The other day, Samo Burja noted that while Europe has a lower per capita GDP than America, Japan’s is even lower:
Now, Samo makes what I think is a major mistake here — using GDP at market exchange rates rather than at purchasing power parity. If only imports mattered for living standards, we could use market exchange rate GDP here, since that reflects how many imports you can afford. But because most of what people buy — rent, health care, transportation, and so on — is produced domestically, you really need to account for those prices when you measure living standards. If people can get cheaper rent, health care, and transportation, they are richer. This is what PPP tries to do. And when we look at the PPP numbers1 for the U.S., Austria, and Japan, they’re a lot closer together than the numbers Samo quoted:
In fact, Japanese people aren’t actually less than half as rich as Americans. They’re about two-thirds as rich.
But there are a number of people who think even that difference is greatly exaggerated. They point out that Japan has a very safe society with high life expectancy and functional public transit, while America is a comparatively dangerous society with much lower life expectancy and poor public transit. Here are a few examples of replies I got when I pointed out that Japanese living standards are significantly lower than Americans’:
To answer East Bay Ray’s question, I have lived in Japan for four years, so I think I have a decently good perspective on how Japanese people live. I think what’s going on here is that Ray lived in Japan a while ago, and Japan and the U.S. used to be a lot closer to each other in terms of living standards:
In 1991, Japan’s per capita GDP (PPP) was about 85% of America’s. Today it’s about 65%. That’s a big difference! Even when I first lived in Japan in the mid-2000s, it was around 70%. Japan’s living standards have been growing only very slowly for decades, while America’s have improved significantly faster. Exactly why that has happened is a topic for another day — it’s a combination of population aging, inefficiencies in the Japanese economy, and trade diversion by China, in rough order of importance. But the point is that Japan is no longer the Japan of the 1990s, or even of the 2000s.
Is GDP the right metric for measuring living standards, though? Many people think it’s not, and the people who replied to my tweet definitely think other factors that don’t appear in GDP are equally important. But when we see a gap as big as the one between the U.S. and Japan has become, it’s definitely going to be real.
Unmeasured quality-of-life factors cut both ways
So let me say, first of all, that the commenters who point out areas where Japan has a quality-of-life advantage over America in areas like safety, longevity, and urbanism are quite correct. There are definitely some ways in which life in Japan is still superior to life in America. Back in the mid-2000s, I judged life in Japan to be about as good as life in America, once these things were taken into account. They do make a big difference.
Let’s go over what these are. As many people note, safety is the most obvious huge difference between Japan and the U.S. America’s murder rate is about 25 times as high as Japan’s.2 Other violent crimes are far lower as well. As I pointed out in my last post, it’s not just murder and violence that are lower in Japan — it’s also public disorder. Japanese cities are so safe that kids can walk around in them alone at night. The TV show Old Enough!, where little kids go on errands alone, might not quite be realistic (there is a camera crew of adults following the kids around), but it’s not too far off the mark either. I have personally witnessed elementary school students walking alone on the streets of Japanese city centers very late at night; they were in no danger except from the occasional car.
It’s this safety, along with high-quality public transit, reasonable zoning laws, good urban design, and support for small business, that allows Japan to have some of the nicest cities on planet Earth. The beautiful, clean public spaces packed with huge numbers of interesting shops and restaurants are probably without parallel in the world. The convenience of suburban neighborhoods, filled with plentiful parks and shops within easy walking distance, makes daily life much nicer.
Japan is also a much healthier place than the U.S. Low levels of violence, drug use, and obesity lead to longer life expectancy and less need to use the health care system. In fact, the life expectancy gap with the U.S. has increased from 3.6 years in 1990 to 5.4 years in 2023.
Public safety, good urbanism, and healthier lifestyles are real, important factors that improve living standards in Japan. These “amenity values”, as economists call them, are not generally reflected in rents or other local prices — it’s difficult to move from country to country, so countries with generally worse health and safety don’t have to raise rents much in order to keep people from moving overseas. Thus, these things really do shrink the actual gap in living standards between the U.S. and Japan, relative to the measured GDP numbers.
