The Antiplanner »

Monthly Archives: July 2007

Migration from the Cities

By | | News commentary
2 Comments

Congratulations to faithful ally Wendell Cox for getting quoted in Forbes magazine about the “great American migration”. The article describes how many of America’s major urban areas are losing population as people move to the suburbs of a variety of smaller cities.

Wendell has been following this migration on his Demographia web site. (Find “domestic migration” on the home page.) He shows that census data put the lie to claims that Americans are moving out of the suburbs and back into downtown areas. Instead, they are moving out of expensive suburbs and into smaller, more remote, and definitely more affordable suburbs.
If any negligence happens during consumption then this may develop various threatening like headaches, stomach cialis viagra levitra pain, tiredness, dizziness, cough, sinus, swelling, anxieties, depression, behavior change or muscle weakness. Mandibular advancement device assists the snorers with managing the jaws in frontward placement tadalafil generic online supplying a space between the air passages while producing the soft palate constant. Unfortunately, the once buy super viagra abundant crop of Eurycoma Longifolia trees has diminished. Reason why these many people do not go sildenafil generico online for the treatment of erectile dysfunction.
Of course, as Forbes notes, a few people are moving to downtown areas. That’s fine for them (though we should always ask how much their million-dollar homes are subsidized). But, as Wendell shows, their numbers remain small compared with suburban growth.

You Can Build Your Way Out of Congestion (But Watch Your Back)

By | | Transportation, Urban areas
17 Comments

The 2007 Preserving the American Dream conference will be in San Jose this year, so I’ve been taking a close look at that region. San Jose definitely practices smart growth, so I presumed that, like Portland, congestion there would have greatly increased as planners tried to discourage driving.

When I examined the Texas Transportation institute’s data file for San Jose, however, I was surprised to find this was not the case. In fact, between 1989 and 1997, the amount of time the typical rush-hour commuter wasted sitting in traffic actually fell by a whopping 50 percent. During this same period, Santa Clara County (of which San Jose is the seat) gained well over 100,000 new jobs.

Who wouldn’t envy a place that could absorb that many new commuters and still cut congestion in half? How did they do it? Simple. They built new roads.

Continue reading →

Prove It! #2: Alleys Increase Crime

By | | Mission
12 Comments

Last week, in a comment on a comment on a post, I mentioned that alleys lead to increased crime. So naturally, someone who is Google-challenged asked me to prove it. It turns out there is a lot of evidence that alleys contribute to crime by providing quiet places where criminals can hide their activities and by offering easy access to secondary entrances to people’s homes.

The research goes back at least as far as the late Oscar Newman, an architect who wanted to know why some neighborhoods suffered higher crime rates than other neighborhoods inhabited by people in a similar socioeconomic class. Newman found that urban design plays a role in making neighborhoods more or less vulnerable to crime, and that the two most important factors were having defensible space, which usually means private property, and impermeability, which means limiting the number of access points to dwellings and businesses. By limiting permeability, cul de sacs make neighborhoods less vulnerable to crime; by increasing permeability, alleys make neighborhoods more vulnerable.

Continue reading →

Suburbs Emit Less Greenhouse Gases

By | | News commentary
26 Comments

It is amazing how many assumptions people make without checking the facts. They assume transit consumes less energy than cars (not true for most U.S. transit systems). They assume suburbs are more heavily subsidized than cities (the vast majority of subsidies go to the cities). They assume that highways are unfairly subsidized (actually, subsidies to transit are greater than to highways even though highways move a hundred times as many passenger miles).

The latest set of assumptions center around greenhouse gases. I’ve already addressed the assumptions that transit emits less greenhouse gases than cars and that high rises emit less than single-family homes.

Continue reading →

Peak Tyranny

By | | Regional planning
41 Comments

Someone once told me that loyal opponent Todd Litman, of the Victoria Transport Policy Institute, thinks of himself as my nemesis. But I don’t want to be a nemesis to Todd. First of all, he is a nice guy. Second, he is pretty analytical; even if I disagree with his conclusions, I appreciate that he knows his way around a spreadsheet.

If I were to have a nemesis, I would want it to be someone who is really my opposite, someone who relies on exaggeration and over-the-top rhetoric to make his case. Someone like James Howard Kunstler.

Continue reading →

Understanding the FTA

By | | Transportation
2 Comments

Today we have a guest post from Tom Rubin.

Dane County, Wisconsin has formed a Transport 2020 task force that is trying to obtain federal funding for a commuter-rail line in Madison. During a recent meeting, a consultant “reviewed the FTA’s recent decision to include “perceived” rail advantages into ridership forecasting and modeling. This allows forecasters to quantify the quality of service for rail travel time, rail headways, and the attractiveness of rail, and include that in the ridership model.”

The problem is, this is not what the FTA actually said.

Continue reading →

RTD to Raise Transit Fares

By | | News commentary, Transportation
9 Comments

In 2004, Denver’s Regional Transit District (RTD) convinced voters to increase the sales tax dedicated to transit from 0.6 to 1.0 cents per dollar so that it could build six new rail lines. Now it says tax revenues are falling short of projections, while costs are higher than expected. So it is raising transit fares, which will only reduce ridership and harm transit-dependent people.

This is a completely predictable result of trying to build a rail megaproject. It is one thing to run a bus system where the capital costs are low and don’t require either long-term borrowing or long-term cost projections. It is quite another thing to plan a ten- or more year construction project that requires a thirty- or more year mortgage.

Blocking traffic.
Flickr photo by Jeffrey Beall.

Continue reading →

Right-Wing Think Tank Releases Report on Portland

By | | News commentary
24 Comments

That well-known right-wing think tank, the Cato Institute, today released a report about Portland written by that not-so-well-known sprawl-loving, car-happy nut, Randal O’Toole. O’Toole spews out all kinds of so-called data that smart-growth planners probably refuted long ago, such as that transit has lost market share in Portland since they started building light rail and that Portlanders voted against building more light-rail lines.

O’Toole (did I mention that he is right wing?) even dredges up the story of Neil Goldschmidt, Portland’s former mayor who, after retiring from politics, formed a “light-rail mafia” that milked Portland’s planning process, directing hundreds of millions of dollars in taxpayer subsidies and no-bid contracts to his clients and friends. So what if Goldschmidt turned out to be be a statutory rapist? That doesn’t mean anything is wrong with Portland’s planning.

Continue reading →

Summer Book Reviews #5: The Peter Hall Trilogy

By | | Book reviews, City planning, Regional planning
16 Comments

Once upon a time there was an urban planner who traveled around the world and looked at urban plans and discovered they were disasters. For this, he received a knighthood from the Queen.

Sir Peter Hall is a planning professor at University College in London, and he also taught and did research for a time at UC Berkeley. Though he believes in planning, his books provide an excellent case for antiplanners. In fact, whenever I get frustrated with some planner talking or writing about the wonders of planning, all I need to do is read a portion of one of these books to get a breath of fresh air from an objective observer of the profession.

Click on the image of each book to get information about purchasing a copy.

Continue reading →

TODs Don’t Work, Says L.A. Times

By | | News commentary, Transportation
17 Comments

The Los Angeles Times takes a hard look at transit-oriented developments (TODs) and concludes that they don’t change people’s travel habits. Local officials say TODs will revitalize neighborhoods without adding to congestion, but the Times finds that “there is little research to back up the rosy predictions.”

The paper cites one study that “showed that transit-based development successfully weaned relatively few residents from their cars.” Two reporters from the paper itself spent two months interviewing TOD residents and reached the same conclusion: “only a small fraction of residents shunned their cars during morning rush hour.”

Continue reading →