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A Second-Rate Collection in a Third-Rate Location

By | | Public lands
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“A second-rate collection of trains on a third-rate site,” was how John White, transportation curator of the Smithsonian, described Steamtown when Pennsylvania Representative Joseph McDade proposed to make it a national historic site. One-time National Park Service director James Ridenour argued that the creation of high-cost parks like Steamtown were “thinning the blood” of the National Parks System because they diverted funds from other parks that were truly of national significance.

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The Steamtown visitor’s center as seen from a Park Service/EarthCam web camera. Click image to go to the live webcam.

John White later recanted and said that he thought the Park Service had done a good job with Steamtown, so I kept an open mind during my first visit to Steamtown this week. What I found was dismaying. Not only does Steamtown not deserve to be a unit of the National Park System, as such a unit, it is poorly managed and much of the collection is rotting away. Continue reading →

Suburbs Are Better Than You Think

By | | Regional planning
44 Comments

Economist Noah Smith writes that suburbs “not my personal cup of tea, but there are good reasons people like them.” Most of those reasons will be familiar to Antiplanner readers, but they come as a surprise to many of Smith’s readers.

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Click image for a larger view. Click here for the study on which the chart is based.

One point that may surprise even Antiplanner readers is that, thanks mainly to the suburbs, Americans spend less time commuting than the commuters of almost any other developed nation. According to an OECD study, only Finland and Sweden have shorter commutes. Commutes in Europe are several minutes longer each way and commutes in Asia are much longer. So much for compact cities shortening commutes. Continue reading →

Highway Accidents Killed 36,640 People in 2025

By | | Transportation
22 Comments

In April, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration announced that motor vehicle accidents killed 36,640 people in 2025, a 6.7 percent decrease from 2024. Last week, the agency released a breakdown of 2025 fatality data for various categories. For example, urban freeway fatalities were down 10 percent; urban arterials down 12 percent; pedestrians down 8 percent; but bicycle fatalities were up 4 percent.

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Fatalities reached their lowest in the last 70 years in 2014, when only 32,744 people were killed in traffic accidents and were at their highest in 1972 at 55,600. Fatalities have declined each year since 2021, when 43,230 were killed on the highways. Continue reading →

May, 2026 Transit Ridership 82% of May, 2019

By | | Transportation, Useful Data
37 Comments

America’s public transit systems carried 82.1 percent as many riders in May of 2026 as in May of 2019, according to data released yesterday by the Federal Transit Administration. That’s down from 84.9 percent in April. This decline is mostly due to the fact that May had two fewer work days in 2026 than in 2019.

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Data for Amtrak will be presented here after it posts its May monthly performance report.

Transit is doing very well in the New York urban area, carrying 87.9 percent as many riders as in 2019. Since 46 percent of transit rides take place in the New York area, that significantly improves the nationwide average, which is only 77.5 percent without New York. Other major urban areas whose transit systems are above the national average (compared with May, 2019) include Cincinnati (102%), Houston (87%), Kansas City (98%), Las Vegas (85%), Miami (90%), San Diego (93%), Seattle (90%), and Washington (85%). Continue reading →

Despite $25M Grant, Brightline Still Dangerous

By | | Transportation
23 Comments

As of June 23, 2026, Brightline trains had killed 214 people, an average of one every 13 days since the passenger trains began operating in 2017. Make that 215, as Brightline killed a pedestrian on July 2.

In August 2022, Brightline announced that it had received a $25 million federal grant to fence its lines and make them safer. The state of Florida also contributed $10 million and Brightline itself agreed to match that, providing a total of $45 million for safety. Continue reading →

Thank You

By | | Housekeeping
7 Comments

In the spirit of freedom of speech, this long Independence Day weekend inspires me to thank everyone who reads this blog and particularly those who leave comments. As long-time readers know, I’ve tried to encourage comments on all sides of the debates by discouraging people from making ad hominem attacks.

I’d like to also call out one of this blog’s most loyal commentaters. Since August, 2024, he has posted well over 700 comments, including comments on almost every post I’ve made in that period. Many of his comments are critical of things that I’ve written, but he’s also critical of Systematicvisionary and other people whose opinions differ from mine. This commentater’s handle is “F*ck Car Culture” (* in original). Continue reading →

May Driving 2.5%, Flying 5.6% More Than 2019

By | | Transportation
5 Comments

Americans drove 2.5 percent more miles in May of 2026 than in the same month before the pandemic, according to data released yesterday by the Federal Highway Administration. In the same month, 5.6 percent more Americans flew than in May of 2019, according to Transportation Security Administration records.

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Transit and Amtrak data will be posted here as soon as it is available.

Driving grew in both urban and rural areas and on all kinds of roads. In particular, driving grew by 5.7 percent in rural areas and by 1.1 percent in urban areas. More miles were driving in May 2026 than in May 2019 in 32 states, while fewer miles were driving in the other 18 states plus DC. Within urban areas, driving grew in 28 states while driving grew in the rural areas of 36 states. Continue reading →

When Transit Is Overpriced, Fewer People Ride.
Who Knew?

By | | Transportation
39 Comments

New Jersey Transit officials were surprised to learn that, when they tried to gouge football fans by charging around $100 for a round-trip train ride to a World Cup event that totals just 8.4 miles each way, they didn’t get as many riders as they expected. In 2024, New Jersey Transit filled 25 percent of its commuter-train seats at a cost of $23 per ride. At $25 per roundtrip, it could have earned a profit if it filled just half the seats to the stadium. Instead, it went for four times that much.

One scene of a train car in this news report shows about half the the seats were empty. A lower fare would have filled more seats at no increase in operating costs.

It didn’t help that this stiff fare didn’t even offer one-seat rides to the stadium. First, riders in New York City had to get to New York Penn Station, probably on a subway. Then they would take a train to Secaucus Junction. From there they took another train to Met-Life Stadium. It is a transit industry axiom that it loses riders every time they ask people to transfer from one vehicle to another. Why couldn’t New Jersey Transit have offered a single train direct from Penn Station to the stadium? Continue reading →

Celebrating Density

By | | City planning
93 Comments

An urbanist named Devon Zuegel compares an aerial photo of the city center of Siena, Italy with a Houston freeway interchange (specifically, the eastern intersection of I-10 and I-610). Both occupy about the same amount of land, she says, but one is home to 30,000 people.

I am not sure what point Zuegel is trying to make. Does she think the freeway interchange is a waste of space because no one is living in it? If so, does she also think that the Piazza del Campo, the 6-acre plaza at the center of Siena’s city center, should be replaced with mid-rise housing? Continue reading →

Planning Fantasies Crash and Burn

By | | Housing, Transportation
45 Comments

“Parking minimums are a waste of money and land,” planners argue, so they immediately turn around and impose parking maxima, saying that people will be happy to live without cars if they aren’t required to pay for parking. Many developers have learned to their sorrow that this isn’t true, the latest being Scape, a British developer that was persuaded to build a 23-story apartment tower on the edge of downtown San Jose. Calls the Fay, the building offers only one parking space for every three units and the developer was unable to fill units that didn’t come with parking spaces.

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Completed in December 2024; foreclosed on in October, 2025. Photo from Google street view.

As a result, the developer defaulted on its $182 million construction loan and the lender foreclosed on the property just ten months after it opened. The city of San Jose took the building off the lender’s hands with the promise that it would provide “affordable housing” to city employees. The city said it would allow those employees to park their cars at city hall, thus undermining the whole “live without a car” philosophy. But since that was seven blocks away, few employees have taken advantage of it, and the building remains 60 percent vacant. Continue reading →