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Population and Housing in 2021

By | | Useful Data
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The 2021 American Community Survey confirms that major population shifts took place due to the pandemic. But those shifts aren’t necessarily reflected by declines in housing prices in cities and regions that lost population. Indeed, prices rose almost everywhere, and usually faster than incomes.

Americans are moving out of big cities to smaller towns and the suburbs, but so far this hasn’t made big-city housing more affordable.

Numerically, the big loser between 2019 and 2021 was California, which saw the net departure of almost 275,000 people. That was just 0.7 percent of the state’s population, but the only state that lost a greater percentage was Mississippi. Other states that lost residents were Arizona, Louisiana, and West Virginia, plus the District of Columbia lost more than 25,000 people, or more than 5 percent of its population. Continue reading →

Census Data Show Transit’s Devastation

By | | Transportation, Useful Data
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More than three times as many people worked at home in 2021 as in 2019, according to data that was released yesterday by the Census Bureau. While this isn’t surprising, the increase in telecommuting had an outsized impact on transit commuting, which declined by more than 50 percent. For comparison, the number of people driving alone to work declined by only 12 percent.

These numbers are from the American Community Survey, a questionnaire that the Census Bureau has sent to about 3.5 million households each year since 2005. Due to the pandemic, the Census Bureau did not do a complete survey in 2020. However, 2021 data are directly comparable to 2019 numbers to get an indication of changes due to the pandemic.

The survey produces more than 1,500 tables about population, race, incomes, housing, commuting, education, and other information. Today, I’ll focus on tables B08103, “Means of Transportation to Work,” B08119, “Means of Transportation to Work by Workers’ Earnings in the Past 12 Months,” B08141, “Means of Transportation to Work by Vehicles in Household,” and B25044, “Tenure by Vehicles in Household.” I’ll write about other tables in future posts. Continue reading →

Land-Use Planning in a Fire Plain

By | | Regional planning, Wildfire
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Fed by high winds, a wildfire about 50 miles from Antiplanner headquarters in Camp Sherman blew up on Sunday, burning 34,000 acres in a few hours. Meanwhile, Oregon’s Land Conservation & Development Commission (LCDC) is seeking comments on a report it has prepared on “wildfire adapted communities.”

Click image to download a copy of this report (2.9-MB).

The report says little about density other than to suggest that structures be clustered “in areas of lowest risk.” Since the only places in Oregon that are naturally at low risk of wildfire are underwater, this suggests that no “clustering” of development makes sense. Continue reading →

Scrutinizing July Transit Data

By | | Transportation
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The Antiplanner is back from Wheeler County where I happened to meet some Portland transportation consultants who were cycling through the area. If you are reading this, I hope you had a good trip with no more mechanical problems.

I promised I would take a closer look at the transit data that the FTA released last week. The data continue to show that rail transit is lagging behind bus ridership, with rail at 57 percent and bus at 61 percent of pre-pandemic levels. Yet worst off is commuter bus, at a mere 36 percent of July 2019 numbers. Rapid bus is 64 percent, and hybrid rail is at 82 percent — though that’s because a new line opened in North San Diego County since the pandemic began. Continue reading →

July Transit Ridership Falls Below 60% of 2019

By | | Transportation, Useful Data
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U.S. transit systems carried 58.7 percent as many riders in July 2022 as they did in July 2019, according to data released by the Federal Transit Administration yesterday. This is a major setback from June’s 65.0 percent of June 2019. Of course, the increase in June was due to high gas prices and the decline in July was due to falling gas prices.

Amtrak numbers are from its July performance report. Air travel numbers are based on TSA passenger counts. Highway numbers should be available in a week or so.

