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Category Archives: Planning Disasters

Mark Steyn: Roundabouts and Decline of Civilization

By | | Planning Disasters, Transportation
23 Comments

“I Correlate the Decline of Civilization to the Incidence of Roundabouts.”

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To be fair, a well-designed roundabout can handle a modest amount of traffic more smoothly than an intersection with stop signs or traffic signals. But too many roundabouts are designed more to obstruct traffic than to facilitate it.

P.J. on Government & the Auto Industry

By | | Planning Disasters, Transportation
8 Comments

P.J. O’Rourke has some pithy and insightful comments about the auto industry and government regulation in this interview conducted by faithful Antiplanner ally Ted Balaker.

In part 1, O’Rourke blames Detroit’s problems, in part, on “volatile government regulation,” which made it hard for car companies to predict what kind of cars people will want to buy.
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Part 2 is less oriented to transportation and more to O’Rourke’s path from a left-wing student to a libertarian adult. This interview is nearly a year old, but it provides nice filler while the Antiplanner is on the road.

Gee, Krugman’s Graphs Look Like the Antiplanner’s

By | | News commentary, Planning Disasters
14 Comments

Comparing housing prices in Los Angeles with those in Atlanta using a graph very similar to those used by the Antiplanner, Paul Krugman remakes the point that the United States did not have one housing bubble: it had many. And, he adds, the bubbles were caused by land-use regulation, while places that did not have government constraints on land did not have bubbles.

The Economist makes the point, previously made by the Antiplanner (on p. 115 of Best-Laid Plans, that volatile housing prices reduces mobility and increases unemployment rates. When home prices drop and homebuyers find themselves “underwater,” some won’t leave even for better jobs elsewhere because they can’t afford to lose the house.
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Unfortunately, most of the people who commented on the Economist article conclude that this means people are better off renting than buying. This may be true if you live in a region infested by smart-growth planners. But in relatively free housing markets, buying remains better for most of those who can afford the down payment — not because of the economic return you get from buying but because homeowners enjoy a higher quality of life.

California: The Future Does Not Work

By | | News commentary, Planning Disasters
15 Comments

Californian William Voegeli compares his home state with the Antiplanner’s favorite state (at least politically), Texas. Being homes to the first- and second-largest populations in the country, both are “populous Sunbelt states with large metropolitan areas, diverse economies, and borders with Mexico producing comparable demographic mixes.”

But there are two sharp differences between them. California spends well over $10,000 per capita each year (and Voegeli argues that it is ineffectively spent), while Texas spends barely two-thirds that much. The second difference, argues Voegeli, is a function of the first: Texas is growing rapidly while California’s growth has stagnated. Companies are moving out of California, while in one recent period, Texas gained more jobs than the other 49 states combined.

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High-Speed Rail: Planning Disaster of the Teens?

By | | Planning Disasters, Transportation
27 Comments

In a recent post, the Antiplanner pointed out that the United States is in competition with China, or more accurately, the Western model of democratic capitalism is in competition with the Eastern model of authoritarian capitalism. Now, China has announced the opening of the world’s fastest high-speed train service, capable of reaching speeds of 245 mph.

Fast for a train.
Flickr photo by Datemarker.

Naturally, this has treehuggers saying China will leave United States “in the dust” and the rest of the world behind as well. But let’s get real: in the United States, we use a technology known as jet airplanes that move people twice as fast as China’s high-speed trains.

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Growth Management: The #1 Planning Disaster

By | | Planning Disasters
7 Comments

Growth management is arguably the biggest planning disaster of the last decade. Though it didn’t kill as many people as the ineptly planned war on terror, it cost far more money and led to enormous financial and social pain all over the world.

We said that growth management made land and housing more expensive (link goes to excerpt from The Vanishing Automobile). Planners denied it, even though increased land and home prices greatly contributed to their stated goals of getting a greater share of people to live in multi-family housing or on smaller lots.

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The War on Terror: A Classic Planning Disaster

By | | Planning Disasters
10 Comments

Certainly one of the biggest government planning disasters of the last decade was the so-called War on Terror. Given the tragedy of 9/11, a government response was certainly called for, but the way it was handled by the Bush administration was poorly conceived from the very beginning.

Start with name: “war on terror.” Instead of treating the terrorists as criminals, we treated them as enemy soldiers, which carries with it the assumption that they work for another country. That was completely untrue, which led to all sorts of mistaken policies.

Then there was the attempt to capture Bin Laden, who supposedly planned the 9/11 attacks. While John Kerry claims that the Bush administration missed its opportunity to catch or kill him, not everyone is convinced. Still, it is clear that the administration completely lost interest in Bin Laden in its eagerness to attack Iraq.

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Rail Disasters of the Oughts

By | | Planning Disasters, Transportation
6 Comments

Although the Antiplanner spends a lot of blog posts ranting about rail transit, the truth is that all of the rail disasters of the last decade together did not cost nearly as much as certain other government planning disasters that the Antiplanner will cover later this week. Yet new rail transit lines can impose huge costs on local taxpayers, property owners, and — often — transit riders.

The sad fact is that rail transit takes so long to plan and build that just about any line that opened in this decade is really a result of planning that began in the 1990s or earlier. But for the purposes of this list, I mainly considered lines that opened after about 2004. This list is roughly in reverse order of the amount of net waste generated by each line or system.

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Top Planning Disasters of the Oughts

By | | Planning Disasters
16 Comments

With the end of the year, many people are making top ten lists for the last decade. The Antiplanner holds the quaint notion that the first year in history was year 1, which means the last year of this decade would be 2010, not 2009. On the other hand, every year is the end of some decade or other. In this way, you will be assured cheapest cialis online learn this here now of not having any side effects of the treatment. Tongkat ali could very well be a solution for free shipping viagra today’s active sexual partners. Vaginal atrophy creates intimate behave uncomfortable. viagra free A Canada Pharmacy can be helpful to people but there are sites that you need to be aware of your blood sugar level and consult your doctor, health care provider or 911(depending buy cheap sildenafil on the severity) at the first signs that something is awry.

In any case, 2009 is indeed the last year of a span of years whose third digit is 0, so the Antiplanner will spend the rest of this week writing about government planning disasters of this particular decade. I don’t know if the list will come to 10, but for now, I look forward to any nominations you may have.

Moving More Expensively

By | | News commentary, Planning Disasters, Transportation
36 Comments

Environmental groups just published Moving Cooler, a report that argues we need to reduce driving in order to reduce global warming. Transportation expert Alan Pisarski has written a critique of this report, saying it is more of a sales document than a credible analysis.

“The benefits and the costs involved” in the report “are so corrupted to be meaningless,” says Pisarski. For example, the time penalty from forcing someone to switch from a 15-minute auto trip to a 60-minute transit trip is assumed to be zero, transit subsidies are not counted, and all mobility losses from coercing people out of their cars are counted solely as benefits.
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Everything I have seen suggests that we can make technological improvements to cars and highways that will reduce greenhouse gases at costs ranging anywhere from minus $50 to $50 a ton. Meanwhile, rail transit and more compact development will reduce greenhouse gases at costs ranging from $5,000 to $100,000 a ton — if they reduce them at all. Until all technological options have been used, we shouldn’t even be talking about the behavioral ones.