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Free Markets No More

By | | Regional planning
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The Niskanen Center is supposed to be a free-market group. It is named after Bill Niskanen, who was Ronald Reagan’s chief economic advisor until he got fired because he was too free-market oriented for Reagan. His research on how bureaucracies work influenced me when I was working on Forest Service planning in the 1980s, long before I met him in person. After I went to work at Cato (where he was chairman of the board), I learned his father had run Pacific Trailways out of Bend Oregon, and I enjoyed visiting with him about the history of transportation.

Click image to download a 4.2-MB PDF of this 22-page report.

After Niskanen passed away in 2011, Cato Institute senior fellow Jerry Taylor, who I remember as being so laser focused on free markets that we had many arguments over the whether it was better to be a pure libertarian vs. a pragmatic one, started the Niskanen Center to bring market tools to environmental issues. Continue reading →

We Don’t Want Your Stinkin’ Jobs

By | | Transportation
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“Yes, but it creates jobs!” has long been the last refuge for scoundrels promoting expensive boondoggles, so it is no surprise that it is now being used to justify continued spending on the California high-speed rail project. The most recent release from the California High Speed Rail Authority says that they now expect the project to cost up to $128 billion, but that’s okay, because it is putting 10,000 people to work.

That argument might carry some weight if we had a high unemployment rate. But right now, the United States is suffering from a major labor shortage. Each person working on the California rail line is one less person helping to move goods to markets, build homes, and so other essential work. One more strike against high-speed rail: it contributes to the increasing costs of everything. Continue reading →

Phoenix’s Irrational Transportation Plan

By | | Regional planning, Transportation
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The Maricopa Association of Governments (MAG) wasted billions of dollars of taxpayer money because it failed to follow the most basic rules of planning, says a report released today by the Arizona Free Enterprise Club. The standard “rational planning process,” which is described in just about every introductory planning textbook, calls for planners to identify a full range of alternatives, evaluate those alternatives, pick the best one to accomplish their goals, and monitor the implementation of the plan to ensure that their original assumptions were correct.

Click image to download a 8.9-MB PDF of this 38-page report.

Maricopa regional transportation plans, including plans issued in 2006, 2014, and most recently 2021, fail to do any of these steps. By failing to consider a wide range of alternatives, MAG ended up writing a plan that didn’t make sense for the 21th century. By failing to evaluate alternatives, it ignored low-cost solutions that could do more to accomplish the plan’s goals. By failing to monitor previous plans, it repeated the same mistake over and over in long-range plans written about every five years. Continue reading →

Brightline’s Folly to Vegas

By | | Transportation
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Brightline says it has raised enough money to start construction on a 200-mph rail line from Victorville, California to Las Vegas. The company projects the line will cost $10 billion, or about $45 million a mile for the 218-mile route.

Brightline in Florida. Illustration by All Aboard Florida (Brightline’s original name).

Brightline has $1 billion in private activity bonds to start construction. But I would be surprised if Brightline has managed to find private investors foolish enough to give the company the other $9 billion needed for this line. The company says that it expects to attract 12 million people a year heading to Las Vegas or Los Angeles out of their cars and buses, or almost 30 percent of the 42 million traveling by highway today, but that seems highly unlikely. Continue reading →

2022 Driving Was 97.2% of 2019

By | | Transportation, Useful Data
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Americans drove 94.2 percent as many miles in December, 2022 as they did in the same month before the pandemic, according to data released by the Federal Highway Administration yesterday. Total driving for the year was 97.2 percent of 2019.

Both urban and rural driving fell short of pre-pandemic levels in December. Americans drove about 99 percent as many miles in rural areas but only 92 percent as many miles in urban areas as in 2019. Continue reading →

Town and Country Dystopian Act

By | | Housing, Regional planning
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The United Kingdom has some of the least affordable housing of any country in the world, with median homes costing more than five times median incomes. In the United States, only California and Hawaii have less affordable housing. A new report estimates that the U.K. needs 4.3 million homes to restore affordability, but the country’s planning system prevents those homes from being built.

Click image to download a 5.1-MB PDF of this 65-page report.

The report, which is published by a think tank called Centre for Cities, correctly places the blame for the state of the country’s housing on the Town & Country Planning Act of 1947. This law took away development rights from every private landowner in the country and only allowed new development if it complied with local and regional land-use plans. Continue reading →

East Side Access Project Opens Today

By | | Transportation
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Today, more than a decade late and after spending $11.2 billion, the Long Island Railroad will begin running trains to Grand Central Terminal. This 3.5-mile project, known as the East Side Access tunnel, cost a mere $3.2 billion a mile, which is a trifle compared with the Second Avenue Subway, the next segment of which is expected to cost $4 billion a mile.

Architect’s vision of what new LIRR platform will look like in Grand Central Terminal. Source: STV Inc.

Meanwhile, New York transit has a $26.6 billion capital funding gap over the next two years. One result of this is that more than a quarter of the region’s transit vehicles are beyond the end of their expected service life. Continue reading →

Urbanization by State

By | | Housing, Useful Data
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The share of land in the United States that is urbanized grew from 2.90 percent in 2010 to 2.94 percent in 2020, according to data recently released by the Census Bureau showing how many square miles of land in each state was urbanized as of 2020. This can be compared with 2010 data and the total land area of each state to calculate what percentage had been urbanized in each of the two years.

Click image to download a 15.0-MB PDF of this map distinguishing urban from rural areas in 2020.

One reason why the growth was so small was that the Census Bureau redefined urban; under the old definition, any community of 2,500 people was urban; under the new definition, communities had to have 5,000 people or 2,000 residences. However, this only makes a small difference — perhaps 0.1 percent — because such communities are, by definition, small. Continue reading →

The Sovietization of Oregon

By | | Housing, Regional planning
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A sweeping new housing bill is prancing its way through the Oregon legislature in the name of affordable housing. The bill would greatly reduce the rights of Oregon residents to have a say in the future of their neighborhoods. Instead, it would direct the state’s Office of Economic Analysis to set housing targets for all cities in the state with more than 10,000 residents, and those cities would have six to eight years to meet those targets no matter what the cost.

If House Bill 2889 passes, there may a place for you to live in Oregon as long as you don’t mind living in a tiny apartment in a place like this. Despite promises of affordability, it won’t be cheap unless it is subsidized: 537-square-foot apartments in this building rent for $1,425 a month. Photo from GBD.

When Oregon first passed its land-use regulations back in the 1970s, citizen involvement was the number one goal. Now, anyone who doesn’t think a giant apartment building should be built next their house is a NIMBY and probably a racist and should be ignored. Continue reading →

Next Up: Gas Rationing

By | | Transportation
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Monday’s Antiplanner noted that Oxford England has set a goal of reducing driving by 25 percent and observed that, “No city in the developed world has been able to reduce driving by this much since World War II.” I didn’t want to give anyone any ideas, so I didn’t add that driving fell during World War II due to gas rationing.

A rationing coupon issued to a resident of Lowell, Oregon, who owned a 1934 Plymouth.

Too late: when I wrote that, I wasn’t aware that, just the day before, a journal called Ethics, Policy and the Environment had published an article arguing in favor of gas rationing to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The authors claim that this would be a “fairer way to fight climate change.” Continue reading →