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Tesla = Tucker?

By | | News commentary, Transportation
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Shares of stock in Tesla Motors are selling for more than $160. Some people think it is overvalued by at least $100 a share. Others think such high prices are appropriate because Tesla is more a tech company than an auto manufacturer.


The Tesla Model S, available over the Internet for a mere $69,500.

The Antiplanner thinks both views are correct. Tesla’s shares are overpriced because they are priced like a tech company–one that is likely to go bankrupt soon, or at least unlikely to ever make any money.

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The Second-Smallest Political Quiz

By | | News commentary
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The debate over American intervention in Syria has the media even more confused than usual. Republicans such as Senator John McCain, Robert Corker, and Representative John Boehner support intervention as do Democrats such as Senators Harry Reid, Robert Menendez, and Richard Durbin. Meanwhile, Republicans such as Senators Rand Paul, Marco Rubio, and Tom Cole oppose intervention, as do Democrats such as Senators Mark Udall, Joe Manchin, and Chris Murphy.

How can it be that the issue doesn’t divide along party lines, or at least on “liberal-conservative” lines? One writer goes so far as to argue that there are 22 different political views being expressed on the issue.

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Dreaming of Economic Progress

By | | News commentary
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Today is the 50th anniversary of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “I have a dream” speech, and some people see lots of progress for black Americans since then. But that progress is only partial, and one of America’s shames is that the descendants of people who were slaves still don’t get a fair break today.

The main progress has been political. One of King’s dreams was that “even the state of Mississippi, a state sweltering with the heat of oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice.” Today, more than a quarter of the Mississippi legislature is black, up from approximately zero in 1963. Nationwide, the number of black elected officials has grown from less than 1,500 in 1963 to more than 10,500 today.

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Air Show

By | | News commentary, Wildfire
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It’s hot and dry in Central Oregon, and a lightning storm on July 31 lit at least 48 fires in or around the Deschutes National Forest. Forest Service firefighters quickly suppressed all but one of them; unfortunately, a 58-year-old firefighter named John Hammack was killed when a tree fell on him.


Fires burning on Green Ridge Sunday night, August 4. Click image for a larger view.

The one fire still burning is about seven miles from the Antiplanner’s home and within view of my back deck. So we’ve been treated to a parade of helicopters and air tankers of various kinds attempting to control the fire. The Forest Service reports that it is spending about $200,000 a day, but the fire grew 90 acres Sunday and 175 acres Monday.

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The Suburbs Are Still Alive

By | | News commentary, Regional planning
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Ho-hum, another prediction that “suburbs are dead,” this time from Fortune magazine assistant editor Leigh Gallagher. Her just-released book, The End of the Suburbs, argues that Americans no longer dream of owning a house with a yard and driving to work and everywhere else.

“All the studies show” that the millenials “want to live where they can walk, whether that’s the city or an urban suburb,” she tells Washington Post reporter Paul Windle. Gallaher herself lives in New York City’s West Village, while Windle lives in inner Washington, DC, so their own personal anecdotal evidence easily confirms what “all the studies show.”

As it turns out, however, all the studies don’t show that. Take, for example, the Census Bureau report (previously noted here) that new homes are larger than ever or this survey, which found that three out four millennials aspire to live in a house of their own–and many of them are working hard to achieve that.

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Was the Twentieth Century a Blip?

By | | News commentary
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An economist named Robert Gordon thinks that the rapid growth the United States experienced from about 1870 to 1970 was just a blip resulting from the discovery of new inventions that will never be repeated again. As a result, he predicts that our future economic growth will never come close to the growth we experienced during most of the twentieth century. His prediction may be right, but not for the reasons he thinks.

Gordon’s argument, presented in detail in this 2012 paper, is that the inventions produced after 1870–electricity, telecommunications, powered flight, and automobility–were so profound that their effects will not be repeated again. They had far more of an impact on the economy than the previous, steam-driven industrial revolution because they affected more segments of that economy. And they had more of an impact than the later, computer-driven revolution, because people of 1870 were far less wealthy than we are today and so it didn’t take as much to add to their wealth.

