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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 →

This Just In: Electric Buses Weigh More

By | | Transportation
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Electric buses weigh more and put more stress on infrastructure than regular buses, as Indianapolis transit agency Indygo realized when it discovered that the streets it paved for its bus rapid transit lines were wearing out after less than three years of service. Now it is repaving those streets, which is causing problems for businesses and annoying residents along the routes.

An electric bus at one of Indygo’s bus rapid transit stops. Photo: Indygo.

The Indianapolis Department of Public Works had urged Indygo to use thicker pavement, but Indygo — which was already spending four years and too much money on a bus line that it could have started practically overnight at little cost — decided to save money on a part of the project that would be less visible to most people. After all, the point of the project was to please politicians with colorful buses and flashy bus stops, not to provide better transportation service. Continue reading →

Letting Your Car Drive You from SFO to LA

By | | Transportation
5 Comments

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 →