Category Archives: News commentary

The Economist published an article claiming that traffic is worse in the United States than Europe and lamenting that the U.S. was not building high-speed rail. Wendell Cox responds with a data-filled article basically showing that everything The Economist said was wrong.

John Charles of the Cascade Policy Institute just published Light Rail, Streetcars & the Myth of “High Capacity Transit,” showing that light-rail has a market share of about 2 percent of travel to so-called transit-oriented shopping areas along Portland light-rail lines and a 20 percent market share to major events such as Trailblazer basketball games and other major events. Curiously, despite the title, he never actually compares light-rail capacities with bus capacities. “Light rail” is not short for “light-weight rail” but “light-capacity rail”; a bus lane can move far more people per hour than a light-rail line, which is why light rail makes no sense anywhere in the world unless your goal is to waste a lot of money.

This is especially true in Portland where short blocks limit trains to just two cars. Moreover, four Portland light-rail lines–to North Portland, the airport, Gresham, and Clackamas–must all cross the Steel Bridge, which can only handle 30 trains an hour each way. That means most of these lines will get just eight trains an hour; at 300 people per train, that’s just 2,400 people per hour. A bus lane can move ten times that many people (600 buses per hour times 40 people per bus) without even requiring any of the passengers to stand in the aisles.

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Here‘s a great way to bring about the collapse of civilization: declare that Mother Earth has equal rights with humans and give anyone standing to represent Mother Earth in court in challenging any activity by anyone else. In practically no time, the gears of industry would grind to a halt, agriculture would shut down, and the resulting problems would no doubt be blamed on greedy capitalists.

So of course the United Nations is apparently considering a proposal to do just that. This proposal was brought before the United Nations by Bolivia, which is about to pass its own Mother Earth law. This law gives Mother Earth the right to life, diversity (good-bye agriculture), water (good-bye industry), clean air (good-bye cities), equilibrium (good-bye science), and pollution-free living (good-bye just about everything).

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The Wall Street Journal has published a “misery index” that ranks Portland as the nation’s second-most miserable city after Phoenix. Or, at least, the second-most miserable of the 20 cities included in the ranking. The newspaper’s index is supposed to be based on changes in unemployment, housing prices, and gas prices in the last year.

As much as the Antiplanner likes to read articles bashing the city I love to hate, I have reservations about any such “indices” of misery or anything else. Here is a conundrum, for example: why is it that higher gas prices (meaning transportation is less affordable) are considered bad, but higher housing prices (meaning housing is less affordable) is considered good?

The Journal‘s answer, no doubt, is that housing is an asset while gasoline is a consumption good. This isn’t really true; housing is a consumable as well. But even if it were true, not everyone bought their home a year ago. Over the last five years, housing prices dropped 15 percent in Boston but rose in Dallas. Yet, because the index is based on an annual change, Boston is considered less miserable than Dallas.

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