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Access and Equity

By | | Book reviews, Transportation
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When David Levinson was at the University of California, Berkeley, he calculated that it would cost more to travel between Los Angeles and San Francisco on high-speed rail than either flying or driving even if the high-speed rail line cost only $10 billion to build. When he directed the University of Minnesota’s Accessibility Observatory, he pioneered research showing that automobiles provide access to far more jobs than transit.

So when I learned that he has co-edited a new book, Applications of Access, that is available for on line for free, I immediately downloaded it to learn about the latest research about access. It turns out you get what you pay for, as I found the book to be a big disappointment. Continue reading →

The Antiplanner’s Library:
Cities Without Planners

By | | Book reviews, Regional planning
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Alain Bertaud (previously) is an urban planner who never met an urban economist until almost a decade after graduating from planning school. The economist opened his eyes: not only did urban economics often teach exactly the opposite of what planning schools taught, the economists based their conclusions on data, models, and real world experience, while the planners based their ideas on intuition and the general beliefs of previous generations of planners.

Bertaud’s new book, Order without Design, reflects a lifetime of growing skepticism about urban planning dogma. Planners, says Bertaud, based their ideas on rules of thumb that were developed by people who often know nothing about the people they are regulating or planning for. Continue reading →

Transit Is Not a Human Right

By | | Book reviews, Transportation
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“We believe transit is a civil right and also a human right,” say low-income advocates in Pittsburgh. An article jointly published by the Huffington Post and The Incline claims that, “Six decades after the Montgomery bus boycott and the Freedom Rides, public transit isn’t just a platform for the civil rights struggle, it is the civil rights struggle.”

Sadly, this terribly misreads the real lesson of the Montgomery bus boycott. That boycott succeeded where previous efforts had failed because many blacks in Montgomery had their own automobiles and shared rides with those who had previously used the bus system. As Washington Post writer Warren Brown says, blacks used “their private automobiles to drive around Jim Crow.”

Similarly, complaints about poor transit service to low-income neighborhoods in Pittsburgh and elsewhere ignore the fact that transit is not the way to get out of poverty; the automobile is. As the latest Access Across America reports show, an hour-long transit trip by the average resident of Pittsburgh reaches less than 7 percent of the region’s jobs, but a 20-minute auto trip can reach 12 percent of the region’s jobs while 40 minutes in a car reaches nearly 50 percent. Continue reading →

The Antiplanner’s Library
Trains, BRT, People — But Don’t Count Costs

By | | Book reviews, Transportation
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Christof Spieler was on the Houston Metro board of directors for eight years, so he thinks he understands transit. Unlike many transit advocates, he is willing to admit that some transit projects, such as Nashville’s commuter train, Cincinnati’s streetcar, and even the St. Louis light-rail system, are failures. “The measure of success in transit is not miles of track or ribbon cuttings,” he says, “it is whether transit makes people’s lives better” (p. 1).

But while his book is called Trains, Buses, People, it almost completely ignores bus service unless that service uses dedicated lanes. Instead, it reviews transit service only in the 47 cities that have or are building either rail transit or dedicated bus lanes. Cities that don’t have these things are ignored. For example, the book devotes several pages each to transit in Austin, Dallas-Ft. Worth, and Houston but leaves out San Antonio, even though San Antonio transit carried more trips per capita in 2017 than transit in any of the other three Texas urban complexes. Continue reading →

The Antiplanner’s Library:
Rethinking America’s Highways

By | | Book reviews, Transportation
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In 1985, Reason Foundation co-founder and then-president Robert Poole heard about a variable road pricing experiment in Hong Kong. In 1986, he learned that France and other European countries were offering private concessions to build tollroads. In 1987, he interviewed officials of Amtech, which had just invented electronic transponders that could be used for road tolling. He put these three ideas together in a pioneering 1988 paper suggesting that Los Angeles, the city with the worst congestion in America, could solve its traffic problems by adding private, variable-priced toll lanes to existing freeways.

