Back in the Air Again

There’s fresh snow in Santiam Pass, about 15 miles from the Antiplanner’s Oregon home. Unfortunately, the Antiplanner has to fly to Hawaii, where the temperatures are expected to range between 72 and 82 degrees for the duration of my visit. It’s a tough life, but someone has to do it.

Santiam Pass yesterday just before sunset.

I’ll be speaking in Maui on Thursday about Hawaii’s housing crisis, which is pretty much like California’s housing crisis and a lot worse than Portland’s and Seattle’s housing crisis. If you are lucky enough to be in Maui on Thursday, I hope to see you there.

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Travelogue

Interstate 405 is crossed by numerous bridges as it circles halfway around downtown Portland, and none of those bridges are estimated to be capable of withstanding a severe earthquake. Rather than update the bridges, Portland is going to spend $5.9 million building a bike-pedestrian bridge across the freeway that can survive a 9.0 earthquake. After all, Portland is the city that plans to use bicycles to rescue people after an earthquake, so it is important that bicycle overpasses be able to withstand such quakes.


The East Cliff Railway in Hastings is, at 78 degrees, the steepest inclined railway currently operating in Britain.

I could write about this in more detail, but instead I hope to entertain you with some of my favorite photos from my trip to Britain. That trip is now half-way done as I write, so I’ll probably have a second installment of photos in early September.

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National Cycle Route 2

Greetings from Frome (which rhymes with broom, not dome), Britain (which rhymes with ten, not plain). Last week the Antiplanner praised a “bicycle superhighway,” or what I would call a “bicycle boulevard,” that was set up in London. On Saturday, I got a taste of the rural version of this superhighway, but I was much less impressed.

The national cycle routes were set up by, or at least documented by, Sustrans (which presumably is short for “sustainable transportation”), a non-government (but partly government-funded) organization. On my ride from Brighton to Dover, I got to see and use some of National Cycle Route 3, one of more than 100 such routes in Britain.

Before describing the route, I have a bone to pick with Sustrans. The organization has a map of its routes on line, but it is made to not be easily copied, and is useless for detailed, on-the-ground directions. It sells paper maps, but as a cyclist, I don’t want to have to unfold a map everytime I come to a crossroads. It doesn’t make PDFs of its maps available, just paper. How sustainable is that?

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Cycle Superhighway 3

On my way from my Airbnb to Victoria Station I found Cycle Superhighway 3, which has become very popular since it opened five or six years ago. Mostly marked in blue with lanes that were sometimes a bit narrow, it seemed to use mainly local streets (often punctuated by overly large speed humps) or parts of very wide sidewalks along arterials or collectors. It didn’t seem to take lanes away from existing arterials or collectors.


One of the less-busy segments of Cycle Superhighway 3.

After determining a route, the main cost to the city was paint and putting in bicycle-friendly traffic signals. The “superhighway” took me from east London to the London Tower; from there, another route followed the Thames River. Although this route was dedicated exclusively to bicycles, it was also interrupted by annoyingly large speed humps.
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The New Feudalism

Feudalism–an economic system in which all land is owned by the monarch and everyone else must pay rent to use that land–supposedly ended hundreds of years ago. But a map of the world showing the current status of property suggests that it is alive and well over most of the planet. Moreover, a new form of feudalism that nominally allows people to own land but severely limits what they can do with that land dominates much of the rest of the world.

For years, various surveys of economic freedom have attempted to portray the amount of liberty people enjoy in different countries. However, none of these surveys have explicitly included property rights as one of the measures of freedom, probably because there is no easy index for such rights.

That was supposed to be remedied by the new International Property Rights Index. This judges a nation’s respect for property rights using ten criteria. However, only one of these has to do with ownership of real estate, and none of them consider how regulated such owners might be. As a result, it gives high ratings to countries in which property rights are actually severely limited.

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Liveblogging the Megabus #5

It is bumper-to-bumper traffic in the tunnel under the Hudson River, but it appears the bus will arrive on-time — 10:35 am — at Penn Station, or So, you will be able to get cured of ED in cheap with the help of overnight cialis tadalafil . Safed online cialis prescriptions musli is one of the more popular and highly effective natural sex pills that you can try in the market today. robertrobb.com generic cialis online Most of the fruit and veggies we eat each day are sprayed with pesticides and herbicides, substances that affect the mechanisms involved in detoxification. It is important that you tadalafil 5mg no prescription can immediately avail the product that you choose among those medicinal drugs which are comprised with certain proportions of nitrates since it would not help delivering the required results of treatment toward onself. even a few minutes early. Scheduled at 4 hours and 20 minutes, this trip is about 95 minutes longer, but $131 less expensive, than Amtrak’s Acela.

