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Sutton Mountain Wilderness Yes, Monument No

By | | Policy brief, Public lands
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In November, Oregon senators Jeff Merkley and Ron Wyden introduced legislation to turn Sutton Mountain into a national monument. If you’ve never heard of Sutton Mountain, don’t feel bad: I’ve lived in Oregon all my life and never heard of it until a few months ago. Briefly, Sutton Mountain is a undistinguished summit in eastern Oregon’s Wheeler County that is surrounded by land that is mostly managed by the Bureau of Land Management, which has studied it for potential wilderness status.

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

Sutton Mountain has some natural values that are deserving of wilderness status. But the Merkley-Wyden bill doesn’t protect natural resources: instead, it is an economic development bill. It proposes to create a national monument in the hope that it would attract tourism to the county that has the smallest population in Oregon. As a national monument, activities would be allowed that would be forbidden in a wilderness area, such as the destruction of juniper trees that some ranchers think reduce forage for their cattle. The bill would also transfer roughly more than 1,300 acres of federal land to a town of fewer than 130 people with the expectation that the town would use the land for economic development. Continue reading →

Americans Keep Moving to the Suburbs

By | | Housing, Useful Data
1 Comment

Remember a few years ago when urban planners had convinced reporters that “the new American dream is living in a city, not owning a house in the suburbs”? That was from 2014, yet Americans have continued to move out of cities and into the suburbs or, increasingly, the exurbs.

In one trend that hasn’t been accelerated by the pandemic, more than two million Americans move from the cities to the suburbs each year. Photo by Wesley Fryer.

According to the latest Census Bureau estimates, since that claim was made in 2014, more than 13.5 million Americans moved out of the “principal cities” in metropolitan areas. Those metropolitan areas have nevertheless grown because 14.0 million Americans moved to the suburbs of those cities. This only includes Americans; the population decline of major cities has been partly mitigated by the 3.2 immigrants from other countries that have moved to those cities. Cities that actually lost population since 2010 were mostly in the rust belt: Baltimore, Buffalo, Chicago, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Milwaukee, Rochester, and Toledo, but also included Baton Rouge, Memphis, and several more. Continue reading →

2020 Transit Commuting Fell to 3.2% of Workers

By | | Transportation, Useful Data
3 Comments

The share of American workers who took transit to work fell from 5.0 percent in 2019 to 3.2 percent in 2020, according to survey data just released by the Census Bureau. The share of people working at home grew from 5.7 percent to 15.8 percent. These numbers are the average for the year, while the pandemic was only during the last three quarters of the year, so pandemic work-at-home numbers may have been higher.

Due to the difficulty in collecting data during the pandemic, the Census Bureau didn’t do as detailed a survey as it had in previous years. Previous American Community Surveys had produced more than 1,500 tables of data including such information as how people commuted to work by age, income, race, and number of vehicles in the household, all available for all states and most counties, cities, and urban areas. For 2020, the Census Bureau produced only 54 tables, and so far they are available only for the nation and states.

Still, there are some useful data. Transit didn’t even do well among people who didn’t work at home. Of people who commuted to work, 81.9 percent drove alone (up from 80.5 percent in 2019), 9.4 percent carpooled (unchanged from 2019), and 3.8 percent used public transport (down from 5.3 percent in 2019). Continue reading →

St. Louis MetroWaste

By | | Transportation
2 Comments

The infrastructure bill was supposed to repair worn out and crumbling infrastructure, but now that it has passed local officials all over the country are eagerly looking forward to spending that money on new projects they won’t be able to afford to maintain. Case in point: St. Louis Mayor Tishaura Jones, who thinks some of those federal dollars should go to building a new light-rail line in the Gateway City.

Light rail in St. Louis operates mostly in an exclusive right of way, which makes it more costly to build but doesn’t add many new riders: MetroLink carried 11 percent fewer riders in 2019 than before it opened its first light-rail line. Photo by Loco Steve.

