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Congress Extends Pork Another Year

By | | News commentary, Transportation
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In a move that will surprise no one at all, Congress has extended federal funding for highways and public transit until September 30, 2021. Such federal funding was set to end on September 30, 2020, and rather than revise the law to take into account the latest trends and events, Congress simply extended the existing law for another year.

It’s not like there was any new information, such as a pandemic, widespread forest fires, or the acceleration of urban decentralization, that might lead Congress to change its funding priorities anyway. Or, to be more accurate, it’s not like any new information would actually persuade Congress to change its funding priorities, as those priorities are driven by ideology more than actual facts.
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The current law, known as the Fixing America’s Surface Transportation or FAST Act, was passed in 2015 and included five years of funding. It didn’t make sense to make the law last five years because Congress is so dysfunctional that it can’t pass any major legislation in even-numbered years, so it should have made it a six-year law anyway.

NYC Transit Is Not Vital to the Nation

By | | Transportation
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According to “experts,” saving New York City’s transit is “vital to the U.S. economy,” reports an article in Business Insider. These “experts” include the usual gang of transit advocates, including the chair of New York City’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA), an urban planning professor at New York University, and the Manhattan Institute’s Nicole Gelinas, all of whom fervently believe that New York financial workers are, if not the masters of the universe, still critical to making the earth successfully rotate around the sun.

New York is “the only place where you have an abundance of face-to-face contact,” says Gelinas, which is supposedly is why its economic productivity was so high. Because Manhattan is so compact, “you can have many, many meetings every day with your potential vendors, your customers, your competitors,” something that supposedly isn’t possible in the suburbs.

I skeptical that maximizing the number of boring meetings per day somehow makes people more productive. Besides, what good are face-to-face meetings when everyone is wearing a mask? If they need to, people can have more meetings per day over Zoom, Skype, or FaceTime without masks and without having to travel from one meeting to the next. Continue reading →

Giving Transit a Pass

By | | Transportation
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Everyone knows that transit is so morally superior to driving that we aren’t supposed to ask about how much it costs. Pay no attention to the fact that the next light-rail line Portland wants to build will cost nearly $3 billion; planners don’t mention the cost in their presentation of the proposal.

Nor are we supposed to ask whether anyone is actually riding transit. When Portland’s last light-rail line, which cost $1.5 billion, opened a few years ago, transit ridership declined. But that’s no reason to question the next line.

Now we have some new questions are we aren’t supposed to ask. A bill signed by California Governor Gavin Newsom on Monday has exempted transit projects from detailed environmental review, meaning we no longer get to find out that the rail project that’s supposed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions will actually increase them. Not surprisingly, the bill was written by state Senator Scott Wiener, who also wants to force single-family neighborhoods to accept high-density transit-oriented developments in their midst. Continue reading →

Recent & Long-Term Housing Trends

By | | Policy brief
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As noted in last week’s policy brief, a pandemic is less likely to “change everything” than it is to accelerate and magnify existing trends. The Census Bureau’s recent release of 2019 American Community Survey data along with other housing data can help us predict what trends the COVID-19 pandemic is likely to accelerate.

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

One unfortunate trend is the increasing cost of housing, which is a result of government regulation. However, this is one trend that the pandemic might reverse, as that increase is mainly taking place in particularly dense urban areas such as Los Angeles, New York, and San Francisco, and people’s responses to the pandemic are likely to reduce densities as they escape from such dense areas and move to places with less land-use regulation. Continue reading →

Home Sales Reveal Demographic Shift

By | | Housing, News commentary
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Last week, the Census Bureau reported a huge surge in July and August new home sales while the National Association of Realtors reported a parallel growth of existing home sales. Total homes sold is the greatest since the 2006 housing bubble while the year-on-year growth in sales was the greatest since 1983, when the economy was recovering from a recession.

The growth in sales in 2020, however, isn’t due to a bubble or an economic recovery. Instead, it represents a major demographic shift. Financial blogger Wolf Richter argues that it is more evidence of a movement “taking place from some densely populated cities, and especially city centers, and especially from rental apartments, to houses a little further out, or in more distant suburbs.”

