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November Ridership Down 63 Percent

By | | Transportation, Useful Data
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Transit ridership in November 2020 was 63.1 percent less than in 2019, according to data released yesterday by the Federal Transit Administration. That was down from October, which was 62.7 percent less than in 2019, and September, which was 62.0 percent less than in 2019. These numbers are preliminary as a few agencies may not have submitted their November ridership numbers in time for this report, but ridership has been stuck at around 37 percent of 2019 numbers since July.

While private businesses have scrambled to cut costs in response to the pandemic, transit agencies continue to operate at 80 percent of 2019 levels. Agencies, of course, received a $25 billion bailout from Congress in April. Since total transit fares were only about $16 billion in 2019, most of this bailout was predicated on the assumption that the state and local taxes that transit agencies rely on would significantly drop due to the pandemic and associated shutdowns.

In fact, state and local tax revenues in the first nine months of 2020 were just 1 percent less than in the same period in 2019. While we don’t yet have exact data for transit systems, it seems likely that transit agencies were awash with cash in 2020 due to the huge federal bailout. This allowed them to maintain service at 80 percent of 2019 levels despite losing more than half of their riders over the year. Continue reading →

Worries for My Country

By | | News commentary
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The events at the Capitol yesterday make me worry for my country. I don’t fear that there will be a revolution or coup, but I do worry that political discourse has become so polarized that everything from masks to the electoral college becomes the subject of violent debate that prevents any sensible policy from being implemented.

I worry that private companies like Google, Facebook, and Apple are threatened with government regulation or break up simply because they are big. I worry that some of those private companies, which claim to be offering the public an open platform for communication, take it upon themselves to censor their customers for expressing views they disagree with. I worry that the president says such insane things that those private companies feel they have to censor him.

I’ve supported President Trump’s transportation policies, but Trump himself seems to me to be a crazy man. That doesn’t mean his policies are crazy; like any president’s, some are good and some not so good. But by middle-class standards, which means my standards, his behavior has been insane, and never more so than in the last few days. Continue reading →

Transit Doesn’t Need to Respond to Reality

By | | News commentary, Transportation
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When the pandemic shut down brew pubs, many breweries went into the business of making hand sanitizer. Ford used one of its auto parts plants to make 50,000 ventilators. Various drugmakers were able to create vaccines in just nine months.

Transit agencies, meanwhile, continued to trundle their empty buses and trains around American cities. Those that were planning new construction projects have made little or no efforts to revise their plans in response to an almost certain downturn in business.

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Supercommuting and Marchetti’s Constant

By | | Policy brief
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The number of supercommuters–people who commute more than 90 minutes each way to and from work–has grown much faster than the total number of workers in the United States. In 2010, 2.4 percent of commuters spent more than 90 minutes en route; by 2019, it was 3.1 percent.

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

These supercommuters are not evenly distributed across the country. Instead, both the number and the rapid growth of supercommuters are concentrated in a few states, mainly California, Hawaii, Massachusetts, New York, and Washington. In particular, the Boston, New York, San Francisco, San Jose, Seattle, and Washington metropolitan areas all have large numbers and higher than average growth of supercommuters. These states and urban areas are all known for using some form of growth management to minimize sprawl. Continue reading →

Another Phony Housing Crisis

By | | Housing
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The Wall Street Journal recently published an op-ed piece about “the housing crisis that is plaguing rural America.” Using Orange County in southern Indiana as an example, the writer, Kerry Thompson, frets that “There simply isn’t enough housing for the people who want to live there,” which is “having a devastating effect on rural America’s economy.”

Evidence of a housing crisis? This 2,900-square-foot home in rural Orange County, Indiana is currently for sale for $265,000, or $91 per square foot. A Wall Street Journal op-ed somehow argues that this low price is evidence of a rural housing shortage. Note the Trump banner; I suspect this is really evidence of the divide between urban and rural areas, as the Journal writer doesn’t seem to understand rural areas despite running an organization that is supposedly devoted to rural problems.