Gordon is expressing a technology theory of economic growth that many, if not most, economists today do not support. If the technology theory were true, then the same technical innovations that made American wealthy should have made South Americans and Africans and Indians and Chinese and Russians wealthy at the same time. After all, there are really no secrets behind electric motors, internal combustion engines, and the shape of airplane wings that enable flight.

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Is Economic Immobility Due to Sprawl?

By | | News commentary, Regional planning
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For the second time in a week, Paul Krugman has written about sprawl. This time he is as wrong as the last, when he blamed Detroit’s bankruptcy on sprawl. Now he blames Atlanta’s entrenched poverty on urban sprawl. “The city may just be too spread out,” he says, “so that job opportunities are literally out of reach for people stranded in the wrong neighborhoods.”

Krugman quotes a study that finds that one of many factors reducing social mobility include “areas in which low income individuals were residentially segregated from middle income individuals.” But income segregation is very different from sprawl, and can take place in communities of any density. New York City, for example, has pretty high economic segregation.

Krugman adds that Atlanta’s sprawl “would make an effective public transportation system nearly impossible to operate even if politicians were willing to pay for it, which they aren’t.” He obviously doesn’t know the history of mass transit in Atlanta, which had a great transit system until regional leaders decided to build an expensive rail transit system. Since they aimed the rail lines at middle-class neighborhoods and sacrificed bus service to low-income neighborhoods to pay for the rail lines, transit’s share of commuting has fallen by more than 60 percent and per capita transit ridership has fallen by more than two thirds.

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High Speed and Low Budgets

By | | News commentary, Transportation
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While it is possible that Spain’s train crash that killed some 80 people was due to a broken rail or other equipment failure, most experts looking at the video below think the problem was simply high speeds. The video shows a train going an estimated 125 mph around a corner designed for 50 mph.

Much attention has been focused on the train’s driver, who apparently has been known to post photos of train speedometers at high speeds (but not more than the speed limits), suggesting he might have been less than fully attentive. But where was the positive train control system, which should have warned the driver and automatically slowed the train if the driver failed to do so?

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The $10 Billion Battle

By | | News commentary, Transportation
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Senate Democrats propose to spend $54 billion next year on transportation and housing. House Republicans want to spend just $44 billion, but President Obama has threatened to veto such a paltry bill.

Obama and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid claim the House bill poses a threat to the nation’s infrastructure, with many citing the collapse of the Skagit River Bridge as an example. But that bridge fell down because it was struck by an oversized truck, not because of any infrastructure shortfall. Besides, the Senate bill only includes $500 million for bridge replacements.

Where will the other $9.5 billion go? Things like Amtrak (half a billion), TIGER grants for such “critical infrastructure” as new streetcars ($1 billion); and $123 million more for New Starts than the House bill. On the housing side, the Senate bill would spend $1.6 billion more than the House on Community Development Block Grants and $75 more than House on “livability” (on which the House proposed to spend zero).

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Bankruptcy and Sprawl

By | | News commentary, Regional planning
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More than twenty years ago, Joel Garreau observed that every American central city except Detroit had undergone a renaissance. Detroit’s problem then, and now, seem to be poor governance, something that can’t be fixed by federal subsidies.

Yet someone was bound to blame Detroit’s bankruptcy on urban sprawl, a benign settlement pattern that seems to get blamed for just about everything bad that happens. Surprisingly, perhaps, in this case the blame is cast by Paul Krugman, who claims that “job sprawl” doomed Detroit.

Krugman compares Detroit with Pittsburgh, noting that the latter has experienced a revival since 2005, while Detroit continued to spiral downward. The reason, says Krugman, is that “less than a quarter of Detroit jobs are within 10 miles of the traditional central business district, versus more than half in Pittsburgh.”

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