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Monthly Archives: April 2009

New FTA Head

By | | News commentary, Transportation
7 Comments

President Obama continues his policy of bringing “change” to Washington by appointing Washington insiders to key posts in his administration. One such insider is Peter Rogoff, who will be the new head of the Federal Transit Administration (FTA).

As a staff member of the Senate Appropriations Committee, Rogoff had a hand in writing ISTEA, TEA-21, and SAFETEA-LU, the 1991, 1998, and 2005 reauthorizations of federal transportation funding. He has also promoted high-speed rail, light rail, and bus-rapid transit systems. Naturally, the American Public Transportation Association — the nation’s transit lobby — is elated to have in Rogoff in charge of federal transit programs, as he knows all the strings to pull to get big bucks for their tiny constituency (meaning, for the most part, transit contractors, not transit riders).

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Planners Put Themselves Out of Business

By | | City planning, News commentary
19 Comments

Cheerful news amid the gloom! The economy has tanked so badly that the city of Petaluma, California, is thinking of shutting down its planning department.

As readers of The Best-Laid Plans know, Petaluma was the first city in the country to try to control its growth by limiting the number of building permits issued each year. Curiously, though, the city’s planning department is funded out of developer fees. That’s okay as long as some development is going on, but now there is next to none.

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I wonder if the planners realize how ironic this is? Probably not.

Reports of the Death of the Suburbs Are Premature

By | | News commentary, Regional planning
30 Comments

“The American suburb as we know it is dying,” says Time magazine. They are going to turn into the next slums, says the Atlantic Monthly. Both articles cite research by a planning professor named Arthur Nelson, who claims that by 2025 the U.S. will have 22 million “surplus” homes on large (over 1/6th acre) lots.

Nelson supposedly calculates this in a 2006 paper published in the Journal of the American Planning Association (JAPA). Table 4 in the paper says that 38 percent of Americans prefer multi-family housing, 37 percent prefer homes on small (less than one-sixth acre) lots, and only 25 percent prefer homes on large lots. A note to the table says it “is based on interpretations of surveys by Myers and Gearin (2001).”

Those turn out to be rather loose interpretations. The Myers and Gearin paper includes the following quotes and summaries of public surveys:

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Japan’s Recent Past = America’s Future?

By | | Book reviews, Meltdown
21 Comments

Years ago, the Antiplanner met some students from the Maxwell School of Public Administration. I asked them what they learned at the school.

“We learned about the Golden Triangle,” they said. That sounded suspiciously like the Iron Triangle, a concept used by public-choice economists to describe the natural alliance between elected officials, bureaucrats, and special interest groups: the elected officials fund bureaucracies, who pass money and resources to the special interest groups, who donate money to the elected officials’ political campaigns.

According to the students, the Golden Triangle “is bureaucrats, elected officials, and special interest groups — with bureaucrats at the apex of the triangle, running things.” Does the Maxwell School think this is a good thing? “It’s an ideal to be achieved, but we haven’t gotten there yet,” they said.

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No Joy for Smart Land

By | | News commentary
14 Comments

It’s official. Not only is Portland the most depressed major urban area in the U.S. (measured using such criteria as sales of anti-depressants), Oregon is the unhappiest state (measured using more conventional criteria such as unemployment and foreclosure rates). Numbers 2, 3, 4, and 5 are Florida, California, Nevada, and Rhode Island, all states with smart-growth laws (or, in the case of Nevada, federal limits on urban expansion).

Meanwhile, the happiest states are Nebraska, Iowa, Kansas, Hawaii, and Louisiana. All but Hawaii have no smart growth laws. How did Hawaii rank so high despite having the nation’s oldest growth-management law? A flip answer is that it would be hard to live in Hawaii and be unhappy, but it seems the real answer is that Hawaii has the lowest “non-mortgage debt as a percent of annual income.” Perhaps this is simply because there are a lot of rich people in Hawaii.
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Michigan and Ohio are pretty unhappy, but that can be credited to the decline in the auto industry. These lists really aren’t very meaningful, but the underlying data are. They show a pretty strong correlation between smart growth and foreclosure rates, and a moderately high correlation between smart growth and unemployment.