There are some other things that shrink the gap as well.3 Japanese people probably do a bit more unpaid eldercare than Americans. Multigenerational households are more common in Japan than in the U.S., and Japan has a higher proportion of old people, meaning that people spend more time taking care of their aged parents in their off hours. That represents real service production (which economists call “home production”) that goes uncounted in GDP.
But here’s the thing — those aren’t the only unmeasured factors that affect GDP. There are plenty of ways where America quietly comes out ahead.
Most important of these is leisure. GDP only measures the value of things that actually get produced — the value of time you spend enjoying your life is not counted in GDP, even though it surely contributes to living standards. Americans are famous for working a lot, and Europeans’ greater leisure time is often cited as an unmeasured advantage in living standards. With the U.S. and Japan, though, this works in the opposite direction.
First of all, despite Japan’s greater fraction of elderly people, a significantly higher percentage of Japanese work than Americans. This was not always true, but since around 2010, essentially everyone in Japan has a job — women, the elderly, teenagers, etc.
Officially, Japanese people work the same number of hours per year as Americans — about 1750. But this statistic is deceptive, because it includes all of the part-time marginal workers (elderly, teenagers, part-time housewives, etc.) who have shifted into the labor force since 2010. Full-time Japanese workers are still working more than their American counterparts.
Also, although apples-to-apples comparisons are hard to find in the data, Japanese people probably do more unpaid overtime. This was definitely true back when I lived there. Substantial progress has been made in reducing this over the last decade — the era of “death from overwork” is mostly over, and companies that make their employees stay in the office all night have been stigmatized. But my bet is that Japan still edges out America in this regard.
(And although I can’t prove it, I’m reasonably sure that most Japanese people have a much higher percentage of “time on task” during their working hours, as opposed to reading Substack articles and scrolling Instagram.)
Japanese people tend to take far fewer vacation days than they’re entitled to, for cultural reasons. Surveys find that the average Japanese worker takes 8.8 days of vacation per year, while Americans take about twice as many. And Japanese people spend a longer time commuting — a 2015 survey showed their average commute was 50 minutes a day, compared to 25 minutes in America. That translates to more than 100 extra hours of commuting time per year.
Finally, all that unpaid eldercare in Japan reduces actual leisure time. In fact, since this eldercare is a “labor of love” (or perhaps a labor of obligation) that would command only a low wage if it were paid, the unmeasured boost to Japan’s GDP from eldercare is probably more than cancelled out by the unmeasured reduction in leisure. Even as unpaid overtime at work has fallen, home eldercare has increased, due to Japan’s rapidly aging population. Even accounting for America’s greater number of children per household, Japan has a significantly higher number of dependents per worker:
Add this all up, and Japanese people exist in a world of toil. That unmeasured lack of leisure time at least partly cancels out the unmeasured quality-of-life improvements from public safety, health, and urbanism.
Americans who go to Japan as tourists only see the good stuff and not the bad, because they aren’t working. They shop and play in the beautiful safe cities all day long, while the Japanese people who keep those cities running are stuck in dingy open-plan offices until all hours of the night.
The point here is not that Japanese lifestyles are horrible compared to American lifestyles — that’s partly a matter of taste. Nor am I claiming that long hours of toil and drudgery are necessary for long lives and safe beautiful cities. I do not believe they are; I don’t think there’s actually a tradeoff here. But if you want to include unmeasured amenities in comparisons of living standards, you should include all of them, or at least as many as you can.
Money matters
If the non-monetary differences between Japanese and American lifestyles are a bit ambiguous, the monetary differences are incredibly clear.
Let’s start with salaries. The Japanese government takes surveys of starting salaries, and the good folks at RealEstateJapan have a handy table breaking down the 2019 numbers for us:
The starting salary for a college graduate just before the pandemic was 210,200 yen per month. At current exchange rates, that’s $1338.23 per month, or just about $16,000 per year.
That’s incredibly low. That’s barely above the poverty line for a single individual in the United States, and it’s below the poverty line for a family. And that is the starting salary of a college graduate.
It’s actually not quite that horrible, for two reasons. First, Japanese companies also pay semiannual bonuses. For workers in their early 20s, these add up to somewhere around 300,000 yen a year; for workers in their late 20s, closer to 800,000 yen a year. At current exchange rates, that would correspond to about $1900 for an early-20s worker and $5000 for a late-20s worker.
