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A Nation of Homeowners or Renters?

By | | Housing
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Somebody over at Bloomberg named Karl Marx, excuse me, Karl Smith, thinks America should become a nation of renters. Homeownership made sense, he says, when ownership costs were low relative to rent. But now, due to something he calls “financialization,” homeownership is too expensive, and so we should abandon the American dream of high levels of homeownership.

It may be self-serving for them to say so, but realtors are right to say that homeownership is a key to building wealth. Photo by Chris & Karen Highland.

Apparently, due to fast-rising home prices, private investors such as pension funds are buying homes and then renting them out. Homebuilders are even building homes with plans to rent them instead of selling them. Continue reading →

Jane Jacobs and the Mid-Rise Mania

By | | Housing, Policy brief, Regional planning
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The next time you travel through a city, see if you can find many four-, five-, or six-story buildings. Chances are, nearly all of the buildings you see will be either low rise (three stories or less) or high-rise (seven stories or more). If you do find any mid-rise, four- to six-story buildings, chances are they were either built before 1910, after 1990, or built by the government.

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

Before 1890, most people traveled around cities on foot. Only the wealthy could afford a horse and carriage or to live in the suburbs and enter the city on a steam-powered commuter train. Many cities had horsecars—rail cars pulled by horses—but they were no faster than walking and too expensive for most working-class people to use on a daily basis. Continue reading →

TransitCenter Says Transit Is Racist

By | | Transportation
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The pro-transit TransitCenter has discovered something that the Antiplanner has been saying for years: transit policies are effectively racist. Many urban areas have “two-tiered transit systems,” says the TransitCenter’s Mary Buchanan, where an expensive form of transit, such as light or heavy rail, whisks high-income people, who are often white, to work while a cheaper, slower form of transit, such as local buses, trundles low-income people, who are often minorities, to their jobs.

Black households have significantly lower auto ownership rates than whites. Source: American Community Survey table B25044. When broken down by race, the Census Bureau only has five-year data for 2011-2015; some auto ownership rates have probably improved since then. Census Bureau data also don’t breakdown Hispanic vs. non-Hispanic ownership rates; most Hispanics are included with whites.

Buchanan and her colleagues evaluated transit in major urban areas such as New York and Chicago and found that low-income people would be much better off owning a car than relying on transit to get to work, which is another thing the Antiplanner has been saying for years. Of course, the TransitCenter sees this as one more reason to increase transit subsidies, while I see it as a reason to encourage more car ownership. Continue reading →

April Driving 92% of Pre-Pandemic Levels

By | | Transportation, Useful Data
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Americans drove 256.5 billion vehicle-miles in April, 2021, according to data released yesterday by the Federal Highway Administration. That’s a 55 percent increase over April 2020 and just 8 percent short of April 2019. As a share of pre-pandemic driving, however, it fell short of March, which saw 262.6 billion vehicle-miles or 97 percent of pre-pandemic driving.

March 2021 had 23 business days while March 2019 had only 21, which probably accounts for some of the increase in driving. April 2021 and 2019 each had 22 business days. Transit also had a slight bump in March vs. April, though nowhere near as large as the 5 percent increase (when compared with April) for driving. Continue reading →

The Vehicle Reliability Revolution

By | | Transportation
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In 1970, the average car in the United States was 5.6 years old, and the average light truck was 7.3 years old. That meant that someone buying a car wouldn’t expect it to last much longer than 12 years, or 15 for light trucks.

Used car for sale. Photo by John Lloyd.

On Monday, a research group called IHS Markit announced that the average age of cars and light trucks has increased to 12.1 years. Data from the Bureau of Transportation Statistics indicates that cars have caught up with light trucks in the longevity sweepstakes, so someone buying either a car or light truck today can expect it to last close to 25 years. Continue reading →

The Gullibility Multiplier

By | | Transportation
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A recent report published by the Transit Cooperative Research Program (TCRP) concluded that transit reduces greenhouse gas emissions. How can this be when (as the Antiplanner has shown) data published by the Departments of Transportation and Energy show that transit emits as much or more greenhouse gases per passenger mile as the average car?

