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It Takes Money to Lose Money

By | | Transportation
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Just before the pandemic, Amtrak proudly announced that it lost only $29.5 million operating passenger trains in 2019 and expected to make an operating profit in 2020. Of course, that didn’t happen thanks to the pandemic, and what’s more, it was lying about losing only $29.5 million; its actual losses were closer to $1.4 billion, a mere 46 times more than it claimed.

Amtrak spent $2.5 billion on new trainsets for its high-speed Acela. These were supposed to go into service in 2021 but are now expected to begin service no sooner than 2023. Photo by Fan Railer.

Now that Congress has flooded Amtrak with money in the infrastructure bill, however, the agency no longer even cares about whether its passenger trains come close to covering their costs. Like any good soviet agency, it recently released its five-year plan, and it projects it will lose more than a billion dollars a year for almost every year in the future. Continue reading →

Liberal or Far Right?

By | | Housing
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A French politician who wants to prioritize housing for French residents, as opposed to Middle Eastern immigrants and refugees, is considered extreme right. But a Canadian politician who proposes to ban purchases of homes by foreigners is considered a liberal.

Foreigners occupying low-income housing makes less subsidized housing available for French residents. Of course, if the government liberalized land-use laws, there could be plenty of housing for everyone with fewer subsidies.

What’s the difference? Mainly that Canada has approved the ban while polls show that the “extreme right” candidate is likely to lose. I guess if you call yourself a liberal you can get away with a lot that leads people to demonize conservatives. Continue reading →

Five Solutions That Won’t Work

By | | Housing
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Sightline Institute researcher Michael Andersen offers Willamette Week readers “five ways to make [housing] cheaper.” Sounds good, except none of them will work.

Here’s a duplex in a Portland single-family neighborhood. According to the Sightline Institute, this was supposed to make housing more affordable, but nobody seriously thinks that it will, so now they are upping the ante for even more density. Photo by Mark McClure of the Sightline Institute.

Andersen starts with the erroneous assumption that “the main factor driving the rising cost of all housing in Portland is the cost of building new housing.” In fact, the main driving factor driving the high cost of housing in Portland is the cost of land, thanks to the region’s urban-growth boundary. Everything else about housing, including high construction costs, is derived from that, so housing will remain expensive until Portland abolishes the growth boundary. Continue reading →

February Driving 97.1% of Pre-Pandemic Miles

By | | Transportation, Useful Data
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Americans drove almost 236 billion miles in February 2022, according to data released yesterday by the Federal Highway Administration. This was 97.1 percent as many miles as they drove in February 2020, the last month before the pandemic began to affect travel. February 2020 had one more day than February 2022, so if they both had the same number of days, February 2022 probably would have seen more miles driven than in February 2020.

Driving remains well ahead of other modes of travel while transit is furthest behind in its recovery from the pandemic.

The published numbers indicate that February driving in Delaware almost doubled from February 2020 levels, which may be due to an entry error. Otherwise, the largest increases in driving were in Louisiana (18%), Rhode Island (17%), Kentucky (16%), Arkansas, Hawaii, and South Carolina (all 13%), Florida and Indiana (both 12%), and Connecticut (11%). The largest decreases, relative to February 2020, were in Washington state (-21%), Kansas and North Dakota (both -18%), Minnesota (-17%), and Illinois (-12%).

Property Rights and the New Feudalism

By | | Regional planning
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The war in Ukraine has forced people of the “West”—a term that has come to mean most of Europe, the United States, Canada, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Australia, and New Zealand—to confront a social system that we have pretended went extinct hundreds of years ago: feudalism. While feudalism has mostly disappeared from the above-named nations, it is thriving in Putin’s Russia, as well as many other places around the world.

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

“Broadly defined,” says Wikipedia, feudalism “was a way of structuring society around relationships that were derived from the holding of land in exchange for service or labor.” A classic example is when William, the Duke of Normandy, conquered England in 1066. Prior to the conquest, people in England could buy and sell land, a system left over from when the Roman Empire ruled Britain.

