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What’s Wrong with the 15-Minute City

By | | City planning
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“What is the 15-Minute City?” rhetorically asks urban planner Steve Mouzon. His answer: “It’s every city ever built by humans on this planet until a century ago, but with a catchy new name.”

A 15-minute city in the 1920s. Click image for a larger view.

In other words, a 15-minute city is crowded. It is noisy. Living quarters are cramped. Grocery stores are small and high priced. Crime and contagious disease are continuing worries. Income inequality is high and only the wealthy enjoy true mobility; most people are confined to walking. Continue reading →

BART Is in Self-Destruct Mode

By | | Transportation
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The San Francisco Bay Area Rapid Transit Authority (BART) spends a lot of money, and anytime a government agency has a lot of money to spend, there is a potential for corruption. For example, a month ago it was revealed that BART spent $350,000 to help one homeless person.

These $2 million cars were recently delivered to BART along with three times the service delays as the 40-year-old cars they replaced, which is a problem that should have been examined by the inspector general.

That revelation came from the BART Inspector General’s office, which was created in 2018 (about 50 years too late) to monitor BART spending. But BART itself hasn’t been too thrilled about having someone look over its shoulder. Continue reading →

Transit Ridership Falls in January

By | | Transportation, Useful Data
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Transit carried 66.4 percent as many riders in January 2023 as January 2019, according to data released by the Federal Transit Administration earlier this week. Though this is a slight improvement from the 66.0 percent of December 2022, the total number of January riders was lower than December’s. This is unusual: normally, January sees more riders than December. January 2023 had one fewer working day than January 2019, which may have contributed to the decline in ridership from December.

Transit ridership has hovered around 66 percent of pre-pandemic (2019) numbers for the last five months, suggesting it may not grow much further. Early in the pandemic, I predicted that ridership would never recover to more than 75 percent of pre-pandemic levels, which I later revised downwards to 70 percent (a projection supported by McKinsey). That’s looking to be slightly too high. Continue reading →

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 →