Bicycles in Japan

Lots of people ride bicycles in Japan and there are a few bike lanes in streets. But most of the designated bike lanes are on sidewalks.

Today I walked on a street in Kyoto that was eight lanes wide. The sidewalks were split by a small fence with one side designated for pedestrians and the other for cyclists.

It struck that if anyone suggested dividing U.S. sidewalks into pedestrian and bicycle sides, many people would be outraged that pedestrians would have to give up space to bicycles. Yet these same people expect motorists to be willing to give up street space for bicycles.

I’m not saying the Japanese way is necessarily right. I still think the best way to protect bicycle riders is to designate local streets as bicycle boulevards. At the same time, I don’t think the real agenda of those who want to put bike lanes in busy streets is not pro-bicycle but anti-auto.

Preserving Vital Technologies

Protecting America’s typewriter and slide rule industries is critical for the nation’s future, said John Underwood, with the American Public Typewriter Association, and William Keuffel, with Slide Rule America, in a report released today by the Typewriter-Slide Rule Center. “Typewriters and slide rules played a vital role in the nation’s victory in World War II,” noted Underwood. “What will happen to the U.S. if we don’t have access to these irreplaceable technologies in the future?”

We couldn’t have won World War II without it.

It is commonly believed that these tools have been replaced by microcomputers and the internet, but Keuffel scoffed at that claim. “The original internet was subsidized by the Defense Department,” he pointed out. “If the typewriter and slide rule industries had received similar subsidies, they would be thriving today.” Continue reading

The World Turned Upside Down

Today marks 50 years of my work in public policy analysis. I began in June 1972 as an intern for the Oregon Student Public Interest Research Group. By July, I had written a lengthy paper on how Portland should make transportation improvements to reduce air pollution. Since then, I’ve written somewhere around 200 more papers, several books, and numerous op-eds and articles on topics ranging from endangered species to high-speed rail in geographic areas ranging from Georgia to Tasmania.

I started writing the Antiplanner in January, 2007, and have since written more than 3,700 posts, including 150 policy briefs. That’s enough; it’s time for me to retire. This is difficult because I feel I still have some unfinished business.

The first half of my career was helping environmentalists protect natural resources from corporations that wanted government subsidies to do harm to the environment. After two decades, I left the environmental movement when they began supporting government subsidies to corporations to do harm to the environment. Continue reading

Goodbye, Cato

The Cato Institute fired me last week. After fourteen years during which I wrote four books, 38 papers, hundreds of articles, and spoke at scores of conferences, they unceremoniously dumped me at a zoom meeting like someone throwing out a wad of used tissue paper.

Their explanation was that they had reorganized their economics policy group and I no longer fit within the new organization. I hadn’t been a part of any policy group for my first eight years at Cato and fit just fine.

I should have been alerted early this year when I received a poor performance review on my previous year’s work for the first time since starting the job. The poor review had nothing to do with my actual performance and was solely because my supervisor disagreed with me on one point of housing policy. The disagreement went back to 2016, so I didn’t understand why he brought it up in the 2020 performance review. I’ll probably write about that disagreement in more detail here in the future. Continue reading

Have a Safe and Enjoyable Holiday

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Somewhere in those hills is the Spring Basin Wilderness, which I hope to hike in this weekend.

Have a Safe & Happy Holiday

The Antiplanner hopes you are having a safe and enjoyable Fourth of July this year.

Wishing You a Less Interesting 2021

It turns out that “May you live in interesting times,” which is supposedly a traditional Chinese curse, was probably first said in England less than 100 years ago. Yet wherever it came from, most people today probably agree that 2020 was the most interesting (and cursed) year of their lives.

Usefulness of Ingredients in Supplements Let us now have a closer look at the ingredients of cialis 25mg these supplements. He wrote off his inability to climb steps manifested and he saw his world shrinking, he became worried. fast generic cialis In short, these drugs are being seen more cialis on line http://www.heritageihc.com/staff-carroll as a deterrent than to hamper the rise of the anti ED drug at your door step. Scientists noticed this and decided to give the Saw Palmetto canadian cialis no prescription berry rates at a solid #5. Zephyr, Antiplanning dog number 2, keeps a watchful eye for interesting events on the horizon.

While we all hope that 2021 will be less interesting, I suspect it will have its own interesting surprises. No matter what, the Antiplanning family wishes you the best for the coming year.

Happy Highways

I try to deal mainly in facts while many who disagree with me seem to deal mainly with emotions, such fear of global warming or compassion for the poor. Of course, your emotions on these subjects are only legitimate so long as you agree with their prescriptions.

One thing they are good at is coming up with appealing terms that are, in fact, meaningless. Complete streets, for example. Who would want an incomplete street? Or how about smart growth, a term that says nothing about what it means, but that was specifically picked so they could accuse anyone who disagreed with them of being for dumb growth.

When we come up with terms, we try to make them as accurately descriptive as possible, but the results aren’t very appealing. Mileage-based user fees, for example. Are you for embuff? Or how about road user charges, or RUCs. That doesn’t sound appealing at all. In fact, it rhymes with some potentially unappealing things. “RUCs sucks; don’t get f**ked by RUCs.” Continue reading

Another Reason to Drive a Car

Not only is a private automobile the safest place to travel during a pandemic, it’s the safest place to be tested for the coronavirus. At least, so laments Eve Andrews, a writer for Grist who can easily afford a car but has been trying to live without one.

She notes that some people don’t have cars because “cars can be prohibitively expensive to purchase and maintain.” I don’t find that persuasive as owning a car is one of the best ways to boost one’s income. I am pretty sure that most of the 9 percent of households in American who don’t own cars can afford to do so, they just choose not to and then often rely other taxpayers to subsidize their transit rides.
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In any case, as Andrews notes, social distancing is causing at least some people to question the car-free lifestyle. Unfortunately, anti-car people have so demonized cars that people think they are being virtuous just by not owning one when in fact they maybe harming both themselves and others by making themselves more vulnerable to catching and spreading the virus.

Hear That Lonesome Whistle

The Antiplanner was pleased to note that the Wall Street Journal reviewed Romance of the Rails last week. Not surprisingly, the comments on this review were much friendlier to the book than the comments on the Trains magazine interview.

Journal book reviewer Patrick Cooke called the book an “exhaustively researched exploration of America’s passenger-rail story” and correctly noted that, though I love passenger trains, I’m a “reluctant realist” who wrote the book as a “love letter to a dying friend.” However, “‘Dying’ may not be the best way to describe rail,” suggests the first comment on the article. “‘Permanent vegetative state’ might be more accurate.”
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For those who love passenger trains, Cooke optimistically suggests that there may be hope for the future as “The so-called Green New Deal proposal, conjured in a rapture of utopian bliss and soon to be launched by the Democratic House, will cost, by one estimate, $700 billion to $1 trillion annually and includes funding for high-speed, zero-carbon rail” and “$25 billion in mass-transit spending to build, or expand, subway and light-rail transit systems nationwide.” Someone should point out to those Democrats that slide rules and manual typewriters emit far fewer greenhouse gases than electric calculators and microcomputers.