NewGeography.com blogs

With news that GM is closing its Lordstown assembly plant near Youngstown, I thought back to a short film I saw in grade school that made such an impression on me at the time that I never forgot it. In the wake of a strike at the plant in 1972, film makers interviewed workers at the plant and created a short documentary from it. Note at the scenes inside the plant are not from Lordstown. In fact, I think they are from a Ford plant. GM refused to cooperate with the film crew in any way, so they used other footage to give a look at life inside the plant in that era. If the video player doesn’t display for you, click over to watch on YouTube.

Another GM plant that’s closing is the one in Detroit’s former Poletown neighborhood. Steve Malanga at City Journal takes a look back at the senseless destruction of a city neighborhood carried out to build this plant that will now just become another hulking ruin in Detroit.

Maine governor Paul LePage has announced that he will move to Florida after his term expires in 2019. According to The Hill, taxes are driving the Governor away. He said: “I will pay no income tax and the house in Florida’s property taxes are $2,000 less than we were paying in Boothbay,” LePage said. “At my age, why wouldn’t you conserve your resources and spend it on family [rather] than spend it on taxes?”

According to the Wall Street Journal, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo said that young people are returning "to upstate cities such as Buffalo." The Governor continued, “This is reality, these are numbers.” Cuomo was quoted in a 27 September article on the population and economic stagnation in New York. Actually, the latest American Community Survey domestic migration data for the Buffalo metropolitan area, there was net outmigration in 2011-2015. The rate of net loss was nearly double the metropolitan area loss rate among those aged 20 to 24, and more than triple the metropolitan rate among those aged 25 to 34. That is the reality, at least according to data developed by the US Census Bureau.

After years of substantially increasing numbers, working at home has now exceeded transit as an employment access mode. In 2017, 8 million people worked at home, compared to 7.6 million riding transit in the U.S. Since 2010, the share of workers at home has risen 21 percent, compared to transit’s 1 percent rise. More details will follow on newgeography.com shortly.

The Nikkei Asian Review reports that: “A high-speed rail line connecting Seoul to Incheon International Airport will be abolished after just four years of service, as the expensive, politically motivated project loses the ridership race to buses.” Incheon is the principal international airport for the world’s fourth largest urban area, Seoul, which has 24 million residents. The Review reported that “Average daily ridership last year totaled only 3,433 passengers, which left 77% of seats unoccupied. Carriages were especially empty during weekday hours.”

The Review contrasted this with the airport volume: “Yet 42.23 million passengers boarded international flights during the first half of 2018, up 14% on the year, transport ministry data shows. … These numbers indicate that air passengers simply did not choose KTX to reach the Seoul-area airport.”

The line had fallen 97 percent short of its projected ridership, according to The Korea Times, which reported that daily ridership was to have reached 490,000 by 2010, yet was only 16,000 last year. This may have been the highest projection error in the history of an industry plagued by such inaccuracies (see: High-Speed Rail: Toward Least-Worst Projections).