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Green Ridge Fire

By | | Wildfire
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A thunderstorm Sunday afternoon ignited more than two dozen fires in Central Oregon. Most were quickly suppressed and the largest one still burning is within sight of my backyard, which means we have been treated to a noisy air show of helicopters and MD-87s dumping water or fire retardant on the hillside.

Looking like a tiny insect, a helicopter dumps water on the north side of the Green Ridge fire on Monday. Despite these efforts, the fire appeared to have spread north of this spot on Tuesday. Click image for a larger view.

Due to drought, many fire officials were predicting that wildfires this year would be “severe and complex,” particularly in the West. In fact, according to the National Interagency Coordination Center’s Tuesday morning situation report, only 53 percent as many acres have burned so far this year as the average of the last ten years. Fewer acres have burned so far this year than burned by this same date in 2014, which was the mildest fire year since 2010. Continue reading →

The Transit-Industrial Complex

By | | Policy brief
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Everybody knows that transit saves energy and protects us from climate change. Everybody knows that transit helps the poor. Everybody knows that transit generates economic development. None of these things are true, but many people believe them because public transit is backed up by a powerful lobby.

Wikipedia has an entry on the highway lobby, but no entry on a transit lobby. In fact, the transit lobby is much bigger than the highway lobby even though highways move a hundred times as many passenger miles as transit, not to mention far more freight. The transit lobby is nonetheless bigger for good reason: most federal and state highway funds come from user fees, so the only thing the highway lobby has to do is protect those user fees from being diverted to other uses, whereas less than a quarter of transit costs come from user fees, so the industry has to scramble for every last transit dollar it can get. Continue reading →

Brightline’s Future Not Too Bright

By | | Transportation
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As decribed in the lates Trains magazine (not available on line), Brightline is currently building tracks so that it can privately operate high-speed trains from Miami to Orlando. A few weeks ago, the company’s effective parent, Fortress Investment Group, was headlined in Forbes for “betting $9 billion that America’s transportation future is passenger rail.”

But things aren’t looking too bright for Brightline since then. For one thing, it has completely shut down its existing passenger train operations due to the pandemic, and doesn’t know when it will be able to revive them. (That may be just as well, as it was losing money on those trains anyway.)

More recently, plans to rebrand the operation “Virgin,” presumably with a significant investment by Richard Branson’s Virgin group, have fallen through. Branson told reporters that he had not actually invested any money into Brightline and that the plan to rename Brightline after Virgin was just a “marketing agreement.” Continue reading →

Can We Trust Government?

By | | Follow up
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The Antiplanner’s friend and frequent commenter on this web site, M (for Michael) Setty, recently co-authored a response to the final chapter of The Education of an Iconoclast, “Lessons from an Iconoclast.” I’m not sure why Michael thought he needed to respond to my memoirs, but here is a brief reply.

The most important lesson, I stated, was “Don’t trust the government.” To which Michael and his co-author respond, more than once, “governments exist to maximize the satisfaction of the public from available resources.” I’m not certain that’s really why governments exist, but even if they do, that doesn’t mean they behave that way. If you assume that governments and government agencies always work they were intended to work, you’re going to be very disappointed when they don’t.

“The American Constitution is designed to be run by crooks, just as the British constitution is designed to be operated by gentlemen,” wrote Freeman Dyson in his book, Infinite in All Directions. “If ever a World Government should come into existence, it had better be a government designed to be run by crooks rather than a government designed to be run by gentlemen. Gentlemen are too often in short supply.” Continue reading →

Driving Bounces Back

By | | Transportation
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The mayor of San Diego wants to spend $177 billion expanding the region’s transit system in order to make San Diego like “Barcelona, Madrid, Paris.” Meanwhile, Barcelona, Madrid, and Paris are becoming more like U.S. cities, at least in terms of the transportation habits of their residents. Driving is the dominant form of travel in all European cities and is rebounding fast after pandemic lock-downs.

Of course, driving is rebounding even faster in the United States, according to INRIX estimates. Total driving at the end of June, the entire month of July, and the first week of August was more than it had been in the weeks before the pandemic. Of course, it was the middle of winter before the virus, but that’s still an impressive comeback.

Interestingly, that driving hasn’t brought congestion back to its pre-COVID levels. Morning rush-hour driving in most urban areas was only only around 70 to 80 percent of pre-shutdown levels while afternoon rush-hour driving was 80 to 90 percent, with afternoon levels exceeding 100 percent in just a couple of urban areas. As a result, rush-hour speeds are significantly higher than they were before the pandemic. Continue reading →

Why the Hyperloop Will Fail

By | | Policy brief
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Soon after you read this, you may hear that the world’s first long-distance hyperloop has been placed in operation in the United Arab Emirates (UAE). The plan is to build a line connecting Dubai (population 3.4 million) and Abu Dhabi (1.5 million), which are about 87 miles apart, a distance planners say can be covered in 12 minutes in the hyperloop.