But including those bonuses still leaves starting salaries for college graduates in Japan at somewhere between $18,000 and $21,000. Those are still poverty wages!
There’s a second factor we need to take into account here, which is that Japanese prices are lower — $18,000 goes farther in Japan than it does in America. This is why we like to use PPP to compare living standards. The World Bank’s PPP conversion factor for Japan is about 1.5. So after taking prices into account, an early 20s college grad in Japan can expect to make about the equivalent of An American making $27,000 a year.
For reference, American college graduates made about $51,500 in 2019. That’s almost twice as much as their counterparts in Japan, after you take local consumer price differences into account.
This difference gets a bit less as workers get older — Japanese companies tend to pay based on seniority, while American companies tend to pay more based on performance, so Japanese full-time employees usually get to enjoy a more steady, predictable upward career path (part-time employees and contract workers are, on the other hand, kind of screwed). But the tradeoff there is that the Japanese full-time workers have a lot less motivation to stand out, take risks, learn new skills, or come up with new ideas, because their promotions and raises will depend on seniority more than on their own personal accomplishments. And in any case, even when Japanese workers reach the peak of their careers, their American equivalents still get paid a lot more than they do, even if it’s no longer twice as much.
So Japanese people are out there working long hours for wages that would make Americans rebel. Think about it — in your 20s, after graduating from your university, how would you have liked to go nose-to-the-grindstone day after day for the same salary that a McDonald’s fry cook makes in America? (Of course, blue-collar wages in Japan are even lower, as the table above demonstrates.)
Those monetary differences translate into real differences in consumption. Let’s take housing, which is the biggest item in both Japanese and American budgets. Japanese houses are actually average by rich-country standards, but still much smaller than American ones. Here’s residential floor space per capita:
Similarly, in terms of residential rooms per person, Japan scores a very respectable 1.9, but Americans come in at 2.4.
Japan has come a long way since the tiny “rabbit hutches” of the 1980s, but a typical one-person apartment in urban Japan now looks like the one at the top of this post, except less stylish and elegant, and with less natural light. Americans walking through the beautiful metropolis of Tokyo, sampling its well-appointed boutiques and restaurants, have no idea of the kind of private domestic spaces the people around them are returning to at night — small tenements similar to what you’d find in New York City, except much less well-furnished. I certainly didn’t mind living in places like that when I was 23 years old, because being in Japan was an adventure — but most Americans would balk at that.
As for the single-family homes that Japanese families prefer, those look like this:
This is very far from a shack, but it’s also far from what a middle-class American would aspire to. There’s no yard, the facade is plain and cheap-looking, and the size isn’t very impressive.
Besides housing, what else can Japanese people buy less of? Vacations, for one, since as I mentioned, Japanese people take much less time off. Also, food. Americans who go to Japan and eat out at the nice restaurants there don’t realize how rarely the average Japanese person can afford to eat at places like that.
Appliances, too — Japanese clothes dryers don’t really dry your clothes, and central AC is a rarity. As incomes have diverged between America and Japan over the last two decades, I’ve noticed Americans buying all kinds of new modern conveniences — air fryers, Instant Pots, projectors, sound systems, and so on. As far as I can tell, most of these are still rare in Japan.4
A fourth example is pet care — Japanese rabbit keepers will tell you that a pet rabbit’s expected lifespan is 6 to 8 years, while American rabbit keepers will tell you it’s 10 to 14, because of the differences in veterinary care. A fifth example is transportation — a $2 train ride is nothing to an American tourist, but middle-class Japanese people are sensitive about their travel budgets.
Basically, the answer to what Japanese people can’t buy as much of is “almost everything”. They can actually buy about the same amount of health care, since prices are tightly controlled. But otherwise, Japanese people just live with a bit less of everything.
Japan has a relatively high number of poor people for an advanced country. Defined by the percentage of the population earning less than half of the median national income, Japan’s poverty rate is more than 15% -- a little lower than the U.S., but considerably higher than countries such as Germany, Canada or Australia:
Japanese poverty is a quiet affair. There are almost no slums or shantytowns. The streets are generally clean and well-kept. Homeless people sleep out of sight. So-called evaporated people leave their homes and families and eke out meager, anonymous existences. Single people live in tiny bare apartments little larger than a closet. Elderly people who never recovered from the economic bust of the 1990s suffer in the shadows. Many shop at 100-yen stores (similar to dollar stores) just to survive.