Job Sprawl? Horrors!

By | | News commentary
13 Comments

The Brookings Institute just discovered the jobs are moving to the suburbs along with people. According to their press release, this decades-old trend “undermines long-term regional [and] national prosperity.”

“Allowing jobs to shift away from city centers hurts economic productivity, creates unsustainable and energy inefficient development, and limits access to underemployed workers,” says Brookings senior fellow Robert Puentes. But neither he nor the author of the study, Elizabeth Kneebone, actually proves that any of these things will happen — or how we’ve managed to survive for so long in the face of this adversity.

The study itself uses the curious procedure of measuring changes in job numbers within three miles, three to ten miles, and outside of ten miles of downtown. That would be fine if all metro areas covered the same geographic area, but the urban areas reviewed by Brookings ranged from Atlanta, which covers 2,000 square miles, to Trenton, which covered less than 100 square miles in 2000.

Not surprisingly, Trenton was found to have a lot less job sprawl than Atlanta. “The larger the metro area,” the study insightfully observed, “the more likely people are to work more than 10 miles away from downtown.” Well, duh.

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Here’s Why the Government Shouldn’t Play With Markets

By | | Why Planning Fails
14 Comments

Back in 2005, biofuels were all the rage, so some member of Congress came up with a great idea: give huge tax breaks to anyone who starts using a combination of Diesel and biofuels. That will help save petroleum and reduce greenhouse gases!

Eventually, paper manufacturers notice the law and so they begin mixing biofuels with Diesel fuels in making paper. Pretty soon they are collecting $8 billion in tax credits a year.

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I know what you are going to say: the law could have been written to specify tax break only for people or companies substituting biofuel for petroleum fuel. But it doesn’t matter; there are always unintended consequences and they usually, if not always, end up doing more harm than the intended good.

Don’t Reform MPOs, Reform Federal Funding of MPOs

By | | Transportation
14 Comments

“Rather than adding broader regional considerations for the better,” says an op ed in yesterday’s Washington Examiner, metropolitan planning organizations have “empowered narrower parochial interests for the worse.” The writer is dealing specifically with the transportation planning organization for the Washington, DC, area, but his comments are valid for any of the hundreds of metropolitan planning organizations around the U.S.

Washington’s dysfunctional transportation system.
Flickr photo by magandafille.

For those unfamiliar with the term, “metropolitan planning organizations” or MPOs were created by federal decree in the 1960s. Basically, agencies giving out housing and transportation grants didn’t want to have to deal with separate grant proposals from each of the 20,000 or so cities and counties in the country. So they ordered all metropolitan areas — then about 250, now more than 400 — to form MPOs that would submit grant proposals for metro regions as a whole and then allocate the funds to local governments in those regions.

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Portland City Commissioners Are Insane

By | | News commentary, Urban areas
14 Comments

There can be no doubt about it: the city of Portland is run by a bunch of nutcases. Well, the Antiplanner knew that long ago, but they keep getting nutsier and nutsier all the time.

Flickr photo by p medved.

The latest is that Commissioner Randy Leonard wants to spend $500,000 to condemn and take over operation of a historic sign. If you’ve ever driven to downtown Portland from the east side, you’ve seen the sign: it has a deer on it jumping through an outline map of Oregon.

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How Much Is Quality Worth?

By | | Mission
38 Comments

That’s a question we have to ask ourselves all the time. It struck the Antiplanner as I was grating Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese for my home-made Neapolitan pizza. Those little wedges of parmesan cheese you can buy at any supermarket cost about $10 a pound. But genuine Parmigiano-Reggiano, aged 18 months, typically costs $15 (though I get it at Costco for about $11). Many people probably couldn’t tell the difference after the cheese has melted on the pizza, but the flavors seem very different to me, and it is worth a little extra to have the genuine stuff.

In this case, I am paying 10 percent more for something that seems to me to be twice as good. Is it ever worth paying ten times as much for something that is only 10 percent better — or even 1 percent better? That’s a question I sometimes think about when I am cycling on my 2001 Trek 5200 bike with its Ultegra components.

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