The Antiplanner » News commentary

Category Archives: News commentary

Because $117 Billion Wasn’t Expensive Enough

By | | News commentary, Transportation
17 Comments

In 2010, Amtrak proposed to spend $117 billion to upgrade its Boston-to-Washington high-speed rail corridor. This idea was so unrealistically expensive that the Antiplanner called it “gold-plated high-speed rail.”

Apparently, Amtrak wants platinum plating instead, as its 2012 update to the proposal has raised the cost to $151 billion. This includes some additional bells and whistles, including a $7 billion revamp of Washington, DC’s Union Station (see Amtrak’s report for complete details).

Amtrak either hasn’t heard or doesn’t care that high-speed rail is dead (except for a train to nowhere in California) or that the federal government is about out of money. Instead, says Amtrak CEO Joseph Boardman, it wants to be “ready” in case someone accidentally drops $150 billion or so in its path.

Continue reading →

RTD Fools the Wall Street Journal

By | | News commentary, Transportation
3 Comments

“Denver rethinks the modern commuter,” heralds the Wall Street Journal. The article goes on to say that, instead of building parking lots at its rail stations, Denver is encouraging developers to build high-density, mixed-use developments. Somehow, this is supposed to be news.

Let’s think this through. First of all, no one is “rethinking the modern commuter.” The Census Bureau reports that transit carried less than 5 percent of Denver-area commuters in 2010, while more than 85 percent drove. Instead, what RTD, Denver’s transit agency, is rethinking is the role of public transit.

The old-style public transit system used cheap, flexible buses whose routes could be altered overnight to take people from where they were to where they wanted to go. When Denver first built rail, it substituted expensive but glamorous trains for inexpensive buses, but still allowed people to go from where they were–provided they were willing to drive to a park-and-ride station–to where they wanted to go–provided they wanted to go downtown.

Continue reading →

Metro Says Heat Wave Not “Extreme”

By | | News commentary, Transportation
15 Comments

A Washington, DC, Metro train broke down for unknown reasons and another one jumped the tracks in another routine day for DC rail transit. The derailment was caused by a “heat kink” in the tracks, and Metro says it normally slows down trains during “extreme heat,” but hadn’t decided to do so in this heat wave.

Metal expands when it gets warm, and railroads used to leave gaps between the rails every 35 feet or so to allow for such expansion. But modern railroads weld the rails together to form a continuous ribbon that is prone to kinking at high temperatures. To deal with this, they use special allows that, they hope, won’t buckle in hot weather. The alloys used on Metro rails are good to temperatures up to 95 degrees, which DC exceeded for 11 days straight. Apparently, no one at Metro remembered to issue the slow orders.

Continue reading →

Environmentalists Destroy Boston Transit

By | | News commentary, Transportation, Urban areas
26 Comments

The Metropolitan Boston Transportation Authority (MBTA, or “T” for short) is in deep financial trouble, with nearly $9 billion of debt and a $3 billion maintenance backlog that is growing more every year. According to a Boston Herald op ed by Harvard researcher Charles Chieppo, the blame for this can be placed on the Dukakis administration and the Conservation Law Foundation (CLF).

When Massachusetts was planning the Big Dig, CLF sued demanding investments in transit to mitigate the air pollution generated by new auto traffic resulting from the Big Dig’s minor expansions in highway capacity. Dukakis settled by agreeing to build 14 new transit projects.

In fact, those transit investments did little or nothing to clean the air. For one thing, relieving congestion actually reduces air pollution. For another, cars today are so clean that persuading people to ride transit instead does little for air quality.

Continue reading →

California Itching to Lose a Decade

By | | News commentary, Transportation
14 Comments

Last week, the California legislature voted to destroy the state’s economy for another decade. The 21 senators who voted for the measure told the public they were approving a high-speed train from Los Angeles to San Francisco, but everyone knows they barely have enough money to build from Fresno to Bakersfield.

In voting to borrow $4.5 billion as a down payment on a rail line that is certain to cost at least $68 billion, and more likely over $100 billion, the legislature is risking the state’s entire economic future. The state already has a $16 billion deficit in its budget (which it closed only with one-time tricks and the promise of increased taxes), and the rail line will immediately increase that by more than a quarter of a billion per year, and in the long run (if it continues building) by much more.

This is not about jobs. More jobs are going to be killed by running up tax rates (or further cutting services) to pay for the deficits. This is not about transportation. Though advocates promise fast downtown-to-downtown travel times, only 2.5 percent of Los Angeles-area jobs are located in downtown LA, so few residents will ever have reason to ride the train. This is nothing more than pork barrel.

Above mentioned foods are likely to be beneficial over a period of time, and they can have a positive impact on self-esteem and self-confidence. order generic levitra Because WordPress is an open source blogging tool, meaning that it’s free and available to everyone, viagra soft pills it’s a prime target for hackers and ne’er-do-wells. Is It Safe To Buy Generic Drugs? Many people have purchased and used this medicine for cialis no prescription usa slovak-republic.org ED and low sex drive. It’s indeed the time to be amazed and live fully. order viagra Continue reading →

Cities Growing Faster Than Suburbs–Not!