Children are going hungry too. Almost 14% of kids, or some 3.5 million in all, are estimated to live in poverty -- and that’s already down from a peak of more than 16% in 2012. To combat the problem, local governments around the country are opening thousands of cafeterias where children can eat for free.
And in 2020, Bloomberg’s Marika Katanuma wrote about how women often bear the brunt of this poverty:
According to government data, the monthly cost of living for a Japanese household with more than two people is 287,315 yen ($2,650). Some 15.7% of Japanese households live below the poverty line, which is about $937 per month.
More than 40% of part-time working women earn 1 million yen ($9,100) or less a year, according to Japan’s Internal Affairs and Communications Ministry. The lack of benefits, job security and opportunity for advancement—hallmarks of full-time employment in Japan—make such women financially vulnerable, particularly if they don’t have a partner to share expenses with.
Americans typically just don’t see this when they travel to Japan. Poverty in the country is hidden — city parks used to have sections where homeless people could pitch their tents, but the need to cater to the tourism boom has done away with that custom. Japanese people’s economic struggles occur in private spaces, between their apartments and their workplaces.
When American tourists go to the urbanist Disneyland that is Tokyo, they’re going there on an American salary. What’s more, they’re going at a time when the yen is incredibly weak against the dollar. When I lived in Japan for the first time in the 2000s, a dollar could buy between 105 and 120 yen — now, it’s close to 160. That means Americans can live very high on the hog on their trips to the Land of the Rising Sun. The country feels rich to them because in that country, they are rich. A lot richer than most of the people they see on the street.
The purpose of this post is not to bash or shame Japan — the stagnant economy is simply a huge challenge that needs to be overcome, and in fact I have a few ideas for how to do this. I’ll write more about that later. But the purpose of this post is to remind Americans how good they actually have it. Declaring America to be a third-world shithole has become fashionable on all parts of the political spectrum these days, and sure, America has plenty of problems that need to be solved. But just for once, I wish Americans would realize how ahead of the pack their country is in so many regards.
Note that “international dollars” is another name for PPP, and “nominal” is a word that’s sometimes used to mean “market exchange rate GDP”. Confusing, I know. Also, the U.S.’ GDP is supposed to be the same in terms of market exchange rates and PPP, but you can see above that there’s a difference between the World Bank’s PPP number for the U.S. and Samo’s number. This is mainly because they’re two different data sources — Samo is citing IMF. It’s also a little bit due to the different year (2022 vs. 2024).
Although Black Americans are famously more likely to get murdered than White Americans, White Americans are about 10 times as likely to get murdered as Japanese people. That’s still a huge difference.
Another of these might be quality differences, but it’s hard to tell which way this goes. PPP comparisons are supposed to take differences in the quality of goods and services into account — if hairstylists in the U.S. give crappy haircuts, and hairstylists in Japan give great haircuts, you should take that difference into account instead of just comparing “the price of a haircut” between the two countries. In reality, this is very, very hard to do, and so lots of real quality differences end up getting ignored in the PPP measurements. People who have lived in Japan know that many local goods and services are just a little higher quality than their equivalents in America. Japanese milk tastes a little bit better than milk in the U.S. At Starbucks in America, tables are typically covered in crumbs and detritus; in Japan, employees wipe the tables down frequently. Roads in Japan have fewer potholes, windows are cleaner, waiters won’t get your order wrong. And so on. Then again, Japanese furniture tends to be low-quality, so I guess it’s hard to draw a general conclusion one way or another. This is also true of the housing stock. Japan’s urban apartments are generally better than America’s, because Japan knocks down old apartments and builds new ones at a famously high rate. This gives them better insulation, better soundproofing, less accumulated crap in the air vents, and a hundred other things that make new apartments better than old ones. On the other hand, America’s single-family homes tend to be much nicer, featuring central AC systems, kitchen islands, and all sorts of other amenities. It’s unlikely that PPP is catching all of those differences, but I don’t know which way they change the headline numbers.
