The Antiplanner » Home Page

Biden to STB: Screw the Environment

By | | Transportation
5 Comments

President Biden and Democrats in Congress want to spend trillions of dollars on a green new deal. But their true colors are revealed when it comes to railroad re-regulation: the needs of the environment are less important than the needs of labor unions and shippers who want the federal government to exercise more control over the railroads.

This container train is saving thousands of tons of greenhouse gas emissions, savings that will be lost if regulation allows trucks to capture some or all of this traffic. Photo by David Jordan.

This is made clear in a report that was released yesterday by the Reason Foundation. Written by the Antiplanner’s faithful ally, Marc Scribner, Pathways and Policy for 21st Century Freight Rail points out that railroads produce less than 10 percent as much carbon dioxide per ton-mile as trucks. As the Antiplanner observed a few weeks ago, the railroads have become more competitive with trucks since deregulation took place in 1980. Continue reading →

Transit Loses Steam in July

By | | Transportation, Useful Data
1 Comment

When measured as a percentage of pre-pandemic (2019) levels, Amtrak ridership grew from 63 percent in June to 68 percent in July while air travel grew from 74 percent to 80 percent. Transit ridership, however, fell slightly from 50.3 percent in June to 49.1 percent in July, according to data released yesterday by the Federal Transit Administration.

Airline numbers from the Transportation Security Administration; Amtrak numbers from July, 2021 and July, 2020 monthly performance reports; transit numbers from the National Transit Database; highway numbers for July are estimated but will be published soon by the Federal Highway Administration.

Part of the decline of transit can be attributed to the fact that June had more business days in 2021 than in 2019 while July had fewer, which will probably also make driving’s percentage slightly lower in July than the 100.5 percent it experienced in June. But transit’s stunted recovery from the pandemic also reveals its lack of resiliency and its declining utility to urban residents. Continue reading →

San Jose Light-Rail Service Resumes

By | | Follow up, Transportation
3 Comments

Last week, the Santa Clara Valley Transportation Authority (VTA) resumed “limited” light-rail service for the first time since the May 26 shooting at VTA’s maintenance center. Service began on the Orange Line and part of the Green Line. A week later, part of the Blue Line opened along with another segment of the Green Line. VTA has to test tracks on each segment before it can open; some lines were lower priorities, said the agency, because they carried few riders, providing further support for the Antiplanner’s belief that light rail was the wrong technology for San Jose in the first place.

VTA closed its light-rail system for more than three months and part of the system will be closed for even longer. Photo by Minh Nguyen.

VTA claims it closed down the light-rail operations “to give employees time to heal from the traumatic experience” of the May 26 shooting. But transit advocate Eugene Bradley pointed out “that other major cities that experienced violent disruptions of transit, such as New York and London, managed to restore service within hours.” Not only did VTA not run light-rail trains for three months, for much of that time it didn’t provide light-rail riders with alternative bus services. “VTA is showing the world how to not recover from a tragedy,” said Bradley. Continue reading →

Have a Safe and Enjoyable Holiday

By | | Mission
Leave a comment

The Antiplanner expects to spend this Labor Day weekend visiting various Oregon wild lands. As a result, there will be no policy Researchers tracked 42 buy generic viagra high-risk individuals that took a 25 mg tablet containing Sildenafil, and a placebo medication three times a day. When a webmaster sets out to market his or her website there are things that are commonly mistaken as good, but really end up cheap viagra http://davidfraymusic.com/buy-2231 hurting in the long run. This is Erectile dysfunction or impotence which is an inability to get enough erection for sexual intercourse purchase viagra on line is known as erectile dysfunction. Enriched with the power of Safed Musli, Musli Strong capsules act as potent sex enhancer pills with no adverse short-term or long-term side effects that can occur as a result of chemotherapy. buy levitra no prescription brief on Tuesday.

Somewhere in those hills is the Spring Basin Wilderness, which I hope to hike in this weekend.

Biden’s Smoke-and-Mirrors Housing Plan

By | | Housing
6 Comments

On Wednesday, the White House introduced a four-point plan to “increase affordable housing supply” nationwide:

  1. Increase rental housing with various low-interest loan and tax credit programs;
  2. Increase federal loan programs for manufactured housing and two- to four-unit homes;
  3. Focusing existing home loan programs on individual homebuyers rather than investors; and
  4. Encouraging state and local governments to use American Rescue Plan funds to build affordable housing and to reduce exclusionary zoning.

