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Hiking Up the South Sister

By | | Travels
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Last week’s weather report for this past weekend (October 23-24) predicted snow in the mountains, so Thursday, October 21, was my last opportunity this year to hike up the South Sister (also known as Charity). At 10,363 feet, the South Sister is the third highest mountain in Oregon and the highest you can hike without any climbing skills. Still, the trail is very steep–5 of the 6 miles averaged 20 percent grades.

I started at Devils Lake, which is about 5,500 feet, so I “only” had to climb about 5,000 feet. The trail began with 1-1/2 miles of steep uphill through dense forest. On emerging from the forest, I had an excellent view of Broken Top, a 9,175-foot mountain east of the South Sister. As the photo shows, morning skies were clear. (Click any photo for a larger view.)

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Postcards from Asia

By | | Travels
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My visit to Korea was courtesy of the Korean Institute of Public Administration (KIPA), which asked me to speak at a conference on “Conflict Management and Collaborative Governance.” Apparently, since Korea became a democracy in 1987, people have expressed their new-found freedom by protesting and debating all sorts of things, conflicts that one analyst estimates has cost the nation a quarter of its gross domestic product. This is probably high but it is a big enough problem to warrant coverage in the local English-language paper.

After the conference, KIPA took me and my fellow speakers on a tour of some of Seoul’s cultural sites and scenic vistas, including this palace built in 1395. (Click on this or any photo below for a larger view.)

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Report from Japan

By | | Transportation, Travels
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On Monday, the Antiplanner rode a high-speed train from Tokyo to Nagano, probably the most expensive high-speed rail route in the world. According to one source, it cost more than half a billion dollars per mile in 1997 dollars, no doubt because much of the route is in tunnels. The train I was on was practically empty, and I understand that is the usual condition for that route except in high tourist season.

The Nagano high-speed rail route is a perfect example of why the U.S. shouldn’t build high-speed rail. Even if the Boston-to-Washington or California routes made sense (which they don’t), once a government starts on a project like this it can’t stop until all the most powerful politicians have one in their states and districts. The Nagano and other Japanese high-speed rail routes were built not because they make financial or transportation sense but because of politics.

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Report from Seoul

By | | Travels
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Even smart-growth planners believe, or say they believe, that Le Corbusier‘s Radiant City would be an awful place to live. If you agree, then Seoul is a scary place, as much of it consists of hundreds of high-rise apartment blocks.

Seoul occupies less than 2 percent of Korea’s land area but contains 40 percent of the population. From the air, it looks like the worst of both Radiant City and urban sprawl, but the sprawl appears to be mostly factories as modern assembly-line methods require horizontal operations. Despite this factory sprawl, the average population density of the Seoul urban area is about the same as that of New York City–meaning it is five times greater than the New York urban area (which includes northern New Jersey).

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Crater Lake User Fees

By | | Public lands, Travels
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The Antiplanner’s Ride Around Crater Lake Three Times in One Day (RACLTTOD) went well. My brother Richard joined me for all three laps, his wife Carin for two, and the Antiplanner’s faithful ally (and sometimes commenter) Andy Stahl for two. With two 2-mile detours to Cloud Cap overlook, Richard and I did a total of 100 miles with 11,800 feet of elevation gain in 8 hours and 20 minutes of ride time–11 hours including lunch, rests, and sightseeing.

Crater Lake from Cloud Cap overlook.

An amateur racer, Andy is by far the better rider, but he handicapped himself by riding tandem the first lap with his 10-year-old son. A 10-year-old simply does not have the power to carry his own weight on such a long ride, so Andy had to work extra hard. After resting the second lap, Andy was easily able to drop the rest of us on a regular bike.

Andy and his son, Olallie circling the lake on the first lap.

While we were riding, comments on this blog focused on national park user fees. The original director of the Park Service, Steven Mather, believed that the parks should pay their way. Unfortunately, this goal was undercut, first by Congress which limited the amounts parks could charge and later by Mather’s successors, who were eager to get federal funds to subsidize park expansion and operations.

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The Antiplanner, Carin, and Richard halfway through the third lap. Andy is way ahead of us, but our main concern is keeping warm as the day is cooling off.

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RACLTTOD

By | | Travels
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Probably no more posts this week as the Antiplanner is heading down to Crater Lake for RACLTTOD–Ride Around Crater Lake Three Times in One Day. The Crater Lake rim road is about 33 miles around with about 3,800 feet of elevation gain. Three laps, with a couple of side trips to a point called Cloud Cap, make a hundred miles with nearly 12,000 feet in elevation gain.