There are a few devices Japanese people tend to have more of, like rice cookers. Most of these were things that Japanese companies like Panasonic produced back in the 1980s, 90s, and 00s, when Japan’s economy was growing more quickly.
A process to split methane into its components, hydrogen and carbon, is advertised as a way to make hydrogen from fossil gas without emissions. Yet, claims that methane pyrolysis is free of CO₂ emissions or more efficient than water electrolysis are highly misleading.
South Korean lawmakers impeached the country’s acting president on Friday, accusing him of impeding efforts to complete the impeachment of President Yoon Suk Yeol.
The country has been gripped by a political crisis since Yoon attempted to impose martial law earlier this month, citing “anti-state forces.” His case now sits before Seoul’s constitutional court, with six of nine justices required to cast affirmative votes required to uphold the impeachment, but only six currently sit on the bench: Acting President Han Duck Soo blocked the appointment of three others, drawing uproar from the legislature.
The domestic turmoil is triggering global reverberations: Yoon has been a staunch US ally and his impeachment could lead to a major shift in Seoul’s foreign policy, The New York Times noted.
Since the election, a conventional wisdom has emerged to the effect that Democrats lost in large part because Joe Biden adopted lax border policies, which led to voter backlash against an influx of immigration, and therefore that tougher immigration restrictions are the road to political success. In an insightful recent piece, my Cato Institute colleague Alex Nowrasteh pushes back on some key parts of this narrative.
As Alex points out, Biden in fact did adopt numerous restrictive border policies, including continuing draconian Title 42 expulsions under bogus "public health" pretexts until May 2023, Trump-lite asylum restrictions, and more:
[David] Leonhardt ignores Biden's numerous actions on the border, from maintaining Title 42, reinstating Remain in Mexico, curtailing asylum, boosting deportations and removals over the level of Trump, and over 100 other actions to shut illegal immigration. Leonhardt blames Biden's campaign statements that imply immigrants should come to the United States. Still, Leonhardt ignores his numerous statements to the contrary since the election – such as in March 2021 when he said, "I can say quite clearly: Don't come."
President Biden even sent his VP and eventual Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris to Central America to repeat the message "Do not come" in 2021 – a tour that primarily highlighted the administration's inability to stop illegal immigration. Leonhardt has no explanation for why Biden's words mattered when they seemed to encourage illegal immigration, and they didn't matter when he sought to more clearly and forcefully persuade people not to come.
As Alex explains, these policies could not prevent extensive illegal border-crossing, because the latter was primarily dictated by strong US labor-market demand, and horrific oppression and economic conditions in many of the migrants' countries of origin. Indeed, restrictive policies making legal entry difficult or impossible for most would-be migrants predictably exacerbated the illegal kind. That, in turn led to the kind of disorder and chaos at the border that angers many voters, and make it politically difficult to expand opportunities for legal migration, even though the latter are the best way to prevent the chaos voters dislike.
As Alex puts it:
Border chaos is an ally of ideological immigration restrictionists like Stephen Miller, who use it to support restrictions on legal immigration. Reducing legal immigration was the greatest achievement of the Trump administration's immigration policy from Miller's perspective, and it will be again. The president has control over legal immigration; he doesn't have nearly so much power over illegal immigration…..
This is the Catch-22 of expanding legal immigration. Border chaos is caused by restrictive US immigration laws that make legal immigration impossible for most, but border chaos prevents liberalization because voters are understandably repelled by disorder. More enforcement reduces illegal immigration, but only temporarily and at high costs. With the economic benefits of migration as high as they are, it's truly incredible that the government is able to reduce immigration as much as it currently is able to, but it will always look like an utter failure.
In cases where Biden did make legal entry easier, as with the creation of the CHNV program for migrants from four Latin America nations, illegal entries from those countries declined greatly. Unfortunately, as David Bier and I explained in a 2023 article, arbitrary numerical caps and the limitation of this program to only four countries severely limited its effects.
