Category Archives: News commentary

A writer for MarketWatch.com, which is part of the Dow Jones-Wall Street Journal group — has penned one of the most smugly ignorant articles about our economy I could imagine. The article is titled Eight Reasons You’ll Rejoice When We Hit $8 a Gallon Gasoline.

His reasons include:

1. RIP for the internal combustion engine

2. Economic stimulus

3. Whither the Middle East’s clout

4. Deflating oil potentates

5. Mass transit development

6. An antidote to sprawl

7. Restoration of financial discipline

8. Easing global tensions

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A new brief from the Brookings Institution says American cities should “expand transit and compact development options” in order to reduce their “carbon footprints.” The brief is based on a study, but frankly, I don’t think the study supports the conclusions.

The study compared per-capita carbon emissions from transit systems with a crude estimate of carbon emissions from driving. But it failed to note that per passenger mile carbon emissions from transit tend to be more than from driving. The study also looked at residential carbon emissions, but not emissions from other sources. The study used so many shortcuts — for example, estimating carbon emissions based on miles driven rather than using actual fuel consumption data — that it is likely rife with errors.

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Gas prices are at record levels, transit ridership is growing, so what do transit agencies do? Cut service!. Denver’s Regional Transit District says it plans to cut some of its “lowest-performing routes,” including one of its light-rail lines.

Of course, transit agencies face higher fuel costs, too. And since transit fares cover only 28 percent of average transit costs (and just 13 percent in Denver), increased ridership doesn’t pay for much of the increased cost.

RTD says that one of the buses it plans to cut costs $330,000 a year and only carries 295 riders a day. Assuming they mean “weekday” (and annual ridership tends to be about 300 times weekday ridership), that works out to an operating cost of about $3.73 a rider. But the average bus operated by RTD costs $3.46 a rider, which isn’t much less.

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Barack Obama attracted some 72,000 people to a waterfront rally in Portland, my old hometown. Aerial photos of the event (which are copyrighted so I won’t include them here) are pretty incredible.

Part of the rally stands in front of one of Portland’s subsidized New Urban developments.
Flickr photo by Selena Marie.

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India built a bus-rapid transit line, but put the bus stops on median strips in the middle of a busy highway. Since it opened nearly a month ago, there have been This energy will allow you to take the medication in the first place. buy levitra wholesale Most of cialis for women the adverse reactions have been reported shortly after sexual activity. You need to have the correct facts when you are using order levitra online kamagra. Men suffering from ED no prescription viagra go into worst conditions. three to four pedestrian accidents a day.

Maybe it was just poorly designed. But maybe spending $52 million on a seven-mile bus-rapid transit line wasn’t such a good idea anyway.

Before the weekend, Hillary Clinton was expected to win Indiana by 5 percent and lose North Carolina to Barack Obama by only about 8 percent. Then, on Sunday before the election, Hillary made the mistake of offending a group of people who she thought were irrelevant.

You know the rest: Hillary barely won 1 percent more votes than Obama in Indiana and lost North Carolina by more than 14 percent.

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After writing a paper showing that rail transit is a waste of energy, the Antiplanner discovered that UC Irvine economist Charles Lave had written a similar paper for The Atlantic Monthly way back in 1979. So I’ve been quoting him as often as possible. Now comes the sad news that he has passed away. From his vita I infer that he was about 69.

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