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When Is a Black Swan Not a Black Swan?

By | | Transportation
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According to Wikipedia, a black-swan event is “an event that comes as a surprise, has a major effect, and is often inappropriately rationalised after the fact with the benefit of hindsight.” The Antiplanner’s policy brief about black swans was condensed into an article in the Federalist this week.

Almost as if in response, Nassim Taleb, the person who coined the term “black-swan event,” says he doesn’t believe this pandemic is a black swan. Why not? Because he predicted it!

He might have predicted that a pandemic would eventually take place. Tom Clancy predicted that someone would fly an airplane into important buildings in the United States. The Weather Service predicted that Hurricane Katrina would hit the Gulf Coast. Many, including the Antiplanner, predicted that the housing bubble of 2006 would lead to a financial crisis. Continue reading →

Did Autos or Transit Spread the Virus to NYC?

By | | Transportation
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Last week, the Antiplanner reported on a study by an MIT economist that found that the New York City subway “was a major disseminator — if not the principal transmission vehicle — of coronavirus infection.” Now, as if in response, a so-called market urbanist named Salim Furth, has published an article blaming the spread of the virus in New York on automobiles.

First, I have to say I am skeptical of the term “market urbanist” because many (though not all) of the people who claim to be one seem to approve of free markets only so long as they achieve the results that they think are right. They seem to be perfectly willing to interfere in the markets to achieve the “right” results if the market won’t produce that result. For example, they complain about single-family zoning but never mention urban-growth boundaries; they complain about subsidies to highways but don’t mention that subsidies to transit are a hundred times greater per passenger mile.

Anyway, Furth presents the following chart to show that automobiles spread the virus. The chart compares coronavirus cases in New York City zip codes as of April 1with the percentage of residents in those zip codes who drove to work in 2014 through 2018. Continue reading →

MTA Forbade Employees from Wearing Masks

By | | Transportation
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Last week, I pointed out a recent report that blamed much of the spread of COVID-19 in New York City on the subway system. Recently, I’ve collected a series of memos suggesting that New York’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) is specifically culpable in this spread.

During the 2012 influenza epidemic, the MTA issued a policy directive stating that the agency would keep a six-week supply of sanitizer wipes, sanitizer gel, and N95 respirators on hand for use by employees. The directive specifically stated that the masks would be available for bus drivers, station attendants, train conductors, and cleaners, among others.

The first COVID-19 death in America was reported in Washington state on February 29, 2020. Rather than make its supposed six-week stockpile of masks available to its employees, MTA issued a memo on March 6 forbidding employees from wearing masks, even if they had their own masks. The memo worried that, if bus operators and station attendants were allowed to wear masks, it could lead to “panicked purchasing of facemasks . . . thereby putting health care providers and their communities at greater risk.” Continue reading →

Class, Not Race, Is the Issue in the Pandemic

By | | Policy brief
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An April 8 article in the New York Times breathlessly revealed that the coronavirus is killing blacks and Latinos in New York City at twice the rate of whites. This fits in with the Times thesis that race has been the most important issue influencing American politics and society since 1619. This allows the Times and other liberal commentators to bash right wingers, who “everyone knows” are racists.

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

But the issue with coronavirus, as with so much else in America, isn’t really about race; it’s about class. The middle class is winning, which isn’t surprising since most policy decisions today are made by middle-class bureaucrats and managers. Meanwhile, the working class is losing, which is sad because it actually forms the majority of people. If there is a right-left divide in the battle between middle-class elites and working-class victims, then the left is firmly on the side of the elites while Trump has brought working-class whites, at least, to the right side. Continue reading →

Transit: The Urban Parasite

By | | Transportation
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Far from being vital to American cities, public transit is a parasite, draining the wealth of those cities and producing little in return. A paper released today by the Cato Institute notes that ridership is declining despite increasing subsidies and the usual justifications for those subsidies no longer apply.

Click image to download a PDF of this report. Click the link in the previous paragraph to read an HTML version of the report.

Needless to say, the paper was written by the Antiplanner and brings together in one place many Antiplanner policy briefs published in the last few months. These include the briefs on 2018 transit commuting, 2018 transit ridership, transit’s lack of energy efficiency, recent transit history, transit capital costs, and transportation costs and subsidies by mode. Continue reading →

50. Lessons from an Iconoclast

By | | Iconoclast
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Fifty years ago this week, I was planning the events for my high school’s version of the first National Environmental Teach-In (later called Earth Day). All of the speakers my friends and I invited were either politicians or government officials. If I knew then what I know now, that event would have been much different. Here are a few of the main lessons I’ve learned since then.

