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Seattle’s Sound Transit Is Officially Insane

By | | Transportation
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Mariya Frost, of the Washington Policy Center, has alerted me that Seattle should be added to the list of cities with transit projects gone wild. Sound Transit, the region’s rail transit authority, has raised the projected costs of projects built between 2017 and 2046 from $54 billion to $142 billion.

An artist’s impression of a planned Seattle light-rail line. Notice that the artist didn’t project any decline in automobiles or driving. Photo from Siemens.

Most of the increase is for the cost of building 62 miles of light-rail lines. Seattle already had the most-expensive light-rail system in the nation, but the latest costs are completely insane. Continue reading →

Housing Policy Debate

By | | Housing
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Last week, the Antiplanner participated in a Federalist Society debate over housing issues, which can now be downloaded as a podcast. Leading off the debate was Richard Rothstein, an NAACP-affiliated attorney whose book, The Color of Law, argued that zoning and lending has historically discriminated against blacks. His presentation claimed that such discrimination continues in today’s suburbs and his solution was to rezone the suburbs to allow lower-cost housing such as garden apartments and townhouses.

Land-use policies that artificially increase housing shortages force more people to live in apartments when they would rather live in single-family homes. Photo by Pubdog.

Next came Vanderbilt University law professor Christopher Serkin, who said that he personally favored higher density development but noted that most Americans did not. He was followed by Notre Dame law school professor Nichole Garnett, who was also a little skeptical about planning for density. Continue reading →

Telecommuting Wins over Returning to Offices

By | | Transportation
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The most credible estimates say that at least 20 percent of workers will continue to work at home on any given day after the pandemic, up from less than 6 percent before the pandemic. The share of remote workers is likely to be much higher in Silicon Valley, where a lot of workers do jobs that don’t require daily office visits and high housing prices give workers extra incentives to want to live elsewhere.

Last June, Apple got some push-back from employees when it announced it wanted them to return to the office at least three days a week. Plans to return to offices were delayed by further COVID waves, but last month employees were still threatening to quit if forced to return to the office three days a week. Continue reading →

Transit Construction Costs Run Wild

By | | Transportation
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America’s transit industry has been heavily criticized for spending so much on construction. Yet the industry continues to roll up cost overrun after cost overrun for projects that should have been too expensive to build in the first place.

VTA’s planned single-bore tunnel into downtown San Jose. Figure by VTA.

Take, for example, the BART line to San Jose, which is being planned and built by the Santa Clara Valley Transportation Authority (VTA), which has never displayed much competence in the past. Rather than cut and cover two small tunnels into downtown San Jose, which is the usual practice, VTA wants to bore one gigantic tunnel three to four stories underground. The 6-mile line was originally projected to cost $4.1 billion, but last October the Federal Transit Administration (FTA) announced that it expected the cost to be $9.1 billion, or $1.5 billion a mile, and the agency expressed doubts that VTA had the funds to cover this cost overrun. Continue reading →

Transit’s Zombie Future

By | | Policy brief, Transportation, Useful Data
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March transit ridership pushed up above 60 percent of pre-pandemic numbers for the first time since the pandemic began, according to data released by the Federal Transit Administration last week. Ridership was boosted by the fact that March 2022 had two more weekdays than March 2019. Since April 2022 has one fewer weekday than April 2019, ridership is likely to dip back down below 60 percent in April.

Click image to download a four-page PDF of this policy brief.

Transit is still lagging well behind other modes of travel. Amtrak carried 68 percent as many passenger-miles as in March 2019 while the airlines carried 88 percent. Domestic air travel was probably above 90 percent, but data sorting domestic from international travel won’t be available for a couple of months. Miles of driving in March will be available in about a week but are likely to be more than 100 percent of March 2019 miles.

Continue reading →

LA Metro Celebrates Losing 138 Million Bus Riders

By | | Transportation
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Los Angeles Metro recently celebrated the tenth anniversary of the opening of its Expo light-rail line. Construction on the line began in 2006, a year in which LA Metro buses carried 409 million trips, and the line opened in April, 2012.

The LA Expo line shortly after it opened. Photo by Gary Leonard for Los Angeles Metro.

To help pay for the Expo and other new light-rail lines, LA Metro cut bus service by nearly a quarter between 2006 and 2019. This contributed to the loss of a third of its bus riders, or nearly 138 million trips per year. The Expo line, meanwhile, boosted light-rail ridership by about 2 million annual trips, enough to make up 1.5 percent of the loss in bus ridership. Continue reading →

Who Rules Transit?

By | | Transportation
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Although 60 percent of transit riders are people of color, says New York’s TransitCenter, 66 percent of transit agency leaders and managers are white. The organization sees this “gulf between ‘who decides’ and ‘who rides'” as a major problem.

Click image to download a 5.2-MB PDF of this report.

The TransitCenter is a well-intentioned organization whose thorough reports on transit issues are generally skewed by the fact that the group is located in the one American city that heavily relies on transit. In keeping with social justice rhetoric, this particular report views transit as a racial issue, whereas I view it as a class issue, namely a gulf between the middle class (people with college educations) and working class. Continue reading →

Electric Ride Lab Gets Everything Wrong

By | | Transportation
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Someone named Chris Wilson has asked me to plug a “thorough and in-depth article about the 5 main reasons why public transportation in the US is so bad.” He and his associates at Electric Ride Lab–which promotes personal electric transportation such as e-bikes, e-scooters, and e-skateboards–“took the time to thoroughly research and include a ton of information” in the article.

If you have an electric bike or scooter, why do you need transit anyway? Photo by Ian Sane.

They should have done a little more research as just about everything they say about transit is wrong. Here are Wilson’s five wrong reasons why public transit is so bad in the United States. Continue reading →

America’s Two Housing Markets

By | | Housing, Policy brief
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Imagine that, on top of all our other problems, the United States had a shortage of pickup trucks. While many pickups are purchased for recreational purposes, they also play vital roles in construction, farming, forestry, and other industries. The impacts of a shortage could reverberate throughout the economy.

Click image to download a three-page PDF of this policy brief.

A California politician says he has a solution to the pickup shortage: Simply buy old pickups, scrap them, and use the materials to build subcompact cars such as the Chevrolet Spark or Mitsubishi Mirage. Full-sized pickups typically weigh twice as much as subcompacts, so this program could flood the market with two or more vehicles for every one that is scrapped. That would have to reduce the price of pickups, wouldn’t it? Continue reading →

Honolulu Rail: $9.9 Billion to Go Nowhere

By | | Transportation
3 Comments

The Honolulu Authority for Rapid Transportation (HART) now says it will cost $9.9 billion to not finish its rail project by 2031. As recently as a year ago, HART insisted it would be able to complete the project by 2031, a mere 12 years late. But now it admits that it has a $1.4 billion funding shortfall that will prevent completion.

The rail line was supposed to go from Kapolei, a community of 21,000 people known as Oahu’s “second city,” to Ala Moana Center, Hawaii’s largest shopping mall. Even now, HART’s website claims it is essential for the rail line to go to Ala Moana “because of the Ala Moana Transit Center, which is the City’s largest bus transit center.” Rail passengers would be able to transfer there to buses that could take them to Waikiki, the University of Hawaii, and other destinations. Continue reading →