By | | City planning, News commentary, Useful Data
19 Comments

A return to the cities and rejection of the suburbs is an article of faith among smart-growth planners, and their wishful thinking is often supported by breathless media reports. The latest news comes from 2011 Census estimates, which the Wall Street Journal reports as revealing that the “cities outpace suburbs in growth.” MSNBC reports that “cities grow more than suburbs [for the] first time in 100 years.”

What do the numbers actually say? Of the 51 largest metropolitan areas, the percentage growth of 26 center cities was higher than the percentage growth of their suburbs. Why 51? Maybe because if they only looked at the 50 largest areas, exactly half of their cities would have grown faster than the suburbs and then they couldn’t say “most.” The percentage growth of central cities in all 51 of the largest areas combined was also higher than of their suburbs, but not by much: 1.03 percent vs. 0.93 percent.

That’s percentage growth, and if that continued as a long-term trend, it might be meaningful. But in fact it was only one year, from 2010 to 2011 (and the 2011 numbers are only estimates). And since, in most cases, the central cities make up only a small portion of the metropolitan area, faster percentage growth doesn’t translate into a large numeric growth. For example, Atlanta grew by 2.4 percent while its suburbs grew by only 1.3 percent. But Atlanta’s 2.4-percent gain means 10,040 new residents, while the suburbs 1.3 percent gain means 62,869 new residents. In other words, Atlanta suburbs actually gained more than six times as many people as Atlanta itself.

Continue reading →

Planners Inspired by Supreme Court Decision

By | | News commentary
11 Comments

Representatives of the Association of American Planners applauded the Supreme Court’s health-care decision that a Congressional requirement to buy health insurance was a tax, not a mandate. “This provides us the tools we need to fix everything that’s wrong with America,” said association CEO Paul “Precious” Farmlands.

The association’s government affairs staff immediately began crafting legislation to save American cities and rural areas through compact development. “We would like everyone to enjoy the benefits of living in high-density, mixed-use housing,” said Jason Georgetown. “But it’s not a mandate; we’ll simply tax anyone who chooses not to live in this kind of housing $50,000 a year. The taxes will go to make high-density housing more affordable for low-income people.”
Add some ginger garlic paste and one green regencygrandenursing.com levitra uk chilli. A new treatment in the form of heat-activated penile implant might help men to overcome ED, offering a safer and easier option to use. regencygrandenursing.com best price for tadalafil The nitric oxide can also help with angina, high blood pressure, heart attack, sickle cell disease, liver disease, stomach or intestinal ulcers, bleeding disorder, cancer, frequent heartburn, HIV infection, low blood pressure, ordering viagra heart disease, stroke, kidney disease and eye problems. It has been prescribed to use one pill in a day, and need not to be taken just few https://regencygrandenursing.com/testimonials/letter-testimonials-pat-b cialis online without rx minutes before having sex.
AAP also was writing a law requiring everyone to walk, bicycle, or take transit to work. Anyone who refused to obey the law would pay a “tax” of $25 for every day they drove to work. The money would be used to subsidize rail transit. “The possibilities opened up by the Supreme Court’s health-care decision are endless,” said Georgetown.

What Is “Middle Class”?

By | | News commentary
8 Comments

This week’s Rolling Stone has an article on the “sharp, sudden decline of America’s middle class.” The only problem is that few if any of the people discussed in the article are in the middle class; instead, they are working class.

As the Antiplanner has noted elsewhere, Americans often pretend to ignore the line between working class and middle class, yet it is very real and difficult to cross. The middle class includes people with college educations and jobs that involve thinking and creating, usually described as “white-collar” jobs. The working class includes people with less education and jobs that require physical labor or repetitive work, usually described as “blue-collar” jobs.

Many people in the middle class have very few working-class friends, so they can’t relate to working-class lives and lifestyles. We imagine that most people are middle class, and only a few unfortunates are in the working class. In fact, less than 30 percent of working-age Americans have college degrees, which is a pretty good proxy for the size of the middle class.

Continue reading →

Clinically Dead

By | | News commentary, Transportation
24 Comments

California’s high-speed rail project seems to be dead. At least, that’s the conclusion of a Washington DC writer commenting on a report that Governor Brown has given up on the idea of exempting high-speed rail from environmental reviews.

Without that exemption, the writer thinks, the state will never be able to build the line. However, In the spirit of former Egyptian President Mubarak, who was clinically dead though maybe still alive, perhaps California high-speed rail is only clinically dead. The latest word is that Brown is only delaying, not ending, his proposal exempt the project from environmental reviews.

Continue reading →

“Environmental Justice” Is Neither

By | | News commentary
27 Comments

When Congress created the New Starts fund for new rail transit projects in 1991, it required that the grants be awarded to projects that were “cost effective.” This same requirement was applied to the small starts fund, for transit projects costing less than $250 million, which Congress created in 2003. The Obama administration, however, is proposing to eliminate the cost-effectiveness test in favor of “livability,” “multi-modalism,” and “environmental justice.”

The Antiplanner’s comments on the proposed rules argue that these criteria are not authorized by law and, moreover, are vague and open to such broad interpretation that they are effectively meaningless. My comments focused mainly on livability and multi-modalism as I hadn’t ever heard of transit projects being justified based on environmental justice.

A recent series of articles in the Washington Times, however, reviews the administration’s infatuation with environmental justice in detail. As the first article in the series notes, seventeen federal agencies recently signed a “memorandum of understanding” agreeing to integrate environmental justice into all of their “programs, policies, and activities.”

Continue reading →