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Category Archives: News commentary

Gentrification: Good or Bad?

By | | City planning, News commentary
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Gentrification is in the news. Protesters against Google buses in San Francisco who object to the fact that mobility allows high-paid Silicon Valley workers to gentrify San Francisco neighborhoods have been joined by Seattle anti-gentrification protesters who object to Microsoft buses for the same reason. In Portland, Trader Joe’s has backed out of plans to build a store on Martin Luther King, Jr. Boulevard because protesters believed the store would contribute to the area’s gentrification.


Photo by Owen G. Richard.

Meanwhile, New York magazine argues that gentrification can actually be good if it is the “more natural, humane kind” rather than the “fast-moving, invasive variety.” Similarly, NPR points to studies claiming that gentrification can actually be good for long-term residents.

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Subsidies Here, Subsidies There, Subsidies Everywhere

By | | News commentary, Transportation
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The Port of Portland plans to spend up to $4 million giving shipping companies incentives to send containers through Portland, rather than another West Coast port. The subsidies would pay shippers $20 per container that is shipped through Portland.

This is a classic zero-sum game: If Portland attracts any containers that would otherwise have gone to Seattle, Vancouver, or some other West Coast port, the other ports will merely match Portland’s subsidies to get the business back. The shipping companies earn a little extra profit, taxpayers lose,and consumers probably won’t save enough to measurably increase purchases of imported goods.

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Farm Bill Slashes Spending by Minus 49%

By | | News commentary
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Members of Congress patted themselves on their collective backs for saving taxpayers’ money by passing a farm bill that cuts spending by minus 49 percent. Of course, astute arithmeticians realize that a minus 49 percent cut is equal to a 49 percent increase. The 2008 farm bill had an average cost of $64.0 billion per year; this one has an average cost of $95.6 billion per year.

The New York Times reports that food stamps were cut, but in fact this was a cut only when compared with expected spending, not to recent actual spending. The $8 billion “cut” over ten years sounds big, but it is only 1.7 percent of what was expected under the old bill. Food stamp spending under the new bill will average $74.8 billion per year, which, even after adjusting for inflation, is more than the total annual cost of the 2008 bill.

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Vehicle-to-Vehicle Communications

By | | News commentary, Transportation
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The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) says it wants to require auto makers to build vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communications systems into new cars. Calling V2V “the next generation of auto safety improvements,” the agency says such devices would “improve safety by allowing vehicles to “talk” to each other and ultimately avoid many crashes altogether by exchanging basic safety data, such as speed and position, ten times per second.”


The government wants every vehicle on the road to transmit its location to every other nearby vehicle–as well as any other receivers that happen to be in range.

Supposedly, “the system as contemplated contains several layers of security and privacy protection.” However, privacy advocates should be far more suspicious of V2V than of electronic vehicle-mile fee systems. The big difference between them is that V2V systems by definition incorporate both a receiver and a transmitter, while it is possible to design vehicle-mile fee systems that do not include a wireless transmitter. No transmitter means no invasion of privacy is possible; on the other hand, despite whatever privacy protection is included in V2V, a transmitter necessarily allows someone to receive the signal.

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Porker of the Month?

By | | News commentary, Transportation
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A group called Citizens Against Government Waste gave Oregon Representative Earl Blumenauer the “Porker of the Month award” for wanting to raise gas taxes in order to fund bike paths. Bike paths? They’re complaining about bike paths?

The group points out that taxpayers (they don’t say if this means all taxpayers or just federal taxpayers) have spent $9.5 billion on bicycle and pedestrian facilities over the last 22 years. It neglects to mention that this is only about 1 percent of federal highway spending and about a quarter of a percent of all highway spending. Maybe I’m biased, as (like Blumenauer) I’m an active cyclist, but I find it hard to complain about this.

MIT Press recently published Fighting Traffic, by University of Virginia researcher Peter Norton, who argues that streets used to be for pedestrians, but some vast conspiracy akin to the Great Streetcar Conspiracy stole the streets and gave them to automobiles. I don’t buy Norton’s extreme view, but I do see the need to provide safe facilities for all forms of transport. If roadways were once safe for cyclists and pedestrians but now are not because they are dedicated to cars and trucks, I don’t have serious problems with spending a tiny percentage of highway user fees on safe bicycle and pedestrian ways.

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Journals of Irreproducible Results

By | | News commentary
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The Antiplanner has long enjoyed humor magazines, such as the Journal of Irreproducible Results. But now, reports the New York Times, it turns out that many if not most scientific journals are journals of irreproducible results. Eager to be published, many scientists appear to have an “unconscious bias” and “nudge . . . the data so it supports the hypothesis, even if just barely.”