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

However, that won’t happen until 2023 at the earliest. This year, Hyperloop Transportation Technologies (HTT) hopes to open a 10-kilometer prototype in Abu Dhabi to both test and demonstrate the technology. Ten kilometers isn’t very long, but it is approximately 9.5 kilometers longer than previous hyperloop test tracks. Continue reading →

June Ridership Down Nearly 70 Percent

By | | Transportation, Useful Data
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America’s public transit systems carried 69.3 percent fewer riders in June 2020 than in June 2019, according to data released by the Federal Transit Administration last Friday. Rail ridership was down 83 percent while bus ridership was down only 56 percent.

That’s an improvement from May, when total ridership was down 81 percent from the previous May. But it’s still a disastrous drop that is leading transit agencies to demand another $32 billion in federal subsidies on top of the $25 billion it received in March, which is on top of the $13 billion it received for 2020 before the pandemic. If Congress provides the $32 billion, the transit industry will have received more money in 2020 from the federal government alone than all of its funding from all sources, including fares, in 2018.

We’ll have June driving data in a few days, but in the meantime June’s gasoline consumption was only 14 percent below June of 2019, suggesting that driving has nearly recovered to its pre-pandemic levels. Unfortunately, this doesn’t discourage anti-auto groups who are using the pandemic to justify closing streets and lanes to auto traffic. Continue reading →

Taking the Rapid Out of Bus-Rapid Transit

By | | Transportation
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International Boulevard is a major northwest-southeast arterial that connects Oakland, California with its suburb of San Leandro. Until recently, it served businesses along the route with four lanes of through traffic, a center left-turn lane, and a parking strip on one and in some places both sides of the street.

Here’s a Google streetview of part of International Boulevard before AC Transit began turning it into a BRT route.

That’s changed as AC (for Alameda-Contra Costa) Transit has claimed most of the street for a bus-rapid transit route that is scheduled to start operating next week. Built at a cost of $232 million, the route reduces much of International Boulevard to a two-lane street with only a few left-turn lanes and few or no parking strips. Continue reading →

The Future of Driving

By | | Transportation
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A new study from accounting firm KPMG predicts that auto travel in the United States will be 9 to 10 percent less after the pandemic than it was before. Telecommuting, says the report, will lead to a 10 to 20 percent reduction in commuting by car while on-line shopping will lead to a 10 to 30 percent reduction in shopping trips.

This is good news to the transit-loving, auto-hating folks at Streetsblog, who celebrate “14 million cars off the road forever” but warn that “if we don’t act fast, they’ll come back” (which makes “forever” somewhat dubious). The “actions” they advocate call for giving the transit industry another $32 billion right away so it can keep its empty transit vehicles clean and even more money after that so it can increase the frequencies of those empty buses and trains.

If you believe the KPMG report, however, that’s not going to work. The report also found that 43 percent of former transit riders don’t plan to go back to riding transit after the pandemic, and most of them will substitute autos for transit. If true, that will increase driving by about 5 billion vehicle miles. KPMG admitted that transit’s loss would somewhat offset the decrease in auto travel, but did not include that in its calculations. Continue reading →

Second-Class Transportation

By | | Transportation
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Is transit second-class transportation, as I argued in an op-ed in the San Antonio News-Express, or are the people who ride transit second-class citizens, as a response from urban planner named Bill Barker implies that I said? Like this question, most of his response focuses on semantics, not reality.

For example, he claims that the billions of dollars that taxpayers are forced to pay to transit agencies aren’t subsidies because he says he found a dictionary that defines subsidies as “a grant to a private company.” Transit agencies aren’t private companies, he notes, so therefore they aren’t subsidized. (No dictionaries I’ve looked at specifies that money has to go to a private company to be considered a subsidy.)

In response to clear evidence that taxpayers pay more than 90 percent of the cost of running San Antonio transit, he alleges that “billions of dollars in transportation subsidies are going to Boeing, General Motors, Ford Motor Co.” Say what? I’m not sure why Boeing is relevant, but I don’t know of any subsidies going to General Motors or Ford. As near as I can determine, neither received funding from the CARES Act, and while the federal government “saved” General Motors from bankruptcy in 2008 by forcing it into bankruptcy, Ford didn’t receive any federal subsidies at that time. (Ford did receive some loans but repaid them, and by Barker’s definition only grants, not loans, are subsidies.) Continue reading →