While admittedly I would be hard pressed to find any light-rail lines that have been successful, St. Louis’ transit system, known as MetroLink, is one of the more unsuccessful. Bus and light-rail ridership had dropped by 25 percent between 2014 and 2019. As of September, it was barely carrying 50 percent of 2019 levels, and given the large numbers of people who plan to keep working at home, it doesn’t look like it will ever fully recover. Continue reading →

Access and Equity

By | | Book reviews, Transportation
10 Comments

When David Levinson was at the University of California, Berkeley, he calculated that it would cost more to travel between Los Angeles and San Francisco on high-speed rail than either flying or driving even if the high-speed rail line cost only $10 billion to build. When he directed the University of Minnesota’s Accessibility Observatory, he pioneered research showing that automobiles provide access to far more jobs than transit.

So when I learned that he has co-edited a new book, Applications of Access, that is available for on line for free, I immediately downloaded it to learn about the latest research about access. It turns out you get what you pay for, as I found the book to be a big disappointment. Continue reading →

US DOT Funding Propaganda

By | | News commentary
6 Comments

The Department of Transportation’s twitter page recently posted a tweet showing a hypothetical zoomer promoting the Build Back Better Act. “The new infrastructure law is going to make getting from place to place so much better over the next decade and when combined with the Build Back Better Act it will create millions of new jobs,” says the zoomer.

I’m not sure if there is a federal law forbidding an agency from lobbying the public in favor of a non-partisan bill, but it is generally frowned on. Legal or not, many if not most of the responses from people in the twitter universe were negative. Continue reading →

Thieves Continue to Raid Container Trains

By | | Follow up
8 Comments

In the San Francisco Bay Area, flash mobs are raiding everything from Home Depots to Louis Vuitton. But in Los Angeles, as I noted here four weeks ago, thieves only have to break into containers on board stalled railroad trains.

NBC-LA news has not only documented that thieves are still breaking into containers on Union Pacific trains, it captured video of them doing it. It also contacted some of the intended recipients of the now-empty boxes to let them know why their packages were late. Continue reading →

Have a Happy and Safe Thanksgiving

By | | Housekeeping
1 Comment

The Antiplanner wishes you the best this Thanksgiving and hopes any journeys you take will be safe.

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The Antiplanner expects to relax this weekend, so there will be no post on Friday and no policy brief next Tuesday.

The Washington Post Has a Sensible Opinion

By | | Transportation
7 Comments

The Maryland Department of Transportation is planning to build express toll lanes along Interstate 270 and the capital beltway. These lanes will cost taxpayers nothing because they will be built by a private company that will be allowed to toll them to recover its costs.

Express toll lanes already exist on Virginia’s portion of the Capital Beltway. Photo by FAMartin.

These will be the first dynamically tolled lanes in Maryland, meaning the tolls will vary with demand anywhere from 17¢ to $3.76 per mile. The lanes will be an alternative to the free lanes they will parallel and that are frequently jammed with traffic. Continue reading →

Midwest Rail Plan: A Disaster in the Making

By | | Policy brief, Transportation
5 Comments

In 2009 and 2010, the Federal Railroad Administration gave the state of Illinois $1.39 billion to improve tracks between Chicago and St. Louis to allow passenger trains to go up to 110 miles per hour, saving one hour of travel time. The agency also gave the state $370 million to buy 88 passenger cars and 21 locomotives to operate more frequent trains in this and other Midwest corridors such as Chicago-Detroit.

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

Pretty much all of that money, along with about $500 million in state funds, has been spent. Yet, more than a decade later, Chicago-St. Louis passenger rains are no faster and no more frequent than they were in 2009. The same happened in other Midwest corridors, including Chicago-Detroit, Chicago-Twin Cities, Chicago-Omaha, and St. Louis-Kansas City, where collectively $1.6 billion was spent yet speeds and frequencies remain the same. So far, of the equipment ordered to serve these corridors, only four passenger cars and one locomotive have been delivered. Continue reading →