Continue reading →

Twelve Ways to Destroy Cities

By | | City planning, Transportation
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Kimberly Nicholas, an associate professor of sustainability at Sweden’s Lund University, says that automobiles are killers and offers twelve ways to get them out of our cities. Typically for sustainability advocates, she completely ignores the benefits provided by automobiles as well as ways in which the costs of automobiles could be reduced without reducing driving.

A typical street in sustainable Stockholm. Photo by European Institute for Sustainable Transport.

Her twelve ways include reducing the amount of parking, charging more for parking, closing parts of cities to automobiles, and charge a fee to drive automobiles into city centers. All revenues from such fees, parking, fines, etc., should, in her opinion, go to fund “sustainable transport,” which means any kind of transportation other than automobiles. Continue reading →

70% of Seattle Light-Rail Riders Don’t Pay

By | | Transportation
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Sound Transit, Seattle’s light-rail agency, has a goal of collecting enough fares to cover 40 percent of operating costs, yet it is collecting just 5 percent. That’s partly because of COVID-depressed ridership, but mainly because the agency makes almost no effort to collect fares. As a result, the agency estimates that 70 percent of its passengers are riding without paying.

Not getting much use: a Sound Transit ticket machine. Photo by Evan Didier.

Like other light-rail systems, Seattle’s operates on an “honor system,” meaning people are expected to pay before they board, but there are no turnstiles to keep them from boarding if they don’t pay. Like other light-rail systems, Seattle’s used to have “fare inspectors” who would hand out tickets to people who didn’t have proof of payment. But then someone pointed out that minorities were getting most of the tickets (maybe because they were most likely to not pay?), so this was deemed inequitable. Continue reading →

Study Shows Transit Spread COVID

By | | Transportation
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A comparison of transit usage and COVID cases early in the pandemic in 52 urban areas found that heavy transit use was strongly correlated with greater numbers of COVID infections. “Increasing weekly bus transit usage in metropolitan statistical areas by one scaled unit was associated with a 1.38 times increase in incidence rate of COVID-19; a one scaled unit increase in weekly train transit usage was associated with an increase in incidence rate of 1.54,” said the researchers.

Plan to wear a mask for the rest of your life. Photo by Jacques Paquier.

The correlation was strong even if New York City was eliminated from the dataset. As I’ve often noted, New York is such a big transit market that it often biases any analysis of transportation across American cities. Continue reading →

Lie Rail Supporters Keep On Lying

By | | Transportation
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The Antiplanner has previously written that light rail should be called lie rail because everything its advocates say about it is a lie. The latest proof comes from Capital Metro, Austin’s transit agency, which now admits that light-rail projects voters approved in 2020 are going to cost at least 78 percent more than originally projected.

Capital Metro persuaded voters to support light rail by claiming it would reduce congestion when in fact it will make it worse by taking lanes away from autos and dedicating them to empty tracks carrying empty light-rail trains.

The original projection, of course, was one of many lies told about the project. Almost every light-rail project ever built has cost far more than the original projections, overruns so systematic that Oxford researcher Bent Flyvbjerg says they are “best explained by strategic misrepresentation, that is, lying.” Other lies included overestimated ridership numbers and the claim that light rail is “high-capacity transit.” Continue reading →

Americans Fleeing Dense Cities & Suburbs

By | | Housing, Policy brief, Regional planning
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Americans are leaving the cities. Between July 1, 2020 and July 1, 2021, New York City lost 305,000 residents. Los Angeles County lost nearly 160,000. Cook County, home of Chicago, lost nearly 90,000. San Francisco lost nearly 55,000. The counties in which Boston, Dallas, Miami, Philadelphia, San Jose, Seattle, and Washington are located each lost well over 20,000. Collectively, the counties containing 26 of the nation’s 33 largest cities lost nearly 900,000 residents.

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

Changes in population in 2021 are particularly revealing because the nation’s overall population hardly grew that year. The Census Bureau estimates that 2021 numbers were only 0.1 percent greater than in 2020, the slowest growth rate since the nation began. Thus, local population changes mainly reflect people’s preferences about where they want to live, not birth rates or foreign immigration. Continue reading →