Peer Review? So What?

“If you’re so smart,” people sometimes ask the Antiplanner, “why haven’t you published any articles in peer-reviewed journals?” Part of my answer is that I’ve seen so many peer-reviewed articles that are simply junk science that I don’t have much respect for the process. (The other part of my answer is that I am not seeking academic tenure, which used to be the major reason for writing peer-reviewed articles.)

A prime example of peer-reviewed junk science is the spate of articles a few years ago linking obesity to suburban sprawl. As noted here before, back in 2003 a group called Smart Growth America breathlessly announced a peer-reviewed study supposedly proving that sprawl “has a hand in the nation’s obesity crisis” which “demonstrate[s] the urgent need” for smart growth. Actually, the results of the peer-reviewed study were much weaker, only claiming that sprawl “had small but significant associations” with obesity.

Small is right. As Wendell Cox discovered, the data used by Smart Growth America indicated that residents of dense Boston weighed just 1.7 pounds less than Boston suburbanites, while those of denser Chicago weighed just 1.4 pounds less than that city’s least-dense suburbs.

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Student Protests

The Antiplanner has long observed that everyone can justify the subsidies they get from the government. So it is no surprise that university students across the nation are protesting increases in tuition. Even though the students themselves are the ones who primarily benefit from their educations, some of them have the nerve to call tuition growth “tax hikes.”

To be fair, when the Antiplanner entered college, my tuition was just over $400 a year, which (after adjusting for inflation) is about $2,000 in today’s money. Today, in-state tuition at Oregon State University, my alma mater, is about three times that amount. Still, that’s just a third of out-of-state tuition, suggesting that in-state students pay only a third of the cost of their educations.

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A Question for John Hickenlooper

A governor is the taxpayers’ last line of defense against money-hungry bureaucrats who incessantly seek their “fair share” of worker incomes in the form of higher taxes for all sorts of boondoggles. Governors can limit the amount of money that agencies request, they can veto excessive spending bills, and they can make sure bureaucracies don’t waste money that legislatures have appropriated.

To successfully defend taxpayers, governors must be skeptical of claims made by bureaucrats and the special interest groups that benefit from excessive spending, and they must be open to listen to citizen views of proposed spending programs. Denver Mayor John Hickenlooper, who is now running for governor of Colorado, has failed to meet these tests.

In September, 2004, during the campaign to spend billions of dollars on Denver-area rail transit, Hickenlooper endorsed the new tax for more trains, saying that Fastracks would “take at least 250,000 cars off the road — thereby relieving congestion.” This was a complete fabrication.

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More Bureaucracy Won’t Make Transit Safe

Last week, the Federal Transit Administration presented a “scathing report” on Washington Metrorail safety programs. The report itself found that the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority (WMATA) frequently failed to comply with or even respond to safety requirements and investigations of the agency that has oversight authority over Metrorail safety.

Back in 1991, Congress asked the Federal Transit Administration to create a state-based transit safety program. After a mere 4 years, the FTA responded with rules (updated in 2005) requiring each state that has a rail transit system to create a state safety oversight (SSO) authority. Because the Washington Metrorail system crosses from DC into two states, its SSO is called the Tri-State (even though DC is not a state) Oversight Committee (TOC).

What the 1991 law and FTA rules did not do is give the SSOs any legal authority to compel transit agencies to improve safety. As FTA administrator Peter Rogoff told Congress on March 4, transit agencies “don’t have to respond to [the SSOs] in a timely way. In fact, they don’t have to respond to them at all.” Thus, it is not surprising that the SSO system failed to prevent accidents such as the one last June that killed 9 people in DC.

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Federal Highway Funds Frozen

The distribution of federal highway revenues to the states ended on Sunday night thanks to Congress’ failure to extend surface transportation funding. This means that transit agencies and highway departments may temporarily lack funds to pay their bills.

