carried as many passengers as were projected in its first year. It’s too bad that the reporters who are questioning this now weren’t asking the same questions in 2004. Continue reading →

BRT Should Use Shared, Not Dedicated Lanes

By | | Transportation
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Dedicating two of the six lanes on major streets in Chandler, Mesa, Scottsdale, and Tempe exclusively to buses would be a complete waste, says a new report released last week by the Arizona Free Enterprise Club and two other groups in the Phoenix area. Each of the lanes that Valley Metro would take for buses typically move roughly three to four times as many people per day as would have taken the bus before the pandemic, and bus ridership has fallen by 50 percent since the pandemic.

Click image to download a 1.1-MB PDF of this 16-page report.

The report notes that bus rapid transit typically stops about once per mile compared with five or six times per mile for local buses. This allows the BRT buses to go faster, which along with higher frequencies makes them more attractive to riders. Giving the buses their own lanes does not significantly increase their speeds, but it does increase congestion for everyone else. Continue reading →

Transit Carries 70% of 2019 Riders in March

By | | Transportation, Useful Data
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America’s transit systems carried 70.3 percent as many riders in March 2023 as in the same month in 2019, according to data released yesterday by the Federal Transit Administration. I reported last month that transit also carried 70 percent in February as in 2019, but that was due to a minor error that crept into my spreadsheet. The actual number was 68.5 percent, so transit is still gaining slowly compared with the pre-pandemic era. However, March 2023 had two more business days than March 2019, while the two Februaries had the same number, which is probably responsible for some of March’s improvement.

The Transportation Security Administration reports that 97.8 percent as many passengers passed through airport security in March 2023 as in March 2019. That’s down from the 100.3 percent in February. The actual number of passengers increased from 58 million to 72 million, but that’s just seasonal variations. Continue reading →