The Census Bureau and Realtor data don’t indicate whether the sales are in cities or suburbs, but both agree that the greatest increases are in the South and Midwest, while increases in the Northeast and West are much smaller. This would fit Richter’s guess that people are leaving expensive apartments in New York City and San Francisco and buying homes in more affordable places in Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Minnesota, North Carolina, and Ohio, states that already had some of the fastest-growing urban areas before the pandemic. Continue reading →

Public Transit’s Last Stand

By | | Transportation
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As transit agencies run out of money running nearly empty buses and trains, the rhetoric for another Congressional bailout of transit has gotten even more shrill. Yet it is all just hot air.

“Without public transit, there will be no economic recovery,” says transit advocate Nick Sifuentes. In case Mr. Sifuentes hasn’t noticed, the economy is already recovering, thanks in part to driving recovering to 89 percent of pre-pandemic levels but no thanks to transit, whose ridership remains nearly 65 percent below last year’s.

“America faces a mobility crisis that will have ‘profound’ implications — especially for those on low incomes and people of color — if Congress does not step in to fill the nation’s $32bn public transport funding gap,” says the ever-Left Guardian. How serious can a mobility crisis be when only 5 percent of low-income workers rely on transit to get to work? Continue reading →

Tongass National Forest Still a Loser

By | | Public lands
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Alaska’s Tongass National Forest, the largest forest in the nation, is losing $15 million to $21 million a year on timber sales, according to a new report from Taxpayers for Common Sense. The forest plans to sell 300 million board feet of timber in the next five years, says the report, and will lose money on all of it.

The Tongass National Forest covers more land than the state of West Virginia and is five times larger than the next largest national forest.

Forest Service timber sales dropped by more than 75 percent between 1990 and 2000, and since the agency lost money on much of the timber it sold, that saved taxpayers a lot of cash. However, it didn’t save as much as it should have, because the Forest Service didn’t reduce its timber staff by as much as the drop in sales. Instead, it relabeled them “vegetation managers” and kept most of them on the payroll. Continue reading →

Transport Policy in the Age of Coronavirus

By | | Transportation
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“The coronavirus pandemic is going to leave behind major changes in America’s transportation system, and those changes, in turn, call for changes in transportation policies today,” says a paper published by the Reason Foundation yesterday. “While the exact numbers are uncertain, the direction of trends is fairly certain, and these trends demand changes in existing transportation policies.”

Click image to download a PDF of the report. Click the link in the previous paragraph to go to an introduction to the report.

For example, “states and cities that are planning mega-transportation projects should at least pause and most likely cancel those projects, especially if they depend on assumptions that people will continue to live in dense cities and ride mass transportation instead of driving. Even projects that are in early construction stages should be reconsidered, as it isn’t worth throwing good money after bad if the project is going to fail to accomplish its goals.” The Maryland Purple Line, whose future is uncertain as the contractor quit in a dispute over cost overruns, is an example of a project that should be permanently halted. Continue reading →

The Last Pre-Pandemic Snapshot of the USA

By | | Policy brief
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The United States had 2.3 million more workers in 2019 than in 2018, and more than 30 percent of the increase worked at home. This boosted the share of people who worked at home from 5.3 to 5.7 percent.

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

Historian Stephen Davies observes that a major pandemic does not “introduce something novel.” Instead, “it accelerates and magnifies trends and processes that were already under way.” It can also bring “a final stop to processes that were already exhausted.” People working at home is an example of a trend that is being accelerated and magnified by the COVID-19 pandemic. Continue reading →

Years to Days

By | | Transportation
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In 1987, the Eno Transportation Foundation published a book called Commuting in America by transportation researcher Alan Pisarski. The book was based on 1980 census data, and included information about differences in vehicles per household and commuting habits by sex, age, race, incomes, and poverty status.

Last Thursday, the Census Bureau published data from the 2019 American Community Survey just 9-1/2 months after the end of the year. I downloaded much of the data related to transportation and wrote up my draft analysis by Saturday afternoon, sending it to Pisarski for review. My analysis looked at vehicles per household and commuting habits by sex, age, race, incomes, and poverty status.

“It’s almost comical,” he responded, recalling that that it took the Census Bureau several years to get the 1980 census data ready for him to use, and then it took him two years to analyze the data and write the book, whereas I was able to draft a mini-replication of his work in two days. “Years to days is nice,” he said. Continue reading →