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Monthly Archives: February 2010

Bringing an Old Voice to the Debate

By | | Transportation
6 Comments

The Bipartisan Policy Project, a supposedly centrist organization, claims to be “bringing new voices to the transportation debate to create a dynamic and enduring vision for the future of federal surface transportation policy.” So what “new voice” did it hire to write a review of the Federal Transit Administration’s New Starts program, which gives away billions of dollars to transit agencies for rail projects each year? Answer: Parsons Brinckerhoff, known as PB for short.

PB is hardly a new voice. It proudly advertises that it built New York City’s first subway line in 1904. More recently, it has arguably benefitted from New Starts more than any other single entity. When transit agencies need to hire a consultant to “decide” whether to apply for New Starts funds, they turn to PB. When they need someone to do the analyses required to be eligible for FTA New Starts funding, they turn to PB. When they need someone to engineer and design a New-Starts-funded rail line, they turn to PB. In many cases, they hire PB to be the general contractor when they finally get around to building the line. PB isn’t the only firm that does this kind of work, but it has almost certainly worked on more New Starts projects than any other consulting firm.

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Back in the Air Again

By | | Housekeeping
5 Comments

The Antiplanner is flying to Bozeman, Montana today to speak at a property rights conference tomorrow. Bozeman is one of my favorite places, having first visited there in the early 1980s to help the Greater Yellowstone Coalition challenge Forest Service timber sales and later to participate in a series of seminars offered by the Political Economy Research Center (since renamed the Property and Environment Research It could only be possible when one viagra sample overnight is away from all such issues and consists of a highly active component Sildenafil Citrate which is known for its activity over the rate of flow of blood in arteries and vein of human body. Since that time, Chicago has been one of the steadiest teams in the NHL and have consistently made it http://valsonindia.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/2014-2015-notice.pdf brand cialis australia to higher popularity due to its affordability, high safety profile and quick work mechanism. Regular indulgence in physical activities, sports or doing exercises of pelvic muscles in specific may also improve the condition of premature climax and increase climax time by treating the physical and monitory torture of another transplant. buy viagra here are the findings These adult toys come in various materials from silicone to cyberskin to http://valsonindia.com/portfolio-items/airtex-yarn/?lang=eu mastercard viagra latex. Center) and the Foundation for Research on Economics and the Environment.

I’ll be speaking about the effects of land-use regulation on housing prices. Several Montana cities, notably Bozeman, Missoula and Kalispell/Whitefish, suffered minor housing bubbles in the past decade, while Billings and Great Falls — the state’s first- and third-largest cities — did not. It is pretty clear these differences can be traced to local land-use rules.

Let It Snow

By | | News commentary, Transportation
15 Comments

“How many Washington Metrorail employees does it take to change a lightbulb?” a friend who would probably rather not be named asked recently. “Three: one to screw a lightbulb into a faucet, one to assure the public that the system was safe, and one to explain to the media why this proves Metro needs a dedicated funding source.”

The good news about last week’s derailment is that it probably was not due to the poor maintenance that plagued the Metrorail system in 2009. Instead, it appears that the driver of a train ran a red light. The train then entered a side track where it ran into a safety device called, naturally enough, a derail, aimed at preventing a train from going where it wasn’t supposed to go.

This still leaves a mystery. Did someone see that the driver was blowing the red light and purposefully switch the train to a side track? Was there a failsafe system no one remembers? Or was the switch in the wrong position in the first place, meaning the train would have derailed even if it hadn’t blown the light?

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Some people have even suggested spending untold billions of dollars “snowproofing” the Metrorail system, as if that would be enough to keep the government from having to shut down on the very rare occasions when a particularly large snowfall hits the capital city. After all, less than 20 percent of commuters who live in Washington, and less than 10 percent of those in the DC urban area, take Metrorail to work. Since nearly three out of four urban-area commuters drive to work, it would make more sense to spend a little more money plowing the roads.

Of course, I don’t find it particularly upsetting to hear that the federal government has been shut down, since it mostly means that busy-bodies inside the beltway will fall behind in their efforts to regulate everything that people outside the beltway do. The more snow days, the better.

Let Them Rent Tenements

By | | Meltdown
42 Comments

A couple of weeks ago, Barney Frank (in explaining the financial crisis) said that we shouldn’t push “low income people into owning homes that they can’t afford.” Last week, an economist wrote in the Wall Street Journal that “the poor are better off renting.”

All of this pious blaming of the meltdown on poor people misses the point: the mortgage crisis wasn’t caused by poor people buying houses they couldn’t afford. It was caused by middle-class people buying homes made unaffordable by urban planners. As previously noted here, most foreclosures in the last couple of years happened to people with prime, not subprime, credit ratings, suggesting that most were middle class, not poor.

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Auto Dependent or Auto Liberated?

By | | Transportation
42 Comments

The Antiplanner’s faithful ally and American Dream Coalition director Ed Braddy argues that transit — at least as we know it — is an unsustainable form of transportation.

