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Monthly Archives: April 2008

Class: The Unmentionable Topic

By | | News commentary
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The recent brouhaha about Barack Obama calling small-town Americans “bitter” brings up an issue Americans rarely talk about: class. Unlike Britain, America does not have an inherited aristocracy, and we like to think we are economically mobile, so we don’t think about class.

Certainly, we use terms like upper class, middle class, and lower class, but these are strictly economically defined, and since (we tell ourselves) we are economically mobile, the labels do not permanently stamp anyone as one thing or another.

But there is another term we sometimes use: working class. Perhaps because of my egalitarian American upbringing, this term puzzled me when I first encountered it. Most families have at least one worker, so how is the working class distinguished from any other class? Are working-class incomes higher or lower than middle-class incomes?

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High Rises Protect Single-Family Homes

By | | City planning, News commentary
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Portland needs more high rises and other high-density housing developments to protect neighborhoods of single-family homes, says Portland city councilor and leading mayoral candidate Sam Adams. Adams admits that Portland’s major high-rise development, the South Waterfront or “SoWhat” District, is floundering despite having received close to $300 million subsidies, so he proposes that Portland lobby the state and federal governments to provide even more subsidies.

The Antiplanner’s friend, Jim Karlock, videotapes Portland-area political events and, in this case, taped himself asking Adams about the financial future of the SoWhat District. You can read some of the reactions of Portland residents to Adams’ reply at Jack Bogdanski’s blog.

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Dorothy English RIP

By | | News commentary
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Dorothy English, whose radio ad helped persuade Oregon voters to pass measure 37, died last Friday at age 95. She once told the Oregon legislature that she planned to live to 100 because there were “some bastards I want to get even with.” But she didn’t make it, and–even though measure 37 passed by 61 to 39–she didn’t get even.

Dorothy English at a meeting of Oregonians in Action, the group that promoted measure 37.

English owned 20 acres just outside of Portland in an area that planners had gerrymandered to be outside of the city’s urban-growth boundary. While many areas far more distant from the city were inside the urban-growth boundary, her 20 acres happened to be next to a major city park, so planners simply excluded her from the boundary so they could, in effect, add her land to the park without paying for it.

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April 15: Government Planning Day

By | | Mission
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Today is income tax day, but it should be known as Government Planning Day as it is partly thanks to government planners that we have to pay so much taxes. Since I have mostly been self employed, I rarely get tax refunds. So I usually wait until the last day to file so I can hold onto my money as long as possible.

When I talk with my left-leaning friends, most of whom are politically active, I notice that most of the political battles they are involved in are against some government agency or another. While they may rhetorically rail against corporations, the entities they actually fight are such things as the Bureau of Land Management, state agencies, or city governments. They know that government isn’t working for them, but they have a childish faith that, if only the right people were in charge, government would do everything they expect of it.

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Rail Transit Contributes to Global Warming

By | | Transportation
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Update: Fixed links to paper.

Most light-rail lines use as much or more energy per passenger mile as an average SUV, and many emit more pounds of CO2 per passenger mile than the average automobile. Moreover, the energy efficiency and CO2 emissions of automobiles are steadily improving, while the energy efficiency of both bus and rail transit are declining. Thus, cities that want to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions would do better to encourage auto drivers to buy more fuel-efficient cars than to build rail transit lines.

Those are the main conclusions of the Antiplanner’s new Cato paper, “Does Rail Transit Save Energy or Reduce Greenhouse Gas Emissions?” While some rail transit operations are energy and CO2 efficient, the energy and CO2 costs of construction overwhelm any savings. Thus, from an environmental viewpoint, rail transit is almost always a bad investment.

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The Boom That Wasn’t

By | | News commentary, Planning Disasters
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The New York Times say the economic boom of the past eight years really wasn’t much of a boom, as American median incomes in 2007 were actually lower than they had been in 2000. So how was it a boom?

The Times implies that the rich got richer while the middle and lower classes got poorer. “We’ve never had an expansion in which the middle of income distribution had no wage growth,” it quotes a Harvard economist as saying.

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Sydney Subway Fantasies

By | | News commentary, Transportation
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One thing I learned about on my recent trip to Australia was a proposal to build five “metro” (i.e., subway) lines in Sydney. The first line on the agenda is expected to cost AU$12.5 billion (which, at current exchange rates is US$12.5 billion) for 38 kilometres (which, at U.S. exchange rates, is 24 miles), or about half a billion dollars a mile.

