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Category Archives: Regional planning

America 2050

By | | Regional planning
35 Comments

Think back (if you are old enough) to 1970 and imagine you were then asked to write a plan for America for 2010. In 1970, you wouldn’t have known about personal computers, and so you probably wouldn’t expect that the number of people working at home in 2010 would be growing faster than the number of people riding transit to work.

In 1970 you wouldn’t have known about the Internet and FedEx (which began in 1973), and so you probably wouldn’t have predicted that many people in 2010 would shop from home and have their goods delivered to them by truck. (In 1970, for those who don’t remember, UPS home deliveries were rare.)

In 1970, the private railroads still operated passenger trains and the airlines hadn’t been deregulated yet so airfares were mainly at wealthy and business travelers. So you probably wouldn’t have predicted the doubling in per capita air travel or that air travel would be one-fourth the cost, per passenger mile, of passenger trains.

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Mansion or Crack House?

By | | Regional planning, Urban areas
28 Comments

Normally, the Antiplanner doesn’t have time for on-line games. But here is a great on-line game illustrating the insanity of housing in Vancouver, BC, which Wendell Cox says is the least-affordable housing market in Consume Medicine In The Presence Of Sexual Stimulation The penis becomes hard by the flow of the blood into the male reproductive uk viagra online organ. It is a vicious cycle that can seriously put viagra uk delivery your sexual life in danger. Lawax capsules improve stamina, strength and offers control over your ejaculate and helps to last longer in controlling ejaculate to satisfy her in bed. cheap levitra pills It supplies the essential cialis soft generic nutrients in bio-available form. the English-speaking world. Of course, the reason it is unaffordable is that Vancouver adopted a growth-management plan in the 1970s that put 70 percent of the land in the region off limits to development.

Not the Only One

By | | Regional planning, Urban areas
22 Comments

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Yglesias Is Baffled

By | | Follow up, Regional planning
69 Comments

Matthew Yglesias is baffled by reality. At least, he finds the Antiplanner’s post about how zoning codes actually work, as opposed to how Yglesias imagines they work, to be “baffling and bafflingly long.”

He boils his case down to three simple statements:

  1. Throughout America there are many regulations that restrict the density of the built environment.
  2. Were it not for these restrictions, people would build more densely.
  3. Were the built environment more densely built, the metro areas would be less sprawling.

Reality is never so simple. As you can see, it all depends on statement 1: are there regulations throughout America that restrict density? As evidence that there are, Yglesias cited the Maricopa County Zoning Code, which he claimed allows development no denser than duplexes. Apparently, he didn’t read (or was baffled by) chapter 7, which allows housing at 43 units per acre, or chapter 10, which allows anyone with 160 acres to build as dense as they want.

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Who Is the Hypocrite?

By | | Regional planning
42 Comments

Urban sprawl is the result of central planning and zoning and therefore libertarians should support smart growth — at least that’s what some supposedly conservative, progressive, and anarchistic bloggers say. This all appears to be a response to James Kunstler’s previously noted rude snub of John Stossel.

Writing for The American Conservative, Austin Bramwell argues that sprawl is “mandated by a vast and seemingly intractable network of government regulations, from zoning laws and building codes to street design regulations.” As a result, “government planning makes sprawl ubiquitous.”

Anarchist Kevin Carson quotes Kunstler’s book, The Geography of Nowhere, as the authority for how planners like Robert Moses forced people to live in sprawl. “Local governments have been almost universally dominated by an unholy alliance of real estate developers and other commercial interests” that insisted on urban sprawl, says Carson.

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Return from the North

By | | Regional planning, Travels
25 Comments

I visited a government-subsidized ice-sculpture park and rode a government-subsidized train. Sometimes, it seems like everything in Alaska is government-subsidized.

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I also spoke in several different forums. You can download one of my presentations in PDF or PowerPoint formats. This presentation focuses on the relationship between urban planning and the housing prices. I may post some of my other presentations later in the week.

