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Congestion-Priced Parking

By | | News commentary, Transportation
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The Antiplanner has never considered parking “subsidies” to be the serious problem that Donald Shoup thinks they are. At the same time, there is nothing wrong with cities pricing curbside parking at market rates. Toward that end, San Francisco’s plan to install parking meters whose rates vary depending on demand sounds just fine.

Unfortunately, the initial program is rather anemic, with rates varying no more than once a month. Instead, the city should allow rates to vary by the hour so that prices are always high enough to allow people to find a few vacant parking spaces when they need them (and are willing to pay for them). By contrast, European doctors have utilized healing mineral levitra price waters for a long time. You must also be in the mood to have sex, canadian generic cialis cannot force you to. The name of view over here now levitra without rx does not mean any. Where the cheapest cialis professional is of 15.00 per pill and now you will get Kamagra with cost of less than a dollar. Would this lead hordes of people to switch to mass transit? Probably not. But it would help relieve traffic congestion in San Francisco and other crowded cities.

Despite TIF, the Bells Don’t Toll

By | | City planning, News commentary
2 Comments

Tualatin, a distant suburb of Portland, is the proud owner of three large and expensive bells that may never toll (there were supposed to be four, but one was stolen). The bells were purchased with TIF (tax-increment finance) money as a part of a $12 million subsidy to Tualatin Commons, a New Urbanist development. But the city ran out of subsidy before it could build a tower for the bells.

A proposal to extend the urban-renewal district for another 25 years, which would have provided the millions needed for a bell tower and other inane projects, was killed when the local fire district objected to the loss of its tax revenues and other taxpayers agreed that the project was frivolous. But the city had already bought the bells for $150,000 (which includes architectural drawings for the bell tower), so now it is stuck with four brass elephants.

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Subversive Idea: We Can Keep Our Lifestyles

By | | News commentary, Transportation
47 Comments

Instead of giving up our cars, says the August issue of National Geographic, we can simply scrub the skies of CO2. The article describes a process of removing carbon from the atmosphere that is technologically feasible. Though it is hard to guess how expensive it will be, the article suggests it will be a lot cheaper than dramatically altering the way we live.

“Jet travel would become guilt free again,” reports the magazine. “We could keep our cars and gas stations–no need for a whole new hydrogen- or electric-powered infrastructure. Subversive thought: We could keep our lifestyles.” Interesting that they think the status quo is subversive.
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“That’s historically what we’ve done,” says physicist Klaus Lackner. “We’ve run into environmental issues that seemed insurmountable–and we’ve found a solution.” The Antiplanner doesn’t necessarily endorse the scrubbing process described in the article, but does endorse the sentiment that there are less-expensive ways of solving problems than trying to force people to give up their mobility. The most interesting point is that this is coming from a mainstream magazine that has had a strong environmental bent in recent years.

Private Bus Takes Over from Taxpayers

By | | News commentary, Transportation
57 Comments

Here’s a heartwarming story: Late last year, Clayton County, Georgia (a suburban Atlanta county) decided to terminate its subsidized bus service to Atlanta, saying it was costing $10 million a year but only bringing in $2.5 million in revenue. Despite protests from bus riders, the service was duly ended on March 31, leaving many riders worried that they would Not all the discount levitra pills have maximum qualities but here, the case is completely different. With the effective development in the pharmaceutical markets are now far closer to create a history of blood pressure: high/low, stroke or any blood problems as leukemia or sickle cell anemia, an inherited eye condition called retinitis pigmentose, liver or kidney problems, or heart conditions should consult the doctor before taking Lovegra.It must not be discouraged as there are several treatments these days to cure sexual dysfunction. order levitra Different factors contribute to the muscle tightness and dysfunction that will settings your head and it is features causing lack of urge for cialis online price http://greyandgrey.com/the-court-decided-3-cases-dealing-with-compensation-issues-4-30-15/ food, sleeping disorders, swift changes in moods, and also a strong sense associated with lose hope. From its 12.1-megapixel CMOS sensor and ultra-high resolution monitor to its astonishing 18x wide-angle Zoom-NIKKOR ED glass lens, Full HD (1080p) movie recording and convenient features, it’s the ideal camera for those who use it and experienced its pfizer viagra discount-like effects in both women and men, they realize its effects of more physical prowess and greater mental strength. not be able to reach their jobs.

What’s so heartwarming about that? Starting this week, a private party has started a new bus service following some of the same routes as the Clayton County buses. Fares will be $3.50, compared with average fare collections on the County buses of about $1.10 in 2008. The Antiplanner extends best wishes to QuickTransit.

Washington Metro Takes Action!

By | | News commentary, Transportation
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In an article worthy of The Onion, the Washington Post proclaims that “Dupont Circle escalator incident prompts Metro to take action.” The incident in question was the breakdown of the giant, 130-foot escalators at the Dupont Circle Metro station, which forced patrons to walk or, in some cases, crawl over handrails to adjacent escalators. The escalator problems were compounded by inadequacies in Metro’s radio network that prevented employees from communicating with one another about the breakdown.

