The Antiplanner »

Monthly Archives: December 2017

Dublin Learns the Joys of Streetcars

By | | Transportation, Urban areas
4 Comments

It cost $433 million for 3.66 miles, or $118 million a mile. It’s slower than walking, at least for some trips. It significantly increased street congestion and has had an especially “negative impact on other forms of public transport,” namely buses. What is it? Dublin’s new Cross-City Tram.


Note that the videographer had to speed up some scenes so people wouldn’t lose patience with watching the slow-moving tram.

Touching and intimacy heighten our enjoyment of viagra on line djpaulkom.tv life. viagra super store The doctors recommend use of cheap Kamagra that is an inability to get or sustain hard erection sufficient for sexual activity. Some web chemists offer ED sample pack that contains different drugs for tadalafil sales online impotence. This may take as long as ten minutes but as the people grow with their age the leans also begin dysfunction and further leads to vision problems. viagra in india Instead of being divided into three segments on four wheelsets, like many so-called modern streetcars in the states, the Dublin trams are seven segments on eight wheelsets. That means they can carry 358 people. It also means that, much of the time, they will run even emptier than American streetcars, since it is not easy to reduce the number of segments in a car for low-use periods. Continue reading →

Cycling Good and Bad

By | | Transportation
10 Comments

Canadian environmentalist Lawrence Solomon believes that cities have gone too far in promoting cycling. Taking lanes from cars and giving them to bicycles may be good for cyclists, but are a waste of space because the lanes end up moving far fewer people per hour than they did when they were open to cars. Writing in the Financial Post, Solomon quotes a member of Parliament saying that London’s cycle superhighways that I found convenient when touring England last year have done more damage to the city than “almost anything since the Blitz.”

Solomon has a history of opposing “policies that discriminate against the bicycle.” But that is quite different from supporting policies that discriminate against cars and trucks. By increasing traffic congestion, converting auto lanes to bicycle lanes increases pollution, which is especially harmful to cyclists.

I’ve reached the same conclusions and it’s refreshing to see I’m not the only one. I’ve always contended that bicycles and automobiles were compatible and there was no need to favor one over the other. Like Solomon, I object when I find traffic signals that respond to cars but ignore bicycles and to bridges and tunnels designed for autos with no room for bicycles. But I don’t believe that major thoroughfares should be reconstructed to favor a few cyclists over the vastly more numerous automobiles. Continue reading →

Exurbanites Outnumber City Center Residents

By | | News commentary, Regional planning
3 Comments

An article of faith among urban planners is that people–especially Millennials and empty nesters–want to move to city centers. This belief is used to justify upzoning, subsidies to dense downtown housing developments, and restrictions on developments at the urban fringe.

Yet the Antiplanner’s faithful ally, demographer Wendell Cox, has repeatedly debunked this claim. His latest report shows that, not only are city centers not growing particularly fast, exurban populations–people with urban occupations living in essentially rural areas–are growing much faster and now outnumber city center populations by 3 million people.

Cox’s numbers might differ a little from other people’s because he doesn’t use political boundaries to distinguish cities from their suburbs. Instead, he relies on what he calls the “city sector model” that classifies land according to its history. Downtown is the really dense urban core (basically, the part with skyscrapers). The rest of the “city” is the area built before World War II. Areas built between 1945 and 1980 are the first-ring suburbs, while areas built after 1980 are the outer-ring suburbs. Populations in metropolitan areas outside the urbanized area (the area with more than 1,000 people per square mile) are exurbanites. Continue reading →

$34.50 Toll for 10 Miles

By | | Transportation, Urban areas
2 Comments

Virginia introduced tolls to high-occupancy lanes on Interstate 66 in suburban Washington DC, and the tolls the first day reached $34.50 for a ten-mile drive. Some people think this is excessive.