The fact that $12.5 billion is about three-fourths of the money that New South Wales plans to spend on transport over the next fifteen years doesn’t bother transit officials a bit. In fact, I suspect they are rather proud of it.

One plan is to privatize New South Wales’ government-owned electric utility to fund the metro. That’s a great way to waste public assets. It might be better to keep the electric utility public until the state’s leaders come to their senses.
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Of course, some naysayers think that the metro plan is just a fantasy. Sydney isn’t dense enough to support a subway, and this particular plan is infeasible from an engineering viewpoint. The scuttlebutt I heard in Sydney is that the tunnels they want to build in (they already have tunnels and it will still be half a billion a mile?) are too steep for the railcars they want to run. Other scuttlebutt says that the plan has only been raised because it is an election season.

How dense does a city have to be to justify a subway? The Baltimore, Los Angeles, and Miami subways are pretty much failures. New York’s subway works, but the cost of building new ones is (or should be) prohibitive. But here is a subway that actually makes a profit. (Sorry about the annoying pop-up ad.) Not that any of us would enjoy riding it.

The Millionaire’s Tax Can Solve Everything

By | | News commentary
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New York’s so-called congestion pricing plan (aka the cordon tax) seems to be dead, so some Democrat in Albany has come up with an alternative way of funding transit: the millionaire’s tax. The plan calls for raising $5 billion in five years for mass transit by putting a 3/4-percent income tax surcharge on all New Yorkers who earn more than a million dollars a year. New York Governor Paterson has announced a blue-ribbon commission to study the proposal.

Yeah, tax the rich — that’s the ticket. Why didn’t anyone think of that before? After all, the rich benefit so much from mass transit, so of course they should pay its extraordinary costs. Much better to soak the rich than to try to find a way to make transit work at a lower cost (such as by not doing such foolish things as building the Second Avenue Subway).

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Wirelessless in New Zealand

By | | Follow up
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I had a difficult time finding wireless in Australia and even more in New Zealand. I found a place that has wireless but won’t let me use FTP to upload photos. I am sorry some of the photos in recent posts were not working, but without FTP it is hard to diagnose the problem.

In any case, Hugh Jardonn was nice enough to ask me to post some photos of my trip to the Zig Zag Railway, so I am doing so using Flickr. The trip was pretty inspirational if you are a railfan, as a small group of people have done a wonderful job restoring dozens of pieces of historic rail equipment along with (so far) more than 7 kilometers of track.

In the late 1960s, most Australian states had converted steam locomotives to Diesel and electrics, and some railfans in New South Wales decided to restore some steam locomotives and operate them for tourists. They looked at a couple of dozen possible locations and picked the Zig Zag, a place in the Blue Mountains west of Sydney where the rails once switched back and forth to gain elevation.

Before 1910, trains from Sydney would cross this “number one” stone viaduct going down a 2.5% grade, then stop just beyond the cut in the right center of the photo. Then they would back down the numbers two and three stone viaducts seen in the center of the photo, then reverse again and continue on to Lithgow on the line barely visible on the right. Today, the bottom line is still the mainline of the railway, while the top two lines are used by the tourist railway.

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Value Pricing, Not Congestion Pricing

By | | News commentary, Transportation
24 Comments

Want to discredit a good idea? Implement a bad idea but name it after the good idea. That is what New York City is doing with its so-called congestion pricing scheme.

If you think density relieves congestion, try driving around Manhattan.
Flickr photo by 708718.

What Mayor Bloomberg proposes is to charge every car that enters south Manhattan between 6 am and 6 pm weekdays. He would then spend the money on mass transit. To be accurate, this should be called a cordon tax — that is, you pay a tax when you pass a line (a cordon).

True congestion pricing differs in several ways. First, with congestion pricing you pay for the use of a road, not for crossing a line. Second, with congestion pricing, the price varies depending on the amount of traffic there is. If it is constant all day long, it will fail to smooth out the peaks and valleys in traffic flows. Third, a congestion fee (as a opposed to a tax) would be spent on things that relieve congestion rather than on subsidies to other people.

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