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Monthly Archives: January 2013

Kansas City Spared Light-Rail Vote

By | | News commentary, Transportation
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Kansas City voters won’t get a chance to vote on light rail despite the fact that proponents gathered enough signatures to put it on the ballot. The court that rejected the measure said that the plan was unworkable because it didn’t provide enough money to build the mandated rail lines.

A light-rail fanatic named Clay Chastain had petitioned for light rail in Kansas City six times and lost. Then, in 2006, he put a crazy proposal on the ballot to built both light rail and an aerial tramway–this was right after Portland opened its aerial tramway–and managed to win, mainly because the people who normally opposed him figured the measure would lose and so they didn’t bother to campaign against it.

The 2006 measure didn’t include enough funding for the project because Chastain figured the federal government would pay for half. But the Federal Transit Administration looked at the numbers and realized that Kansas City would be forced to drastically cut its bus service if it built light rail, so it rejected the plan. Kansas City leaders put another measure on the ballot that voters mercifully rejected.

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Neglecting the Basics

By | | City planning, News commentary
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Portland is proud of being a livable city. Sure, its streets are crumbling, city buildings are neglected, and its schools are crappy. But don’t worry; it’s a livable city.

The Portland Building in August 1982. Photo by Steve Morgan.

A building so ugly that Willamette Week newspaper uses the “ugly” tag for any article that refers to it.

The Antiplanner noted last February that the city’s transportation bureau elected to give up on street paving and repair so that it could fund streetcars. The latest news is that the city isn’t even property maintaining its buildings, including the internationally famous (for being ugly) Portland building. The city has just over half the money it needs to keep this and other city buildings maintained.

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Confusing Inputs with Results

By | | Transportation
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Why do liberals confuse inputs with outputs? Matthew Yglesias raves about how wonderful Los Angeles is for building more rail transit, even though the city’s last burst of rail construction resulted in a 17 percent decline in transit ridership.

A Los Angeles attorney named Robert Garcie provides an antidote to Yglesias’ rantings. He notes that LA’s transit agency “spends almost twice as much on rail to carry about one fourth as many passengers” as buses. LA transit ridership recovered only when a court order directed the city’s transit agency to restore the bus service it had cut to pay for rail. When that order expired, it started new rail projects, cut bus service, and ridership is again decreasing.

Meanwhile, Cleveland reporter Angie Schmitt thrills to the fact that, even though big cities such as Boston, Chicago, and Washington can’t afford to maintain the rail systems they have, smaller cities such as Grand Rapids, Ft. Collins, and Savannah want to build their own rail systems that they won’t be able to afford to maintain. Schmitt writes for DCStreetsBlog, a popular blog known for its support of “livability,” whatever that is.

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The Transit Overtime Scandal

By | | News commentary, Transportation
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The Oregonian reports that drivers for TriMet, Portland’s transit agency, are taking so much overtime that many get little sleep. Paying for overtime costs taxpayers a lot of money and the lack of sleep creates hazardous situations.

This TriMet light-rail train crashed into the bumpers at the end of the line because, investigators found, the driver fell asleep at the controls. The TriMet employee who released this video to the public was suspended for doing so.

Thanks to overtime, four TriMet drivers earned more than $100,000 last year, but TriMet says that “only” four of them have been involved in accidents. How about that? Just 50 percent. This naturally raises the question of what share of drivers who don’t take so much overtime have been involved in accidents.

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End Gas Tax? Yes! Pay for Roads with Sales Tax? No!

By | | News commentary, Transportation
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Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell wants his state to be the first to end the gas tax. The Antiplanner supports that idea because gas taxes are an imperfect user fee.

However, McDonnell proposes to replace the gas tax with a 0.8-cent sales tax that he says will generate more revenue than the gas tax. If your only goal is to make government bigger, then generating revenue is a good idea. However, if your goal is to have better roads, then even a gas tax makes more sense than a sales tax.

The key to the success of the free market is feedback. As imperfect as the gas tax is, it generates feedback to highway agencies: if they build roads no one uses, they get no gas taxes.

Sales taxes generate no feedback at all; the agencies get money whether anyone uses the roads or not. We know from the transit industry what happens when transportation agencies are funded out of general taxes. First, they build expensive monuments aimed at pleasing politicians rather than solving transportation problems. Second, they fail to maintain those monuments. That’s hardly a sound prescription for our highway system.

