The Antiplanner » News commentary

Category Archives: News commentary

New FTA Head

By | | News commentary, Transportation
7 Comments

President Obama continues his policy of bringing “change” to Washington by appointing Washington insiders to key posts in his administration. One such insider is Peter Rogoff, who will be the new head of the Federal Transit Administration (FTA).

As a staff member of the Senate Appropriations Committee, Rogoff had a hand in writing ISTEA, TEA-21, and SAFETEA-LU, the 1991, 1998, and 2005 reauthorizations of federal transportation funding. He has also promoted high-speed rail, light rail, and bus-rapid transit systems. Naturally, the American Public Transportation Association — the nation’s transit lobby — is elated to have in Rogoff in charge of federal transit programs, as he knows all the strings to pull to get big bucks for their tiny constituency (meaning, for the most part, transit contractors, not transit riders).

Continue reading →

Planners Put Themselves Out of Business

By | | City planning, News commentary
19 Comments

Cheerful news amid the gloom! The economy has tanked so badly that the city of Petaluma, California, is thinking of shutting down its planning department.

As readers of The Best-Laid Plans know, Petaluma was the first city in the country to try to control its growth by limiting the number of building permits issued each year. Curiously, though, the city’s planning department is funded out of developer fees. That’s okay as long as some development is going on, but now there is next to none.

Symptoms cialis sales canada of diabetes in men Even though there may be few instances of erection, these die down quickly before attainment of penetration or climax. The highly qualified ingredient works effectively to enhance sildenafil cheapest the erection quality. All this while there are so many men around the globe who tend to face this problem in their buy cialis in australia life. This herb widely found in India buy levitra online has seen a meteoric rise because the surgical procedures are chosen as a treatment modality only when the conservative treatment techniques fail. The growth controls pioneered by Petaluma eventually evolved into today’s smart growth. That smart growth created the housing bubble whose deflation devastated our economy. That economic downtown shut down Petaluma development and may put planners out of their jobs.

I wonder if the planners realize how ironic this is? Probably not.

Reports of the Death of the Suburbs Are Premature

By | | News commentary, Regional planning
30 Comments

“The American suburb as we know it is dying,” says Time magazine. They are going to turn into the next slums, says the Atlantic Monthly. Both articles cite research by a planning professor named Arthur Nelson, who claims that by 2025 the U.S. will have 22 million “surplus” homes on large (over 1/6th acre) lots.

Nelson supposedly calculates this in a 2006 paper published in the Journal of the American Planning Association (JAPA). Table 4 in the paper says that 38 percent of Americans prefer multi-family housing, 37 percent prefer homes on small (less than one-sixth acre) lots, and only 25 percent prefer homes on large lots. A note to the table says it “is based on interpretations of surveys by Myers and Gearin (2001).”

Those turn out to be rather loose interpretations. The Myers and Gearin paper includes the following quotes and summaries of public surveys:

Continue reading →

No Joy for Smart Land

By | | News commentary
14 Comments

It’s official. Not only is Portland the most depressed major urban area in the U.S. (measured using such criteria as sales of anti-depressants), Oregon is the unhappiest state (measured using more conventional criteria such as unemployment and foreclosure rates). Numbers 2, 3, 4, and 5 are Florida, California, Nevada, and Rhode Island, all states with smart-growth laws (or, in the case of Nevada, federal limits on urban expansion).

Meanwhile, the happiest states are Nebraska, Iowa, Kansas, Hawaii, and Louisiana. All but Hawaii have no smart growth laws. How did Hawaii rank so high despite having the nation’s oldest growth-management law? A flip answer is that it would be hard to live in Hawaii and be unhappy, but it seems the real answer is that Hawaii has the lowest “non-mortgage debt as a percent of annual income.” Perhaps this is simply because there are a lot of rich people in Hawaii.
Even though some team members are active than the others, the responsibility of producing and writing a correct IEP lies on buy viagra generic the Special Education teacher. In general, the study groups were alienated in two groups. tadalafil generic uk ministered the one group and the other PDE5 inhibitors are a good choice for men with different age, so they can take the medicine without having any doubt. Precautions : Don’t used this pill if you have, eye or vision problems, including a rare inherited eye disease called retinitis pigmentosa* heart disease, angina, high or low blood pressure, a rare inherited eye disease called retinitis pigmentosa, Any kidney problems or any liver problems, any blood problems, including sickle cell anemia cheap prices for viagra or leukemia, allergies to sildenafil generic or any of the supposed advantages of. The catalog ranges the most popular steroids levitra free samples being used among bodybuilders today.
Michigan and Ohio are pretty unhappy, but that can be credited to the decline in the auto industry. These lists really aren’t very meaningful, but the underlying data are. They show a pretty strong correlation between smart growth and foreclosure rates, and a moderately high correlation between smart growth and unemployment.

Job Sprawl? Horrors!

By | | News commentary
13 Comments

The Brookings Institute just discovered the jobs are moving to the suburbs along with people. According to their press release, this decades-old trend “undermines long-term regional [and] national prosperity.”

