Category Archives: News commentary

Thanks to Portland’s reputation as a streetcar pioneer and a Congressional earmark made by a Eugene politician, a Lake Oswego company looks set to get federal funds to start manufacturing streetcars.

Boondoggle coming soon to a city near you.
Flickr photo by functoruser.

To get those funds, the company only had to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on lobbying. This doesn’t count thousands of dollars in campaign contributions made by company officials to said Eugene congressman and other members of Congress.

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Trial attorneys have a saying: “When you can’t win on the law, argue the facts. When you can’t win on the facts, attack your opponent.” So we antiplanners always feel a bit vindicated when someone responds to our data with ad hominem (Latin for “against the person”) attacks.

For example, the Reason Foundation has been doing some excellent research lately on mobility, highways, and toll roads. This prompted an ad hominem response from Railway Age magazine.

According to William Vantuono, the magazine’s editor, the Reason Foundation “would like to pave over every square mile of the U.S. that isn’t already paved.” Why? Because it is “heavily funded by Exxon, General Motors, and several other large corporations with a vested interest in selling either automobiles or gasoline.”

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Last March, I criticized the National Association of Realtors for spinning the data (really, for lying) to make it look like the housing bubble wasn’t bursting. It turns out that the Realtors’ economist who wrote that paper, David Lereah, has been widely criticized for such things.

Some call him the realtors’ equivalent of “Baghdad Bob,” the guy who claimed that American soldiers were losing to the Iraqi army.

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The Oregon House of Representatives has approved a law intended to promote bicycle safety. In fact, it will simply create more hostile conditions for auto drivers.

The law would require autos to pass cyclists with enough clearance that they would miss the cyclist if the cyclist were to fall over into the traffic lane. This is an amendment to an existing law that simply requires drivers to pass cyclists “at a safe and reasonable distance.”

Give me room.

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Bandon, Oregon, my home town, was featured in the New York Times last week as a “hard-luck community” apparently inhabited by a bunch of rubes who foolishly subsidize wealthy executives. The article (also viewable as a video) actually left out some of the juiciest parts of this tale.

#6 at Bandon Dunes Golf Course. Photo by Bandon Dunes Resort.

The story is about Bandon Dunes, a destination golf resort built by a wealthy golf enthusiast named Mike Keiser (who, everybody likes to observe, made his money selling greeting cards printed on recycled paper). Keiser spent tens of millions of dollars of his own money building the course on sheer speculation. When he opened, greens fees started at something like $175 a round (and are now as high as $250). But every hole has an ocean view and the course was quickly rated one of the best in America, so he got more business than originally anticipated.

Keiser did not need any subsidies to build. Full disclosure: I understand Keiser gives money to my new employer, the Cato Institute. After his resort proved successful, however, some local governments decided to promote their empires by subsidizing Bandon Dunes and its wealthy customers.

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