Amtrak, meanwhile, has pushed up from 83.6 to 84.3 percent while air travel dropped from 89.1 to 87.9 percent of pre-pandemic levels. The air travel numbers include both domestic and international travel; domestic travel numbers for July aren’t available yet, but the last numbers that were available, for April, stood at 97.2 percent of pre-pandemic levels. Continue reading →

Minnesota’s Embarrassing Licensing Board

By | | News commentary
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The Antiplanner disagrees with Charles Marohn, of Strong Towns fame, about a lot of things. But I agree with him that the Minnesota Board of AELSLAGID (that’s Architecture, Engineering, Land Surveying, Landscape Architecture, Geoscience and Interior Design, in case it isn’t obvious) was wrong to fine him $1,500 and censure him for being late in renewing his license as a professional engineer.

Charles Marohn in 2016. Photo by SEAGreenways.

Marohn is trained as a professional engineer and started practicing, with a Minnesota license, in 2000. Though he stopped practicing in 2012 to form Strong Towns, he kept his license up and continued to call himself an engineer on his resume. However, he moved his residence in 2018 and forgot to notify AELSLAGID, so when they sent him a renewal notice he didn’t get it. He eventually renewed, paying a $120 late fee. Continue reading →

Colorado Transit Lies about Free Transit

By | | Transportation
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Colorado transit agencies convinced the state legislature to subsidize free transit for the month of August based on the flimsy claim that doing so would reduce air pollution. At the end of the money, the Colorado Association of Transit Agencies claimed the program was a great success, with many agencies seeing 30 to 50 percent increases in ridership compared with August, 2021.

Transit buses in Pueblo saw a 59 percent increase in ridership in August, but Pueblo’s transit system normally carries less than 0.75 percent of all transit riders in the state, so this increase wasn’t very important. Photo from Pueblo Transit.

The problem with this claim is that Colorado transit agencies were already seeing 30 to 50 percent increases in ridership compared with 2021 before they offered free transit. Colorado transit ridership in the first half of 2022 was 37 percent greater than the first half of 2021. Most of the increase in August was due to the recovery from the pandemic, not to free transit. Continue reading →

Pandemic Reversal?

By | | Transportation
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A recent article in the San Jose Mercury-News reports that transit ridership in “car crazy” Los Angeles has exceeded ridership in the “transit mecca” of the San Francisco Bay Area, a “reversal that could remake California’s mass transit landscape.” This would be a lot more interesting if the writer hadn’t done the arithmetic wrong.

Contrary to the implications of the Mercury-News story, Los Angeles has always been one of the biggest transit markets in the country and certainly bigger than that of the Bay Area. Photo by Downtowngal.

The story compares ridership carried by the major agencies in six San Francisco Bay Area counties with ridership carried by the main agencies in Los Angeles county. But Los Angeles County is not all of the Los Angeles urban area any more than San Francisco County is all of the San Francisco Bay Area. The Los Angeles urban area includes all of urban Los Angeles County and all of urban Orange County, while the Greater Los Angeles area also include three more counties. Continue reading →

Triumph of the Exurb

By | | Transportation
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The amount of money spent on business travel in 2021 was less than half of 2019, according to the Global Business Travel Association. Moreover, it is likely never to fully recover.

Forty percent of Americans who once frequently traveled for business say they never expect to do so again. Photo by Business Travel Panama.

According to a recent survey of Americans who once traveled for business at least three times a year, 40 percent say they never expect to travel for business again and 12 percent say they don’t expect to travel for at least the next year. In France, Germany, and the United Kingdom, the share who say they never expect to travel for business again is 50 percent or more. “Business travel will never return to a pre-pandemic normal,” concludes the survey. Continue reading →

MBTA Crashes and Burns

By | | Transportation
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The Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority (MBTA) is crashing and burning, sometimes literally. An Orange line train caught fire a few weeks ago. A Red Line train ran away out of control. The Orange line and parts of the Green line are in such bad shape that they have been shut down at least until September.

The Orange line in 1978, when it was in a lot better condition than it is today. Photo by Henry Petermann.

The situation is so bad that various think tanks have proposed putting the agency in receivership, which would mean taking control from its highly politicized board of directors. At least one member of Congress from Massachusetts agrees, saying that the federal government should take control. But it’s not clear that federal oversight of DC’s Metro system did much to solve that system’s safety problems a few years ago. Continue reading →