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August 2022 Driving 101% of August 2019

By | | Transportation
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Americans drove 101.0 percent as many miles in August of 2022 as they did in the same month before the pandemic, according to data released yesterday by the Federal Highway Administration. This is in spite of the fact that fuel prices in 2022 were at least a dollar more per gallon than in 2019 (more than $3.70 per gallon of regular in August 2022 vs. under $2.70 in August 2019).

Amtrak is unusually late in issuing data for August.

Driving surpassed 2019 levels in 26 states and fell short in 24. Arizona saw a huge gain of 39 percent while Alaska driving grew by 15 percent, Connecticut by 11 percent, and Idaho and Florida by 10 percent. Driving dropped 21 percent in Delaware, 13 percent in Hawaii, and 10 percent in New York and Pennsylvania. Driving grew in both urban and rural areas, but urban driving grew slightly more than rural. Continue reading →

August Transit 63.4% of 2019 Numbers

By | | Transportation, Useful Data
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Transit in August 2022 carried 63.4 percent as many riders as in August 2019, according to data released yesterday by the Federal Transit Administration. This is the second-highest since the pandemic began (the highest being in June) and only the third time in the last two years that transit has carried more than 60 percent of pre-pandemic numbers. One reason for the increase may be that August 2022 had one more business day than August 2019.

Amtrak and the Federal Highway Administration have not yet published August data, but airlines carried more than 91 percent as many passengers in August 2022 and August 2019, according to Transportation Security Administration counts. I’ll post the Amtrak and highway data when they are made available.

When compared with July 2022, the biggest gains among major urban areas have been in Phoenix (24%), Denver (22%), Cincinnati (21%), and Riverside-San Bernardino (16%). Urban areas that are still lagging include Chicago (55% of 2019 numbers), Washington (56%), Atlanta (53%), Detroit (24%), and Minneapolis-St. Paul (49%). DC and the Twin Cities are doing poorly because their downtown are among the slowest to recover and I presume the same is true for the others. In addition, the Twin Cities light-rail system has the most transit crime, per passenger-mile carried, of any in the nation, which is discouraging both ridership and downtown recovery. Continue reading →

Cars Still More Energy Efficient Than Transit

By | | Transportation
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The average car used less than 2,800 British thermal units (BTUs) of energy per passenger-mile in 2019, according to the latest edition of the Department of Energy’s Transportation Energy Data Book. This is nearly a 25 percent improvement since 1999. It also made cars more energy efficient than transit in every urban area in the country except New York and San Francisco.

Click image to download a 16.4-MB PDF of this report. Click here to download Excel spreadsheets for the 361 tables in the report (11 MB).

The Department of Energy releases its annual update to the data book every February, but I wasn’t paying attention when the last one came out. In fact, it doesn’t say a lot that’s new since the previous one was issued in 2021, but it shows that both autos and airplanes continue to improve their energy efficiencies, the latter by 42 percent since 1999. Continue reading →

The Vice of Making Losses

By | | Transportation
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A recent staff presentation to the Washington Metro board’s finance committee revealed that the agency is expecting to run out of federal COVID relief funds in 2024 and anticipates a $187.5 million shortfall in funding that year. From then on, it anticipates funding shortfalls of more than $500 million a year, rising to more than $700 million by 2030.

With half of DC employees working at home, Washington Metro trains have been running nearly empty since the pandemic began. Photo by Elvert Barnes.

That’s if ridership recovers to 100 percent of pre-pandemic levels. If only 75 percent of riders return, shortfalls will range from more than $700 million in 2025 to more than $900 million in 2030. In fact, as of July, ridership was still less than 50 percent of pre-pandemic numbers. Continue reading →

Comments from Colorado

By | | Transportation
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The Denver/Colorado Springs Gazette has published two articles by the Antiplanner highlighting problems with transportation planning in Denver and nationwide. The first, dated September 11, argues that cities have lost the war on cars. In particular, Denver has been reducing roadway capacities and spending billions on transit, yet driving keeps growing. A follow-up editorial by the newspaper agrees.

Stuck in traffic in Denver, thanks to local and regional transportation planners. Photo by Adrian Black.

More recently, an op-ed by the Antiplanner argues that the pandemic has changed Colorado transportation for good, yet transportation planners still plan for a pre-pandemic world. The number of people working at home in the Denver urban area tripled between 2019 and 2021, which devastated transit ridership yet led to an 8 percent increase in driving as people working at home run errands and take other auto trips they weren’t taking when confined to an office. Continue reading →

U.S. Not Running Short of Land

By | | Housing
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Alert the FBI! Someone has stolen and hidden away most of the land in the United States. At least, that’s the message I get from a recent Wall Street Journal article that claims that “the U.S. is running short of land for housing.”