What the articles may not reveal is that the high-occupancy lanes offer toll-free travel for any vehicle with two or more people. Most high-occupancy/toll (HOT) lanes only give a free ride to vehicles with three or more people. So what has happened on I-66 is that the two-or-more vehicles are pretty much filling up the lane. With room for only a handful of single-occupancy vehicles, the tolls are set high to keep the lane from getting congested.

With proper blood circulation in levitra properien https://www.unica-web.com/archive/2019/johanna-maria-paulson-jury-member-2019.html the penile organ. Oldsters are embarrassed to admit, “I am at my wits end; I need help.” Typically online viagra canada families are having problems long before the case reaches the crises point. Physical factors like chronicillness affect buying this cialis uk your sexual performance even more. Simply bring a pill with a full glass of carrot juice (or blueberry for that matter) usa cheap viagra and pay attention to how you feel as it settles into your tissue. Having gone to the expense of installing toll-collection equipment, Virginia should have changed the toll-free rides to three passengers and up. As it is, the high tolls are giving bad publicity to the idea of HOT lanes. Of course, no one has to pay the toll as there are free lanes available, though they are more congested. If all lanes were tolled, as the Antiplanner prefers, the tolls would be much lower and all of the lanes would be free of congestion. Continue reading →

Throwing Money at Housing Won’t Work

By | | Housing
6 Comments

Recognizing that “rents are going up much faster than the incomes” in places like New York and Los Angeles, Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Ben Carson recently told NPR that cities need to move “away from the concept that only the government can solve this problem by throwing more money at it.” In response, Portland’s Mayor Ted Wheeler tweeted, “Secretary Carson, if you don’t think gov’t can provide solutions, then you should step aside and allow someone up to the task to lead.” Apparently, in Oregon it is an apostasy to think that any problem can’t be solved by throwing tax dollars at it.

This is particularly ironic when Portland is now suffering cost overruns on its so-called affordable housing projects comparable to those for its light-rail projects. One project that was supposed to cost $200,000 per unit is coming in at $285,000 per unit–a 42.5 percent overrun. Wheeler proudly tweeted that the city just approved another project with 203 units of so-called affordable housing. Because home prices in a market of nearly 820,000 homes are going to be significantly influenced by the subsidized construction of 203 more–Not!

As the Antiplanner previously noted, “affordable housing is not the same as housing affordability.” Affordable housing is government subsidized housing for people too poor to afford housing. It is not intended or expected to influence the overall housing market because it does nothing about the underlying conditions that have made housing expensive in the first place. The problem in Portland, and the entire West Coast, is that housing is unaffordable to almost everyone, not just the very poor, and the only real solution for most people is to move away. Continue reading →

The Continuing Transit Apocalypse

By | | Transportation
5 Comments

The Utah Transit Authority (UTA) has come up with a creative explanation for why its ridership is dropping. It seems Salt Lake police have started something called Operation Rio Grande aimed at arresting drug dealers and other criminals near downtown Salt Lake. Many of those drug dealers were apparently regular light-rail users, so their incarceration has significantly reduced UTA ridership. Or so UTA says.

UTA hopes to gain new riders once the system appears to be safer. But it is forecasting “stagnant” ridership for the next year, which may actually be optimistic.

Meanwhile, reporters in Hawaii have noticed a drastic decline in ridership on Honolulu’s bus system, which on a per-capita basis is one of the most popular in the nation. Local transit officials profess to believe that bus ridership will recover when the city’s rail line opens. That’s pretty unlikely, however, both because they don’t even have funding to complete the rail line and because bus ridership has dropped when new rail lines opened in nearly every other city. Continue reading →

Who Stole What from Whom?

By | | Public lands
4 Comments

I visited the Patagonia web site looking for some Christmas presents yesterday and learned that “the president stole my land.” How horrible! So I looked into it and discovered that President Trump took federal land that was managed by a particular set of federal agencies under a particular set of restrictions and changed it into federal land managed by the very same federal agencies under a slightly different set of restrictions. Not to jump on Patagonia, whose clothing I’ve always enjoyed, but where’s the theft in that?

