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About The Antiplanner

The Antiplanner is a forester and economist with more than fifty years of experience critiquing government land-use and transportation plans.

Beluga Caviar or Pâté de Fois Gras?

By | | Housing
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A YouTube site called “Oh the Urbanity!” challenges the “myth” that five-stories is the “optimal” height for residential buildings. I would agree, except Oh the Urbanity! thinks that taller, not shorter, is better and criticizes other urbanists who are satisfied with “only” mid-rise buildings.

I’ve got news for Oh the Urbanity! Most Americans (surveys say 80 percent) wouldn’t want to live in your towers even if they cost no more than a similarly sized single-family home. They especially don’t want to live in mid-rise or high-rise buildings that cost a lot more, per square foot, than single-family homes. Continue reading →

The $346 Million Business Killer

By | | City planning, Transportation
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San Francisco’s Van Ness Avenue is full of vacant storefronts, and city officials are blaming past city policies discouraging chain stores in the area. In order to fill those vacancies, city officials have promised to speed any permitting applications for new stores, chain or otherwise.

Google street view shows that 1700 Van Ness Avenue was occupied by a chain store, Staples, in 2013. Note that there is parking the entire length of Van Ness on both sides of the street plus a nice tree-filled center strip.

That’s nice of them, but at least one of the stores that is now vacant used to be a chain store. The Staples at 1700 Van Ness was open in May 2022 but closed by December. Continue reading →

Amtrak Does Well in December; Airlines Do Better

By | | Transportation
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Amtrak carried 7 percent more passenger-miles in December of 2024 than in the same month of 2019, according to its monthly performance report issued earlier this week. The airlines, meanwhile, carried 10 percent more passengers in December of 2024 than 2019, according to TSA passenger counts.

Transit and highway data will be added as soon as it is available.

The airlines, of course, carried a lot more passengers than Amtrak. Amtrak carried about 3.0 million passengers in December while the airlines carried 66 million. The difference in passenger-miles is even greater. While airline passenger-mile data is not yet available for December, the average Amtrak trip is about 200 miles long while the average domestic airline trip is 950 miles, which means domestic airlines carry about 100 times as many passenger-miles as Amtrak. When international airline trips are included, the difference is even greater. Continue reading →

Density vs. Fertility

By | | City planning
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A downtown Minneapolis office building that sold for $220 million in 2016 was resold last week for $6.25 million, a 97 percent markdown. The Ameripress Financial Center is a 31-story office building that was built in 2000 and occupied by a single tenant, the American Express Financial Advisors (which was spun off by American Express in 2005 and renamed Ameripress). The building had been leased by Ameripress, which has its own building in downtown Minneapolis, and with so many people working remotely, it moved out of the leased one.

Photo by AlexiusHoratius.

The Minneapolis Downtown Council keeps saying that downtown is recovering, but admits that that recovery is more in the nature of evening restaurant patronage than office workers. It recently released a 2035 recovery plan that relies heavily on government urban-renewal projects in sites such as the waterfront and former post office. Continue reading →

Make DOGE a Predatory Bureaucracy

By | | News commentary
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The national debt is more than $36 trillion, which is about $110,000 for every man, woman, and other-gendered person in the United States. When I was in high school, the national debt was about $1,800 per person, and I remember wondering if I could afford to pay my share. At that time, it might have been possible to pay it off with a one-time tax on everyone; today, not so much.

Before World War II, the U.S. had a long history of going into debt during wartime and then paying off most of that debt between wars. The above chart shows that after 1945 we paid off some of the war-related debt, but then entered a 1984-like world of permanent hot or cold war, which led Congress to give up any notion of completely paying off the debt. Still, as shown in the chart below, after adjusting for inflation the debt per capita continued to decline until around 1974. Continue reading →

Cordon Pricing Makes New York Congestion Worse

By | | Transportation
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Early reports claim that New York City’s so-called congestion pricing program is a great success, reducing the number of vehicles driving into lower Manhattan by 5 to 6 percent. However, because it really isn’t congestion pricing — that is, it doesn’t price roads by how much congestion there is but just charges people for crossing a line — it is likely that traffic will bounce back just as it did when London imposed a similar cordon pricing scheme.

