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California: The Future Does Not Work

By | | News commentary, Planning Disasters
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Californian William Voegeli compares his home state with the Antiplanner’s favorite state (at least politically), Texas. Being homes to the first- and second-largest populations in the country, both are “populous Sunbelt states with large metropolitan areas, diverse economies, and borders with Mexico producing comparable demographic mixes.”

But there are two sharp differences between them. California spends well over $10,000 per capita each year (and Voegeli argues that it is ineffectively spent), while Texas spends barely two-thirds that much. The second difference, argues Voegeli, is a function of the first: Texas is growing rapidly while California’s growth has stagnated. Companies are moving out of California, while in one recent period, Texas gained more jobs than the other 49 states combined.

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The Worst-Managed City

By | | City planning, News commentary
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Ask progressives what they think is the nation’s most-progressive city, and many are likely to mention San Francisco. Not coincidentally, the progressive SF Weekly argues that San Francisco is also the nation’s worst-managed city.

Welcome to San Francisco, where per capita budgets climb halfway to the stars.

The city spends more than $8,000 per capita, compared with less than $7,200 by New York and less than $3,000 by Philadelphia and Denver. The Weekly suggests that most of the difference is waste. (In San Francisco’s defense, San Francisco is a combined city-county government and its budget includes a lot of services, such as public transit, not included in Philadelphia or Denver budgets.)

Still, “even other liberal places wouldn’t put up with the degree of dysfunction they have in San Francisco,” says faithful Antiplanner ally Joel Kotkin. “In Houston” — which both Kotkin and the Antiplanner admire — “I assume you’d get shot” if you did so poorly.

There are a lot of problems with the city, but one of the biggest is public employees unions. Unions were probably important in providing workers with a balance against large corporations. But the potential corruption of unions with the dysfunction of government is a recipe for disaster.

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Fair-Weather Transportation

By | | News commentary, Transportation
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Some of the Antiplanner’s faithful allies are chortling over the closures of rail lines — advertised as “all-weather transportation” — due to snowstorms, including parts of the the Washington Metro system, the The study, which was viagra generic uk done in Finland, followed 989 men for five years and questioned them about any ED symptoms. Testosterone is additionally in charge of the bone thickness, muscle quality and the vitality level generic cialis without prescription of the body. Penegra is usually substituted by men who are also prescribed to take other types of medications. cialis generic pills If you are suffering from heart diseases or if you have not encountered one yet, then viagra ordination http://www.slovak-republic.org/zilina/ it is advisable to follow eating this drug after the consultation with the health expert. href=”http://www.mtamaryland.com/status/index.cfm?service=Light%20Rail”>Baltimore light-rail system, and New Jersey light rail.

And don’t forget the shutdown of the Eurostar high-speed trains through the Channel Tunnel. How does weather shut down train service in a tunnel?

Make the Kiddies Pay

By | | News commentary, Transportation
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New York City has the greatest transit system in America. It carries a third of all transit rides, and well over half of all rail transit rides in the U.S. Fares cover close to two-thirds of its operating costs, more than any other transit system. New York’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) is what every other transit system aspires to be.

Broke.

So broke that the MTA is planning “service cuts that would affect nearly every bus, subway and commuter rail rider in New York.” These include the complete elimination of two subway lines and many bus routes, along with reductions in frequencies on many other routes and cuts in services to disabled riders. These cuts are deemed necessary to close a $383 million gap in the agency’s 2010 budget — more money than the entire annual budgets of most transit agencies.

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Blame Government Mismanagement on Climate Change

By | | News commentary
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People in Bolivia are going thirsty, and the New York Times blames it on climate change. But, in fact, the glaciers have been retreating for well over 100 years.

The real problem in Bolivia, as the Times admits well down the page, is that the government declared water to be a “human right” and took over the private water company. But because the government is inept, not to mention broke, it has failed to provide water to those who need it or to adjust to long-term changes in water flows.


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Simply declaring something a human right doesn’t automatically mean everyone will get some. As Bremerton, Washington, blogger Keli Carender points out in the video above, someone has to pay for it.

Bolivia no doubt hopes that, by blaming the problem on climate change, it will guilt-trip wealthy nations into providing billions in foreign aid, thus compensating for its own ineptitude. If the United States nationalized health care, who are we going to guilt-trip to fund our future health costs?

