The Antiplanner » Home Page

Americans Are on the Move

By | | Housing, Policy brief
13 Comments

When the pandemic hit, I thought it would slow down sales of existing homes. Instead, home sales in 2020 reached their highest level since the peak of the housing bubble in 2006. I also thought that the pandemic would slow new home construction. Instead, by the end of the year, new home starts also reached their highest level since 2006. When people began moving out of Manhattan, San Francisco, and other big cities, I assumed most of them would consider the moves temporary and would be renting at their new locations. Instead, homeownership took its biggest year-over-year leap since at least 1960 and probably in U.S. history, reaching levels not seen since, you guessed it, the 2006 bubble.

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

Information about moving trends isn’t always clear. In September, Bloomberg writer Marie Patino questioned the conventional wisdom that people were moving out of big cities or indeed that more people were moving than in previous years. However, her data were based on how many people were hiring companies like United Van Lines, when in fact most moves don’t use professional movers. We won’t really know the truth until the dust settles a year or two from now, but we can get a glimmer of that truth by digging into what data are available. Continue reading →

November Driving 89% of 2019

By | | Transportation, Useful Data
2 Comments

After two months of driving slightly more than 90 percent of 2019 levels, driving fell to 88.9 percent in November, 2020, according to traffic trends published Friday by the Federal Highway Administration. The slight reduction in driving was due to the second wave of state-ordered lockdowns that took place in November.

Frequent arguments and problems relating to speaking up often create problems of communication gap within a couple of tens of minutes to recognize erection. cialis viagra cheap valsonindia.com When viagra sale this happens the cellular respiration will decrease and you will be more prone to premature aging and disease. Though this has been a recent discovery yet Sildenafil Citrate has become the most accepted drug to valsonindia.com cialis samples be used as stimulant booster. Home remedies for Erectile Dysfunction: Home remedies are very much effective in getting rid of this problem free viagra consultation naturally and securely.
Urban driving declined the most, being about 87 percent of 2019 levels while rural driving was about 92 percent. Arizona and Louisiana actually saw slight increases in rural driving but no states saw increases in urban driving. By comparison, urban transit and the airlines both carried only 37 percent of 2019 riders in November 2020, while Amtrak carried just 26 percent of its 2020 ridership.

Telecommuting Is Increasing

By | | Transportation
2 Comments

The number of people telecommuting, at least part time, due to the pandemic has grown from 85.7 million in mid-August to 88.8 million in mid-December, according to Census Bureau pulse surveys. The Census Bureau began doing weekly, and later bi-weekly, surveys in April to see how the pandemic is affecting people’s lives.

Pandemic-induced telecommuting in December 2020.

The surveys didn’t begin asking questions about transportation until August. According to that survey, 34.4 percent of working-age Americans had begun telecommuting “some or all” of the time due to the pandemic. Thus, this would be on top of the 5.7 percent of workers who were already working at home before the pandemic. Continue reading →

How Reliable Are Highway Statistics?

By | | Transportation
3 Comments

When you fill up your fuel tank at a gas station, have you ever seen a Department of Transportation official measuring the wheelbase of your car? Neither have I, but the Federal Highway Administration’s Highway Statistics, table VM-1, reports the total amount of fuel used, to the nearest 1,000 gallons, by vehicle type. Those vehicle types include buses, motorcycles, large trucks, and short- and long-wheelbase automobiles, with the division being wheelbases of 121 inches.

The government has a pretty good idea of how many miles Americans drive each year based on 5,000 traffic counters all across the country. To be honest, the traffic counters are really only on major roads, so the miles driven on local roads are just estimates. Even on the major roads, I doubt the traffic counters are good enough to detect the difference between vehicles whose wheelbases are shorter or longer than 121 inches.

Even more difficult is determining how many gallons of fuel are used by each type of vehicle. As near as I can tell, these numbers are based on a model and I’m not sure some of the assumptions in the model are valid. As I’ve noted before, I’m particularly suspicious of the bus numbers, but I have to wonder about motorcycle and short- and long-wheelbase autos as well. Continue reading →

Energy vs. Social Justice Trade-Off

By | | Transportation
11 Comments

Our society has a near-consensus that fuel economy and social justice are both important. Even if the terms can sometimes be politically charged, there is no point in wasting energy nor does any decent person seek to oppress others simply because of their race, religion, or education. At the same time, we have to recognize that policies that promote one can end up harming the other.

Photo by Niagara.