Of course, what Trump did was reverse changes by Presidents Clinton and Obama who first imposed the slightly different set of restrictions in 1996 (Clinton for the Grand Staircase-Escalante) and 2016 (Obama for the Bears Ears). I can say with absolute certainty that, when they made those changes in 1996 and 2016, many people in Utah said, “the president stole our land.”

Supposedly, one issue is vandalism and destruction to Native American antiquities and artifacts. But such vandalism and destruction was equally illegal (under laws that are equally difficult to enforce) under both sets of restrictions, so claims that Trump’s decision opens the areas to more looting or devastation are red herrings. Continue reading →

Another Nail in Transit’s Coffin

By | | Transportation
6 Comments

A light-rail train in Minneapolis derailed last week, forcing Metro Transit to bus riders around the train for several hours. The Phoenix light rail is suffering from major problems due to homeless people, leading the agency to try to force people off the trains.

But the biggest hit against transit is the me-too movement that encourages women to speak out against sexual harassment and other sex crimes. “The me-too movement is a public transportation issue,” says Washington Post writer Martine Powers. “If you’re a woman who rides public transportation, you’re almost guaranteed to experience the kinds of demeaning or threatening encounters that fit squarely within the bounds of the #MeToo conversation.”

The good news is that women are more likely to report such assaults than they were a few years ago. Powers notes that reports of sexual harassment on the Washington Metro system are up 65 percent in 2017 over 2016. Similarly, reports of sex crimes on the New York City subway have gone up 50 percent in the last three years. We can hope that these increases are because women are more willing to speak out and not because harassment is actually increasing. Continue reading →

Death by Cell Phone App

By | | Transportation
4 Comments

The Antiplanner has previously noted the frightening increase in highway fatalities in the last few years and suggested it might be related to growing traffic congestion. An alternative view is presented in a new paper by researchers at Purdue University titled “Death by Pokémon Go.” The paper found that the release of the Pokémon Go game led to a “disproportionate increase in vehicular crashes and . . . fatalities in the vicinity of locations, called Poke?Stops, where users can play the game while driving.”

After mysteriously collapsing by 25 percent between 2005 and 2010–the biggest five-year decline in 60 years–the number of fatalities remained roughly constant at around 32,500 for five years. But between 2014 and 2016, they grew by 15 percent, or nearly 4,800 deaths. While one computer game isn’t responsible for all 4,800 deaths, the study suggests that the growth of cell phone apps–from 800 iPhone apps in 2008 to more than 2 million today–and related distracted driving could be responsible for much of the increase.

Comparing 2016 fatalities with those from 2005 shows a 14 percent decline overall. However, the decline for occupants of motor vehicles is much larger, while non-occupant fatalities actually increased. Continue reading →

The Worst Reason for Subsidizing Amtrak

By | | Transportation
4 Comments

There are a lot of bad reasons for subsidizing Amtrak: it provides a vital service to small towns (how vital can it be when only a handful of people get on or off the train in any of those towns each day?); it saves energy (extending the tax credit to the Prius and other low-mpg vehicles would save more energy for less money); it relieves congestion (how congestion is there between Wolf Point and Glasgow, Montana?). But the worst reason was laid out a couple of days ago in a New York Times op-ed: Amtrak’s dining car will heal our political divisions.

On a 9,000-mile trip on six Amtrak trains, songwriter Gabriel Kahane learned that, when you eat in the dining car, you are often seated with other riders. Where most of our digital world “finds us sorting ourselves neatly into cultural and ideological silos,” the dining car “acts, by some numinous, unseen force, as a kind of industrial-strength social lubricant.”

In other words, he met people whose politics were very different from his–“abhorrent, dangerous, and destructive”–and discovered they were still human beings. “That ability to connect across an ideological divide seemed predicated on the fact that we were quite literally breaking bread together.” This made him “wonder if the train might be a salve for our national wound, bringing us into intimate conversation with unlikely interlocutors, and allowing us to see each other as human rather than as mere containers for ideology.” Continue reading →