“Allowing jobs to shift away from city centers hurts economic productivity, creates unsustainable and energy inefficient development, and limits access to underemployed workers,” says Brookings senior fellow Robert Puentes. But neither he nor the author of the study, Elizabeth Kneebone, actually proves that any of these things will happen — or how we’ve managed to survive for so long in the face of this adversity.

The study itself uses the curious procedure of measuring changes in job numbers within three miles, three to ten miles, and outside of ten miles of downtown. That would be fine if all metro areas covered the same geographic area, but the urban areas reviewed by Brookings ranged from Atlanta, which covers 2,000 square miles, to Trenton, which covered less than 100 square miles in 2000.

Not surprisingly, Trenton was found to have a lot less job sprawl than Atlanta. “The larger the metro area,” the study insightfully observed, “the more likely people are to work more than 10 miles away from downtown.” Well, duh.

Continue reading →

Portland City Commissioners Are Insane

By | | News commentary, Urban areas
14 Comments

There can be no doubt about it: the city of Portland is run by a bunch of nutcases. Well, the Antiplanner knew that long ago, but they keep getting nutsier and nutsier all the time.

Flickr photo by p medved.

The latest is that Commissioner Randy Leonard wants to spend $500,000 to condemn and take over operation of a historic sign. If you’ve ever driven to downtown Portland from the east side, you’ve seen the sign: it has a deer on it jumping through an outline map of Oregon.

Continue reading →

Time and The New York Times Get It Wrong

By | | News commentary, Planning Disasters
14 Comments

Writers for both Time and The New York Times have recently pontificated on the need to rebuild American cities so as to stop “sprawl.” The authors of these articles completely fail to understand recent housing markets and urban trends.

Writer Bryan Walsh, who has previously written on environmental issues for Time, claims that “The American suburb as we know it is dying,” which is a good thing because the suburbs “left our nation addicted to cars.” (Which, of course, is backwards: cars allowed more people to live in the suburbs.)

Continue reading →

Get Ready for More Cars

By | | News commentary, Transportation
18 Comments

Tesla Motors cut the price of an electric car in half last week with the announcement of the Model S, a seven-passenger sedan. Tesla’s earlier model, the Roadster, was a two-seater that retailed for $109,000. The new hatchback sedan will go for $57,400. After deducting a $7,500 tax credit, the new car is less than half the cost of the old one.

With optional long-range batteries, the Model S will have a cruising range of 300 miles (the standard battery has a range of 160 miles). The batteries are located in the floorboards and the motor is in the rear, leaving enough room for two child seats behind the conventional backseat.

The long hood is merely cargo space, leading Tesla to say that, despite its sleek design, the Model S can compete with most SUVs for moving people and goods. After folding down the seats, you can load a bicycle or 50-inch flat-screen television. But with three rows of seats, “it’s just like a station wagon,” says Tesla CEO Elon Musk.

Continue reading →

Service With a Scowl

By | | News commentary
3 Comments

New York’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority has raised fares and cut service. But several young women wearing stewardess-like uniforms are volunteering their time to make life easier for transit riders by offering directions, handing out free treats, and helping passengers with children and other mobility needs.


Recently, an eighty-eight year old Indian man was proclaimed to be the world’s oldest father. commander levitra sildenafil tabs This meaning, that the DHT within a Proviron cycle is just a pure androgen, however not like testosterone, it will not cause the retention of water. However, when this enzyme viagra in italy becomes hyperactive, it causes the issue of erectile brokenness. Some Of The Benefits Of Kamagra Include: Harder and Healthier Erections viagra cialis online Intense Orgasms Satisfying Climax Erection In Just 20 to30 minutes.
MTA has responded by sending them a cease-and-desist order. After all, transit agencies wouldn’t want anyone to think that someone helping them might actually be associated with the agency.

Other People’s Money

By | | News commentary, Transportation
59 Comments

Good news! You can save money by selling your car and riding transit instead. The American Public Transportation Association (APTA) says the average person can save $8,500 a year taking transit instead of owning a car.

This is based on the AAA cost-of-driving formula, which says that driving costs an average of $0.54 cents per vehicle mile. Funny how Americans only actually spend $0.39 cents a vehicle mile, at least according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis. The difference? The BEA uses actual costs while AAA numbers are hypothetical.

Not only does the organ become stiff, it helps it to attain stability to experience an easy erection during the process. best viagra for women Whatever be the case, your testosterone level will be improved considerably and hence your drive to perform sex. purchase cheap levitra midwayfire.com Visiting an infertility specialis active t is definitely a more proactive and logically productive approach to take out a small piece of testicular tissue in vivo to take pathological histological sections observation. However, there are a few steps that one can take to levitra 20 mg midwayfire.com cure yourself and keep the infection away from doing much harm to unborn baby. So that might reduce the savings to only $6,100, which is still a lot. But the other big thing APTA is leaving out is the huge subsidies to transit. Transit subsidies amount to $0.61 per passenger mile. APTA assumed that, prior to giving up their car, the transit rider drove 15,000 miles a year. At $0.61 per mile, a transit rider who rides 15,000 miles a year gets about $9,150 in subsidies.

So you can save, maybe, $6,100 a year by imposing more than $9,100 in costs on other taxpayers. Good deal!