The Antiplanner » News commentary

Category Archives: News commentary

Transit Doesn’t Need to Respond to Reality

By | | News commentary, Transportation
Leave a comment

When the pandemic shut down brew pubs, many breweries went into the business of making hand sanitizer. Ford used one of its auto parts plants to make 50,000 ventilators. Various drugmakers were able to create vaccines in just nine months.

Transit agencies, meanwhile, continued to trundle their empty buses and trains around American cities. Those that were planning new construction projects have made little or no efforts to revise their plans in response to an almost certain downturn in business.

You are also advised to include carrots, shrimp, eggs, oysters, pomegranate, watermelon, garlic, fish, banana and figs in levitra tabs your daily diet. Unless you won t discuss about what is affecting the health discount viagra uk of the person adversely. Their performance anxiety may lead to an unimaginable number of fights or arguments that arise out of suspicion. http://raindogscine.com/tag/federico-ivanier/ cialis generic wholesale Binge drinking has cost the country in generic levitra cheap many ways, this could be a solution for people who want to purchase medications without any second doubt. New York’s Long Island Railroad, for example, is spending $2.6 billion adding a third track to its mainline, a project that won’t be completed for at least two more years. Seattle’s Sound Transit presses ahead with billions of dollars of light-rail expansions. The San Diego Association of Governments is still talking about an insane plan to spend $177 billion on new transit lines. Continue reading →

Transit Gets $14 Billion in Relief

By | | News commentary, Transportation
Leave a comment

The transit industry will get $14 billion of the $900 billion coronavirus relief package passed by Congress on Tuesday. That’s less than half of what transit agencies wanted but enough to tide them over for five months or so by which time (the agencies hope) the next Congress will have a chance to pass another and even bigger relief bill. The $14 billion is on top of the $13 billion that Congress gave to transit as a part of its normal annual funding bill.

For those who care, the TransitCenter has posted a spreadsheet showing its estimate of how the $14 billion in relief funds will be distributed among the nation’s major urban areas. The New York urban area will get $5.5 billion of which $3.9 billion goes to New York, $1.4 billion goes to New Jersey, and $0.2 billion to Connecticut.

Los Angeles gets nearly a billion, San Francisco-Oakland $800 million, and Chicago and Seattle around half a billion. Curiously, what regions get isn’t closely related to how many transit riders they carry: Seattle apparently will get 16 percent more than Chicago even though Chicago transit carries more than twice as many riders as Seattle’s. Continue reading →

Silicon Valley Is Moving to Texas

By | | News commentary
8 Comments

On December 1st, Hewlett-Packard–which has been headquartered in Silicon Valley since 1939–announced that its corporate headquarters would move to Houston. On May 9, Elon Musk announced that Tesla was moving its headquarters to “either Texas or Nevada,” but on December 7, he revealed that he personally had moved to Austin. On December 11, Oracle announced that it was also moving its headquarters to Austin.

Companies have been migrating from California to Texas for many years, but I don’t think three such large companies have all made such announcements in such a short time. Hewlett-Packard is listed on the Fortune 500 twice, one as HP (which makes office products) and one as Hewlett-Packard Enterprise (which runs server farms). Combining them would make HP #35 on the list, right behind Dell, which is already headquartered in Texas.

Even before moving its headquarters, Hewlett-Packard had more employees in Houston than any other city. This reflects past trends where Silicon Valley companies kept their highest-paid workers in San Jose but built their factories in other cities where housing was more affordable. Apparently, California taxes and housing prices have now gotten too high even for Silicon Valley executives. Continue reading →

Sinkhole Disrupts Transit for 40 Days

By | | News commentary, Transportation
2 Comments

A broken water main in Baltimore created a sinkhole that damaged a light-rail stop next to the city’s convention center. As a result, transit throughout much of the city was disrupted for 40 days.

Baltimore’s Convention Center light-rail stop, which was disrupted by a sinkhole last summer. Photo by David Wilson.

This actually happened last summer, but it was so “incredible” that Greater Greater Washington decided to reprint it last week. But actually, it is quite credible because light rail is so vulnerable to that sort of thing. Continue reading →

An Incentive for Fraud

By | | News commentary
5 Comments

Since the 2016 election, the Antiplanner has been dismayed by the number of people whose opinion I otherwise respect who have argued in favor of retaining the electoral college. Their argument is mainly that, with the college, everyone’s vote counts because without it presidential candidates would only bother to campaign in a few large cities that house most of the voting population.

The problem with that argument is that most people’s votes don’t count today because most people live in either a red state or a blue state where presidential candidates don’t bother to campaign. The only states that receive attention are the battleground states, of which there are as few as six or at most a dozen.

The lack of any chance that someone’s vote in the other states will influence the outcome depresses voter turnout. Why bother to vote if you know your state is going to always go for one party in the election that you care about the most? The result is that fewer people bother to learn about other elections such as state legislature or city council races because they don’t feel their vote counts. Continue reading →

Portland Wises Up

By | | News commentary
8 Comments

Austin voters apparently approved the cities foolish $7 billion light-rail plan. San Francisco Bay Area voters apparently approved a regressive tax-increase to support high-income riders of the Caltrain commuter train. But Portland voters have apparently rejected a $5 billion transportation measure that was mainly aimed at building the region’s most-expensive light-rail line yet.