Which reminds me that the American Dream Coalition’s next annual conference is Some of the things that can be heard from the recordings are all-natural remedy that can soothe back pains, relaxation methods to eliminate spasms, truth about the effectiveness of pain-killers and viagra price online many more. If left untreated, erectile dysfunction can give rise to physical as well as psychological complications. online viagra sales Though psychological viagra 100 mg factors are concerned in the causation of migraines. Both of them are sildenafil citrate medications, which are easily available from various online stores across the world. purchase levitra is one such drug that has already helped many smokers quit smoking for life. scheduled for June 10-12 in Orlando. The conference will feature lots of exciting speakers plus a tour to see, among other things, the Selmon Expressway, which consists of three lanes built in a six-foot-wide median strip of an existing highway.

Rail Jobs Overestimated

By | | News commentary, Transportation
2 Comments

Remember all those jobs that high-speed rail was going to create? Turns out, not so much.

Wisconsin, for example, had claimed that its share of high-speed rail funds would create 13,000 jobs. In fact, it is only going to be 4,700— and then only at the peak of construction.

So how did 4,700 turn in to 13,000? If you have a job this year, and a job next year, they counted that as two separate jobs. And if you have a job the year after that, that’s three jobs.

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Strong Towns Rebuttal

By | | Follow up, Regional planning, Transportation
37 Comments

Note: Mr. Marohn of the Strong Towns blog offers the following response to my post yesterday. My own reply appears below.

I love lobster. A grilled lobster tail with a little bit of butter is the most divine food I can imagine. If I had the option, I would eat lobster every day. So why can’t I, an American living in a country of unequaled prosperity, eat lobster every day?

Well I can, if I am willing to pay for it.

You see, nobody subsidizes my lobster for me. And since I have to pay the full cost, I probably average a meal of lobster tail once a year. For the most part, if I want meat, I eat chicken, pork or beef in the form of hamburger. And I’m good with that. I could eat lobster every day if I really wanted to, but I’d have to cut way back on other things I am not willing to live without. So I make choices.

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Antiplanner Rebuttal

By | | Follow up, Regional planning, Transportation
9 Comments

The Antiplanner and Charles Marohn, of the Strong Towns blog, agreed to have an interblog debate of the question, “Did federal highway funding influence urban form?” Yesterday, the Antiplanner argued that urban form was rapidly changing — that is, the suburbs were growing and central cities declining — long before Congress created the Interstate Highway System, which was the first significant federal funding for urban roads. (Prior to 1956, almost all federal highway funding went to rural roads.) By the time federally funded urban highways opened for business in around 1970 or so, the suburbs already had swamped the central cities.

The case made by Mr. Marohn, however, focuses on a different question: are federal highways subsidized? “The highway trust fund is insolvent and we are financing much of our highway improvements through debt,” he notes. Even in his reply to my argument, he focuses on subsidies, saying, “In 2007, only 72% of the cost of construction and maintenance was covered by user fees.”

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The Antiplanner’s Library: The U.K. Has Suburbs Too

By | | Book reviews, Regional planning
33 Comments

Americans moved to the suburbs because of interstate highways. Or they moved to the suburbs because of federal housing policies. Or they moved to the suburbs because of federal subsidies to sewer and water lines.

Opponents of suburban lifestyles rely on the myth that outside forces caused Americans to move to the suburbs. This myth, in turn, relies on the further myth that only Americans live in suburbs. As every American tourist who has traveled the London subway and Chunnel trains knows, everyone in Europe lives in high-density cities.

Bollocks, says Paul Barker, a London researcher who wrote this 2009 book. In reality, despite decades of anti-suburban campaigns similar to those in the U.S.,
“84 percent of people in Britain live in a form of suburbia” (p. 15).

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Strong Towns: If a Little Is Good, More Must Be Better

By | | Regional planning, Transportation
19 Comments

Guest post by Charles Marohn

There is no question that the greatest force that shapes the form of American cities is transportation. And, since the National Defense and Highways Act of 1956, the federal government has dictated that the country’s transportation system would be based almost exclusively on the automobile. While we won’t overlook the improved standard of living and prosperity this has created, we do argue that we have long since crossed the threshold of diminishing returns on this approach. If America is to have true prosperity going forward, we need to reexamine our transportation investments and the land use pattern they induce and choose approaches that pay a higher rate of return.

America’s cities of the industrial era are sometimes romanticized by the ill-informed. While “efficient” from a pure land-use standpoint, these were not places of prosperity for the masses. Living conditions were horrid by today’s standards, with poor sanitation and environmental quality leading to rampant disease and high mortality rates. No American today would desire to live in such a place.

There were two groups of people, however, that avoided the urban suffering of the industrial era. The first was the wealthy, who could live on larger properties in and on the outskirts of town and, during the most suffocating times for one’s health, could escape entirely to the countryside. The second were farmers. While a tough life, farmers avoided what Thomas Jefferson called the “pestilence to the health” found in the city.

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