More than 600,000 acres of land like this can be found outside of San Jose. It isn’t prime farm land, nor is it too steep to build on. Yet San Jose has some of the most expensive housing in America because almost no one can see that this land is available for housing.

According to a 2017 land inventory by the Department of Agriculture, the contiguous 48 states have about 1.9 billion acres of land. Of these, about 116 million have been developed (including rural developments such as roads and railroads). Another 406 million acres are federal. The USDA doesn’t say so, but about 70 million acres are state land. An unknown number are county or city lands, but it is probably under 50 million acres. Continue reading →

The Future of Urban Work

By | | Transportation, Useful Data
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Between 40 and 50 percent of workers in 13 American cities telecommuted in 2021, according to the recently released American Community Survey (discussed here previously). The record is Fremont, California (outside of Oakland), where 48.9 percent telecommuted. More notable, three — possibly four, depending on how you count* — of the 13 cities are central cities, including San Francisco, Seattle, and Washington.

CityStateTelecommuters2021 JobsChange from 2019Change in Transit CommutersChange in Drive Alone Commuting
FremontCA48.9%112,50824,873-81.6%-17.9%
ArlingtonVA48.8%142,653-6,747-79.2%-34.2%
WashingtonDC48.3%353,845-32,033-68.8%-28.9%
BellevueWA48.1%74,006-6,368-80.3%-37.5%
SunnyvaleCA47.1%81,435-3,936-68.0%-45.9%
SeattleWA46.8%438,357-23,131-75.8%-30.8%
BerkeleyCA46.5%57,877-3,989-84.4%-16.5%
San FranciscoCA45.6%438,886-87,136-73.9%-22.8%
CambridgeMA44.4%70,450-816-58.9%-31.4%
CaryNC44.2%91,3932,32037.3%-34.2%
NewtonMA43.9%45,504-579-68.9%-36.0%
BoulderCO42.6%55,376-3,192-72.5%-28.9%
Santa ClaraCA40.2%68,880-6,756-80.1%-42.9%

Most of these 13 cities saw 70 percent or more declines in transit commuters since 2019. The major exception was Cary, North Carolina. However, the survey numbers for Cary are questionable. Transit’s share of Cary workers went from 0.3 to 0.4 percent. Because these numbers are so small, the margins of error are large. The Census Bureau reported 295 plus or minus 233 transit commuters in 2019 and 405 plus or minus 348 in 2021. Since the error terms overlap, the change from 2019 to 2021 isn’t statistically significant. Continue reading →

Is Wall Street Making Housing Unaffordable?

By | | Housing
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“Wall Street is snapping up [single-] family homes,” reports the Economist. This isn’t exactly news. A year ago, CNN reported the same thing. Two years ago, the New York Times reported a “$60 billion housing grab by Wall Street.” Three years ago, the Atlantic announced that “Wall Street is your landlord.”

Wall Street’s or your street? Photo by isipeoria.

These articles are often accompanied by an implicit accusation that Wall Street speculators are responsible for housing becoming unaffordable. Sometimes the accusation is more explicit. A year ago, Tucker Carlson claimed that the “phenomenon of skyrocketing house prices is being driven by Wall Street outbidding normal Americans trying to buy homes.” Earlier this week, HousingWire.com claimed that “Institutional purchases are . . . making houses less affordable.” Continue reading →

Pandemic Increases Homeownership

By | | Housing, Useful Data
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The nation’s number of occupied homes grew by 3.9 percent between 2019 and 2021, representing 4.7 million units of new homes, according to table B25032 of the American Community Survey. More than 98.5 percent of those new units were owner occupied, while rental housing grew by just 0.2 percent or less than 1.5 percent of total new homes.

More than three-fourths of new homes were single-family detached homes, reflecting the preferences of most (about 80 percent) Americans for such homes. Another 16 percent were single-family attached (row houses), while only 12 percent were multifamily. Continue reading →

July Driving Falls to 97% of Pre-Pandemic Levels

By | | Transportation, Useful Data
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Americans drove 97 percent as many miles in July 2022 as they had in July 2019, the year before the pandemic, according to data released yesterday by the Federal Highway Administration. This is only the fourth month out of the last fourteen in which driving was less than 100 percent of pre-pandemic levels.

See this post for sources of data for Amtrak, air travel, and transit.

The dip in driving in April was explainable by the spike in fuel prices caused by the war in Ukraine. Prices actually peaked in mid-June and have declined almost every day since, so it isn’t clear why driving declined a bit in July. Continue reading →