The Antiplanner » Home Page

Who Lives in Rural Areas?

By | | News commentary
6 Comments

One of the provisions of President Biden’s American Jobs Plan is to spend $100 billion bringing broadband internet services to “more than 30 million Americans” who live in rural “areas where there is no broadband infrastructure that provides minimally acceptable speeds.” That’s $3,333 per person or about $8,800 per household.

Rural home in desperate need of high-speed internet.

Who are these people who deserve such a big subsidy? Well, I’m one of them. Here in rural central Oregon, we have DSL speeds that are barely faster than dial-up. The alternative is satellite, which is pretty fast but I don’t like the idea of paying by the gigabyte. That’s just me; some of my neighbors have it and it works pretty well for them. Satellite is available everywhere, so it’s not like any rural Americans are physically deprived from broadband. Continue reading →

The Columbia River Crossing Rises Again

By | | Transportation
3 Comments

After being declared dead seven years ago, the proposal to replace the bridge over the Columbia River between Portland and Vancouver has been revived. Proponents of a new bridge have a web site that must be designed for Generation Z, as I find it pretty incomprehensible.

The original Pacific Highway bridge, now known as the Interstate Bridge, had two lanes of traffic including room for trolley cars.

Part of the existing structure opened as a two-lane bridge in 1917, and its capacity was doubled by building a duplicate bridge in 1958. Later the bridges were re-striped for three lanes to match the Interstate 5 freeway lanes north and south of the river. Continue reading →

Making Massachusetts Housing Affordable

By | | Housing, Policy brief
Leave a comment

by Joshua Rosen and Randal O’Toole

Massachusetts covers 7,800 square miles of land, yet thanks to a variety of land-use rules 92 percent of its residents are confined to a fifth of that land. Even in the Boston metropolitan area, thousands of acres of open space persist. Satellite imagery reveals huge stretches of open, largely undeveloped lands as close to twenty miles from downtown Boston.

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

Unlike Pacific Coast states that use urban-growth boundaries to keep people in existing urban areas, Massachusetts’ land-use patterns result from a variety of causes, including the abolition of county governments, several programs that aggressively acquire land for conservation, and large-lot zoning by the towns that control much of the land in the state. These policies and programs combine together to reduce the affordability in Boston and other Massachusetts cities. Continue reading →

More Like an Artificial Shortage

By | | Housing
4 Comments

As previously noted here nearly three years ago, Hong Kong is one of the densest and least affordable housing markets in the world. According to Chinese University of Hong Kong geography professor Ng Mee Kam, the region’s housing shortage “is more like an artificial shortage.”

That’s because Britain only allowed development on 25 percent of the territory’s land, and the government of China has continued this policy since it took over in 1997; the other 75 percent is owned by the government. The dense area packed with high rises occupies just 3.7 percent of the land and such high rises are prohibited on the other 21 percent or so that is developed. Continue reading →

50th Anniversary of a Loser

By | | Transportation
14 Comments

Fifty years ago today, Amtrak operated its first passenger trains, a fact that President Biden celebrated a day early yesterday. Biden wants people to think that Amtrak is enough of a success that it deserves $80 billion in additional funding. But the reality is it is just a big loser.

Rail fans remember May 1, 1971, as the day America lost more than half of its passenger trains. On April 30, ten trains left the Midwest for the West Coast: the Empire Builder, Western Star, North Coast Limited, and Mainstreeter (all of which went to Seattle with sections to Portland), City of Portland, Portland Rose, City of San Francisco, San Francisco Chief, City of Los Angeles, and Super Chief. The next day, Amtrak killed all of them except the Empire Builder (and it killed the leg to Portland), Super Chief, and City of San Francisco (which was cut to three days a week). That’s a loss that’s hard to forgive.

Business analysts remember that the idea of a national passenger railroad was sold to Congress as a profitable enterprise. Rather than a normal government agency, Amtrak was created as a for-profit corporation with stockholders and, potentially, investors. The railroads were supposed to give it seed money based on the amount of money they claimed they had lost in the previous three years. After spending that to get started, as I noted six months ago, Amtrak was supposed to make money. Continue reading →

If You Can’t Beat ’Em, Ban ’Em

By | | Transportation
3 Comments

Rail advocates like to claim that the introduction of high-speed trains has led to a cessation of airline service, apparently to show that high-speed trains can compete against faster planes. While this may have happened on a few routes, European air travel before the pandemic was growing far faster than rail travel. For example, in France, Germany, Italy, and Spain — the main European countries with high-speed rail — rail travel between 2011 and 2019 grew by 14 percent while air travel grew by 34 percent. No European country saw rail travel grow faster than air travel.

