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Monthly Archives: January 2007

The Modeling Problem: Garbage In, Gospel Out

By | | Why Planning Fails
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Planners by definition deal with complicated problems, and the only way to handle complicated problems is with models. Some models are computer programs. Others are simply in the heads of the people doing the planning. Either way, they are simplifications of reality.

For some purposes, simplifications can be useful. But when planning something as complicated as a national forest, urban area, or regional transportation system, planners fun up against what I call the Law of Modeling Limits:

Before a model becomes complicated enough to be useful for planning, it becomes too complicated for anyone to understand.”

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The Hiawatha Light-Rail Disaster

By | | Transportation
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One of the arguments for light rail is that it is supposed to have lower operating costs than buses. But Minneapolis’ Hiawatha light rail is losing so much money that Hennepin County wants a region-wide sales tax to cover the costs of what Minnesota Governor Pawlenty calls “these very expensive transit projects.” The feds were subsidizing it with a $10 million grant, but that ended last year.

This one 11.6-mile light-rail line costs more than $20 million a year to operate. Farebox revenues cover only about a third of that. Half the rest is paid by the state of Minnesota and most of the other half comes from Hennepin County property taxes.

The light-rail line does not go outside of Hennepin County, so clearly most riders are residents of that county. But some commuters from Dakota and other nearby counties drive to park-and-ride stations and use the rail line. “There is no rational basis why the property taxpayers in Hennepin County ought to be paying for people from Dakota County to use the LRT line,” says one official.

But are they? Half the operating costs are paid by state taxpayers, including taxpayers from Dakota County. All of the construction costs were paid by federal and state taxpayers, including taxpayers from Dakota County. Considering the subsidies Hennepin County transit riders have received, they should pay Dakota County riders to take the train.

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The Baptist Who Became a Bootlegger

By | | Transportation, Why Planning Fails
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Someone responded to my Baptists & bootleggers post by asking if I really had to mention the rape. The answer is “yes,” and not just because Wonkette started a trend of bloggers putting a sexual spin on all political news.

The Neil Goldschmidt story, including the statutory rape, is important because it shows how a Baptist became a bootlegger, and how everyone–the media, leading politicians, business leaders–continued to pretend he was a Baptist until the revelation of the rape came out. Only then did the media reveal to the public what a few had suspected all along: that all the stories of Portland’s light-rail utopia were merely a cover for a taxpayer-subsidized real-estate con.

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See a Planning Disaster at the 2007 Preserving the American Dream Conference

By | | Planning Disasters, Regional planning, Transportation
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San Jose is one of the greatest urban planning disasters in the country. As the heart of Silicon Valley, the region’s economy should be booming. Instead, growth was extremely slow in the 1990s–less than 0.7 percent per year–and the 2001 recession caused it to lose 17 percent of its jobs.

San Jose was probably the fastest-growing region in the country in the 1950s and 1960s, gaining 40,000 people per year. But in 1974 a new city council decided to “save” San Jose from becoming like Los Angeles, which they thought was a sprawling, low-density region with too many freeways. So they drew an urban-growth boundary around San Jose, thus “saving” thousands of acres of marginal pasturelands from development. But the results turned out to be a disaster.

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Blog Stuff

By | | Housekeeping
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A few people tell me that their browser is not displaying The Antiplanner correctly: that the left column is interfering with the center column. I don’t know what browser they are using, but I suspect it is Internet Explorer, since I don’t have that browser on my computer (and it isn’t even available for the Macintosh anymore).

If I can get an old copy of Explorer, I will try to solve this problem (though it probably requires more CSS skills than I have). In the meantime, if you have this problem, you can do one of two things:

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  2. Try a different web browser. I have three browsers, all Mozilla based, and they all seem to work.

I also just figured out how to put long posts on separate pages. So now all of the longer posts on the home page display just the first few paragraphs. I hope this will make it easier to read The Antiplanner.

Baptists, Bootleggers, and Transportation Planning

By | | Transportation
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In 1983, an economist named Bruce Yandle suggested that the demand for much government regulation came from a loose alliance of what he called Baptists and bootleggers. The “Baptists” represented moralists who argued that government needed to regulate–for example, by banning liquor sales–for the good of society. The “bootleggers” represented businesses who quietly profited from those regulations–for example, makers and dealers of illegal alcoholic drinks.

This combination explains the political demand to build rail transit in cities where at least 95 percent of travel is by automobile. The anti-auto moralists provide grassroots support for rail projects. The bootleggers–rail contractors, railcar manufacturers, and property developers–provide the financial support, usually in the background.

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The Data Problem: Planners Can’t Get Enough

By | | Regional planning, Transportation, Why Planning Fails
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I count architect Andres Duany as a friend who believes in New Urban design but is skeptical of coercive planning. But his book, Suburban Nation (co-written with Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk and Jeff Speck), advises that “The most effective plans are drawn with such precision that only the architectural detail is left to future designers.”

This is from a section on “Regional Government,” so Duany is clearly advising regional planners to dictate land uses to landowners throughout their regions. Yet it is simply impossible to imagine that planners could do this.

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Who Should Be Allowed to Live in Rural Areas?

By | | News commentary, Regional planning
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“Only those who need property for growing crops or keeping animals and livestock not allowed in urban areas should be allowed to build homes in rural areas,” writes a reader of the Oregon Statesman-Journal. Though the Census Bureau does not keep track of exurbanites, many demographers believe that exurbia is the fastest-growing part of America. Naturally, anti-sprawl forces want to stop this growth.

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