For what it's worth, Alex, David Bier, and I have long argued that disorder at the border strengthens restrictionist sentiment, and that increasing legal migration opportunities is both good in itself, and a valuable strategy for reducing chaos and disorder. As Alex likes to put it, we need to "make immigration policy boring." His new article includes a useful thought experiment illustrating this point:
Imagine the 2024 election without the over 7.2 million border encounters during Biden's administration. Imagine a lack of shocking videos of thousands of migrants streaming across the Rio Grande, rushing Border Patrol agents, or turning themselves in to law enforcement in the desert. There are no images of barbed wire, fortifications that look like they're being stormed, soldiers, tear gas, or smugglers dropping children off on the US side of the river.
Imagine, instead, 7.2 million more legal immigrants and temporary migrant workers flying into the US on lawful visas to live, work, and start businesses during Biden's administration (encounters and individuals aren't the same, but work with me). They mostly came from a dozen Latin American countries and arrived in hundreds of locations across the US as families or as individual workers. No dramatic bussing by Texas' governor, no mass chaos at the border. Just millions of more people orderly entering through a legal immigration system simplified and expanded by Congress and an administration seeking more order and legal immigration.
No reporters would be making their careers filming border chaos because there wouldn't be much to film. Calls to build a wall would sound like fanciful calls to build a giant space laser to ward off space aliens. Immigration would have dropped from a top-tier issue to third or fourth-tier – at best.
The Democrats might still have lost the election thanks to inflation and price increases (The most important issues for voters, according to surveys). But immigration would not have been a significant cause of their woes.
Obviously, disorder at the border isn't the only cause anti-immigration sentiment. There are also various economic and cultural arguments, plus generalized xenophobia. But disorder is nonetheless a major factor, that easing legal migration could greatly reduce.
Alex makes many more good points, which are not easily summarized here. If you're interested in these issues, read the whole thing!
Second, like Alex, I favor reducing migrant access to welfare (though, as he notes, migrants already use it at much lower rates than natives). But I am not, so far, convinced this will make a big difference to public opinion. Most voters are "rationally ignorant" about policy details and don't know to what extent migrants (or even natives) have access to various welfare benefits. Chaos at the border has more of an impact on public opinion because it is dramatic, and often readily visible even to people who don't follow politics closely and don't know much about most policy issues.
During the holidays while GGWash’s office is closed, we’re sharing our favorite posts from 2024: “Having a sheltered place to sit while waiting for the bus can be the difference between someone being able to access the bus or not—especially among seniors and people with disabilities. Santiago’s post is my top pick of the year because it shines a light on an overlooked issue that affects hundreds of thousands of riders annually. Santiago educates us about how the current agreement falls short for riders who need bus shelters the most, how urban heat and bus shelters overlap (or don’t) and suggests what DDOT can do to improve bus shelter equity in the next agreement.”—Kai Hall, Policy Officer
DC has a legal maximum of 788 bus shelters — meaning only around 25% of its over 3,000 Metrobus stops can have a shelter. This contractual (not statutory) limit, the result of archaic agreements, coupled with the way shelters have been placed over the years, means that wealthier, whiter, and less transit-dependent communities are more likely to have bus shelters. But it doesn’t have to be that way.
Bus shelters, while maybe less sexy of a topic than bus lanes or electric buses, are critical to supporting existing ridership and attracting new riders to the bus. Shelters allow riders to rest and stay protected from the elements, including direct sunlight, which is especially important in the urban heat islands across DC. The District’s own “Keep Cool DC” plan to tackle urban heat islands touts bus shelters as a solution to protect riders from extreme heat.
Our current predicament
The District Department of Transportation (DDOT) manages bus shelters through a 20-year franchise agreement, similar to a public-private partnership, with the outdoor advertising company Clear Channel Outdoor (formerly a part of iHeartRadio). The agreement, signed in 2005, delegates the installation, management, and repair of all bus shelters in the District to Clear Channel in exchange for a cut of the revenue from ads shown on the shelters. As of now, that revenue is used to service the District’s general debt and does not go back to infrastructure investments for bus riders. The agreement also creates an artificial maximum, limiting the District to only 788 bus shelters. What this leads to is the status quo: fewer bus shelters than riders need and an inequitable placement of existing shelters that don’t adequately serve riders who need them most.
