People like ski and snowboard towns. Here's an excerpt from a recent WSJ article talking about Park City:
Prices continued to rise in most luxury ski towns this past year, but none grew as much as Park City, a former silver mining town 32 miles east of Salt Lake City. The average home sale price there grew 35% in 2023 from 2022, compared with a 9.4% increase at Vail and Beaver Creek and 3.2% at Aspen, according to the resort report by Summit Sotheby’s International Realty.
The main point of the article is this: Park City has gotten really expensive, and so people are now looking and buying homes further out in places like Heber City, Midway, and Kamas. Here's how expensive expensive is:
Over the last four years, Covid has stoked demand for western resort real estate. In Park City, single-family homes have sold for a median price of $4 million year-to-date, up from $1.996 million in 2019, according to Redfin, which averaged the monthly median sales prices weighted for the number of homes sold. One home was listed in September for $65 million, which could set a record for the state. It’s now under contract, according to listing agent Paul Benson of Engel & Völkers, who declined to disclose the sale price.
This, of course, isn't a novel phenomenon. It's the whole "drive until you qualify" thing. But what's interesting about this particular mountain example is that it's not centered around access to a CBD or downtown; it's centered around "how fast can I get to a ski and snowboard resort?"
For example, Deer Valley has a new East Village that is expected to open up in 2025. This brings the cities mentioned above closer in. And buyers seem to be doing that math: "It's a 25-minute drive today, but next year I'll be able to get on a lift in 15 minutes. Score."
Given that Deer Valley also doesn't allow snowboarders, it's interesting to think about how these trends could be bifurcating the region between skiers and snowboarders. I don't have any data on this, but I bet if you mapped it out, there would be some sort of clustering happen.
The article also goes on to talk about transportation. Because you can't talk about new development and real estate without talking about traffic. But I think Bill Ciraco (Park City Council) gets it exactly right in the article: This is a car problem, and less of a people problem.
In my mind, the Wasatch Range is destined for something like this ONE Wasatch concept, which is/was a proposal to link seven resorts through a handful of new skiable connections. This is similar to what you'll find in Europe, and it means less driving and more time on the mountain.
That's what everyone wants to be doing anyway.
Photo by Lauren Pandolfi on Unsplash
This is the current state of global electric vehicle adoption:
Last year was the first year that global electric-vehicle sales reached 10% of all car sales -- the total was around 7.8 million cars (see above chart)
Fully-electric vehicles accounted for about 5.8% of all car sales in the US, 11% of all car sales in Europe, and about 19% of all car sales in China -- China is leading in this department
The US saw 807,180 fully-electric vehicle sales last year -- Tesla remains the biggest EV maker in the world
In Germany, electric vehicles accounted for about 25% of all new vehicles produced last year -- BMW reported a 5% decline in new-car sales, but saw its EV sales more than 2x
Similar story with Volkswagen: 7% decline in new-car sales; 26% increase in EV sales
This year, some are predicting that China will see EV sales increase to every third car, and that it will reach its tipping point sometime between 2025-2030
It is obvious where all of this is heading. It is simply a question of how fast, and who will be the leaders at the end of the day.
All data sourced from the WSJ
Over the past few years, I have been writing about the fall off in public transit ridership that we have seen as a result of the pandemic. Most recently, I mentioned it in my predictions for 2023.
This topic doesn't seem to get a lot of air time, but it is a problem. Because the standard way to operate a transit system in North America is at a loss.
According to this recent WSJ article, the average fare recovery ratio across the US is somewhere around 1/3, with the remaining 2/3 of operating costs being covered by public money.
(Somehow Japan has figured out a way to make money on rail.)
During the pandemic, federal aid was disbursed in order to maintain service levels. The MTA in New York, for example, received $15.1 billion. But these aid packages will eventually run out, and ridership has yet to fully return:
New York’s subway system has regained about two-thirds of its pre-pandemic ridership with about 91 million trips in November, according to the MTA. But that is about 50 million fewer rides than in November 2019. Officials worry usage has stalled out at that level.
In San Francisco, the Bay Area Rapid Transit, or BART, recorded 3.7 million trips in November—a little more than one-third of the ridership before Covid.
The obvious answer is likely to be a combination of service cuts and/or more public money. But an even better answer would be to use this opportunity to figure out how to make our transit systems a little more Japanese.
That is, let's make them more financially sustainable. And yes, that is going to necessarily involve looking at how we build around and on top of transit.