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January Driving 7.8% below Pre-Pandemic Miles

By | | Transportation, Useful Data
1 Comment

Americans drove more than 240 billion vehicle-miles in January 2022, according to preliminary data released yesterday by the Federal Highway Administration. This was a 7.8 percent decrease from the nearly 261 billion vehicle-miles driving in January 2020. This was the first month in half a year that driving was less than the same month before the pandemic.

Driving thus follows the same pattern as other modes of travel, declining in January after several months of increases relative to before the pandemic. When compared with December, miles of driving fell by 10.4 percent, compared with 21.9 percent for air travel, 14.0 percent for transit, and 37.8 percent for Amtrak. These declines must have been due to concerns about the omicron variant of the coronavirus. Continue reading →

Densification Was a Communist Plot

By | | City planning, Housing
7 Comments

Can there be any doubt that one of the reasons why the U.S.S.R. favored high-density apartment buildings for everyone in the Ideal Communist City is that it would be easier to bomb them if ever anyone tried to revolt? And one of the reasons why the communists favored mass transit over private automobiles is that it would be more difficult for people to escape such attacks?

Soviet-style apartment in Mariupol after Russian bombardment has damaged most of them. YouTube video by SkyNews.

After 9/11, we were warned by World War II historian Stephen Ambrose:” Don’t bunch up.” Yet urban planners in the United States, supported by fellow travelers in the Cato Institute and Mercatus Center, successfully persuaded the California legislature to pass laws that will make that state’s urban areas, already the densest in the nation, even denser. The people supporting these laws either have no understanding of history or are deliberately trying to make America more vulnerable to its enemies, or at least easier to control from the top down. Continue reading →

Attempting to Ward off Cyber Attacks

By | | Housekeeping
1 Comment

Since the Antiplanner is vital to national security, I was disturbed to learn that people with .ru domain names have signed up and attempted to take control of this web site. In fact, there are nearly 10,000 .ru users.

A few years ago, I realized that nearly 50,000 users had signed up, and while it is flattering to think that many people were interested in my pearls of wisdom, I was disillusioned to discover that most of them were spammers. At the time I searched in vain for a way to delete those users in bulk without deleting any real users. Instead, I installed a captcha system that supposedly would prevent bots from signing up.

It didn’t do a very good job as the Antiplanner had 156,600 users yesterday. I found a WordPress plug-in that would delete users who have never left a comment, so I tried to use it. It would only let me delete 1,000 at a time, and after deleting 10,000 the system broke down.

Unfortunately, I suspect that it also deleted some real users. If you have been unable to log in, you may have to sign up again as a new user. Please accept my apologies. If anyone is a WordPress expert who can recommend a way to delete spam users, please let me know.

Airlines: Our #2 Source of Mobility

By | | Policy brief, Transportation
2 Comments

Airlines carried Americans 77 percent as many miles of domestic travel in 2021 as they did in 2019, according to data recently released by the Bureau of Transportation Statistics. International air travel was still far short of pre-pandemic levels, being just 29 percent of 2019 numbers. The 578 billion miles of domestic air travel was about the same as in 2013, while the 1,743 miles per capita was slightly more than in 2003.

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

U.S. airlines are, or should be, the envy of the world. They carry Americans far more miles per capita than airlines (or, for that matter, railroads) of almost any other country. Airport infrastructure is in excellent condition: as of 2020, 85 percent of commercial airport runways were in good condition, 13 percent in fair condition, and only 1 percent in poor condition. U.S. airlines’ safety record is second to none, experiencing just 14 fatalities while carrying more than 7 trillion passenger-miles since 2010. And airlines do all this at a profit: while some companies have lost money in some years, the domestic airline industry as a whole earned a profit in every year since 2010. Continue reading →

Prolonging the Climate Crisis

By | | Transportation
11 Comments

It is probably appropriate that climate extremists have named their policies after Roosevelt’s New Deal, a response to the Great Depression that, most economists agree, prolonged that depression. I find myself increasingly skeptical of the climate-change narrative, not because of the data but because the people promoting it seem more interested in social engineering than in reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

Click image to download this report.