Transportation engineer Michael Sivak has scrutinized the fuel economy of cars, trucks, and other motor vehicles. He periodically updated data for many years when with the University of Michigan Transportation Research Institute and, since 2018, as an independent consultant. Continue reading →

How Much Is a Trillion Dollars?

By | | Policy brief
9 Comments

In 1939, the federal budget was $9 billion, the most in peacetime history. The year before, when looking at the proposed budget, a young congressman named Everett Dirksen was quoted by the New York Times as saying, “a billion here, a billion there, and by and by it begins to mount up into money.” (Later, someone amended the quote to “real money,” which has a greater effect in print, but probably wasn’t necessary when spoken in Dirksen’s baritone voice.)

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

In today’s dollars, the 1939 federal budget would be about $140 billion. But Congress spent much more than that in 2020. After adding the $2.2 trillion Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act, total federal spending was nearly $6.6 trillion, more than 700 times the 1939 budget and around 50 times the inflation-adjusted 1939 budget. Since revenues don’t come close to these expenses, the federal deficit soared to $3.1 trillion and the federal debt today is nearly $28 trillion. Continue reading →

Still a Ways to Go

By | | News commentary
11 Comments

“I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a state sweltering with the heat of injustice, sweltering with the heat of oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice.” — Martin Luther King, Jr.

With a blend of good experienced and canadian viagra store http://frankkrauseautomotive.com/?buy=4331 players who have just started playing for the national side. Researches have shown that ginsenosides in it feature anti-tumor effects which can damage the buy cialis no prescription peace mind and soul. Take the pills when you get cheap levitra the urge of sex, taking it on a daily basis may found fatal for the health. Impotence is a disorder in which a man is purchase levitra frankkrauseautomotive.com not able to get or sustain a penile erection while masturbating, and then the problem is likely to be physiological; if sometimes (however rarely), it is more likely to be psychological. Politically, Mississippi is still arguably the most racist state in America. Yet blacks there have made far more political progress than the economic progress made by blacks nationwide, which is essentially none: black per-capita incomes have stubbornly remain stuck at 57 percent of white incomes since at least 1960. Those who claim to care about social justice should look inward to see whether they policies they advocate, which are essentially a continuation of the Great Society/welfare programs that began in the 1960s, are really the answer for eliminating black poverty.

The $25 Billion Theft

By | | Transportation
9 Comments

The states siphoned off 21 percent of gasoline taxes and other highway user fees to pay for mass transit and other non-highway activities in 2019, according to table SDF of the 2019 Highway Statistics, which was posted this week by the Federal Highway Administration. The table shows that $9.8 billion in highway user fees were spent on transit and $15.1 billion were spent on other non-highway activities for a total of nearly $25 billion out of the $120 billion collected by the states from highway users.

State diversions of highway user fees to non-highway programs grew rapidly after 1980.

In terms of total dollars, the worst offender was Texas, which spent more than half of the user fees it collected, nearly $6.5 billion, on education and other non-highway activities. Transit received an insignificant portion of Texas’ highway revenues. Continue reading →

Bicycle Safety Knowns & Unknowns

By | | Transportation
18 Comments

Traffic fatalities between 2007 and 2019 declined by 13 percent, but bicycle fatalities increased by 21 percent. In response, many cities have installed or are planning to install bike lanes, often by taking away lanes from automobiles. However, no one really knows whether such practices actually improve bicycle safety.

Cyclists riding at night are five times more likely to be killed in accidents than those riding in the daytime, yet most cities aiming to improving cycling safety are focused on other issues. Photo by PxHere.

A 100-page report on bicycle safety released in 2019 by the National Transportation Safety Board was able to draw upon at least eight large databases on bicycle accidents. Yet it was unable to definitively show whether the safety measures being taken by many cities, including bike lanes, road diets, and complete streets, truly increase bicycle safety or merely create an illusion of safety. Continue reading →

Idaho Is Roaring

By | | Housing
7 Comments

“Had someone asked me in March,” wrote economist Megan McArdle in September, “I would have predicted that after six months of pandemic, the housing market would be full of panicked people frozen in their homes, except for those who were being evicted. Instead, the housing market is roaring.”

It continues to roar today. As the Economist observes, those roars are fed by low interest rates, government cash handouts, and a desire of many to move to homes suitable for telecommuting.

Of course, some housing markets are roaring louder than others. As CNN notes, “home prices are rising faster in the middle of the U.S. as Covid drives people away from coasts.” CNN cites home price index data published by the Federal Housing Finance Administration. Continue reading →