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Bandon Is Urban After All

By | | Useful Data
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Last week, I complained that, under the Census Bureau’s new definition of “urban,” Bandon, Oregon is rural. It turns out that it squeaked into the list of urban areas by virtue of having 2,012 housing units. (My count of housing units was based on the Census Bureau’s 2018 estimates.)

This large shopping center in California City, California isn’t enough for the Census Bureau to classify it as “urban.”

However, 1,143 areas that had been classified as urban in 2010 were counted as rural in 2020. To be urban, an area had to have either 5,000 people or 2,000 housing units and an urban core that had at least 1,275 housing units per square mile. Continue reading →

Steve McCarthy R.I.P.

By | | News commentary
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My first real job was a summer internship with the Oregon Student Public Interest Research Group (OSPIRG) in 1972. Steve McCarthy was the flamboyant director of OSPIRG, and my work that summer on low-cost ways to improve TriMet, Portland’s transit system, helped propel him into the job of TriMet’s general manager. He implemented some of my suggestions and made other improvements and by the end of the decade Portland was one of the few urban areas in America where transit ridership had grown faster than driving.

Steve McCarthy growing pears in bottles that will soon be filled with Clear Creek pear brandy. Photo courtesy of Clear Creek Distillery.

Nearly two decades later, Steve invited me out to lunch in Northwest Portland where he had started a new business making pear brandy. Over lunch, he told me that after leaving TriMet he took over his father’s business making hunting accessories and then bought a pear orchard in Oregon’s Hood River Valley, where his family had been in the fruit-growing business since 1910. He wanted to prove to other orchardists that they could make more money by adding value to their fruit than by just selling fruit to grocers. Continue reading →

The Most Congested Cities

By | | Transportation
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The most congested urban area in America in 2022 was Chicago, where the average auto commuter lost 155 hours to traffic delays. That was only one hour less than London, the most congested urban area in the world, or at least the most congested city evaluated in the latest INRIX global traffic scorecard.

Prior to the pandemic, more than half the people who worked in downtown Chicago took transit to work, but the city was still very congested and — according to INRIX — is even more congested today. Photo by Michael Kappel.

The second-most congested U.S. urban area was Boston, with 134 hours of delay per driver, followed by New York at 117 hours. Los Angeles, which has often been at the top of the list, was way down in 2022, suffering 95 hours of delay per driver, and was edged out by San Francisco at 97 hours. Miami and Philadelphia were between New York and San Francisco. Continue reading →

The Bureau of Transportation Deceptions

By | | Transportation
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Last Friday, the Bureau of Transportation Statistics, which keeps track of all kinds of transportation, released 2020 data on government revenues and expenditures in transportation. The new data, however, are based on a radically altered definition of revenues and should be rejected.

Under the Bureau of Transportation Statistics’ new definition of revenues, transit revenues more than tripled and highway revenues nearly doubled.

The agency has kept track of this information for many years, with revenues being recorded in table 3-32 and expenditures in table 3-35 of an annual report called National Transportation Statistics. In the latest tables, the numbers go back to 2007, but in earlier editions (such as the 1995 edition), they go back as far as 1980 (in five-year intervals). Continue reading →

Transit Carries 67.5% of 2019 Riders in November

By | | Transportation, Useful Data
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Transit ridership in November 2022 was 32.5 percent below November 2019, according to data released late last week by the Federal Transit Administration. This is in spite of the fact that November 2022 had one more work day than November 2019.

Amtrak and highway data are not yet available but this chart will be updated when they come out.

U.S. airlines saw 94.3 percent as many travelers in November as in the same month in 2019, down slightly from 94.5 percent in October. Amtrak data should be available soon; highway data seem to take a little longer. Continue reading →

Drawing the Line Between Urban & Rural

By | | News commentary
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Is urban sprawl overrunning the countryside? To answer this question, it is important to define the difference between urban and rural. The Census Bureau is proposing to change its definition, but I don’t believe the proposed change makes sense.

Is this urban or rural? Under the Census Bureau’s old definition, it is urban, but by its new definition, it is rural. Photo by Visitor7.

In 1900, the line between urban and rural was pretty easy. If land was in an incorporated city, it was urban. If it was outside the city limits, it was rural. The main transportation of the day was streetcars, and if you couldn’t get somewhere on a streetcar, it wouldn’t be developed. If a developer built a new streetcar line outside the city and developed that area (which is how most suburban streetcar lines got built), the city would quickly annex the newly developed land. Continue reading →

An Opportunity to Reinvent an Obsolete Industry

By | | Transportation
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As illustrated by the tweet from Stanford economics professor Nick Bloom, it’s beginning to sink in that transit ridership is not going to recover to more than about 65 percent of what it was before the pandemic. However, instead of raising “concerns over the survival of public transit systems,” we should see this as an opportunity to reinvent an industry that was already obsolete years before the pandemic.

The 2021 National Transit Database reveals that many transit agencies are spending as much per rider as it would cost to send those riders in taxis, Uber, or Lyft. Counting both operating and capital costs, the average cost per light-rail trip was more than $40. Even just counting operating costs, the average cost per light-rail rider in San Jose was more than $53 and in Pittsburgh was almost $49. Continue reading →

Don’t Bunch Up

By | | Housing
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“One of the first things you learn in the Army,” wrote Stephen Ambrose after 9/11, is “don’t bunch up,” as dense groups make “tempting targets.” The once-feared Russian army is still learning this lesson.

“After strikes [by Ukraine] on large ammunition and fuel depots, the depots
were being dispersed in order to avoid a large loss of materiel in the event of strikes,” thus reducing losses, wrote one Russian. Yet the army failed to disperse personnel, and a New Years Day strike by Ukrainian HIMARS missiles on a single building killed hundreds of soldiers. Apparently, the Russian army had not only brought those soldiers to the building, it also stored ammunition there, making the destruction that much worse. Continue reading →

Let Cities Be What They Want to Be

By | | Housing
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An on-line site called the Dumber, er, I mean Intelligancer says that, for cities to survive, developers must be allowed to convert office buildings into housing. There are a lot of problems with this recommendation.

Your former office today. Photo by Tomi Knuutila.

There are a lot of problems with this recommendation. First, both people and jobs are moving away from the cities, so who is going to want to live in former office buildings anyway? Second, office buildings are not designed for human habitation, so converting them will be expensive, probably far more expensive than the single-family homes people are moving to. Third, if cities allow such conversions, and they don’t happen, you know what the next step will be: cities will begin subsidizing such conversions. Continue reading →

Sound Planning or Just Luck?

By | | Transportation
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In 2018, Jersey City adopted Vision Zero, the goal of reducing traffic fatalities to zero. In the past year, it had zero fatalities on city-owned streets. Mission accomplished!

A street in Jersey City. Photo by schokker64.

A Bloomberg article yesterday breathlessly reviewed all the things the city did to reduce fatalities to zero, including roundabouts, road diets, bike lanes, lower speed limits, and the closure of one street to automobiles. Yet there isn’t any real evidence that any of these steps contributed to reduced fatalities. Continue reading →