This is a problem, Thompson claims, because the pandemic has led to “upticks in interest in rural areas, as more Americans determine to flee the cities for greener pastures.” If there is a rural housing crisis, there may not be any greener pastures for them to move to. Continue reading →

Wishing You a Less Interesting 2021

By | | Mission
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It turns out that “May you live in interesting times,” which is supposedly a traditional Chinese curse, was probably first said in England less than 100 years ago. Yet wherever it came from, most people today probably agree that 2020 was the most interesting (and cursed) year of their lives.

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While we all hope that 2021 will be less interesting, I suspect it will have its own interesting surprises. No matter what, the Antiplanning family wishes you the best for the coming year.

Evidence on Post-Pandemic Telecommuting

By | | Regional planning, Transportation
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More studies have been published indicating that telecommuting is likely to be far more important after the pandemic than it was before. A University of Chicago study published early this month concluded that “22 percent of all full work days will be supplied from home after the pandemic ends, compared with just 5 percent before.”

The reasons are clear: “The pandemic drove a mass social experiment in which half of all paid hours were provided from home.” By most accounts, that experiment was successful.

A PricewaterhouseCoopers study found that 44 percent of employers believed that their employees were more productive working at home than in an office or other workplace, while only 31 percent believed they were less productive. Even where employees were a little less productive, the potential savings in office costs might encourage employers to allow people to work at home. Continue reading →

RTD Violated Stay-at-Home Orders

By | | Transportation
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Denver’s Regional Transit District lost 68 percent of its riders last April due to Colorado’s stay-at-home orders. Rather than obey the orders, some of RTD’s staffers visited some of the so-called transit-oriented developments along its rail lines and found — gasp! — 40 to 50 percent of the parking spaces were empty. They concluded that those parking spaces were a waste and should be taken away, perhaps filled with more mid-rise housing.

What time of day would you count spaces in an apartment parking lot to see how many were needed? RTD picked 10 am to 3 pm. Photo by Bearas.

According to RTD’s report, they did the parking lot counts between 10 am and 3 pm in the middle of a week in April. RTD’s reasoning seems to be that, since everyone was supposed to stay at home, any empty spaces meant that no one really needed those spaces. Continue reading →

Transportation & COVID-19

By | | Transportation
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How should state transportation policies change after the pandemic? What is the relative importance of Amtrak, urban transit, highways, and other modes of transport to the states? How can states respond most effectively to future transportation needs?

Click image to download a 5.2-MB PDF of this 25-page paper.

These questions are addressed in Transportation and COVID-19, a set of seven brief articles written by various free-market transportation experts. The guide is aimed at state legislators, state think tanks, and others who are interested in the transportation policies of their states. Continue reading →

One Leaves, Another Enters

By | | Transportation
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Early this month, Uber announced that it has given up on its efforts to make a driverless car to replace its human-driven mobility services. A few weeks later, Reuters reported that Apple plans to have its driverless car ready by 2024(though some say it likely won’t be ready for one to four years after that).

Too much can be made of either of these reports. Uber didn’t halt its driverless car program, it merely transferred it, along with $400 million, to another company, Aurora. If and when Aurora brings Uber’s technology to fruition, Uber will apply it to its various services. The New York Times called this transaction a “fire sale” since Uber actually paid Aurora to take the program off of the ride-hailing company’s hands, but another view is that Uber is investing in the work Aurora has already done.

Apple, meanwhile, is as tight-lipped as ever about the products it may or may not bring to the market. The Reuters report is apparently based on a few statements by current or (more likely) former Apple employees. The most important statement they made is that Apple plans to have an electric car using a new battery technology, but batteries are far from the most important part of an autonomous vehicle. The real earth-shaking news would have been any indication that Apple’s autonomous system has a chance of competing with Waymo, not to mention GM and Ford, in the marketplace.

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In the software business, the first is not always the winner. Google wasn’t the first internet search engine, Excel wasn’t the first spreadsheet, and Word wasn’t the first word processor. With nearly $200 billion in cash, Apple has both the opportunity and the means to become a player.

On the other hand, in the hardware business, sometimes first is best: look at iPod, iPhone, and iPad. If Apple really wants to sell cars, and not just software to carmakers, it will have to have something more than a better battery.