Search Results for: plan bay area

Who Benefits from Variable-Priced Road Tolls?

By | | Housing, Transportation
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The Oregon Department of Transportation is planning to toll all lanes of major freeway in the Portland area soon. The San Francisco Bay Area Metropolitan Transportation Commission is considering tolling all freeways in the region later this decade. Plans such as these always raise charges that they will heavily impact low-income drivers.

An electronic tollgate that collects tolls without slowing traffic. Photo by OnionBulb.

In response, the Antiplanner has argued that low-income people will greatly benefit from variable-priced tolling. While many taxes, including gas taxes, are regressive, tolling is not because people pay for only what they use. Congestion, however, is regressive because low-income people are less likely to be able to work at home or on flexible schedules that allow them to avoid rush hour. “If variable user fees can relieve that congestion, working-class people will be among the greatest beneficiaries.” Continue reading →

Out for Growth

By | | Housing
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A new report on housing decries the fact that many unaffordable housing markets have gotten even less affordable in the last few years. The report’s solution is in the name of the organization that published it: Up for Growth, as in “grow up, not out.”

Click image to download a 24.0-MB PDF of this report.

The reports calls for cities to identify what neighborhoods to build in, “the appropriate increase in density for each location,” and the “optimal housing mix,” in other words, the mix of single-family vs. multifamily housing, for each neighborhood. Where people actually want to live and whether they prefer to live in single- or multifamily housing are not to be considered. Continue reading →

Fixing MBTA’s Financial Mess

By | | Transportation
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Boston’s transit agency, the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority (MBTA or T for short), appears to be on the verge of collapse. Eight years ago, it reported a $7.3 billion repair backlog, which has probably grown since then. As I read its 2022 financial statement, it also has $5.4 billion in unfunded pension and health care liabilities.

No one was particularly surprised when an Orange Line train caught fire last year. Photo by Marissa Babin.

State officials have known about the T’s serious maintenance and safety problems at least since 2009, when an outside report commissioned by the governor found that it had a $3 billion maintenance backlog and wasn’t even spending enough on maintenance to keep that backlog from growing further (which is why it grew to $7.3 billion six years later). This was creating serious safety problems, the report charged, finding that the agency’s maintenance program was addressing only about 10 percent of the system’s most serious safety issues. Continue reading →

All Recovered but Transit

By | | Transportation, Useful Data
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Highways, airlines, and Amtrak all carried more travel in August 2023 than the same month before the pandemic, according to data recently released by the Department of Transportation. Urban transit, however, is languishing at less than 72 percent, and it would be even lower except that August had one more business day in 2023 than in 2019. Agencies such as the Regional Cleveland Transit Authority and San Jose’s Valley Metro that were behind on their data reporting have caught up, so can’t be used as an excuse for the industry’s overall poor performance.

Highway vehicle miles and transit ridership data were released yesterday. Amtrak issued its monthly performance report, including passenger-miles earlier in the week. Airline data are based on Transportation Security Administration counts, which are updated daily. Air passenger-miles are reported by the Bureau of Transportation Statistics but they are further behind, having issued data only up through June. Continue reading →

Amtrak Crossing: Watch Out for the Subsidies

By | | Transportation
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“Flush with cash” from the 2021 infrastructure bill, says the Wall Street Journal, Amtrak hopes to “double ridership by 2040.” That’s an ambitious goal, and yet one that is totally insignificant.

Amtrak’s logo looks like a pointless arrow, but the real point is to spend lots of money.