A case in point is a recent report from the Climate and Community Project, a “project of the Tides Center.” Full disclosure: the Tides Foundation once gave money to the Thoreau Institute, but they stopped when they figured out I wasn’t a socialist. In any case, the new report proposes “a green new deal for transportation” that will “build just and sustainable communities.” Note that social justice has suddenly become as important as climate change. Continue reading →

Gas Prices and Transit

By | | Transportation
10 Comments

While no Americans are happy about the “special military operation” in Ukraine, transit agencies and advocates are positively giddy about the effect of that operation on gas prices. Despite all their bombast about light rail, bus-rapid transit, and other expensive programs, they know that, historically, the only thing that really boosts transit ridership is rising fuel prices.

How high will prices go — and more important, how long will they remain high? Photo by Chris Yarzab.

The problem with that is that the forces against transit are much stronger than they were before the pandemic, when more than 7 million people a day marched to jobs in big city downtowns. That was transit’s target market, and now it has all but evaporated. Continue reading →

A New Take on Induced Demand

By | | Transportation
8 Comments

Induced demand is not a phenomena to be feared but one to be welcomed, according to a recent Reason Foundation report by Steven Polzin. Demand for travel is always growing, and if new roads reduce the cost of travel, they will be used. Highway opponents say that’s why we shouldn’t build new roads, but Polzin points out there are many economic benefits from new road capacity and even from the demand “induced” by that new capacity.

Click image to download a 1.2-MB PDF of this 35-page report.

New road capacity, Polzin says, allows people who either weren’t traveling at all due to congestion or who were traveling at inconvenient times or routes to avoid congestion to travel at preferred times and routes. This makes it appear that new capacity has “induced” demand but all it has really done is released demand suppressed by congestion. To the extent that new capacity leads to new travel, says Polzin, that generates economic activity that is good for the region. Continue reading →

Will the Infrastructure Bill Improve Transit?

By | | Transportation
3 Comments

The Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs held a hearing yesterday on how last year’s infrastructure law will “advance” transit. Three of the witnesses represented transit agencies or transit unions and all talked about how the law will fund new transit projects, but none talked about whether those projects would lead to more riders.

In contrast, testimony from the Antiplanner argued that taxpayers have spent well over $1.5 trillion in the last 50 years only to see transit ridership per urban resident decline. The new spending will enrich engineering and construction firms but not lead to more riders. My testimony begins at 55:30; here is my written testimony and here is my speaking text.

Except for ranking committee member Pat Toomey, the only senators in attendance were Democrats. They were less interested in my dire predictions than in hearing from the agency representatives about how excited they were to have more money to spend. Continue reading →

A Century-Old Love of Rail Monopolies

By | | Policy brief, Transportation
10 Comments

In the mid-1990s, the United Kingdom privatized its government-owned railroads. That privatization proved to be a disaster, and now the country is renationalizing the trains.

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

Except none of these things are true. Britain didn’t really privatize its railroads in the 1990s. What it did do turned out to be pretty successful but, like many transportation systems, failed to survive the pandemic. What it’s doing now isn’t really nationalization but merely rebranding of the system—in effect, rearranging the deck chairs. Continue reading →

Measuring Housing Affordability

By | | Housing
11 Comments

Vancouver, BC, had the least affordable housing in North America in 2021, according to Wendell Cox’s latest International Housing Affordability report. The median home price in Vancouver was 13.3 times the median household income, which means almost no one can really afford to buy a home. According to Zillow, condos typically sell for around a million dollars while single-family homes sell for $3 million to $6 million. Yes, those are Canadian dollars, but still unaffordable.

Click image to download a 3.2-MB PDF of this report.

Vancouver was followed by San Jose, whose median home prices were 12.6 times median incomes, and San Francisco, at 11.8. Vancouver was exceeded by Sydney, Australia, at 15.3, and Hong Kong, at a stunning 23.2. As Cox takes pains to point out, all of the most-expensive housing markets are in areas with urban-growth boundaries, greenbelts, or other containment policies. Continue reading →