Category Archives: Iconoclast

Fifty years ago this week, I was planning the events for my high school’s version of the first National Environmental Teach-In (later called Earth Day). All of the speakers my friends and I invited were either politicians or government officials. If I knew then what I know now, that event would have been much different. Here are a few of the main lessons I’ve learned since then.

1. Don’t trust the government

Everyone knows that “I’m from the government and I’m here to help you” is a joke. Yet too many people still believe that government works the way their high school teachers taught them. I recently watched some college students debate whether to privatize public transit, and one of them said, “I think transit should be run for the public interest and not for profits.” I wondered what made him think that any public agency operates in the public interest, but that’s what we are taught and that’s what many implicitly believe.

People in Congress and state legislatures know better; they’ve seen how the sausage is made. Yet most of the legislation they pass assumes that the bureaucracies they create and fund will automatically work in the public interest. The Supreme Court put this assumption into a legal precedent called the Chevron decision. In reality, we can’t trust any level of government — the legislators, the executives, or the bureaucrats — to work in the public interest, even if we could define it. Continue reading →

Shortly before the Cato Institute published Gridlock, Knopf published a similar book called Traffic by a writer named Tom Vanderbilt. The two didn’t cover exactly the same ground: Traffic focused on the physics of congestion while Gridlock focused on the institutional issues around transportation. But I noticed that Traffic received far more reviews and mentions in major newspapers and magazines than Gridlock.

American Nightmare, my next book, got even less attention. Part of the problem, I was told, was that book reviewers didn’t take Cato seriously as a publisher. I wanted to change that, so I asked Cato’s book editor, John Samples, and Cato’s marketing director, Bob Garber, how I should write a book that would sell better.

“Tell stories,” they said. People like stories. Gridlock and American Nightmare both delved deep into history, the latter going back a thousand years to look at housing and property rights. But the stories these books told were impersonal. Continue reading →

In 2000, Dartmouth University economist William Fischel coined the term homevoter to describe the fact that, in most of the United States, a majority of voters were also homeowners and that they would tend to support policies that boosted the value of their homes. In particular, Fischel argued that homevoter preferences were responsible for the rise of no-growth and slow-growth laws that became popular on the West Coast and in the Northeast after Earth Day, 1970.

This suggested that efforts to abolish urban-growth boundaries were doomed to failure. Why would Portland or San Jose homeowners ever vote to get rid of boundaries when doing so would reduce the value of their homes by 50 percent (in Portland) to 75 percent (in San Jose)? Even in places where a majority of people were renters, renters are less likely to vote than homeowners, so getting rid of the boundaries appeared to be impossible.

However, a new rule published by the Department of Housing and Urban Development in 2013 offered an alternative solution, one that by-passed voters and their elected representatives. This solution was called disparate impact, and it said that land-use regulations that made it more difficult for low-income minorities to live in an area were effectively the same as putting up a sign saying “No Blacks Allowed.” Continue reading →

British Columbia is big. It’s really big. It’s bigger than Texas. It’s 40 percent bigger than Texas. And while Texas has four major urban areas with a combined population of more than 15 million people, British Columbia has only one major urban area with fewer than 2.3 million people.

So, naturally, Vancouver regional planners fear that urban sprawl might overrun the entire province. The plans and regulations they have written to preserve British Columbia’s supposedly scarce open space have made Vancouver the least-affordable housing market in North America, according to Wendell Cox’s latest review of housing prices. In the rest of the English-speaking world, only Hong Kong is more expensive.

In 2007, the Fraser Institute asked me to visit Vancouver to review its regional plan–or plans, actually, since the first one was written in the 1960s and later, more-restrictive plans were written periodically after that. I spent several days in the offices of the Greater Vancouver Regional District (now known as Metro Vancouver), which were located not in Vancouver but in the suburb of Burnaby. Continue reading →

When Congress created the transit capital improvement grants or New Starts fund in 1991, it required that each proposed project be “justified based on a comprehensive review of its mobility improvements, environmental benefits, cost effectiveness, and operating efficiencies.” Initially, the Federal Transit Administration measured “cost effectiveness” in dollars per new rider: the annual operating cost of the project plus the amortized capital cost divided by the projected number of annual new riders.

While a useful measure, the FTA made no effort to enforce it. While transit agencies calculated that bus projects (such as bus-rapid transit) typically cost about $5 per new rider and rail projects typically cost $20 to $100 per new rider, the agencies routinely selected the rail projects even though they clearly weren’t cost effective.

In 2003, U.S. representative from Oregon, Earl Blumenauer, convinced Congress to carve out a portion of New Starts for what he called Small Starts: smaller transit projects that would only cost a couple of hundred million dollars. He specifically expected that the money would be used for streetcars. Continue reading →

“This book should not be necessary,” were the opening words to my first book for the Cato Institute, Best-Laid Plans. It covered the same ground as many previous books, most notably Frederick Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom. It appears, however, that every generation has to learn for itself the reality that socialism doesn’t work.

