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Monthly Archives: March 2009

Transportation for Some Americans

By | | Transportation
30 Comments

A group calling itself Transportation for America has compiled a list of more than 80 transit agencies that have made or are considering cuts in service in response to the recession. T4America sees this as a reason for federal bailouts to support transit agencies. This would be stupid.

As bad as they are, recessions do have a golden lining: they force businesses to clear out the dead wood and pare inefficient operations. Even in a pure market economy, private businesses would tend to become inefficient because of tradition, internal politics, and other forces. Recessions keep such inefficiencies to a minimum.

But when public agencies survive on tax dollars, they can avoid such housecleaning by seeking more tax support. This leads them to become increasingly bloated.

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Back in the Air Again

By | | Housekeeping
9 Comments

The Antiplanner is spending this week in Washington, DC. On Thursday, I’ll be joining the Reason Foundation’s Bob Poole in speaking about federal transportation funding. That will take place in “Congressional Meeting Room South” in the new Capitol Visitor Center from 1:30 to 3:00 pm.

On Friday, I’ll be speaking at the 5th annual Public-Private Partnership conference about the comparative environmental costs of various modes of transportation. That is taking place at the Ronald Reagan Building/International Trade Center, 1300 Pennsylvania Avenue NW, from about 10 to 11 am.
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If you are in DC, perhaps I will see you at one of these two events.

Transit Is Catching Up

By | | News commentary, Transportation
25 Comments

Transit ridership reached new heights in 2008, says the American Public Transportation Association. Naturally, APTA sees this as a reason for increased subsidies to transit.

Over the past five years, APTA’s numbers show that transit ridership has grown by 2.51 percent per year. Meanwhile, according to the Federal Highway Administration, urban driving has grown at only 1.34 percent per year — and actually declined in 2008.

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More FasTracks Chaos

By | | News commentary, Transportation, Urban areas
8 Comments

Many people in Denver actually thought the recent economic meltdown would be good news for that city’s FasTracks megaproject because the downturn would reduce projected construction costs. It did, slightly, but (as the Antiplanner predicted) it reduced projected revenues even more.

Regional Transit District (RTD) officials promised voters that the 119-mile rail project would cost $4.7 billion in 2004. By 2008, cost projections had increased to $7.9 billion. But the 2009 projection is “only” $6.952 billion (see p. 39).

(For some reason, the Denver Post rounds this down to $6.9 billion, when it properly should be rounded to $7.0. I guess that’s what happens when a city loses one of its two daily papers.)

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Privatizing Fish Makes Iceland Rich Enough to Lose It All

By | | Meltdown, News commentary
6 Comments

Vanity Fair has a fascinating story about Iceland, a nation whose economy is far worse off than our own. Its no wonder: until last month, the nation’s central banker was a poet, the finance minister a veterinarian, the business minister a philosopher.

Iceland: Beautiful and broke.
Photo by stuckincustoms.

How did this happen? Back in the 1970s, the nation privatized its ocean fisheries by giving percentage shares of fishing rights to fishermen. This gave the fishermen an incentive to promote, rather than overfish, the fisheries. Plus, they could sell their shares or borrow against them. “In a single stroke the fish became a source of real, sustainable wealth rather than shaky sustenance,” says writer Michael Lewis.

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Taking Back the Land

By | | News commentary
46 Comments

Vermont passed a law saying that any unused and undocumented old public roads will, after July 2015, revert to private ownership. As a result, groups of volunteers are joining city officials to examine old records to see if they can find “ancient roads” and return them to public ownership.

Is this someone’s private yard, or a public road? In Vermont, some homeowners won’t know until July, 2015.
Flickr photo by paul+photos=moody.

One person bought land after a complete title search plus assurances from the town clerk that there were no public rights of way on the land. But then someone unearthed “hand written set of surveyors notes from 1793 hidden in an old leather ledger in the town office vault” that showed a road on the property. This was made into “an encumbrance on our deed,” and as a result, “Our life has been put on hold, our farm has been put on hold, and our business has been put on hold. It’s the ultimate nightmare.”

Meanwhile, other people find it “thrilling” to “to sift through records for two or three days and find a road.” The hope is that, by making these roads public, they can give more public access to Vermont’s natural scenic beauty.

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How Depressing: Portland Is Number One Again

By | | News commentary, Urban areas
11 Comments

City officials are probably not going to brag about this one. Business Week wanted to find out which are the the nation’s unhappiest cities. It used criteria such as green space, crime rates, unemployment, and divorce, but weighted things like depression (based on antidepressant sales) and suicide rates more heavily. Oh, yes, it also considered the number of cloudy days per year.

Portland is number one! And not just on number of cloudy days, but also on antidepressants. It is pretty high up on suicide rates too.

By comparison, Detroit, which nobody would use as a model city, has the lowest suicide rate and one of the lowest rates of depression. The magazine still ranks Detroit number 4 based on its high crime and unemployment rates.

Continue reading →

This Explains a Lot

By | | News commentary
9 Comments

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Privatize Transit? Horrors!

By | | Transportation
6 Comments

Who could possibly suggest such a thing?

Speaking of which, I seem to have fallen behind on these bits of shameless self-promotion. Here is an article on infrastructure stimuli, one on light rail in San Antonio, and most recently one about turning NYC’s Broadway into a pedestrian mall. I also had an op ed on rail transit in the late-lamented Rocky Mountain News, but its last edition was last Friday, and no one seems to know how long its web site will be maintained.
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Final Edition from Matthew Roberts on Vimeo.