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Downtown San Francisco Is Dying

By | | City planning
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The owner of San Francisco’s first and fourth largest hotels announced Monday that it is going to walk away from the mortgage it owes for those buildings. The owners of the Hilton Union Square Hotel noted that San Francisco’s path to recovery remains clouded and elongated by major challenges,” including the fact that fewer groups want to hold conventions in a city now more famous for its homeless population than its cable cars and restaurants.

Once famous as the center of the 1960s counterculture, Haight Street is now the home of a new kind of counterculture. Photo by Franco Folini.

Last month, Nordstrom said that it was closing both its stores in downtown San Francisco. “The dynamics of the downtown San Francisco market have changed dramatically over the past several years,” said a Nordstrom official, “impacting customer foot traffic to our stores and our ability to operate successfully.” Continue reading →

Amtrak Carried 91% of Pre-Pandemic PM in April

By | | Transportation
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Amtrak carried 90.9 percent as many passenger-miles in April 2023 as in the same month in 2019, according to the company’s monthly performance report posted yesterday. This was only the second time Amtrak exceeded 90 percent since the pandemic began.

April ridership was strongest in the Northeast Corridor, where Amtrak carried 93.9 percent as many riders as in the same month of 2019. Long-distance trains were next at 88.9 percent. State-supported trains were weakest at 84.5 percent. Continue reading →

April Transit Carried 65% of Pre-Pandemic #s

By | | Transportation
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America’s transit systems carried 65.0 percent as many riders in April 2023 as the same month in 2019, according to data released by the Federal Transit Administration yesterday. This is down from 70 percent in March.

TSA data indicate that the airlines carried 99.7 percent as many passengers in April 2023 as April 2019. Data for Amtrak and highway travel have not yet been released but I’ll post an update here when they are.

The reason for the variation is simple: March had two more business days in 2023 than in 2019, while April had two fewer. February has the same number of business days each year, so transit’s February performance of 68.5 percent is probably a realistic estimate for the future. The transit industry’s record for the year to date is 67.9 percent of the first four months in 2019, which is pretty close to 68.5 percent. Continue reading →

Another Day, Another Anti-Auto Screed

By | | Transportation
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“Parking ruined everything,” says self-described urbanist blowhard Dante Ramos in The Atlantic. Apparently, parking is the reason why housing is so expensive, your favorite architectural styles are no longer being built, and why your favorite delicatessen was torn down last year.

All of that is hogwash, of course, but since Ramos is singing to the choir, he doesn’t even try to prove any of these assertions. Instead, the article is filled with ridiculous comparisons, such as, “In a typical year, the country builds more three-car garages than one-bedroom apartments.” Yes, that’s because the demand for family homes is a lot higher than the demand for one-bedroom apartments. Continue reading →

California May Not Bail Out Transit

By | | Transportation
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California transit agency warnings about a fiscal cliff may be falling on deaf ears in Sacramento. Although transit activists are becoming increasingly shrill, the state legislature has good reasons to ignore them.

Not much point in bailing out a transit agency that is running empty trains. Photo by Wally Gobetz.

One reason is that the state has its own funding problems. Earlier this year, it was projecting a $10 billion budget deficit, but that has recently increased to more than $32 billion. Continue reading →

I Couldn’t Have Said It Better

By | | Transportation
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Last week, I submitted a draft review of plans to expand St. Louis’ light-rail system to the Show Me Institute, Missouri’s state-based think tank. The region has the biggest light-rail system in the Midwest, yet it is a complete failure. Buses and rail together carried fewer riders in 2019 than buses alone carried in 1993, the year before the first light-rail line opened. Doubling light-rail miles in 2001 and another significant expansion in 2008 both resulted in an overall loss of riders. Yet Metro, the region’s transit agency, wants to build more light rail.

My draft report was more than 13,000 words long including an 800-word executive summary. While writing it, I was disappointed but not particularly surprised to find that local media failed to report any significant opposition to Metro’s billion-dollar plan to add 17 miles of new light-rail lines. So I was pleased to watch the above video, in which local reporter Sarah Fenske charged that it was “crazy” to build light rail when the local bus system was “failing” low-income riders and not getting people to their workplaces. To my chagrin, Fenske pretty much summarized in 35 seconds what my long-winded report said in 13,400 words. Continue reading →

Get Back to Work, You Cretin!

By | | City planning, News commentary
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Perhaps the Antiplanner is naive, but I’ve always believed that government infrastructure exists to help us be more productive and live the lives we want. To the contrary, I’ve noticed that news reports take it for granted that we exist solely to support the infrastructure that government thinks we should have.

According to the latest estimate, economic activity in downtown San Francisco is only 32 percent of what it was before the pandemic. Photo by PhotoEverywhere.

This is most obvious with urban transit which, since we aren’t riding it, “experts” argue we should pay more taxes to keep it running anyway. Lately, the same attitude is creeping into stories about downtowns. Continue reading →

The Face of Public Transit

By | | Transportation
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This is Daquan Rogers. He is a 27-year-old Minneapolis light-rail rider who has a history of transit crimes including being arrested last month for brawling aboard a light-rail train. Following the arrest he was released pending his court case.

On May 20, while standing on a light-rail platform, he got into an argument with 41-year-old Eugene Snelling. A horrific video shows Rogers pushing Snelling on to the tracks between two light-rail cars. Snelling died and Rogers was arrested in what was considered to be a homocide case. Continue reading →

Reordering of Cities

By | | Housing, Useful Data
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Jacksonville is now the nation’s 11th-most populated city, having overtaken San Jose in 2022. This is partly because Jacksonville grew by 1.5 percent since 2021, but also because San Jose lost 1.0 percent of its residents, according to Census Bureau estimates released earlier this week.

The new number eleven. Photo by Jon Zander.

Charlotte also overtook Indianapolis as the nation’s 15th largest city, partly because Indianapolis lost 0.2 percent of its residents but mainly because Charlotte grew by 1.7 percent. Las Vegas grew by 0.8 percent, overtaking Boston as the 24th largest city as the latter shrank by 0.6 percent. Continue reading →