Manhattan traffic before cordon pricing. Photo by Rachel Maddow, yes, that Rachel Maddow.

Worse, the traffic monitors at INRIX have found that cordon pricing effectively exported congestion out of lower Manhattan and into other parts of the New York urban area. The result has been a net overall slowdown of traffic. The region’s travel speeds were 3 percent slower during morning rush hour and 4 percent slower in the afternoon. People working downtown benefitted from the program; everyone else was hurt. Continue reading →

Climate Change, Insurance, and the LA Fires

By | | Wildfire
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Scientific American blames the Los Angeles fires on climate change. A Yale University publication agrees. An article in Quartz predicts that climate change is going to make housing “uninsurable.” Instead of insurance, a New York Times op-ed by a former California insurance commissioner argues that oil companies should be forced to pay for fire damages.

The Palisades Fire on the evening of January 7. Photo by Toastt21.

It’s a neat argument that appeals to homeowners eager to blame the loss of their houses on anything other than their own decisions to buy or build flammable homes with flammable landscaping in a fireplain. Yet there are valid reasons to believe that climate change is not the issue, and that even if climate change is occurring, it won’t make homes uninsurable. In fact, people who believe climate change is the problem should be all the more interested in making sure that homes and landscaping are fireproof. Continue reading →

Cliff Slater: A Hawaiian Hero

By | | News commentary
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I was sad to learn that my friend, Cliff Slater, died earlier this week at the age of 92. Cliff was a genuine hero who worked hard to improve life for people in Hawaii and in particular devoted thousands of hours and lots of his own money fighting the Honolulu rail boondoggle.

Cliff Slater does battle with the rail transit cabal in this political cartoon by John Pritchett. Used with permission.

Born in England in June, 1933, Cliff grew up in Chingford, a suburb of London. After serving as an officer in the Royal Air Force, he moved to Hawaii in his 20s. In Maui, he met Jack Ackerman and Larry Windley, who had started a tourist diving company called Maui Divers. They had also discovered black coral beds and were making some of the coral into jewelry. Continue reading →

Will Trump’s Electric Vehicle Order Kill EVs?

By | | News commentary, Transportation
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One of the executive orders President Trump signed on Monday calls for ending federal subsidies to and preferences for electric vehicles. With numerous media reports that EV sales were already tanking, some think that Trump’s order will kill the market for electric vehicles. It won’t, but it will shift things around.

A Tesla Model S at a Supercharger station in Germany. Photo by Avda.

Curiously, Trump’s order is supported by Elon Musk. He claims he simply opposes all subsidies, but some think that he hopes an end to subsidies will benefit Tesla by discouraging other automakers from developing new electric vehicles. But there is a hidden cost to this order that could severely impact Tesla’s bottom line. Continue reading →

TriMet’s Definition of High-Tech

By | | Transportation
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Portland’s transit agency, TriMet, is introducing new “technologically advanced” light-rail trains to its system. Yet most of these “technological advancements” seem pretty lame to me. Among other things, the new cars have “Better temperature control for heating to keep trains warm in cold weather.” Is this an admission that past light-rail cars from the same builder were too hot in summer and too cold in winter?

The new cars also carry 168 people. That’s hardly a major “technological advance” over the previous cars, which carried 172 people. However, TriMet’s original light-rail cars, which the new ones will be replacing, only carried 164 people. They achieved this incredible technological advance by making the new cars four feet longer. Portland has the shortest city blocks in the country, and since light-rail trains can’t be longer than a city block, TriMet operates the lowest-capacity light-rail system in the country, yet it still calls its light rail “high capacity transit.” Continue reading →