Most of these points do nothing to increase housing supply. The first two mainly redeploy funds that are already being spent on housing into slightly different housing programs. The third assumes that speculators are driving up housing prices and denying homeownership to families when in fact the “large investors” that Biden proposes to exclude from federal home loan programs are merely responding to rising prices. Almost no new homes would be built as a result of any of these three points.

Only the last point has the potential to increase housing supply, but will do so in the most expensive ways possible. Government construction of so-called “affordable housing” is usually anything but affordable, with cities and states often spending twice as much per square foot as private builders on new homes. Continue reading →

The Usual Misinformation

By | | Wildfire
5 Comments

It’s fire season again, and so we are treated to various horror stories such as gridlock as people tried to evacuate South Lake Tahoe (though they all got out by 4 pm). These stories are followed by the usual misinformation that is spread around about wildfire.

Firefighters attempted to hold the line on the Dixie Fire in this July 29 photo, but since the photo was taken the fire has grown by more than 20 times. Forest Service photo.

“Wildfires in 2021 are breaking records,” says one report. However, in the United States, only 4.9 million acres have burned so far this year, which is 14 percent less than the last ten-year average of 5.6 million acres through this date. Continue reading →

Teach That Man Some Geography

By | | Housing
3 Comments

Paul Krugman needs to learn some geography. Last week, he wrote, “there’s no more room for housing” in California unless they build up. After all, he notes, “San Francisco is on a peninsula, Los Angeles is ringed by mountains.”

This is not the kind of housing Californians want, but it is the kind of housing they are going to get under restrictive policies advocated by Krugman and others who believe in “building up,” not out. Photo by Junkyardsparkle.

Yes, San Francisco is on a peninsula. But, immediately to the south of the city is San Mateo County, which — according to census data — is 68 percent rural open space. South of San Mateo is Santa Clara County, home of San Jose, which is 74 percent rural. Continue reading →

Charting Transit Values and Trends

By | | Policy brief, Transportation
Leave a comment

Is transit ridership growing or declining in your urban area? Do fare increases have anything to do with ridership trends? Are operating costs growing and are fares keeping up with costs? What is happening with transit speeds?

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

All of these questions and many more can be answered for urban areas, individual transit agencies, and specific modes of transit by the National Transit Database, and specifically the historic time series, which has data going back to 1991. Unfortunately, the database is hard to use. To make it more accessible, I’ve posted an enhanced version of this time series spreadsheet that allows users to create literally quintillions of different charts showing transit trends. Continue reading →

The Tide Celebrates Ten Years of Waste

By | | Transportation
7 Comments

The Tide, Norfolk’s light-rail line, has been open to the public for ten years. As noted in this article in the Pilot, it opened 18 months late after a 60 percent cost overrun.

The Tide light rail in downtown Norfolk. Photo by Dean Covey, Virginia Department of Transportation.

The article claims the light-rail line carried its first million rides “five months ahead of original projections,” but that’s a transit agency lie. The original projections estimated that the rail line would carry 10,400 riders per weekday in its opening year. That would be about 1 million riders in less than four months. In fact, it carried less than half that, just 4,900 riders per weekday in its first year, and took eight months to reach 1 million riders. Continue reading →

The Failure of Dallas TOD

By | | Transportation
5 Comments

The Dallas Area Rapid Transit (DART), the transit agency serving Dallas and a dozen other cities, is proud of the fact that it has built the longest light-rail system in the country. It is almost as proud of the many transit-oriented developments (TODs) built near light-rail stations. Of course, it never mentions that many if not most of those developments were subsidized through below-market land sales, tax-increment financing, and other government assistance.

Apartments and condos surround the Las Colinas light-rail station in Irving, Texas, yet that station attracted only 137 round-trip riders per weekday in 2019.

To transit advocates, such subsidies are justified because they boost ridership. But is there cause for such justification? How well have transit-oriented developments worked in promoting DART ridership? Continue reading →