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He Lived Long Enough to Become the Villian

By | | News commentary
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“You either die a hero,” said a character from a Batman movie, “or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain.” Neil Goldschmidt, who died last week four days short of his 84th birthday, was once my hero but died the leading villain of Oregon politics.

The official portrait of Mayor Goldschmidt.

After working as a legal aid lawyer for several years, Goldschmidt joined his friend, homebuilder Tom Walsh, in running as reform candidates for the Portland City Council in 1970. Portland, they said, was run by a “good old boy” network that left minorities, low-income people, and many others out of the system. Goldschmidt won; Walsh lost. Continue reading →

R.I.P. Mr. Liberty

By | | News commentary
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Libertarians will sorely miss David Boaz, who died last Friday after a year-long battle with cancer. While many familiar with the libertarian movement will remember Milton Friedman, Murray Rothbard, and Karl Hess, Boaz, who was about a year younger than me, was arguably the most eloquent and influential libertarian of my generation.

When Ed Crane founded the Cato Institute in 1977, David Boaz was one of the first persons he hired. For the next 41 years, Boaz served as Executive Vice President. While Crane’s job was to raise money, Boaz effectively ran the organization, overseeing a shop of more than 50 policy experts. Continue reading →

April 2024 Transit Ridership 74.6% of 2019

By | | Transportation
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Transit systems carried less than 75 percent as many riders in April 2024 as in the same month before the pandemic, according to data released by the Federal Transit Administration last week. Transit ridership tends to be significantly greater on weekdays than weekends and holidays, but April had the same number of business days in both years. Ridership has been hovering between 73 to 76 percent for the last eight months and since March 2020 has never actually reached 76 percent of pre-pandemic levels.

Of the major modes, bus-rapid transit is doing best with 111 percent of 2019 riders, but that’s mainly because cities such as Houston, San Francisco, and Tampa opened BRT routes between 2019 and 2024. Conventional buses carried 80 percent of 2019 riders, light rail 74 percent, and heavy rail under 70 percent. Commuter trains carried 67 percent but commuter buses carried only 49 percent. Continue reading →

April 2024 Driving 6.3% Less Than April 2019

By | | Transportation, Useful Data
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Americans drove 6.3 percent fewer miles in April of 2024 than the same month of 2019, according to data released yesterday by the Federal Highway Administration. This is the first time in nine months that miles of driving have fallen below 99 percent of the same months in 2019.

April driving was also 4.2 percent less than in March 2024. In “normal” years, such as 2018 and 2019, Americans have driven more miles in April than March despite the former having one fewer day, probably because of better weather in April. Continue reading →

April Amtrak 101%, Air Travel 105% of 2019

By | | Transportation, Useful Data
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Amtrak carried 100.9 percent as many passenger-miles in April of 2024 as in the same month of 2019, according to the state-owned company’s most recent monthly performance report. Meanwhile, the Transportation Security Administration reports that airlines carried 105.3 percent as many passengers as in 2019.

April data for transit and highways will be posted here as soon as it becomes available.

A close look at Amtrak data reveals that the Northeast Corridor is carrying the system. While April NEC ridership was 10.2 percent greater than in 2019, ridership on state-supported day trains was more than 8 percent short of 2019 and ridership on long-distance trains was almost 8 percent below 2019. That’s been roughly the pattern for the year to date as well. Continue reading →

International Housing Affordability

By | | Housing
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Most major cities that were unaffordable in 2022 became even more unaffordable in 2023, according to Wendell Cox‘s latest annual report on international housing affordability. The major exception is in New Zealand, where land-use reforms have led to a home construction boom and increased housing affordability.

Click image to download this 3.3-MB 33-page PDF.

He has been doing these reports since 2005 so this may be his 20th report (though he may have missed 2021). This year’s report, which is based on data from the third quarter of 2023, examines affordability in 94 housing markets in eight English-speaking countries: Australia, Canada, China (Hong Kong only), Ireland, Singapore, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Of these 94 markets, the least affordable are Hong Kong, Sydney, and Vancouver while the most affordable are Pittsburgh, Rochester, and St. Louis. Continue reading →

Who’s to Blame for Increase in Cycling Fatalities?

By | | Transportation
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The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) recently reported that more than 1,100 bicycle riders died in U.S. traffic accidents in 2022. That’s a 77 percent increase from 2010 and the most bicycle fatalities in recorded history (which goes back to 1932).

Do bike lanes make streets safer for bicycle riders? Photo by Missouri Bicycle Federation.

Bicycle advocates blame the increase on larger automobiles, particularly pickups. But the numbers don’t necessarily bear that out. In order to reduce fatalities, they want “safer street designs,” but the numbers don’t support that either. Continue reading →

SEPTA’s Bus Revolution Not Revolutionary Enough

By | | Transportation
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The Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority (SEPTA) is planning to revolutionize its bus network next year. While transit systems are due for a revolution, the agency’s plan isn’t revolutionary enough.

Click image to go to a map comparing SEPTA’s current dense bus routes (left) with the proposed sparser bus network (right).

The problem with most bus systems is that they focus on downtowns to the exclusion of the rest of the region. Before the pandemic, half of all workers in downtown Philadelphia took transit to work, but only 8 percent of the region’s workers worked downtown. The bus system did such a poor job of serving the rest of the region that less than 6 percent of workers who didn’t work downtown commuted by transit. Continue reading →

Transit $60 Million in the Hole? Build a Monorail!

By | | Transportation
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In case anyone believes that transit advocates haven’t completely lost their grip on reality, take a look at Memphis. The new CEO of the Memphis Area Transit Authority (MATA) has “discovered” a $60 million deficit in the agency’s budget that “prior leadership was unaware of.”

Memphis’s transit agency can’t afford to keep its streetcars running and has a $60 million deficit, so naturally people want to build a monorail or light-rail system. Photo by Charles Phillips.

How can you not be aware of a $60 million deficit? According to the new CEO, before she took the job, “MATA’s executive leaders did not have access to the company’s detailed financials.” Why not? How could anyone claim to be a leader and not demand access to financial information for the entity they were supposedly leading? Continue reading →

The Great Post-Pandemic Population Shift

By | | Useful Data
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A little more than half of America’s incorporated cities collectively lost 2.7 million residents between 2020 and 2023, according to estimates released by the Census Bureau earlier this week. New York City alone lost almost 500,000 residents, or 5.5 percent of its population, while the next 20 biggest losers together lost about half a million people.

Moving day. Photo by James Fee.

The biggest losers, other than New York City, were Chicago (-78,877), Los Angeles (-74,934), San Francisco (-61,530), Philadelphia (-50,142), San Jose (-39,664), and Portland (-22,846). San Francisco’s population slightly recovered between 2022 and 2023, but most major cities that have lost population have seen declines in every year from 2020 to 2023. Continue reading →