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More Automakers Move Toward Self-Driving Cars

By | | News commentary, Transportation
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Lexus cautiously presented its work towards a self-driving car at the Las Vegas Consumer Electronics Show yesterday. Audi has taken the bolder step of obtaining a Nevada license for its self-driving car. Tire maker Continental has also entered the field.

Lexus (which of course is owned by Toyota) is advertising its technology as more of a “co-pilot” that will take over driving in case of what it judges to be an emergency. “Our vision isn’t necessarily a car that drives itself,” said executive Mark Templin, “but rather a car equipped with an intelligent, always-attentive co-pilot whose skills contribute to safer driving.” That’s an important intermediate step that will make driving safer, but it won’t have the revolutionary effects that truly autonomous cars will bring.

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So who will dominate the self-driving auto field? Google hopes that automakers will provide the hardware and let it provide the software. But
the fact that both an automaker and an auto parts company are actively working on self-driving technology shows that the future of self-driving cars is still anyone’s game.

Land-Use Manifesto 2013

By | | Housing, Mission, Regional planning
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Here is the second of my statements of principles for the New Year.

1. The Property-Rights Principle: Government should not regulate land uses except to prevent trespasses or nuisances.

People should be allowed to use their land in any way they see fit provided their use does not harm others (such as through air, water, or noise pollution) or violate contracts they have voluntarily agreed to. Any regulation beyond this “for the greater good” puts someone’s subjective notion of social values above individual rights.

Even if it could be proven that such regulations would benefit society more than they would harm individual property owners, government should not have this power because it invites abuse. If the social benefits are truly greater than the individual costs, then society should be willing to compensate the property owners.

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A Rental Crisis?

By | | Housing
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The Bipartisan Policy Center released an “infographic” arguing that there is an imminent shortage of rental housing. “Five to six million new renter households will form over the next ten years,” says the “graphic” (quotations used because it really isn’t that graphic), but a “slowdown in new construction . . . means rental market conditions are tight.”

Click to download the entire infographic.

The group buys into the notion that an increasing number of people want to rent rather than buy. Yet it is more likely that the sagging economy combined with housing prices that are still too high in many states are preventing people from buying even though they would prefer to do so.

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Not a Crisis After All

By | | News commentary
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The “obesity crisis” became a hot topic just over a decade ago when the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) published data showing that American weights were increasing. All sort of interest groups jumped on this crisis, including urban planners who blamed obesity on urban sprawl and driving.

If obesity has a cause, it is more likely due to the increased availability of low-cost sweeteners such as high-fructose corn syrup than to sprawl. For one thing, obesity appears to be increasing throughout the developed world, including in European nations that supposedly have controlled sprawl.

In commenting on this supposed problem more than a decade ago, the Antiplanner was skeptical that obesity was even a crisis. “More than one recent study has found that weight is less important to health as you get older,” I noted. “People over 50 can have BMIs [body mass indices] as high as 32 and not suffer any greater mortality than people with BMIs under 25. Researchers add that, unless such people have heart disease, diabetes, or some other obesity-related disease, asking them to diet “might unjustifiably decrease their perceived quality of life.”

It turns out this isn’t just true for people over 50. As yesterday’s Wall Street Journal noted (see also an article in the Independent), a new CDC study indicates that people who are somewhat overweight (BMIs of 25 to 30) can actually expect to live longer than people of “normal” weight (BMIs of 18 to 25).

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Transportation Manifesto 2013

By | | Mission, Transportation
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The New Year seems an appropriate time to state, or restate, the main goals of this blog. Today the Antiplanner will focus on transportation. Future manifestos will focus on land-use regulation and public land management. Any suggestions for improving these principles and corollaries are welcome.

1. The Transportation Agency Principle: The sole goal of government transportation agencies should be to efficiently enhance mobility.

Mobility is so important socially and economically that it deserves the same protection under the Constitution as freedom of speech and freedom of religion. (In fact, freedom of movement is nominally protected under the privileges and immunities clause of the Constitution.) Enhancements in mobility over the past century have been a major factor in increasing wealth, reducing poverty, increasing lifespans, and increasing leisure time. No other goal should be allowed to divert attention from the efficient enhancement of mobility.

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