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Don’t bother Googling RACLTTOD; as far as I know I am the only one to have done such a ride, about four years ago. This year I have challenged a couple of friends to join me. I’ll let you know next week if I make it.

Budget Maximization & Walkin’ Jim

By | | Public lands, Travels
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I have a friend who needs my help, and I hope some of my readers will help him too. Back in 1985, the Antiplanner worked exclusively for environmental groups like the Sierra Club and Wilderness Society, reviewing Forest Service plans and helping environmentalists understand how the Forest Service worked. My research showed that the Forest Service lost taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars a year doing environmentally destructive activities.

Walkin’ Jim Stoltz

Why would it do this? The Forest Service’s own historian argued that the agency was “unlike other bureaucracies.” It was “more like a religion. . . fulfilling a sacred mission to bring wood to the world in order to avert the evils of a timber famine.” Other people suggested the agency had been captured by the timber industry.

Neither of these explanations made sense to me as they were not consistent with some of the things I saw the Forest Service do. Instead, as I reviewed plan after plan and collected data on thousands of timber sales and other activities, I realized that the only explanation that was consistent with all the agency’s policies was budget maximization. This did not mean that anyone in the agency necessarily thought, “How can I maximize my budget today?” Instead, through a process similar to natural selection, those policies that maximized the agency’s budget tended to be favored over ones that did not.

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Hawaii – Land of Crony Capitalism

By | | Regional planning, Travels
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Wikipedia defines crony capitalism as an “allegedly capitalist economy in which success in business depends on close relationships between businesspeople and government officials.” Crony capitalism has sadly played an important role in state and, especially, local government for just about ever. But Hawaii suffers from a particularly strong case.

Hawaii’s history of crony capitalism dates back at least to the mid-1950s. Before then, the future state was run by an oligarchy consisting of the Big Five land-owning companies and a sixth company that was mainly involved in construction. The oligarchy ran the political, economic, and social system of the entire territory in a system that would be considered more feudal than crony capitalistic. Nearly all of the private land in the islands was owned by one of these companies or a relative handful of other families, companies, or trusts, leaving only about 3 percent of the state available for fee simple ownership by ordinary residents.

That began to change in 1954, when reform-oriented Democrats, bolstered by the votes of children of immigrant workers from Japan, China, and the Philippines, took control of the legislature for the first time in the territory’s history. Among other things, the Democrats promised land reform so that more land and opportunities would be available to the average person.

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Happy Memorial Photo Day

By | | Travels
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Update: Oops, I’m confused. Guess Memorial Day is next week. Oh well, enjoy the photos.

Today is a day when we are supposed to remember fallen heroes, but most people just consider it the first holiday of the summer. Instead of ranting about transit or land-use plannng, I thought I would show off a few photos from my own recent travels. Click any picture for a larger view.

Here is a stone arch bridge in New Hampshire, built entirely without mortar and dating back to before the Civil War.

Garden of the Gods in Colorado. This land was given to the city of Colorado Springs by the president of the Chicago, Burlington & Quincy Railroad.
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Phoenix Mountain City Park in Phoenix, Arizona. This photo is actually a merger of nine different exposures.

Smith Rocks State Park in Oregon.

I hope you enjoy the day.

Travels with the Antiplanner: New Orleans

By | | Travels, Urban areas
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Last week was the Antiplanner’s first visit to New Orleans since Katrina. What I remember from my previous visit in 2002 was a thriving area centered around the French Quarter filled with overweight tourists eating fatty foods at overpriced restaurants. (I remember weighing myself as soon as I got home to see how many pounds I would have to shed through hard cycling.)

Yet all but the most brain-dead tourists could catch glimpses of another city: run-down buildings, poor people — mostly black — many of whom may have considered themselves lucky to have menial jobs in the tourist hotels and restaurants. At the time, the city was building a new Canal Street Streetcar line for the tourists even as it was cutting back on bus service to the low-income neighborhoods: bus vehicle miles dropped by 12 percent between 1999 and 2003, while streetcar service grew by 40 percent. The 3 million new streetcar riders hardly made up for the lost 6 million bus trips, especially since the streetcar riders were “choice” riders while the bus riders were transit-dependent.

Thousands of homesites in the Lower Ninth Ward remain vacant today.

Katrina transformed the region’s demographics. In 2000, New Orleans had 485,000 people and the urban area had just over 1 million. In 2008, says the Census Bureau, the city had only 312,000 and the urban area less than 800,000. Most of the departed are poor blacks, many of whom found refuge from the flooding in Houston and decided to stay in a city that had better schools and less corruption.

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