Category Archives: News commentary

My first real job was a summer internship with the Oregon Student Public Interest Research Group (OSPIRG) in 1972. Steve McCarthy was the flamboyant director of OSPIRG, and my work that summer on low-cost ways to improve TriMet, Portland’s transit system, helped propel him into the job of TriMet’s general manager. He implemented some of my suggestions and made other improvements and by the end of the decade Portland was one of the few urban areas in America where transit ridership had grown faster than driving.

Steve McCarthy growing pears in bottles that will soon be filled with Clear Creek pear brandy. Photo courtesy of Clear Creek Distillery.

Nearly two decades later, Steve invited me out to lunch in Northwest Portland where he had started a new business making pear brandy. Over lunch, he told me that after leaving TriMet he took over his father’s business making hunting accessories and then bought a pear orchard in Oregon’s Hood River Valley, where his family had been in the fruit-growing business since 1910. He wanted to prove to other orchardists that they could make more money by adding value to their fruit than by just selling fruit to grocers. Continue reading →

Is urban sprawl overrunning the countryside? To answer this question, it is important to define the difference between urban and rural. The Census Bureau is proposing to change its definition, but I don’t believe the proposed change makes sense.

Is this urban or rural? Under the Census Bureau’s old definition, it is urban, but by its new definition, it is rural. Photo by Visitor7.

In 1900, the line between urban and rural was pretty easy. If land was in an incorporated city, it was urban. If it was outside the city limits, it was rural. The main transportation of the day was streetcars, and if you couldn’t get somewhere on a streetcar, it wouldn’t be developed. If a developer built a new streetcar line outside the city and developed that area (which is how most suburban streetcar lines got built), the city would quickly annex the newly developed land. Continue reading →

The Antiplanner disagrees with Charles Marohn, of Strong Towns fame, about a lot of things. But I agree with him that the Minnesota Board of AELSLAGID (that’s Architecture, Engineering, Land Surveying, Landscape Architecture, Geoscience and Interior Design, in case it isn’t obvious) was wrong to fine him $1,500 and censure him for being late in renewing his license as a professional engineer.

Charles Marohn in 2016. Photo by SEAGreenways.

Marohn is trained as a professional engineer and started practicing, with a Minnesota license, in 2000. Though he stopped practicing in 2012 to form Strong Towns, he kept his license up and continued to call himself an engineer on his resume. However, he moved his residence in 2018 and forgot to notify AELSLAGID, so when they sent him a renewal notice he didn’t get it. He eventually renewed, paying a $120 late fee. Continue reading →

In a controversial ruling, the New York Court of Appeals recently decided that elephants are not people with constitutional rights. While this would seem to be a no-brainer, animal rights advocates believe that giving animals more rights is a natural progression from a few hundred years ago when only the aristocracy had what we conventionally regard as human rights. Since then, rights were extended first to property owners, then all white men, then women, and then blacks and other minorities.

Elephants at the Bronx Zoo. Photo by Wally Gobetz.

In the New York case, two elephants in the Bronx Zoo were forced to live together in a confined area even though they did not get along. A group called the Nonhuman Rights Project argued that such imprisonment violates the right of habeas corpus and the elephants should be allowed to sue so that they could be released into a larger sanctuary. Continue reading →

Few people other than debt watchdogs noticed when the national debt reached $29 trillion last month. The debt has been rising at more than a trillion dollars per year since 2017, so it is almost certain to reach $30 trillion sometime in 2022. The Office of Management and Budget actually predicted it would exceed $30 trillion by the end of 2021, but it didn’t quite make it.

Although the national debt has long been a subject for debate, it didn’t start growing rapidly except in wartime until the late 1970s. Why then? My theory is that the post-Watergate election brought so many liberal Democrats into Congress that they were able to strip fiscally conservative Southern Democrats of power, and the latter were no longer able to serve as guardians of the public purse.

Just for perspective, $29 trillion is more than $87,000 per resident. Although the latest numbers for other countries are hard to come by, it is likely that only Japan has a greater per capita national debt. Back in the 1960s, national debt per capita was about $1,500. I remember thinking, “I don’t have $1,500, but I could probably earn that if I had to in order to pay my share of the national debt.” Today, when 40 percent of Americans can’t cover an emergency expense of $400, I doubt many would be able to repay an $87,000 debt. Continue reading →

Large numbers of Americans migrated away from heavily urbanized states last year, but the nation’s overall population grew by only 0.1 percent, according to data released by the Census Bureau early this week. Not only was this was the lowest rate of population growth in the nation’s history, “17 states and the District of Columbia lost population,” said the bureau.

Some of those population losses were quite large. According to this Census Bureau table, between July 1, 2020 and July 1, 2021, New York lost more than 319,000 people, or 1.6 percent of its residents. California lost nearly 262,000 people, or 0.7 percent of its residents. DC’s population dropped by 2.9 percent; Illinois’ by 0.9 percent; and Hawaii’s by 0.7 percent. Other states that lost population included Massachusetts, Maryland, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania.

The fastest-growing states were Idaho (2.9%), Utah (1.7%), Montana (1.7%), Arizona (1.4%), and South Carolina (1.2%). Numerically, the fastest-growing states were Texas (+310,000 residents), Florida (211,000), Arizona (98,000), North Carolina (94,000), and Georgia (74,000). (All these numbers are rounded off as they are only estimates.) Continue reading →

The Department of Transportation’s twitter page recently posted a tweet showing a hypothetical zoomer promoting the Build Back Better Act. “The new infrastructure law is going to make getting from place to place so much better over the next decade and when combined with the Build Back Better Act it will create millions of new jobs,” says the zoomer.

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— TransportationGov (@USDOT) November 26, 2021

I’m not sure if there is a federal law forbidding an agency from lobbying the public in favor of a non-partisan bill, but it is generally frowned on. Legal or not, many if not most of the responses from people in the twitter universe were negative. Continue reading →

“Inflation is good for you!” proclaims a headline from the Intecept. “Inflation is bad for the 1 percent but helps out almost everyone else,” the article claims.

Inflation in Germany in the early 1920s led to this basket of groceries costing a million marks. Before World War I, one dollar would buy 4 to 5 marks, but by the end of 1923, a dollar was worth more than 5 billion marks.

Inflation “may be a good sign,” agrees New York Times business writer Jeanna Smialek. “Don’t panic” about inflation, says economist Paul Krugman. Continue reading →