Death of an Economist

By | | News commentary
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No economist influenced the economics profession in the second half of the twentieth century as much as Paul Samuelson, who died Sunday at the age of 94. As the New York Times noted, “Samuelson was credited with transforming his discipline from one that ruminates about economic issues to one that solves problems, answering questions about cause and effect with mathematical rigor and clarity.”

Unfortunately, Samuelson’s influence was not as positive as the Times would have it. Samuelson turned economics from a social science that tried to figure out how the world worked into an pseudo-science that tried to turn the world into a mathematical model — a model that failed to account for the realities of individual human desires, incentives, and diversity. As a result, by 1960, economists, politicians, and would-be central planners were misled into viewing the economy as a machine that could be controlled by pulling levers, i.e, passing laws, issuing regulations, and setting tax and discount rates.

The economy is not a machine. As Michael Rothschild showed in his book, Bionomics, the economy is more like an ecosystem. One implication is that the economy is so complex that, when you pull a lever (pass a law, issue a regulation, create a tax), the unintended consequences are likely to be far greater (and far more negative) than the intended ones.

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The Ideal Environmental Issue

By | | News commentary
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There is some kind of meeting going on in Copenhagen this week. Most of what the Antiplanner might say about it has already been said by others, such as this article or this one.

Aside from these stories, one of the reasons I’ve always been skeptical of anthropogenic climate change is that it is tailor-made for a greedy environmental movement. I spent nearly two decades immersed in that movement, and during that time everyone seemed to be looking for the Ideal Issue that would win them the debate over whatever little piece of earth they were trying to save.

The Ideal Issue is one that appears scientifically valid but is actually scientifically irrefutable. The Ideal Issue represents a major crisis, but — like the end-of-the-world predictions made by religious prophets — not one that will happen soon enough that its failure to take place will prove the issue invalid. For some, the Ideal Issue was a true public good, which meant it could only be solved through massive government interventions.

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Why Use Buses When Trains Cost So Much More?

By | | News commentary, Transportation
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Whenever the Antiplanner reads a news story such as this one, which tells how Amtrak’s Boston-to-Portland Downeaster train hit an automobile, I think, “There were only 48 people on that train. We’re subsidizing a train to carry just 48 people?”

Flickr photo by lazytom.

While the route of the Downeaster is 116 miles, it is considered a commuter train and was subsidized by the Federal Transit Administration, so it is in the National Transit Database. Amtrak timetables indicate the train makes five round trips each day (which means two train sets each make 2-1/2 round trips). The 2008 transit database reports that it carries an average of 492 passengers each weekday, and slightly more on Saturdays and Sundays. That means the average train carries about 50 people. Since not everyone goes the whole distance, the average number of people on board at any given time will be somewhat less.

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This Just In: Highways Are Subsidized

By | | News commentary, Transportation, Useful Data
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The Pew Charitable Trusts looked at highway revenues and found that they fail to cover highway costs. Only 51 percent of the cost of highways came from user fees in 2007, says Pew.

According to a Pew data file, 2007 highway user fees totaled to $98 billion while “non-user revenues” spent on highways totaled to $70 billion and another $25 billion came from bond issues. I’ve checked Pew’s source data (table HF-10 from Highway Statistics) and the numbers are accurate.

However, the Antiplanner has a few quarrels with Pew’s interpretation of the data. Most important, Pew counts as “user revenue” a number that the federal government identifies as “highway user revenues used for highways,” which in 2007 was $97.9 billion. But users actually paid $124.5 billion. Just because federal and state officials diverted most of the different to mass transit and non-transportation related funds doesn’t mean they aren’t paid by users.

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Short of Money? Call in Federal Regulators

By | | News commentary, Transportation
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In 2006, the National Transportation Safety Board found that 298 subway cars in the Washington Metrorail system are “vulnerable to catastrophic telescoping damage” and should be replaced or reinforced immediately. They weren’t, which was a major reason why nine people died in a rail collision last June.

In 2007, supposedly failsafe circuits in Metrorail’s train detection and control system began to “intermittently malfunction.” This contributed to at least one near miss before the fatal crash, and was the other major reason why nine people died in June.

Clearly, the Washington Metropolitan Area Transportation Authority is short of funds. It still has not begun to replace the 298 cars; instead, it is merely inserting them into the middle of trains so that, in the event of a crash, the will be buffered by newer (and hopefully stronger) cars.

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