Easy! The authors of the TCRP paper, using the same data I used, found that transit emitted as much or more greenhouse gases per passenger mile as the average car. They also admitted that without transit, only “33 percent of transit passenger miles would otherwise be replaced by personal vehicle miles,” which means transit is three times worse than driving.

However, they then introduce two magic numbers that, when combined with transit’s real emissions, allow them to make it appear that transit is saving huge amounts of total emissions. The first magic number is called the land use efficiency multiplier. It assumes spending money on transit would lead to land-use changes that would in turn lead people to drive less, including people who don’t ride transit. The second magic number is called the transit efficiency multiplier, and it assumes that people who ride transit, say, 100 miles a week avoid several hundred miles of weekly driving. Continue reading →

Does Transit Cost-Effectively Help the Poor?

By | | Policy brief, Transportation
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Almost every effort to justify subsidies to urban transit makes similar claims: transit supposedly saves energy, reduces greenhouse gas emissions, promotes economic development, relieves congestion, and helps low-income people. Previous policy briefs have shown that, in all but a handful of urban areas, transit uses more energy and produces more greenhouse gases than the average car; often makes congestion worse; fails to promote economic growth; and hurts the 95 percent of low-income workers who don’t ride transit.

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

But what about the 5 percent of low-income workers who do commute by transit (or, at least, did so before the pandemic)? For some transit advocates, it’s not enough that nearly 80 percent of the costs of transit are subsidized. They argue that, to truly help low-income people, transit should be free. Is transit a cost-effective way of providing mobility needed to thrive in modern cities? Continue reading →

The Politics of Working at Home

By | | News commentary
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JPMorgan, the nation’s largest bank, has said it will require employees to return to offices rather than continue working at home after the pandemic. Apple Computer has asked its corporate headquarter employees to return at least three days a week starting in September.

Office workers aren’t all happy with this. Apple employees, for example, have protested the new policy and stated that some have already quit their jobs. On a larger scale, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that record numbers of people are resigning from their jobs, some out of fatigue as the pandemic is winding down but some because they are happy working at home and don’t want to be ordered to go back to an office.

“Humans have a fundamental need for autonomy,” observes Texas A&M Business Management professor Anthony Klotz, who specializes in employee and organizational behavior. He predicts there will be a “great resignation” in the next few months. Managers who insist that employees return to the pre-pandemic methods of working, he adds, are guilty of “lazy management.” Continue reading →

Five Reasons for Infrastructure User Fees

By | | Transportation
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An op-ed in the Orange County Register offers five reasons why transportation infrastructure should be paid for out of user fees, not taxes. A similar case can be made for other kinds of infrastructure as well.

Unfortunately, it has become easier to ask the federal government to pay for everything out of funny money (deficit spending) than to charge people user fees. Case in point: Oregon water infrastructure, which a recent study found has billions of dollars of maintenance backlog.

Years ago, some fiscal conservatives put a measure on Oregon’s statewide ballot to require local governments to get voter approval for any increases in taxes or user fees. I told them that they should limit this to tax increases only, but they said they didn’t trust the government to not hide tax increases in user fee increases. Most water departments in Oregon are government owned, and since that ballot measure many cities have been unable to finance major rehabilitation programs because voters haven’t approved them. Continue reading →

Traffic Fatality Rate Highest Since 2004

By | | Transportation
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An estimated 38,680 people died in motor vehicle traffic accidents in 2020, a 7 percent increase from 2019, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA). This is despite the fact that Americans drove 13 percent fewer miles in 2020 than they did in 2019. One caveat: the 2020 numbers are only preliminary based on a “statistical projection.”

The reported increase in fatalities pushed fatality rates up to 13.7 deaths per billion vehicle-miles traveled in 2020 and 1.45 in the last nine months of 2020, the highest rate since 2004. Fatality rates had declined to just 10.8 per billion miles in 2014, then hovered between 11 and 12 for the next five years.

The 2008 financial crisis led to a 1 to 2 percent annual decline in driving in 2008 and 2009, which resulted in a nearly 10 percent annual decline in fatalities. The pandemic led to a 13 percent decline in driving, yet fatalities increased. What was the difference between these two events that one made highways safer and the other made them more dangerous? Continue reading →