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Monthly Archives: May 2007

Anti-Town Planning #1: Vancouver Community Plans

By | | City planning
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The American Planning Association celebrates November 8 as “Town Planning Day,” so the Antiplanner will celebrate calendrically opposite May 8 as “Anti-Town Planning Day.” In fact, this is Anti-Town Planning Week, and each day the Antiplanner will present an example of bad city or town planning.

Vancouver skyline. Flickr photo by mureena.

First up is Vancouver, BC, a city of 580,000 people. Under British Columbia law, every city in the province must have a city plan, and those plans must meet a variety of goals, including supporting “the unique character of communities.”

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Bay Freeway Update: Going Back to Cars (Updated)

By | | Follow up, News commentary, Transportation
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BART carried a record number of passengers on Monday, April 30, the day after a tanker truck blew up and destroyed a key part of the Oakland freeway system. BART and other transit systems offered free service on Monday, so they don’t have exact counts. However, on Tuesday, BART carried about 10.8 percent more than on a normal weekday, but only 5.2 percent more on Wednesday and 7 percent more on Thursday.

Wikipedia photo by T.J. Morales.

As Tom Rubin says, the real test is what happens to Bay Bridge counts. On Monday, the bridge carried about 18 percent fewer cars than usual. On Tuesday, it was down to 14 percent; on Wednesday, 11 percent. Part of the decrease in bridge traffic from the east was offset by an increase from the south as drivers realized that there would be less congestion due to the freeway collapse.

AC Transit, the agency that provides bus service throughout Oakland and the rest of Alameda County (including a few routes that cross the bridge to San Francisco) did not record any more riders on Tuesday than on a normal weekday.

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November Ballot to Test: Are Seattleites Still Suckers?

By | | News commentary, Transportation
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After rejecting it once, Seattle voters got fooled into voting for a light-rail line whose cost doubled almost immediately after the election. Then Seattle voters got talked into a monorail line whose costs also exploded after the election. Fortunately, they were able to vote their way out of that one.

Now Sound Transit, whose light-rail costs have blown up and whose commuter-rail trains carry far fewer riders than projected, has a new plan: another 50 or 60 miles of light rail.

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Update on Measure 37

By | | Follow up, News commentary
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Faithful readers of the Antiplanner will recall that loyal opponent DanS predicted that Oregon would repeal measure 37, the property rights law, by 2008. He believed so strongly that Oregon voters were fed up with the law that he offered to bet the Antiplanner, with the stakes being a dinner.

The Democratic majority in Oregon’s legislature is apparently not so confident about the mood of the voters. After all, 61 percent of voters approved measure 37. While planning proponents are pushing hard to get the legislature to amend the law, few are actually talking about repeal.

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Bay Freeway Update: No Traffic Snarls

By | | Follow up, News commentary
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Will the tanker truck accident that destroyed a key part of the San Francisco Bay Area freeway network cost commuters millions of dollars a day? Will those commuters respond by switching to public transit? So far, the answers seem to be “no” and “maybe.”

Flickr photo by Thomas Hawk

The closure of a freeway interchange that normally sees 80,000 vehicles a day did not result in huge traffic jams yesterday or this morning. Many people may have used the free public transit offered by the state, but so far no reliable reports have said how many. (Transit was free yesterday only; today it should be back to normal fares.) Continue reading →

Fire Season Begins: New Cato Paper

By | | Wildfire
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Wildfire season has begun with nearly half a million acres burned so far this year, mostly in the South. And so it is time for the armchair generals to pontificate on problems with U.S. fire policy and how those problems can be fixed.

When it comes to the Forest Service, few have as much experience at armchair generaling as me, so it is timely that the Cato Institute should publish my paper on wildfire, The Perfect Firestorm. The paper shows that Forest Service fire expenditures are growing out of control, having increased by 450 percent in the last 15 years.

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