Although Poole’s proposal has since been carried out successfully on a few freeways in southern California and elsewhere, it is nowhere near as ubiquitous as it ought to be given that thirty years have passed and congestion is worse today in dozens of urban areas than it was in Los Angeles in 1988. So Poole has written Rethinking America’s Highways, a 320-page review of his research on the subject since that time. Poole will speak about his book at a livestreamed Cato Institute event this Friday at noon, eastern time. Continue reading →

The Antiplanner’s Library:
Richard Florida’s The New Urban Crisis

By | | Book reviews, Regional planning
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In a review of Richard Florida’s recent book, The New Urban Crisis, left-wing writer Sam Wetherell says that cities that have followed Florida’s “creative class” prescriptions “are becoming gated communities” for the rich, “or at least the college-educated children of the rich.” They suffer from increased inequality, gentrification pushing the poor out to the suburbs, and a disappearing middle class.

As a socialist, Wetherell believes the problem is a crisis of capitalism. But really the problem is a crisis of big government. Whatever the source of the problem, Wetherell claims that, in The New Urban Crisis, even Florida “all but admits that he was wrong,” though “he stops just short of saying it.” Continue reading →

Ten Things to Know About Megaprojects

By | | Book reviews, Planning Disasters
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Megaproject expert Bent Flyvbjerg–who is now at Oxford University–has a new book called, coincidentally, the Oxford Handbook of Megaproject Management. His introduction, which he was nice enough to make available on line, introduces the Iron Law of Megaprojects along with “ten things you need to know about megaprojects,” at least if you think you are going to try to manage one.

The Iron Law is, simply, “Over budget, over time, under benefits, over and over again.” He says that 90 percent of megaprojects go over budget and most end up under performing. Continue reading →

The Antiplanner’s Library: Bike Battles

By | | Book reviews, Transportation
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University of Wisconsin historian James Longhurst has written a book about the history of conflicts over cyclists’ rights to use the road. As Longhurst points out, cycling has gone through a number of “booms,” starting in the late nineteenth century, then during World War II, later with the growth of environmentalism in the 1970s, and most recently in the last few years. As a cyclist myself, I was familiar with most of this history except for the WWII part, and as near as I can tell Longhurst’s account is accurate.

However, as illustrated in the video below, Longhurst approaches the debate as an environmental issue, which leads him in the wrong direction. Treating cycling as an environmental issue leads to the conclusion that bicycles are morally superior to automobiles because they use less energy and pollute less. That leads to demands that cyclists be allowed special rights, such as the right to unnecessarily block traffic or use the middle of a lane even if it slows auto traffic. Continue reading →

A City Is Not a Fugue

By | | Book reviews
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If you want a book demonstrating that smart growth is based on mumbo-jumbo, half-truths, and outright fabrications, there are few better examples than The Well-Tempered City. Jonathan Rose is a real estate developer who happens to be married to the sister of New Urbanist architect Peter Calthorpe. Rose claims to have been at the 1996 meeting where the term “smart growth” was coined, though he doesn’t mention that one of the reasons for choosing the name was so its supporters could tar anyone who disagreed with them for favoring “dumb growth.”

Full disclosure: The publisher gave me a copy of this book on the condition that I write a review in my blog, so anything positive I say about the book should be taken with a grain of salt. I told the publisher my review might not be too positive, but they seemed to think a bad review was better than none at all. As it turned out, the book is far worse than I suspected, as I usually expect a semblance of reason from people I disagree with. I could find none in The Well-Tempered City.

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Antiplanner’s Library: Who Owns the World

By | | Book reviews, Follow up
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While doing research for my map of the New Feudalism, I found this 2010 book by Irish journalist Kevin Cahill. Despite the shrill cover rhetoric, the book is basically a nation-by-nation (and, in the United States, state-by-state) inventory of land ownership patterns. There are a lot of question marks about some countries, but it helps to fill in some of the blanks in Eastern Europe on my map.

Click image to find booksellers offering this book through abebooks.com.

Cahill’s thesis is that “the main cause of most remaining poverty in the world is an excess of landownership in too few hands.” The book is a follow-up to Cahill’s 2002 book, Who Owns Britain? Cahill makes much of Britain’s claim that the crown is the ultimate owner of all the land in the United Kingdom, and goes further and claims the Queen owns all of the land in Canada, Australia, and two-thirds of Antarctica. In fact, 60 to 70 percent of families in Australia, Britain, and Canada have fee-simple title to their land, which is just as valid as the titles Americans have to the land they own.

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