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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 →

Transit Ridership 53.8% of Pre-Pandemic Levels

By | | Transportation
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Transit agencies carried 53.8 percent as many riders in February 2022 as in February 2020, according to data issued last week by the Federal Transit Administration. Thanks to generous federal subsidies, transit agencies were able to offer 83 percent of pre-pandemic service (measured in vehicle-revenue miles) despite reduced fare revenues.

Transit’s February performance was an improvement over January, but still below Amtrak, which carried 59.3 percent of pre-pandemic passenger-miles; and airlines, which carried 80.3 percent as many passengers as in February 2020. As usual, miles of driving won’t be available for a week or so. Continue reading →

Obsolete Technology Now Also Antique

By | | Transportation
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Monorails have been the transportation of the future for more than two centuries, as a British engineer named Henry Robinson Palmer filed a patent for a monorail in 1821. A monorail was displayed at the 1876 Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia.

Two forms of obsolete transportation in one photo: the Seattle monorail and Seattle streetcar. Photo by Oran Viriyincy.

The Wuppertal monorail was more than 60 years old when Seattle helds its Century 21 World’s Fair in 1962. But people still thought monorails were the transportation of the future, so one was built to connect downtown Seattle with the fair. Continue reading →

Big City Populations Fell in 2021

By | | Regional planning, Useful Data
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The populations of many big cities declined in 2021 according to data recently released by the Census Bureau. The new data are for counties and metropolitan areas (which are simply the sums of various counties), and not necessarily for cities. But many cities, including Chicago, Portland, San Francisco, and Seattle, are closely identified with single counties, so those counties can be compared with surrounding counties to see what is going on.

People are leaving the cities.

I may cover this in more detail in a future policy brief, but for now I want to ask a single question: did people move out of cities in 2020 because of taxes and housing prices, as one article claims, or because of COVID? Continue reading →

The Perils of Bus-Rapid Transit

By | | Transportation
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Ten years ago, the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency (Muni) decided to build a two-mile long busway on Van Ness Avenue, dedicating two lanes of the six-lane street exclusively to buses. The project was supposed to cost $125.6 million and make transit more attractive by speeding up buses. The planners’ calculations indicated that, without the project, buses would carry 50,800 transit riders a day. With the project, it would carry 52,400 riders, a 3.15 percent increase.

Van Ness before the busway. Click on image to see the original photo in Google street view.

The busway opened for business last week after more than a decade of planning and six years of construction. The final cost turned out to be $345.9 million, a mere 175 percent cost overrun. Ridership on Muni buses is currently about half what it was before the pandemic, and it will be a long time before the Van Ness route recovers to 50,800 riders a day, much less 52,400. Continue reading →

Old Technologies for New Starts

By | | Policy brief, Transportation
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As part of the president’s proposed 2023 budget, the Federal Transit Administration plans to give out an unprecedented $4.45 billion on new transit capital projects, sometimes called New Starts and Small Starts. For comparison, in 2022 it gave away less than $2.5 billion. The difference, of course, is due to passage of the infrastructure law, which massively increased federal subsidies to transit.

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

This increase in spending and the projects that the FTA proposes to fund demonstrate that neither the transit industry nor the legislators funding it are responding to changes resulting from the recent pandemic. Transit was already declining before the pandemic, and the pandemic led to a much larger decline, much of which is likely to be permanent. Transit’s response to the decentralization of downtowns and cities should be to rely on smaller vehicles. Yet the New Starts proposals all presume that downtown job numbers and transit ridership will rapidly grow and thus more spending and larger vehicles are needed to accommodate that growth. Continue reading →

Equity Is a Complex Issue

By | | Transportation
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“Equity is a complex issue” and “there is a decided lack of agreement regarding” the meaning of equity, says a recent paper by Joshua Schank of the left-of-center Mineta Transportation Institute. This “leaves substantial vulnerabilities for the idea of equity to be hijacked for political purposes.”

Click image to download a copy of this paper.

As an example, Schank notes that Los Angeles voters approved funding for a bus-rapid transit line in the Vermont Avenue corridor, “one of the busiest transit corridors in the U.S.” But the LA Metro board held up the project based on the argument that it might be more “equitable” to build a subway in the corridor. Since subways take years to build, this “represents a very narrow view of equity that in practice postpones improvements for those who need them the most,” says Schank, adding that “the Board effectively delayed better transit service for the people in the corridor.” Continue reading →

LCDC’s Phony Climate Rules

By | | Regional planning
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Oregon’s Land Conservation and Development Commission (LCDC) is writing new climate rules aimed at helping Oregon reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 80 percent by 2050. The rules won’t do that, but they will impose even higher housing and transportation costs on Oregonians.

This is LCDC’s example of what it calls a “climate-friendly” neighborhood. Pay no attention to all of the cars in the picture. LCDC photo.

LCDC is a seven-member unelected commission that rigidly controls all of Oregon’s private land. Most importantly, it requires cities to have urban-growth boundaries and forbids development of most areas outside of those boundaries. The proposed new rules will impose even stricter policies on landowners in urban areas. Continue reading →

Replacing One Bad Idea with Another

By | | Transportation
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Seattle-area residents have got themselves into a real fix. They voted to impose numerous taxes on themselves to spend tens of billions of dollars building new light-rail lines to downtown Seattle. Now, cost have increased, Seattle transit ridership is down by 54 percent, and Amazon is moving workers out of downtown Seattle.

Now a group called SkyLink has proposed a solution: replace light rail with aerial gondolas. These would supposedly be higher in capacity, less expensive, and would require less displacement of homes and businesses. Continue reading →

Free Transit Is Just More Oppression

By | | Transportation
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“The fight for free transit is about connecting people to opportunity,” proclaims Boston Mayor Michelle Wu. More realistically, the fight for free transit is about keeping poor people oppressed.

The Rosa Parks bus at the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, Michigan. Photo by Roderick Eime.

At one time, blacks in the South were expected to ride in the back of transit buses and to yield their seats to whites on demand. Whites at the time probably thought themselves generous that they allowed blacks to ride the buses at all. Today, well-off people such as Wu think they are generous in wishing to use other people’s money to give blacks and other poor people free transit rides. Continue reading →