Amtrak carried 5.1 billion passenger-miles in 2022. Divide that among the 332 million Americans and Amtrak carried the average American 15 miles. That compares with 16,000 miles of per capita travel by automobile and more than 2,100 miles by domestic airline. The Census Bureau expects the nation’s population to rise to 373 million by 2040, so even if Amtrak could double ridership, which is unlikely, per-capita intercity rail travel would grow to only about 27 miles per year. In other words, Amtrak will still be irrelevant to most Americans. Continue reading →

California Homes Still Sell Above the Asking Price

By | | Housing
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A math-challenged report finds that homes in the San Francisco Bay Area are still selling above their asking price despite census data showing that the region’s population is declining. The report says that Vallejo (which is part of the San Francisco Bay Area but the Census Bureau counts as a separate urban area) “is the number one metro area for selling homes over the list price,” followed by San Francisco and Rochester, New York.

This 1,020-square-foot house on a 4,800-square-foot lot is offered for sale in Vallejo for $499,000, but if recent experience is any guide it will actually sell for around $536,000.

The report says that homes in Vallejo typically sell for 1.07 percent more than their asking price and homes in San Francisco sell for 1.03 percent more than their asking price. However, this is wrong: what the report means is that homes in Vallejo sell for 1.07 times their asking price (which is 7 percent more) and homes in San Francisco (meaning the San Francisco-Oakland urban area) sell for 1.03 times their asking price (or 3 percent more). Continue reading →

Housing Affordability in 2023

By | | Housing
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Due to the large number of people seeking to move during and after the pandemic, the number of severely unaffordable housing markets quintupled between 2019 and 2022, says a new report from demographer Wendell Cox that traces the changes in housing affordability in 174 major U.S. housing markets. Of those 174, Cox classified 44 as affordable in 2019, but only 11 were still affordable in 2022. The good news is that’s a slight improvement over 2021, when only 9 were affordable.

Click image to download a 3.1-MB PDF of this 28-page report.

Cox measures affordability by comparing median home prices with median household incomes. This is slightly different from the Antiplanner’s comparison of median home prices with median family incomes. Both of us consider housing to be affordable when median prices are less than three times median incomes and severely unaffordable when median prices are more than five times median incomes. Continue reading →

Transit’s Insatiable Appetite

By | | Transportation
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A few weeks ago, the Antiplanner reported that transit advocates were holding up rush hour traffic in San Francisco in order to blackmail the legislature into giving billions of dollars to transit systems that few people are riding anymore in order to prevent a fiscal cliff. I also noted that the blackmail worked as the state gave transit $2 billion including $1.1 billion for BART.

Is there a fiscal cliff ahead? Photo by Cary Lee.

Fiscal cliff averted! Except state senator Scott Weiner wants to “temporarily” raise Bay Area bridge tolls by $1.50 (from the current $7) for five years in order to provide more subsidies to transit. The increase will only be needed for five years, Weiner says, because by then he hopes Bay Area voters will have passed another tax increase to support transit systems they are no longer using. Continue reading →

Entitled Transit Stooges Blackmail for BART

By | | Transportation
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“We are not asking, we are demanding that Governor Newsom allocate $5 billion to public transit,” said Brett Vertocci, a protestor who was blocking rush-hour traffic in San Francisco. “We need the state to step up so that we don’t have to cancel bus lines, so we don’t lose BART weekend service,” Vertocci continued. “Also so we don’t create huge traffic jams in these intersections,” he ominously added.

“Gavin Newsom is killing transit”? No, but maybe the lack of ridership is killing it. But in that case, why not let it die?

How is maintaining BART weekend service going to prevent huge rush-hour traffic jams? Apparently because unless the state forks over $5 billion, people like Vertocci will continue to block rush-hour traffic. In other words, they are blackmailing the state. Continue reading →

California May Not Bail Out Transit

By | | Transportation
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California transit agency warnings about a fiscal cliff may be falling on deaf ears in Sacramento. Although transit activists are becoming increasingly shrill, the state legislature has good reasons to ignore them.

Not much point in bailing out a transit agency that is running empty trains. Photo by Wally Gobetz.

One reason is that the state has its own funding problems. Earlier this year, it was projecting a $10 billion budget deficit, but that has recently increased to more than $32 billion. Continue reading →