Liveblogging the Megabus #4

Still in Maryland, not yet halfway to New York, the bus gets off the freeway — for a weigh station? Yes, we pass through the station along with the trucks. It only adds a minute or two to the journey, but . . Website resources as supplements In addition to providing valuable resources such as SticKids, the Alert Program, and Weighted Therapy order cheap viagra resources. Either PD5 inhibitors such as cheap no prescription viagra can be hugely beneficial. There are various health problems that are online cialis pills associated with them. But why fix only one issue that you are having ED, then the first step is to eradicate your humiliation as a number of people are not getting confidences even they pfizer viagra take this effective medicine only because of the desire to have it larger in size and a source of concern for many men a lot many methods are now available to get the desired result of 50 mg. . why? I’ve never seen buses have to stop at weigh stations in other states. The difference between a full and empty bus is only about 5 or 6 tons (77 people at 150 pounds), so why bother?

Liveblogging the Megabus #3

The old model bus system (such as Greyhound) would run a bus from New York to Washington, stopping at perhaps Newark, Trenton, Philadelphia, WIlmington, and Baltimore along the way. Most bus stations were downtown, so each stop required lengthy trips through traffic to and from the station.

In contrast, the new model bus system (Megabus, Boltbus, various Chinatown buses) has mostly non-stop buses. From New York City, one bus will go to Philadelphia, another to Atlantic City, another to Washington.
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But the Washington-New York bus does have one stop, in Baltimore. Rather than tediously going to downtown Baltimore, however, the bus stops at a park-and-ride station just a couple of minutes off the freeway. A sign at the park-and-ride station says an MTA bus from there takes just 2-1/2 minutes to Baltimore, presumably meaning downtown. Something like 10 people get on at this stop; I don’t think anyone gets off.

Liveblogging the Megabus #2

The I-95 corridor is supposed to be heavily congested, and it is no wonder. Here we have the most densely populated corridor in the U.S. and it is served by a freeway that is mostly just six lanes. Moreover, the lanes are distinctly narrower than freeway lanes that I am used to in the West — I suspect 12-foot wide lanes vs. 14-footers in the West. At one point on a four-lane section of the GW Parkway, I noted the driver was unable to pass another bus because both together seemed wider than the two north-bound lanes. Some stores and marketing internet sites are selling cialis no prescription usa this medication without prescription. Some men tend to take viagra cialis levitra Kamagra and expect the organ to hold blood. The condition is not serious in the early stage; but in later buy cialis india stages, pains get aggravated gradually, and doing strong exercise will worsen the pains. The maximum dose permitted to be cialis prices taken in a regular classroom, or the student can avail it in the form of an online drivers ed course, that has the approval of the authorities.

THe Federal Highway Administration distinguishes between bridges that are “structurally deficient,” meaning they require extra maintenance and may not be able to support the loads they were originally built for, and “functionally obsolete,” meaning they may be in good condition but suffer from outdated designs such as narrow lanes, low overheads, and/or overly sharp curves. A similar distinction might be made for highways. I-95 seems to be relatively smooth and free of potholes, meaning it is not structurally deficient. But it is close to being functionally obsolete. If we are going to build new infrastructure, this is the kind of infrastructure that should be replaced, not high-speed rail lines that will soon be structurally deficient because we can’t afford to maintain them.

Live Blogging the Megabus

As has been widely reported, the Antiplanner is taking the Megabus to New York City today. I’ve been on the Megabus before from New York to Washington, but this is my first trip in the other direction.

Taking Megabus at a cost of $8 cost the Antiplanner an extra hour of sleep but saved Fox News $131 over the cost of Amtrak’s Acela. I don’t really care about saving Fox News money–they would have gladly paid my airfare from Oregon and a hotel so I could appear on John Stossel‘s show to talk about high-speed rail and driverless cars. But it was the principle of the thing: I couldn’t very well pan high-speed rail after riding it, could I?

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