The government of France has found a solution to for-profit airlines outcompeting government-subsidized trains: ban the competing air travel. Under a law passed earlier this month, airlines will not be allowed to operate on routes that trains can serve in less than two-and-a-half hours. If high-speed trains were able to compete on their own, they wouldn’t need such a law.

Of course, French politicians justified this law based on the supposed savings in carbon emissions. But conventional trains are only a little more energy efficient than planes, and high-speed trains require well over 50 percent more energy, per train-car-mile, than conventional trains. Passenger occupancies also tend to be much higher on planes than trains — typically 85 percent vs. 50 percent — because planes usually operate in non-stop service while trains make many stops, so the size of planes can be set to demand while trains must be sized to fit the portion of the journey where demand is highest. Continue reading →

Did Ride Hailing Increase Congestion?

By | | Transportation
Leave a comment

“A new MIT study found that not only do rideshares increase congestion, but they also made traffic jams longer, led to a significant decline in people taking public transit, and haven’t really impacted car ownership,” reports Gizmodo. As noted here previously, transit advocates blame ride hailing for all sorts of problems in order to justify taxes and other restrictions to limit competition.

The new study from MIT is frankly unpersuasive. First of all, it says very little about the methodology used to come up with its results: page 1 of the study is an introduction and page 2 immediately begins to present the results. It appears the writers compared data in 44 urban areas before and after the introduction of ride hailing into those areas between 2012 and 2016.

Second, the writers appear to have made no effort to correct for or even consider any other variables. Although Uber began operating in San Francisco in 2010, ride hailing didn’t really begin growing until 2014. But the other thing that happened in 2014 was a huge drop in gasoline prices — prices fell by 50 percent in some areas. This isn’t even mentioned in the paper even though that drop could have most of the same effects the paper attributes to ride hailing. Continue reading →

Housing and Homelessness

By | | Housing
Leave a comment

“A provision in President Biden’s American Jobs Plan to make housing more affordable by giving cities incentives to abolish single-family zoning has a number of flaws,” says an op-ed published by Real Clear Policy on Monday. “Most important, single-family zoning didn’t make housing expensive and abolishing single-family zoning won’t make it more affordable.”

Homeless tents in Los Angeles’ Skid Row. Photo by Russ Allison Loar.

Urban planners are so eager to impose higher densities on American cities so badly that they are willing to ignore the costs, whether those costs are unaffordable housing or the truth about densities. Unfortunately, almost every city in America has urban planners on its staff while almost no city has an antiplanner on its staff. The result is that no one looks seriously at the unintended consequences that result from their programs and policies, which are usually layered on top of (and supposedly remedies to) the unintended consequences of previous programs and policies. Continue reading →

Can U.S. Power Plants Support Electric Cars?

By | | Policy brief, Transportation
1 Comment

Will electric cars completely replace internal-combustion vehicles anytime soon? Are electric vehicles, whether rail or highway vehicles, truly cleaner, especially in states where most electric power comes from burning fossil fuels? Does the United States electric grid have the capacity to power the nation’s automotive fleet? A detailed look at America’s energy budgets and electrical power supply systems will help answer questions like these.

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

Today’s Electrical Grid

The Department of Energy’s Monthly Energy Review shows that the leading source of electricity in the United States is natural gas, which produced 40 percent of the nation’s electricity in 2020, while coal produced 19 percent. This is a turnaround from just 15 years ago, when coal produced half of our electricity and natural gas just 19 percent. Some people blame coal’s decline on the Obama administration’s hostility to fossil fuels, but much of the credit is due to the development and widespread use of hydraulic fracturing and the low-cost natural gases it produced. Continue reading →

Post-COVID: More Driving, Less AM Congestion

By | | Transportation
5 Comments

A recent survey from PriceWaterhouseCooper found that the majority of office workers want to continue working at home at least three days a week after the pandemic, and most employers are likely to let them do so. In fact, a higher percentage of employers — 83 percent vs. only 71 percent of workers — think that remote working during the pandemic has proven successful.

Data collected by Streetlight, which tracks people’s cell phones, reveals that the large numbers of people working at home has nearly eliminated the morning rush hour. However, the afternoon rush hour remains and is in many places worse than before. Before the pandemic, San Francisco had an afternoon peak that lasted from 4 to 6 pm. By June, 2020, the peak began around noon and lasted until 5.

Notice that these graphs show the percentage of daily travel, not total travel. Since total travel in June 2020 was less than June 2019, the afternoon peak period was not as severe in 2020 as it had been before the pandemic. But that could change as the economy recovers if total miles of travel return to close to 100 percent of what they were in 2019. Continue reading →