Strong Towns Rebuttal

By | | Regional planning, Transportation
8 Comments

I want to begin my rebuttal by expressing my condolences to the Antiplanner, Randal O’Toole, for the pain and suffering he endured reading more than seventy metropolitan transportation plans. It is quite a price to pay for insight. I am happy he survived the ordeal, although it seems Mr. O’Toole may now be suffering from an intellectual form of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder that has biased him against planning. I’m gently teasing, but let me offer some “treatment.”

I don’t know what will happen on my way home from work today. I may be killed in a car accident. I may stop and help a woman deliver a baby on the side of the road. Or I may stop and buy milk before heading home. Using Antiplanner logic, I should not bother to call home to see if anything is needed at the grocery because I am not sure I’ll even make it home. In contrast, Strong Towns would argue that I should buy life insurance and carry a cell phone for the first two possibilities, but should assume I will make it home for dinner.

To be fair, O’Toole has indicated that he is not opposed to short-term planning. But short-term planning is an oxymoron commonly known as “reacting.” The fact that we don’t know what will happen in twenty years is the exact reason we should plan.

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Antiplanner Rebuttal

By | | Regional planning, Transportation
7 Comments

Charles, you agree with me that most of the long-range transportation plans written by states and metropolitan areas are “dismal.” But you imagine that planning is necessary for all sorts of reasons — efficiency, meeting national priorities, measuring results, and promoting innovations. Just because you think those are necessary goals, you insist that we must plan.

I submit to you that no long-range plan has ever met any of those goals, nor will one ever do so because they are impossible to meet over the long run. Efficiencies? When we don’t know what the future will bring or what people will want, we can’t imagine what will be efficient. Priorities? How can people today dictate priorities for the future, and how can Congress — where “all politics is local” — set national priorities anyway? Measuring results? When have government agencies ever bothered to follow up to see if their plans produced the results they claimed? And, by their tedious and time-consuming nature, long-range plans are much more likely to stifle innovations than promote them.

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Federal Funding & Transportation Planning

By | | Regional planning, Transportation, Why Planning Fails
6 Comments

Note: This is the second of a series of interblog debates between the Antiplanner and Charles Marohn of the Strong Towns Blog.

Should Congress require cities and states to do transportation planning in order to be eligible for federal transportation funds? Under current law, states and metropolitan planning organizations (MPOs) are required to do two kinds of plans: long-range transportation plans that look ahead for about 20 years, and transportation-improvement plans (TIPs) that focus on projects that are going to be funded or partly funded in the next year or two.

The Antiplanner has always believed that short-term, mission-specific planning is a necessary part of any program or activity. We plan our days, school teachers plan their lessons, and highway departments plan road maintenance and bridge construction. So I don’t have a lot of objections to TIPs, though I think the legal requirement is unnecessary — it’s going to happen whether the law requires it or not.

But the Antiplanner has always objected to long-range planning. Two years ago, I sat down and read more than 70 long-range metropolitan transportation plans (and if you don’t think that was painful, try it sometime). I found that they all failed to do a good job of setting goals, developing alternative ways of meeting those goals, and fairly evaluating those alternatives.

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Strong Towns Rebuttal

By | | Follow up, Regional planning, Transportation
37 Comments

Note: Mr. Marohn of the Strong Towns blog offers the following response to my post yesterday. My own reply appears below.

I love lobster. A grilled lobster tail with a little bit of butter is the most divine food I can imagine. If I had the option, I would eat lobster every day. So why can’t I, an American living in a country of unequaled prosperity, eat lobster every day?

Well I can, if I am willing to pay for it.

You see, nobody subsidizes my lobster for me. And since I have to pay the full cost, I probably average a meal of lobster tail once a year. For the most part, if I want meat, I eat chicken, pork or beef in the form of hamburger. And I’m good with that. I could eat lobster every day if I really wanted to, but I’d have to cut way back on other things I am not willing to live without. So I make choices.

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