Category Archives: Planning Disasters

The Continuing Saga of the American-Made Streetcar

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Portland Streetcar, the non-profit organization that operates streetcars in Portland, is demanding that the city cough up $145,000 to fix its brand-new, American-made streetcar. Let’s take a look at the history of this car.

First, the city used its own money to buy streetcars from the Czech Republic for an average of $1.9 million apiece. Each streetcar has just 30 seats, but the cost per vehicle is about six times greater than a 40-seat bus. But that wasn’t expensive enough.

The most recent expansion of Portland’s streetcar system was funded by the federal government, which has a buy-America requirement. So Oregon’s congressional delegation and lobbyists persuaded the Federal Transit Administration to give Oregon Iron Works $4 million to build a prototype streetcar. The company used plans purchased from the Czech manufacturer of Portland’s streetcars to effectively produce a replica of those cars.

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Planning Is Destroying Britain

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The Economist reviews housing prices in London, one of the most expensive cities in the world, and what do you know, it finds that high housing prices are due to urban planning. “The biggest constraint on development in London is the Green Belt,” says the magazine that calls itself a newspaper. “Tt runs (with perforations) all around London, to a depth of up to 50 miles, and bans almost all building on half a million hectares of land around the city.”

Ah, but Britain has 62 million people in an area slightly smaller than the state of Oregon (94,000 vs. 98,000 square miles), so those greenbelts are needed to preserve farms, forests, and open space, right? Not really.

As a BBC writer points out, urban areas cover just 6.8 percent of the United Kingdom (10.6 percent of England, 1.3 percent of Scotland, 3.6 percent of Northern Ireland, and 4.1 percent of Wales). Moreover, much of the land inside those urban areas is open space, so less than 2.3 percent of England, and even smaller proportions of the rest of the kingdom, have been “paved over.”

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Crony Infrastructuralism

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Last night, the Antiplanner dreamed that Apple, the company with the highest market capitalization in the world, was spending some of its $97 billion in cash on roads, bridges, and other local infrastructure. A crazy idea, I know, but then, in the dream, some politician says, “What a great idea! Let’s create some TIF and special assessment districts so other corporations can help our infrastructure too.”

Somewhere between dreamland and waking up, I tried to explain why this was a bad idea. Suppose a town has two business districts, I said, and one is doing poorly compared to the other, possibly because it is older. Shops, restaurants, and other tenants turn over frequently, vacancy rates are high, and the shops that do exist tend to be downscale, including thrift stores and antique malls. The other district, perhaps because it is newer, is doing much better.

Suppose the city creates a special-assessment district around the older area and uses the funds to update the infrastructure. Unfortunately, the assessments, i.e., taxes, paid by the property owners in the district force them to raise rents, which causes even more turnover. The other district will probably complain and demand its own infrastructure improvements, which the wealthier property owners will more easily afford and thus give that district an even greater advantage over its rival.

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Another Bad Idea

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Someone named Marc Fasteau urges the United States to adopt an industrial policy. Because, after all, it worked so well in Japan (two lost decades of nearly zero economic growth), China (rapid growth but rampant corruption), and Germany (which has fined one of its biggest manufacturers more than $1.5 billion for bribing local officials to sell its products).

Fasteau’s column is accompanied by the above mindbogglingly complex (and almost unreadable) chart showing how five federal departments or agencies would work with banks and corporations to create a US Tech Strategy Board that would engage in a “technology based planning system.” This system would be sure to bring the rapid pace of technological advancement in computing, biotech, and other fields to a near standstill. The board would no doubt endorse high-speed rail, minicomputers, composting toilets, and other “modern” technologies.

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World Boondoggle Center

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The World Trade Center that was destroyed almost ten years ago was a frequently photographed symbol of New York City, but it was also a huge boondoggle of the New York & New Jersey Port Authority that was heavily subsidized by motorists paying bridge tolls. So of course, it is completely appropriate that the building that will replace it will be an even bigger boondoggle, costing $3.3 billion. As New York Times columnist Joe Nocera says, this is “an example of just about everything wrong with modern government.”

Still under construction.
Flickr photo by Sergey Shpakovsky.

This price tag will make it “by far, the most expensive office building ever constructed in America,” yet it “will add 2.6 million square feet of office space in a city that doesn’t need it.” At the time the original, 13.4 million-square-foot World Trade Center was destroyed on 9/11/01, Manhattan already had more than enough vacant office space to make up for it. At the most recent report I can find, downtown Manhattan alone currently has more than 10 million square feet of vacant space.

The building will be just one part of “a staggering $11 billion worth of government-sponsored construction,” says Nocera, including a subway station that is already $1 billion over budget. How fitting that we celebrate the attack that led to the most expensive war we’ve ever fought with the most expensive war memorial ever built. Of course, somewhere with 72 virgins, Osama Bin Laden is laughing away, because what better way to defeat the Americans than to get them to spend themselves into oblivion.

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Arithmetic-Challenged Favor High-Speed Rail

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On Monday, the Washington Post published a devastating critique of high-speed rail written by journalist Robert Samuelson. In fewer than 800 words, Samuelson blows up just about all the arguments put forth in favor of rail. An 8-word summary: costs are too high and benefits too low.

One person who remains unconvinced is the popular innumerate, Matthew Yglesias. Normally I would not personalize an issue by calling attention to someone’s disability, in this case Yglesias’ inability to deal with simple arithmetic. But by describing me as a “car-subsidy shill,” Yglesias shows he is math challenged.

Apparently, if you believe, as I do, that all modes of transportation should be paid for by users, and not by tax subsidies, then you, too, are a “car-subsidy shill.” Here is a simple lesson in arithmetic: if users pay for all of something, then subsidies are zero. That makes me a “zero-subsidy shill.”

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The Climate Trust Scam

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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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California High-Speed Rail in Trouble

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New reports have raised questions about and spurred opposition to California’s grandiose high-speed rail plans. First, last April, the California state auditor reported that the state’s high-speed rail authority suffered from “inadequate planning, weak oversight, and lax contract management,” which is not exactly what you want to hear about an agency that is about to build the most expensive state-sponsored public works project in history.

Second, a new report from the University of California found that the state’s ridership forecasts “are not reliable.” Based on a re-assessment by economist David Brownstone (who is fast becoming one of the Antiplanner’s favorite economists) and two UC engineering profs, the fares needed to cover the trains’ operating costs would have to be more than double the original projections, which is also more than the cost of flying. Since the measure approved by voters in 2008 forbade any state operating subsidies, such high fares would doom the project.

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The Antiplanner’s Library: Visiting Paradise

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One of the Antiplanner’s co-speakers during a couple of events in Honolulu is David Callies, a law professor and author of two books on Hawaii land-use law: Regulating Paradise and Preserving Paradise. Hawaii passed the first statewide growth-management law in 1961, and still has about the strictest land-use laws in the nation. Not coincidentally, it also competes with California in having the nation’s least-affordable housing.

Regulating Paradise, a 1984 book that Callies is currently updating, shows that the 1961 law (sometimes called Act 187) is only one of several laws that have limited development of the state. Landowners in some parts of the state have to comply with as many as 30 different sets of regulations, from historic preservation to coastal zone management.

The original purpose of the 1961 law was to protect farmland. But Callies points out that this backfired. By limited urban development to about 5 percent of the Hawaiian Islands, the law made housing so expensive that farmers could not pay workers a living wage and compete with other tropical countries that grew similar crops. As a result, Hawaiian agriculture is in decline, and the only justification for the land-use law is to provide scenic views for upper-middle class urbanites.

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