  1. Don’t trust the government

Everyone knows that “I’m from the government and I’m here to help you” is a joke. Yet too many people still believe that government works the way their high school teachers taught them. I recently watched some college students debate whether to privatize public transit, and one of them said, “I think transit should be run for the public interest and not for profits.” I wondered what made him think that any public agency operates in the public interest, but that’s what we are taught and that’s what many implicitly believe.

People in Congress and state legislatures know better; they’ve seen how the sausage is made. Yet most of the legislation they pass assumes that the bureaucracies they create and fund will automatically work in the public interest. The Supreme Court put this assumption into a legal precedent called the Chevron decision. In reality, we can’t trust any level of government — the legislators, the executives, or the bureaucrats — to work in the public interest, even if we could define it. Continue reading →

NY Subway “Major Disseminator” of COVID-19

By | | Transportation
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“New York City’s multitentacled subway system was a major disseminator — if not the principal transmission vehicle — of coronavirus infection during the initial takeoff of the massive epidemic that became evident throughout the city during March 2020,” reports an MIT study published two days ago. “Maps of subway station turnstile entries, superimposed upon zip code-level maps of reported coronavirus incidence, are strongly consistent with subway-facilitated disease propagation.”

The study notes that MTA’s decision to reduce train service may have actually “accelerated the spread of coronavirus throughout the city” because it prevented social distancing aboard the subway cars. Buses don’t escape notice, as the study suggests that they “may have served as secondary transmission routes out to the periphery of the city.”

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What Were They Thinking?

By | | Policy brief
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If light rail was once viewed as an inexpensive alternative to true rapid transit, some cities saw commuter rail as an even less-expensive way of reintroducing rail transit into their regions. After all, most commuter-rail lines used tracks that already existed, so how much could it cost to run passenger trains on those tracks?

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

Beguiled by this reasoning, nearly twenty different transit agencies have built commuter rail in urban areas that didn’t have rail transit in 1980. Many of these proved to be absolute disasters, with fare revenues covering as little as 4 percent of operating costs despite having spent hundreds of millions of dollars on capital costs. This brief will look at various commuter-rail projects that have started since 1980 to see which proved total disasters and which were only partial disasters. Continue reading →

One More Reason Not to Ride Transit

By | | Transportation
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Isn’t it wonderful how urban transit gives people a sense of community as they are collectively yelled at and berated by self-officious transit employees? Case in point: On Thursday morning, April 9, the Southeast Pennsylvania Transportation Authority (SEPTA), Philadelphia’s main transit agency, announced that it “urged riders” to wear masks, but did not require them. (In fact, elsewhere SEPTA’s web site said that masks were prohibited.)

Sometime during the day, SEPTA changed its mind and, without any formal announcement, decided to require riders to wear masks. As a result, we have this video of a maskless SEPTA employee ordering riders (some of whom had masks, but apparently not good enough ones for SEPTA) off of a bus, and another video showing several white police officers dragging a black man off of a bus for not wearing a mask.

SEPTA was right to be worried even if it was wrong in its enforcement tactics. On Friday, New York’s MTA announced that 1,900 of its employees had tested positive for coronavirus (about three times the rate for New York City as a whole) and 50 had died (slightly higher than the New York City rate which itself is twelve times higher than the national rate). Ridership was down 93 percent on the subways, 95 percent on Metro-North commuter trains, and 97 percent on the Long Island Railroad–but bridge and tunnel auto traffic into Manhattan was down by “only” 66 percent. Continue reading →

49. Romance of the Rails

By | | Iconoclast
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Shortly before the Cato Institute published Gridlock, Knopf published a similar book called Traffic by a writer named Tom Vanderbilt. The two didn’t cover exactly the same ground: Traffic focused on the physics of congestion while Gridlock focused on the institutional issues around transportation. But I noticed that Traffic received far more reviews and mentions in major newspapers and magazines than Gridlock.

American Nightmare, my next book, got even less attention. Part of the problem, I was told, was that book reviewers didn’t take Cato seriously as a publisher. I wanted to change that, so I asked Cato’s book editor, John Samples, and Cato’s marketing director, Bob Garber, how I should write a book that would sell better.

“Tell stories,” they said. People like stories. Gridlock and American Nightmare both delved deep into history, the latter going back a thousand years to look at housing and property rights. But the stories these books told were impersonal. Continue reading →