Map of bus shelters in the heat island near high ridership routes on Bladensburg Road and Benning Road NE. Thick blue lines on the map are MetroBus routes with over 4,500 daily riders, while thin blue lines on the map are MetroBus routes. Blue and green shading indicate cooler temperatures in the urban heat island, while yellow, orange, and red progressively indicate hotter temperatures in the urban heat island.
Map of bus shelters in a much cooler Cathedral Heights and McLean Gardens along lower ridership routes. Thick blue lines on the map are MetroBus routes with over 4,500 daily riders, while thin blue lines on the map are MetroBus routes. Blue and green shading indicate cooler temperatures in the urban heat island, while yellow, orange, and red progressively indicate hotter temperatures in the urban heat island.
Under the current franchise agreement, riders in wealthier, cooler (temperature-wise), less transit-dependent neighborhoods are far more likely to have a bus shelter nearby than those in less wealthy, transit-dependent neighborhoods that experience the worst of the urban heat island effect. For example, someone who rides the N4 bus on Massachusetts Avenue NW in Tenleytown will likely have a bus shelter to wait in, whereas someone who rides the B2 bus on Bladensburg Road NE in Carver-Langston is far less likely to be sheltered from the elements. That is despite the B2 having six times more riders than the N4 and ranking as the fourth highest-ridership bus route in DC.
Bus shelters are also a critical safeguard for some of the most vulnerable bus riders: seniors. Seniors, especially those with health conditions, are more likely to benefit from the protection of a bus shelter as one of the groups most susceptible to health risks from exposure to extreme heat. In addition to just protecting from heat, bus shelters and benches designed for comfort offer a respite for seniors and riders with disabilities who need to rest when waiting for a bus, ensuring the bus system is accessible to all.
Bus shelters are not a panacea for tackling the urban heat island, but they do provide a measure of protection — especially from direct sunlight. Recent innovations in shelters have added green roofs, further enhancing their cooling capacity through evaporative cooling. Other District agencies, including the Department of Energy and the Environment (DOEE) and the Homeland Security and Emergency Management Agency (HSEMA), are addressing this by applying for federal funding to build trial versions of bus shelters that can better cool down a bus stop and protect users against extreme heat. District leaders and agency staff should keep this experiment in mind as we consider purchasing new shelters.
What’s next?
All of this is not an insurmountable bureaucratic problem. Bus shelters are a relatively cheap piece of infrastructure that can be mass-produced and also happen to bring in revenue that allows them to pay for themselves and even generate additional revenue for the District.
The current bus shelter franchise agreement expires in December 2025, with a one-year renewal negotiation period that begins at the end of this year. The District is currently embroiled in a legal battle with Clear Channel, its current franchisee, over ad revenue payments Clear Channel had to make during the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic. This legal battle seems to have led agency leaders to stay quiet on the future of bus shelters and is just another sign that it is time for the District to rethink its approach to bus shelters to one that doesn’t include Clear Channel. DDOT risks perpetuating bus shelter inequities—and by extension health and climate inequities—if it decides to renew the franchise agreement with Clear Channel.
A new way forward
Los Angeles, infamously known for “La Sombrita,” may have redeemed itself and actually offers a good model bus shelter franchise agreement that the District should follow. The city of Los Angeles and the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority (LACMTA) will pay for the capital cost of purchasing and installing thousands of new bus shelters, allowing it to prioritize serving residents equitably, while its franchisee will maintain the shelters and operate advertising networks on the shelters. Part of the revenue from that advertising would go back to the city, allowing the city and the LACMTA to cover the original capital costs of installing new shelters while earning a return on their investment.
This relatively simple change to the structure of the agreement can become the norm for bus shelters in the District and the United States. In 2022, the District brought in almost $8.2 million in advertising revenue from its 711 bus shelters, approximately $11,500 per shelter, per year. At that rate, adding an additional 1,000 shelters could bring that total closer to up to $19 million in revenue per year. Changing the agreement would allow the District to expand its bus shelter network — making buses more accessible to riders and making communities more resilient to the negative effects of climate change, all while increasing revenues, something important in a time of tight budgets. Unlike most things in the District’s budget, when it comes to bus shelter equity, DC can have its cake and eat it, too.
Editor’s note: This article has been updated to clarify the contractual nature of the cap on bus shelters.
