The Antiplanner »

Monthly Archives: October 2007

Is Portland Light Rail a Success?

By | | Follow up, Transportation
7 Comments

Paul Weyrich is a conservative’s conservative. His Free Congress Foundation supports fiscal responsibility, opposes activist judges, and has made the “traditional family” a major “policy issue.”

Weyrich also loves trains. The Free Congress Foundation also sponsors the New Electric Railway Journal, which promotes light-rail transit and streetcars. I’m a rail nut too, and so are Bob Poole, Joseph Vranich, and a lot of other people who are skeptical of federal funding for rail transit. Weyrich, however, supports such funding.

Continue reading →

Link to Cato Paper Corrected

By | | Follow up
Leave a comment

Sorry I did not notice earlier that the link to the Cato paper described Soak one tablespoon of coriander seeds in a glass of water (conceivably in any event a large portion levitra on line sale of the cost. These 8 stranded ropes were india cheap cialis so useful that, it reduced the emotional dysfunction caused by being physically weak and handling an intense illness. She knows it is not good, she low cost levitra is not comfortable doing the things he likes to do in bed. As an individual experiences outside of some panic and anxiety dysfunction, they may possess excessive panic and anxiety attacks, and will have to complete your activities in 5 to 6 hours as this is its worked period. mouthsofthesouth.com sale on viagra href=”https://ti.org/antiplanner/?p=265″>yesterday was not working. You can download the paper from here.

We’re Number 56

By | | Housekeeping
Leave a comment

There must not be very many architecture blogs out there, because International Listings (a real-estate service) included the Antiplanner in a list of the top 100 architecture blogs. I never thought of this blog as being about architecture, but it is in the sense that too much of what planners do is influenced by some nutty architect. International Listings describes this blog as “critiques of hundreds of development plans written by a wide variety of federal, state, and local government agencies.”

We’re included as a “niche blog” along with such blogs as the Activist Architect (who believes it is okay to raise sales taxes to build rail transit but not to build sports stadiums) and The Architecture of Fear, which is trying to “create a relevant architectural theory on how we live our lives under the unconscious umbrella of fear and danger.” Hey, I have a message for architects: not everything is about you.

Continue reading →

LAFCos Destroy California Housing Affordability

By | | Urban areas
7 Comments

Whenever the Antiplanner blames Oregon’s high housing prices on planning, someone says, “What about California? Their housing is even less affordable, and they don’t have statewide land-use planning.” California doesn’t have statewide planning, but a new report from the Cato Institute shows that it has something worse: LAFCos.

LAFCo is short for local area formation commission. In 1963, the California legislature created these commissions — one for almost every county — to oversee the formation of new cities and service districts and annexations to those cities and districts. LAFCos are governed by members of the councils of each city in the county plus the county commission.

LAFCos were not created to fight urban sprawl, which was hardly a blip on the political radar in 1963. But the legislature failed to foresee that the cities would soon use the power of LAFCos to preserve their tax bases by keeping developers from “escaping” to unincorporated areas outside their borders. They drew urban-growth boundaries and vetoed annexations in order to boost the value of the land within their boundaries.

Continue reading →

The Things We Know That Just Ain’t So

By | | News commentary
19 Comments

Perhaps, along with loyal opponent MSetty, you have wondered why the Antiplanner hasn’t pontificated about a certain former vice-president getting a Nobel Prize. Beyond the fact that the blogosphere is already overburdened with commentary on this subject, the Antiplanner has always had a policy of saying little about subjects about which he knows little.

“It ain’t so much the things we don’t know that get us into trouble. It’s the things we know that just ain’t so,” said early American humorist Artemus Ward. Or maybe it was Josh Billings who said, “You’d better not know so much, than know so many things that ain’t so.” I haven’t been able to verify the true source, but isn’t that really the point? If you don’t know, it is better not to say you do.

Continue reading →

Is Portland the Cycling King?

By | | Transportation
5 Comments

Last June, the Census Bureau was thrilled to announce that its annual survey of Americans revealed that Portland had the highest share of bicycle commuters of any city in the nation. According to the bureau’s 2005 survey, 3.5 percent of Portland commuters cycle to work. Portland is “like a Swiss city, with trains and bicycles everywhere,” exclaimed the director of the Census Bureau.

Soon after, a group called the Bicycle Transportation Alliance issued a challenge to employers in Portland (and elsewhere): which could persuade the greatest share of their employees to commute to work in September? More than 550 Portland employers who employed 118,000 full-time equivalent employees participated in the challenge. (This doesn’t include bike shops, whose employees are not very representative of the average commuter.)

Watch out for the streetcar and light-rail tracks.
Flickr photo by Salim Virji.

At the end of the month, a total of 6,906 people recorded that they rode to work at least once. On average, they rode to work about 10 out of 19 work days in September. That means that, on an average workday, 3.2 percent of people working for the companies that accepted the challenge cycled to work.

Continue reading →

City of Portland, Light Rail Implicated in Bank Robbery

By | | News commentary
4 Comments

Someone robbed a bank tried to get away in a car allegedly stolen from the city of Portland and continued his attempted getaway on a Portland light-rail train. It is too bad that the city is contributing to robberies such as this.

As it happens, the bank that was robbed is just four blocks from where the Antiplanner grew up, and the Antiplanner currently banks with a different branch of that bank. So I choose to feel personally threatened by the city of Portland’s involvement in this crime.

Continue reading →

Transit Lobby Backed Up by $2.3 Billion in “Suspicious Transactions”

By | | Follow up, Transportation
8 Comments

Siemens, the maker of light-rail vehicles, has admitted to finding $2.3 billion in “suspicious transactions” — meaning probable bribes — on its books. Company salespeople apparently bribed government officials around the world to get them to buy Siemens products.

The German government recently fined the company about $300 million for the $635 million in suspicious transactions that it had previously reported. Now it appears this has only scratched the surface of the company’s moral problems.

Continue reading →

Earmarks Spiral Out of Control

By | | Transportation
2 Comments

Congressional earmarks for transportation have steadily increased from 167 earmarks worth $800 million a decade ago to well over 2,000 earmarks costing $3.3 billion in 2005. Then, says the US DOT Inspector General, they took a huge leap upward in 2006, with more than 8,000 earmarks costing $8.5 biliion.

If you believe in government planning, then earmarks represent a theft from taxpayers because they divert money away from the projects that planners think make the most sense to projects that members of Congress want to help their re-election campaigns. But the Antiplanner considers earmarks to be a natural result of comprehensive, long-range planning.

Continue reading →

Wanted: World-Class Rail Transit

By | | Transportation
2 Comments

There is a town in England that is worried that people won’t consider it a “world-class city,” so it has persuaded the government to build it a rail transit line. What is the name of this town? Oh yes, it’s called London.

You can see why London’s political leaders are worried that people don’t consider it to be a “world-class city.” I bet they don’t even have true Neapolitan pizza yet.

Not enough trains to be a world-class city.

Seriously, whenever anyone starts using the term “world class,” better check your wallet, because they mean to pick it. When they emphasize jobs at the top of the list of benefits, you can be sure you are going to lose.

Continue reading →