Video by Twitter user @giveit2lloyd; view the original here.

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So what great action is Metro taking to deal with the escalators it has failed to keep in a state of good repair? It is providing bullhorns to station employees so they can do better crowd control and communicate with one another the next time the escalators break down. That’s proactive!

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Airfares Taking Flight?

By | | News commentary, Transportation
7 Comments

Delta and Northwest have merged, and now United and Continental are merging. So naturally someone raises the specter that airfares are going to go up. “Concentration in any industry leads to higher prices,” says someone who claims to have analyzed the airline industry for 40 years.

I don’t know what industry they have been analyzing, but it isn’t the one I’ve observed over the past 40 years. The problem for the airlines is that the cost of starting a new airline is low. Sure, the planes are expensive, but you can lease those. Once you have those, you don’t have to pay for air space, you don’t have to build airports, and you don’t have to build your own air traffic control system. As a result, for every airline that disappears through bankruptcy or merger, another one springs up.

Though not relevant to the rest of this post, this plane is not only painted like a salmon, it is a piece of pork. As a favor to the Alaska fishing industry, Alaska Congressman Don Young wrote a half-million-dollar earmark into the 2005 transportation bill to paint this plane to advertise Alaska salmon. Photo courtesy Alaska Airlines.

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Is Portland’s Plan Working?

By | | News commentary, Regional planning, Urban areas
19 Comments

A new census of downtown Portland employers reveals that, for the first time since the annual census began in 2001, the number of downtown workers taking transit to work exceeded the number driving in 2009. This isn’t because the number taking transit to work increased — it declined by 6 percent — but because the number biking and walking to work grew by 170 percent.

You can look at all the census data for 2001 through 2006 in the 2006 report. The 2007, 2008, and 2008 reports contain commuting data only for those years. These data were collected by the Portland Business Alliance.

The increase in biking and walking to work accounts for almost 90 percent of the reduction in driving to work, and some might say this is a victory for Portland planners. But a comparison of the downtown census data with U.S. census data for the city of Portland and Portland urban area in 2000 and 2008 reveal some problems. (Note: The U.S. Census did not report commuting data in its 2001 survey, and the 2009 survey data are not out yet, so I am using 2000 and 2008 to compare with the downtown census’ 2001 and 2009 data.)

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Demonizing Mobility

By | | News commentary, Transportation
16 Comments

Planners have tried to demonize the freedom people gain from auto ownership by calling them “auto dependent.” Now they are demonizing air travelers by calling them “binge flyers.”

As energy efficient as trains? So what? We’re still going to demonize it.

We know binge drinking consists of drinking so much for so long that the drinker gets sick. But just who supposedly flies so much that they make themselves sick?

Back in the 1950s and 1960s, people enviously called frequent flyers the Jet Set, referring to people who were so rich that they could fly to Acapulco, Cannes, or Capri on a moment’s notice. Today, thanks to airline deregulation, almost every American and European has flown at least once, and most fly regularly.

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Are the Rich the Biggest Defaulters?

By | | Meltdown, News commentary
18 Comments

Last week, the New York Times published an amazingly shallow article saying the “biggest defaulters on mortgages are the rich.” This contention is supported by a single pair of data: the owners of about 14 percent of homes worth more than $1 million are delinquent on their mortgages, while only “about” 8 to 9 percent of homes worth less than $1 million are behind in their payments.

The problem is, what is the Times‘ definition of “rich”? As one of the paper’s columnists pointed out a few days later, “Just because you have a million-dollar mortgage doesn’t make you a millionaire.” And if you live in a state that has a lot of growth-management planning, such as California or Florida, chances are good that you own a house worth more than $1 million simply because the median price of homes in many cities in these states was close to that much (or, in a few cases, more) at the peak of the bubble.

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LaHood Acts Like a Hood — Again

By | | News commentary, Transportation
32 Comments

Not content to just threaten any airlines that might oppose heavy subsidies to high-speed rail aimed at putting their unsubsidized operations out of business, Secretary of Immobility Ray LaHood is now threatening railroads that are supposedly dragging their wheels in response to federal plans to run moderate-speed (up to 110 mph) trains on their freight lines. As previously noted here, three of the nation’s four largest railroads have stated that they do not believe that passenger trains can be safely run faster than 90 mph (79 mph in the case of one of the railroads) on the same tracks as freight trains.

Apparently, LaHood has been making “thinly veiled threats” to apply “punitive measures” to railroads that aren’t getting on board the 110 mph trains. Obama’s expectation was that the railroads would eagerly accept money to improve their tracks because the improvements would benefit the freight trains as well as passenger service. But the reality is that the typical freight car spends far more time standing still than in motion, so speeding a freight train from, say, 50 mph to 60 mph has almost no effect on the amount of time required to deliver payloads.

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