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Best Wishes from the Antiplanning Family

By | | Housekeeping
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Smokey, the Antiplanning dog, brings you holiday greetings from all of us in the Antiplanning family.

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This past year has been the strangest of all our lives, but it looks like next year may surpass it. We hope you have done well this year in spite of the pandemic, wildfire, and other issues, and wish you the best for 2021.

October 2020 Driving 91.2% of 2019

By | | Transportation, Useful Data
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Americans drove 91.2 percent as many miles in October 2020 as they did in October 2019, according to data released Monday by the Federal Highway Administration. This isn’t quite as good as the September release, which reported 91.4 percent as much driving. However, the FHwA has revised September numbers slightly so that both September and October driving were 91.2 percent as much as the same months in 2019.

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This allows me to update the chart tracking transportation use by various modes during the pandemic. The chart indicates that air travel is growing but other modes appear to have leveled off. We will find out next month whether these trends continue through November.

Transit Gets $14 Billion in Relief

By | | News commentary, Transportation
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The transit industry will get $14 billion of the $900 billion coronavirus relief package passed by Congress on Tuesday. That’s less than half of what transit agencies wanted but enough to tide them over for five months or so by which time (the agencies hope) the next Congress will have a chance to pass another and even bigger relief bill. The $14 billion is on top of the $13 billion that Congress gave to transit as a part of its normal annual funding bill.

For those who care, the TransitCenter has posted a spreadsheet showing its estimate of how the $14 billion in relief funds will be distributed among the nation’s major urban areas. The New York urban area will get $5.5 billion of which $3.9 billion goes to New York, $1.4 billion goes to New Jersey, and $0.2 billion to Connecticut.

Los Angeles gets nearly a billion, San Francisco-Oakland $800 million, and Chicago and Seattle around half a billion. Curiously, what regions get isn’t closely related to how many transit riders they carry: Seattle apparently will get 16 percent more than Chicago even though Chicago transit carries more than twice as many riders as Seattle’s. Continue reading →

Closing the China-US Freeway Gap

By | | Policy brief, Transportation
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With growing recognition that China has become the United States’ main economic and political competitor in the world, many people point to China’s high-speed rail system as evidence that the United States is “falling behind.” But the real transportation gap between China and the United States is not high-speed rail, but freeways. China has about the same number of motor vehicles as the United States. But where the U.S. has about 67,000 miles of freeways and is adding fewer than 800 miles per year, China has 93,000 miles of freeways and is growing its system by more than 5,000 miles a year.

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

China began building freeways before it began building high-speed rail and it has built more miles each year and spent more money on new freeway construction (though less per mile) than on high-speed rail. Highway travel has grown faster than rail travel, and the highway system has become particularly important for freight, as it moves about 2.5 times as many ton-miles as rail lines. Continue reading →

$1.5 Million to Scrap $51 Million Streetcar

By | | Transportation
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How much does it cost to repair the damage to streets done by streetcar construction when people finally figure out that streetcars are obsolete? In the St. Louis suburb of University City, which spent $51 million building the 2.2-mile Delmar Loop Trolley, the answer is supposed to be $1.5 million. But anything to do with rail transit has cost overruns, so it is likely to be more.

Streetcars are often touted as generators of economic development, but the Loop Trolley went through a business district that was already thriving. Photo by Paul Sableman.

The Obama administration loved streetcars so much that it gave $25 million of “urban circulator/livability project” funds to St. Louis to cover half the cost of this streetcar. Though that was in 2010, construction didn’t actually begin until 2015. Though construction was completed in November 2016, operations didn’t begin until November 2018. The streetcar ran for just over a year, but having attracted hardly any riders, it ran out of money in December 2019. Continue reading →

Silicon Valley Is Moving to Texas

By | | News commentary
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On December 1st, Hewlett-Packard–which has been headquartered in Silicon Valley since 1939–announced that its corporate headquarters would move to Houston. On May 9, Elon Musk announced that Tesla was moving its headquarters to “either Texas or Nevada,” but on December 7, he revealed that he personally had moved to Austin. On December 11, Oracle announced that it was also moving its headquarters to Austin.

Companies have been migrating from California to Texas for many years, but I don’t think three such large companies have all made such announcements in such a short time. Hewlett-Packard is listed on the Fortune 500 twice, one as HP (which makes office products) and one as Hewlett-Packard Enterprise (which runs server farms). Combining them would make HP #35 on the list, right behind Dell, which is already headquartered in Texas.

Even before moving its headquarters, Hewlett-Packard had more employees in Houston than any other city. This reflects past trends where Silicon Valley companies kept their highest-paid workers in San Jose but built their factories in other cities where housing was more affordable. Apparently, California taxes and housing prices have now gotten too high even for Silicon Valley executives. Continue reading →

Sinkhole Disrupts Transit for 40 Days

By | | News commentary, Transportation
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A broken water main in Baltimore created a sinkhole that damaged a light-rail stop next to the city’s convention center. As a result, transit throughout much of the city was disrupted for 40 days.

Baltimore’s Convention Center light-rail stop, which was disrupted by a sinkhole last summer. Photo by David Wilson.

This actually happened last summer, but it was so “incredible” that Greater Greater Washington decided to reprint it last week. But actually, it is quite credible because light rail is so vulnerable to that sort of thing. Continue reading →

Buttigieg for Transportation Secretary

By | | Transportation
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President-elect Joe Biden plans to nominate Pete Buttigieg to be Secretary of Transportation. As mayor of South Bend, Buttigieg promoted a “smart streets” program that used tax-increment finance funds to turn one-way streets into two-way streets, widen sidewalks, add bike lanes, and build traffic calming measures and roundabouts in the downtown area. According to some, these measures helped revitalize downtown.

Wall Street Journal writers Jeanne Cummings and Gerald Seib listen to Pete Buttigieg speak at an infrastructure forum held last February. Photo by Gage Skidmore.

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Ten Reasons Why Transit Parity Is a Bad Idea

By | | Policy brief
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From the Department of Bad Ideas for Transportation (DOBIT) comes a new one: transit parity, which means the federal government should spend as much money on transit as it spends on highways. This compares to the current system where about three times as many federal dollars are spent on highways as on transit. While transit parity is right up there with free transit when measured on the idiocy scale, at least 33 members of Congress have signed onto a transit parity resolution.

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

Since this issue is likely to be raised in a Biden-led Democratic Congress, here are ten reasons why it is a bad idea. Some of these reasons are obvious, but this policy brief will provide details most people might not have. Other reasons have been mentioned in past policy briefs, yet they are worth repeating just to counter the nonsense that is so often repeated by transit advocates. Continue reading →

Plotting Transit’s Demise

By | | Transportation, Urban areas
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A new website designed to help people plot the demise of public transit has been posted and is being publicized by, of all groups, the American Public Transportation Association (APTA). To be fair, by “plot” I don’t mean “scheme” but “make a graph.”

Click image for a larger view.

The web site makes graphs showing weekly ridership for the nation or for any region or transit agency. Graphs can show the last four, 13, 26, or 52 weeks. Users can also access data showing ridership in the last 52 weeks either in absolute numbers or as a percentage of the same week from the year before. Continue reading →