“For most study designs and settings,” says (ironically) a peer-reviewed study, “it is more likely for a research claim to be false than true. Moreover, for many current scientific fields, claimed research findings may often be simply accurate measures of the prevailing bias.” The problem is so bad that Nature has a special web page with links to nearly twenty articles it has published on the subject.

This shouldn’t be a surprise. When I hear about research saying things like dogs poop facing north or south, or foxes are more likely to catch mice when pouncing in the northeast or southwest direction, I have to be skeptical. More broadly, when studies show that wine or chocolate is good for the heart or that cell phones cause brain cancer, I strongly suspect that the margins are so tiny (“people who use cell phones are 0.1 percent more likely to get brain cancer!”) as to be worthless.

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Drive by Wire

By | | News commentary, Transportation
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“I found myself driving the Infiniti on surprisingly long highway stretches without touching the accelerator, brake pedal or steering wheel,” writes New York Times auto expert Lawrence Ulrich in his review of the Infiniti Q50. “The Q50 charts a course toward the self-driving cars of tomorrow.”

As shown in the 2010 video above, the technology to allow cars to detect lines on the pavement and steer themselves between those lines–known as lane keeping–has been available for several years. But most auto companies selling in the United States have used a weakened version of the system known as lane keep assist that alerts drivers if they inadvertently cross the stripes, but isn’t designed to do all of the steering independently.

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Peak Phosphorus

By | | News commentary
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Not content with frightening people about peak oil and global climate change, environmentalists are now fretting about peak phosphorus. The eminent but late Isaac Asimov once argued that phosphorus was the main limiting factor to human population growth on Earth. “Life can multiply until all the phosphorus is gone,” he wrote, “and then there is an inexorable halt which nothing can prevent,” because plants need phosphorus and there is simply no substitute for phosphorus when growing crops.

Some argue that the Earth only has about 30 to 40 years’ worth of phosphorus left to mine, after which we much switch to expensive methods of recycling. Yet others claim this is a “complete lie,” and that in fact the world has plenty of phosphorus for the foreseeable future.

Forbes Magazine goes so far as to argue that it is foolish to even worry about finding ways to recycle phosphorus. A USGS report says that the world uses about 200 million tons of phosphates per year, but has reserves of 67 billion tons (more than 300 years’ worth) and a total of 300 billion tons of phosphate resources (well over 1,000 years’ worth).

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Why Slate Is Bad for Your Intellect

By | | City planning, News commentary
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Slate posted an article yesterday by someone named Charles Montgomery who has fallen, hook, line, and sinker to the design fallacy–the idea that urban planners can shape human behavior by shaping urban design. The title of the article says it all: “Why cul-de-sacs are bad for your health.”

Montgomery’s thesis–expressed at length in his book, Happy City–is that people who live on cul-de-sacs drive more and walk less, so therefore cul-de-sacs must be at fault. Gee, could it be the other way around? Perhaps people who don’t want to walk to go shopping choose to live on cul-de-sacs because they offer the best combination of privacy and security they can find. After all, numerous studies have shown that neighborhoods with cul-de-sacs have significantly less crime than neighborhoods with the gridded streets favored by planning advocates like Montgomery.
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Studies have also shown that plenty of people who live in the suburbs get exercise doing things other than walking to shops or cycling to work. Who are urban planners like Montgomery to tell them they are doing it wrong? Meanwhile, while urban planners continue to have faith in the design fallacy, most economists believe that the trends planners think they see (such as people walking more in dense, mixed-use communities) are the result of self-selection, not urban design.

Obama: A Threat to Freedom & Prosperity

By | | Housing, News commentary
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The Obama Administration hates wealth and success. That’s the only explanation for recent actions it has taking to bring down those who are wealthy and successful.

First, the administration is plundering J.P. Morgan of $13 billion, partly for actions taken by Washington Mutual and Bear Stearns, financial institutions that went broke and which J.P. Morgan took over as a favor to the federal government. These fines are for things WAMU and Bear Stearns did that no one thought were illegal at the time. The Obama administration has effectively made them retroactively illegal and fined a company that hadn’t engaged in similar activities itself. Normally, when a bank goes broke, the government asked another bank to take over so that people don’t lose access to their savings. Good luck convincing a bank to do that now. As J.P. Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon says, “A Bear Stearns deal would not happen again that way, we simply wouldn’t undertake it.”

Second, the administration has charged Apple for acting as a monopoly price fixer for selling ebooks at certain prices. Never mind that Apple was entering an already competitive textbook market and offering to sell ebooks for far less than its competitors sell hard-copy books. The judge in the case has appointed as an inquisitor someone who has no experience in antitrust law, but is charging Apple more than $1,000 an hour to go through its books and question its employees.

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