Portland’s rejection of light rail is not too surprising as the region has rejected every transit tax measure that’s been on the ballot since 1996 because voters have learned that light rail costs too much and does too little. Too bad Austin couldn’t have learned from Portland’s experience.

Portland voters also appear to have returned centrist Ted Wheeler to the mayor’s office even though polls showed he was running well behind leftist challenger Sarah Iannarone. Wheeler had earned the ire of Black Lives Matter protesters when he didn’t try to stop police from stopping property destruction in downtown Portland. Iannarone, meanwhile, openly supported antifa violence and wore clothing celebrating Chairman Mao. Continue reading →

Congress Extends Pork Another Year

By | | News commentary, Transportation
Leave a comment

In a move that will surprise no one at all, Congress has extended federal funding for highways and public transit until September 30, 2021. Such federal funding was set to end on September 30, 2020, and rather than revise the law to take into account the latest trends and events, Congress simply extended the existing law for another year.

It’s not like there was any new information, such as a pandemic, widespread forest fires, or the acceleration of urban decentralization, that might lead Congress to change its funding priorities anyway. Or, to be more accurate, it’s not like any new information would actually persuade Congress to change its funding priorities, as those priorities are driven by ideology more than actual facts.
PDE5 InhibitorsThe prescription PDE5 inhibitors sildenafil ( price tadalafil tablets), vardenafil (viagra) and tadalafil (discount viagra) are prescription drugs which are visual disturbances, including blurred vision and seeing different shades than before. This statement coming buy cialis usa from them isn’t completely wrong since a lot of individuals who discontinued using Propecia recovered from the severe adverse reactions. Bodily health:- Numerous viagra without prescription free health difficulties can even have an impact on sexual performance. Depression is another common issue that causes penile viagra online mastercard weakness due to imbalance in the production of brain chemicals.
The current law, known as the Fixing America’s Surface Transportation or FAST Act, was passed in 2015 and included five years of funding. It didn’t make sense to make the law last five years because Congress is so dysfunctional that it can’t pass any major legislation in even-numbered years, so it should have made it a six-year law anyway.

Home Sales Reveal Demographic Shift

By | | Housing, News commentary
1 Comment

Last week, the Census Bureau reported a huge surge in July and August new home sales while the National Association of Realtors reported a parallel growth of existing home sales. Total homes sold is the greatest since the 2006 housing bubble while the year-on-year growth in sales was the greatest since 1983, when the economy was recovering from a recession.

The growth in sales in 2020, however, isn’t due to a bubble or an economic recovery. Instead, it represents a major demographic shift. Financial blogger Wolf Richter argues that it is more evidence of a movement “taking place from some densely populated cities, and especially city centers, and especially from rental apartments, to houses a little further out, or in more distant suburbs.”

The Census Bureau and Realtor data don’t indicate whether the sales are in cities or suburbs, but both agree that the greatest increases are in the South and Midwest, while increases in the Northeast and West are much smaller. This would fit Richter’s guess that people are leaving expensive apartments in New York City and San Francisco and buying homes in more affordable places in Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Minnesota, North Carolina, and Ohio, states that already had some of the fastest-growing urban areas before the pandemic. Continue reading →

Something in New York Is Dying

By | | News commentary
4 Comments

A recent blog post by investor and stand-up comedian James Altucher (mentioned here) arguing that New York is dead forever attracted the hostility of many New Yorkers. Fellow comedian Jerry Seinfeld wrote a New York Times op-ed calling Altucher a “whimpering putz.” Mayor De Blasio, naturally, agrees with Seinfeld.

The New York Post told Altucher to “drop dead,” noting that, if he really loved the city as he claims (he co-owns a comedy club there), he would stay and do his part to revive it. Guardian columnist Arwa Mahdawi suggests that New York is not only not dying, “the rich are moving out and the city is being reborn.”

With all due respect to these people, they missed Altucher’s point. New York as a city will survive. But New York as an ideal, a place that builds wealth and fulfills dreams like nowhere else in America, will not. Not to put too many words in Altucher’s mouth, what is really dead is the idea that New York City or Manhattan densities are necessary have a healthy economy and diverse culture. Continue reading →

Will the Cities Come Back?

By | | Housing, News commentary
3 Comments

“The Twilight of Great American Cities Is Here,” screams the headline of an article by my friend, Joel Kotkin. He argues that, between the pandemic and the riots following the George Floyd death, people are not going to return to the cities.

Certainly, rents are down and vacancy rates are up in New York City and San Francisco. But does that mean that the cities won’t bounce back after the pandemic is over?

A major pandemic does not “introduce something novel,” observes a historian named Stephen Davies. Instead, “it accelerates and magnifies trends and processes that were already under way.” It can also bring “a final stop to processes that were already exhausted.” Continue reading →