Democrats in Congress had proposed to extend funding through the end of the year as a part of a bill extending unemployment compensation. But Kentucky Republican Senator Jim Bunning objected to the unemployment bill, since there was no money to pay for it. So the House passed a bill extending transportation funding for four weeks, but Bunning objected to that as well. Bunning agreed yesterday to drop his objections, but the funds will remain frozen for a few more days.

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Tossing the Neocons

It is amazing how few people understand the tea party movement. The movement is portrayed as fringe right wingers, radicals, conspiracy nuts, and so forth. Yet extremism has nothing to do with what the movement is all about.

What is really going on is that conservatives are throwing out the neoconservatives. Neocons aren’t really conservatives, yet they managed to hi-jack the Republican party after the 2000 election. The Bush administration betrayed the conservative movement by going neocon, and the leaders of the tea party movement are fighting to retake control of that movement.

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Let It Snow

“How many Washington Metrorail employees does it take to change a lightbulb?” a friend who would probably rather not be named asked recently. “Three: one to screw a lightbulb into a faucet, one to assure the public that the system was safe, and one to explain to the media why this proves Metro needs a dedicated funding source.”

The good news about last week’s derailment is that it probably was not due to the poor maintenance that plagued the Metrorail system in 2009. Instead, it appears that the driver of a train ran a red light. The train then entered a side track where it ran into a safety device called, naturally enough, a derail, aimed at preventing a train from going where it wasn’t supposed to go.

This still leaves a mystery. Did someone see that the driver was blowing the red light and purposefully switch the train to a side track? Was there a failsafe system no one remembers? Or was the switch in the wrong position in the first place, meaning the train would have derailed even if it hadn’t blown the light?

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Some people have even suggested spending untold billions of dollars “snowproofing” the Metrorail system, as if that would be enough to keep the government from having to shut down on the very rare occasions when a particularly large snowfall hits the capital city. After all, less than 20 percent of commuters who live in Washington, and less than 10 percent of those in the DC urban area, take Metrorail to work. Since nearly three out of four urban-area commuters drive to work, it would make more sense to spend a little more money plowing the roads.

Of course, I don’t find it particularly upsetting to hear that the federal government has been shut down, since it mostly means that busy-bodies inside the beltway will fall behind in their efforts to regulate everything that people outside the beltway do. The more snow days, the better.

Rail Jobs Overestimated

Remember all those jobs that high-speed rail was going to create? Turns out, not so much.

Wisconsin, for example, had claimed that its share of high-speed rail funds would create 13,000 jobs. In fact, it is only going to be 4,700— and then only at the peak of construction.

So how did 4,700 turn in to 13,000? If you have a job this year, and a job next year, they counted that as two separate jobs. And if you have a job the year after that, that’s three jobs.

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Obama’s Transportation Budget

The White House released its proposed 2011 federal budget today, including the transportation budget. For the most part, this budget is an extension of past budgets, but it includes a few new programs.

First, the budget includes $4 billion for a National Infrastructure Innovation and Finance Fund, also known as an “infrastructure bank.” The Antiplanner has a couple of problems with this idea. First, infrastructure should be paid for out of user fees, not tax dollars. Second, unlike many other transportation funds, which are distributed based on specific formulas, this fund will be an “open bucket.” This will give states incentives to come up with the wackiest, most expensive transportation projects.

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High-Speed Raildoggles

A day after proposing a spending freeze (that everyone from Glenn Beck to Paul Krugman thinks is stupid), Obama gleefully announced $8 billion in federal grants for high-speed rail. But Obama knows full well that the final cost will be much, much more than $8 billion.

How much more? The Antiplanner once estimated $550 billion in capital costs (not counting cost overruns). BNSF CEO Mark Rose guesses $1 trillion (he must have included cost overruns). Oregon Congressman Peter DeFazio compromises at $700 billion.

“The thing is unimaginably expensive,” admits DeFazio. But, he adds, $700 billion is “the same amount of money that Congress gave in one day to Wall Street!” In trying to make high-speed rail sound cheap, he is hoping you won’t remember that Congress didn’t give Wall Street anything; it was almost all loans and most, if not all, will be repaid. That won’t happen with high-speed rail.

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