Part of the problem is that socialism can mean several different things. One answer is worker ownership of the means of production, but the United States already has that: numerous firms are owned by their workers, and the biggest investors in major corporations are pension funds that exist for the benefit of workers. I suspect that most socialists don’t see this as any different from capitalism because it doesn’t include a role for government to step in to reduce inequality or protect the environment.

Another kind of socialism is a social democracy, which is capitalism with a safety net. The problem is just how big should the safety net be. At its most basic, it seems to include unemployment income for those who lose their jobs along with housing, food, and health care for the chronically unemployed. But where do you draw the line? It seems that all it takes is someone chanting “X is a human right” and sudden X becomes part of the safety net. In addition to free medical care for all, Bernie Sanders thinks the government should provide free higher education, free childcare, and build at least 10 million affordable homes. Lately free public transit has been added to the list of “human rights.” Continue reading →

In 1991, Congress passed the Intermodal Surface Transportation Efficiency Act. It should have been called the Obsolete Transportation Inefficiency Act, as among other things it created a multi-billion-dollar annual slush fund to give to cities to build new rail transit projects. This fund, informally called New Starts and more formally called Transit Capital Investment Grants, had no limit on the amount of money any city could take out of it, which gave cities incentives to propose the most expensive projects they could so they could get the most “free” federal money.

This law was actually a continuation of a 1973 law that allowed cities to cancel planned interstate freeways within their borders and spend the federal dollars that would have gone towards building those freeways on transit capital improvements instead. The 1973 law was instigated by then-Massachusetts Governor Francis Sargent, who wanted to cancel some freeways in Boston but didn’t want to be accused of “losing” federal transportation dollars. Boston, of course, has lots of rail transit and could easily absorb the federal dollars from a cancelled freeway by buying new railcars, installing new signals, replacing track, and so forth.

Sargent’s law gave hope to Portland Mayor (and infamous pedo) Neil Goldschmidt, who wanted to cancel an interstate freeway in east Portland. But Portland’s transit agency, TriMet, only operated buses, and if it used all of the freeway funds to buy new buses, it wouldn’t have enough money to operate all of those buses. Continue reading →

After the 2003 Preserving the American Dream conference in Washington DC, we had a series of annual conferences in a different city each year: Portland, the Twin Cities, Atlanta, San Jose, Houston, Bellevue, and Orlando. Although I invited most of the speakers and knew what they were going to say in advance, I found them very educational, especially on housing and land-use issues.

The highlight of the Portland conference was a speaker from England named Stephen Town, who was an expert on policing neighborhoods of different densities and designs. In fact, he was a policeman.

It so happened that, in 2001, the American Planning Association published a book titled SafeScape, which purported to show how neighborhoods could be designed to reduce crime. “At last a book that tells us exactly what we have to do to make our cities safe!” enthused a cover blurb written by a Portland police chief. Continue reading →

In December, 2004, France opened the Millau Viaduct, which by some measures is the largest bridge in the world. More than a mile-and-a-half long, supported by pylons that are as much as 1,100 feet tall, the bridge carries auto and truck traffic as high as 900 feet above the Tarn valley below, reducing the journey across the valley from many minutes to barely more than 60 seconds.

The bridge cost 394 million euros, well over half a billion dollars in today’s money. What was most interesting to me is that not a penny of public money went into construction (though some was spent on planning). Instead, this was a public-private partnership, meaning the public granted a private company, in this case a construction company called Eiffage, a franchise to build, operate, and collect tolls from users of the bridge. After a certain number of years, in this case 40 to 75 depending on the amount of tolls collected, ownership of the bridge reverts to the public. Continue reading →

Not long after the Preserving the American Dream conference, I was approached by Jon Caldara, who had attended the conference and encouraged me to form an American Dream Coalition. But now he wanted me to come work for his organization, the Independence Institute, Colorado’s free-market think tank.

Jon came to lead the Independence Institute via an unusual path. He had a business doing stage lighting for rock-and-roll bands when he decided to run for the board of directors of Denver’s Regional Transit District (RTD), whose fifteen members are elected from individual districts. Jon got himself elected by the Boulder district in 1994 and was later named board chair. Although he was unable to prevent RTD from putting light rail on the ballot in 1997, he led a successful campaign against the tax increase. As a result, the institute offered him the job of being its director in 1998.

At the time, Denver already had one light-rail line that, ironically, had been built as the indirect result of the Independent Institute’s actions. The institute’s founder, John Andrews, helped persuade the state legislature to require that RTD contract out a portion of its bus routes—initially 20 percent, later half—to private operators. This reduced costs by almost 50 percent per vehicle mile. Andrews expected RTD would spend the savings expanding bus service. Instead, it used the funds to build the region’s first light-rail line, which in the long run proved to be more wasteful than letting RTD operate all of its buses. Continue reading →