The Antiplanner

The world won’t be the same without you. I’ll remember your songs every time I hike in the wilderness.

Will a high-speed rail line ever be built from San Francisco to Los Angeles? The California High-Speed Rail Authority (CHSRA) has less than 10 percent of the money it needs to build this line. The plan is increasingly under fire from local and state organizations. On one hand, President Obama’s vague and controversial proposal to spend $50 billion to “rebuild 150,000 miles of roads [and] construct and maintain 4,000 miles of railway” could keep the California project alive. On the other hand, if Republican Meg Whitman is elected state governor this November, she could kill the program.

Can’t afford to build it; can’t afford to run it. Maybe it isn’t needed?

A recent op ed in the San Francisco Chronicle succinctly points out that projected costs have nearly doubled since voters approved the plan, adequate funding is unavailable, and–”with 10 airports and six competing airlines”–the San Francisco-Los Angeles corridor doesn’t need high-speed rail anyway.

Perhaps most important, the measure approved by voters in 2008 forbade any tax subsidies for operations. Yet recent recalculations of ridership projections and costs make it clear that fares will never cover operating costs, so even if they build it, they would not be able to run it (at least, without changing the law and finding money for operating subsidies).

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Donald Shoup supports free parking. At least, in a response to my first post about Tyler Cowen’s op ed against free parking, Dr. Shoup points out that he only wants the price of parking to be “right,” and “the right price [for parking] will often be zero.”

However, the main purpose of Shoup’s response is to correct my mistaken claim that he supports maximum-parking requirements, requirements that all businesses charge for parking, or other coercive policies. I apologize for that error.

In fact, Shoup’s book, The High Cost of Free Parking, argues only that cities should eliminate minimum-parking requirements and charge market rates for on-street parking, things that the Antiplanner favors as well. Where we disagree is about the effects of these policies.

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Two weeks ago, the Antiplanner responded with dismay to George Mason University economist Tyler Cowen’s op ed against free parking. This led to a variety of responses in the blogosphere, none of which address the Antiplanner’s point. Instead, they all argue against the minimum-parking requirements found in many zoning regulations.

In particular, Cowen himself points to a study that found that Los Angeles’ minimum-parking requirements forced some developers to build more parking than they would have without such requirements. But Cowen’s op ed was titled, “Free Parking Comes at a Price,” not “Minimum-Parking Requirements Come at a Price.” The op ed was based on a book by Donald Shoup titled “The High Cost of Free Parking,” not “The High Cost of Minimum-Parking Requirements.”

Nothing the Antiplanner wrote defended minimum-parking requirements. Instead, the Antiplanner pointed out that, even without such requirements, most businesses still provide free parking for their employees and customers. It is one thing to oppose minimum-parking requirements as an unnecessary form of government regulation. It is another thing to favor government regulation mandating that private businesses charge for parking.

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A couple of years ago, the Antiplanner described a Portland program of accepting carbon-offset funds to do traffic signal coordination. While I support signal coordination, the claimed benefits seemed outlandish. When I found out that the money came from an organization called Climate Trust that was co-founded by the director of Portland’s Office of Sustainable Development, I smelled “scam.”

I didn’t pursue it any further, but it turns out I was right. According to this 2009 report from the Cascade Policy Institute, the Portland-based Climate Trust has been legally extorting money from energy companies for more than a decade and then failing to spend that money on activities that truly reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

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Last January, Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood announced that he was replacing rules that required that federal transit grants had to be “cost effective” with rules promoting “livability.” Yesterday, the Federal Transit Administration asked for your comments on this proposal.

The FTA doesn’t have new rules yet; it just wants to know what you think of the idea. Considering that the head of the FTA has revealed that he is skeptical of expensive rail projects, especially when cities can’t afford to maintain and operate the systems they have, they might genuinely be interested in some new ideas. After all, how livable can a city be where lots of people have given up their cars for transit only to find that the transit agency has stopped running for lack of funds?

Speaking of costly transit, the Tennessee Center for Policy Research has just published a new paper on the cost of transit in that state. The paper also shows how Tennessee transit systems use more energy and emit more greenhouse gases, per passenger mile, than cars or even SUVs. The only really efficient transit system, the paper shows, is vanpooling, which is the closest thing most transit agencies have to actual automobiles.

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On Wednesday, April 14, the Antiplanner had the honor of debating James Kunstler, the famous author of Geography of Nowhere and The Long Emergency. The students at Brown University who set this up chose the topic, “Building America: Who Should Control Urban Growth–Planners or Markets?”

I’ve never met Kunstler before, and I was a bit nervous since he hasn’t exactly been friendly on his blog. But he turned out to be very warm and congenial. We share many recreation interests and I am sure we could be friends if we didn’t live on opposite sides of the country, which (despite our mobility) might be a bigger barrier than being on opposite sides of the political debate.

Kunstler and I were each asked to speak for 25 minutes, after which we were invited to ask each other one question. Then the floor was opened to questions from the audience, mostly (I was told) students in political science, environmental studies, urban planning, and economics.

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On Wednesday the Antiplanner expressed disappointment that St. Louis voters agreed to triple the sales tax so the region’s transit agency can go on another rail construction spree. In response, faithful opponent Dan commented that, “the voting-age population again has…um…different…priorities than the collection of white conservative males who consistently oppose these ballot questions.”

The Antiplanner respectfully disagrees. Instead, what I see is a powerful asymmetry in rail transit elections. On one hand, it is easy for a transit agency to put a measure to build rail transit on the ballot. Usually, the agency has to do nothing more than have its board of directors pass a resolution. On the other hand, it is very difficult for the public to put a measure on the ballot to stop rail transit. At best, they can do so by collecting tens of thousands of signatures. Many states don’t even provide that option.

Many transit agencies also have discretion to choose when to hold the election, and in the St. Louis case it clearly decided to have the election in an off-month of an off-year when turnout would be low. Barely 150,000 people voted in this year’s election vs. more than 500,000 in the November, 2008, election in which voters rejected Metro’s tax increase.

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Matthew Yglesias is baffled by reality. At least, he finds the Antiplanner’s post about how zoning codes actually work, as opposed to how Yglesias imagines they work, to be “baffling and bafflingly long.”

He boils his case down to three simple statements:

1. Throughout America there are many regulations that restrict the density of the built environment.
2. Were it not for these restrictions, people would build more densely.
3. Were the built environment more densely built, the metro areas would be less sprawling.

Reality is never so simple. As you can see, it all depends on statement 1: are there regulations throughout America that restrict density? As evidence that there are, Yglesias cited the Maricopa County Zoning Code, which he claimed allows development no denser than duplexes. Apparently, he didn’t read (or was baffled by) chapter 7, which allows housing at 43 units per acre, or chapter 10, which allows anyone with 160 acres to build as dense as they want.

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On Tuesday, March 2, the Antiplanner gave an anti-light-rail slide show in Vancouver, Washington. You can download this show, with the core of my narrative in the notes, in either PDF or PowerPoint formats. Each of these files are about 15 megabytes.

There are two short videos in the show that aren’t really necessary to understand it. Of course, they won’t appear in the PDF. But if you really want to see them in the PowerPoint show, you will also need to download this 43 megabyte zip file, unzip the file, and make sure your PowerPoint software inserts the videos into the show. Sorry for the large size; these are my original videos taken in Denver and France.

On Wednesday, March 3, the Antiplanner gave a presentation about Gridlock. Although the presentations on the book vary slightly from place to place, you can download the basic presentation in either PDF or PowerPoint formats. Each of these files are about 20 megabytes.

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