If you weren’t aware that Martin Short was hosting Saturday Night Live last night, you might have had a difficult time figuring that out. It’s not that Short wasn’t in sketches—he was, using his natural flair for showmanship as he sang about getting medicated for the holidays. It’s just that a lot of other celebrities were also there. Lots and lots of them: Melissa McCarthy, Tom Hanks, Kristen Wiig, Scarlett Johansson, Paul Rudd.
The evening felt like SNL flexing its muscles as it heads into its 50th anniversary celebration in February, a testament to its might as an entertainment superpower—and the episode capped a fall season during which guest spots have grown from fun cameos to essential elements of the show. Yet this episode’s glut also felt like a criminal underuse of Short, who, after all these years, still gets relegated to sidekick status.
The cold open set the tone. It began with Hanks sitting regally in a robe and explaining the concept of the show’s “five-timers club,” the somewhat hollow honor that is bestowed (along with a robe emblazoned with the number 5) on those who have hosted five times. After Rudd joined Hanks, Short arrived on the clubroom set to cheers, but the applause for his big moment was quickly drowned out by hosannas for the parade of others that followed. In addition to the aforementioned stars came Tina Fey, Alec Baldwin, Emma Stone, John Mulaney, and Jimmy Fallon.
The sketch emphasized just how much the current iteration of SNL relies on famous faces. Fey turned to Short and said, “First things first, we need to make sure you’re really ready to be a five-timer. Quick: Name three current cast members.” Short paused and then shot off the correct answer: “No idea.”
That self-lacerating gag turned out to be more than a punch line for the episode. Sure, a couple of cast members had breakthrough moments—Bowen Yang killed on “Weekend Update” playing a sassy drone; Marcello Hernandez reprised his fast-talking Sábado Gigante host Don Francisco—but through the night the cameos (such as Rudd playing the Spanish-language game show’s bewildered English-speaking guest) were what sustained the sketches’ momentum.
For another example, just when you thought “Parking Lot Altercation,” in which Short and Mikey Day played Christmas shoppers warring about a parking spot with over-the-top miming gestures, was wearing thin, McCarthy appeared as Short’s aggressive wife. Wearing a wig with a Kate Gosselin haircut, she spit what appeared to be iced coffee on Day’s car window and rubbed her breasts in the residue. Chloe Fineman, playing Day’s bratty daughter, couldn’t help but break.
Later, “Christmas Airport Parade” was just that: a procession of special guests. Yang and Ego Nwodim played enthusiastic TSA agents introducing all of the oddball characters who populate Newark airport during the holidays, but the biggest audience whoops came when Rudd showed up as himself, McCarthy played a gate agent who lewdly mispronounced passenger names, and Hanks reprised his role from Clint Eastwood’s Sullyas the “Miracle on the Hudson” pilot, Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger. Clever observations about how people behave while traveling were overshadowed by the blinding lights of Hollywood.
Even “Weekend Update” benefited from the added star power. Michael Che and Colin Jost’s annual ritual of mutual humiliation, in which each co-host reads jokes the other one wrote sight unseen, was amped up with reaction shots from Jost’s famous wife, Johansson, who watched in horror from backstage as Che made him recite jokes at the couple’s expense in a corny “Black voice.”
SNL has been relying on cast alumni and high-wattage friends of the show a lot this season. Election coverage brought out Maya Rudolph and Andy Samberg as Kamala Harris and Doug Emhoff, respectively. And Dana Carvey can’t seem to leave the studio, even though the series isn’t relying on his Joe Biden impression anymore. He was there last night, too, just being wacky in the Sábado Gigante sketch.
On one hand, this celebrity cornucopia feels a little lazy. Rudd and Johansson get automatic cheers that can sub in for earned laughter or applause. On the other, bringing them all out is smart business, serving as a reminder of the show’s brand loyalty and staying power in the run-up to a banner year it hopes can also translate to big-time ratings.
And yet the overuse of this crutch was frustrating last night, most of all because Short suffered for it. In the final sketch of the night, “Peanuts Christmas,” he played a flamboyant director who had no time for the goofy dancing of Charles M. Schulz’s characters. It was a late reminder of Short’s irrepressible dynamism on stage. Short and Yang made a great team shaming the Peanuts children. If only we had gotten to see more of that.
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