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Monthly Archives: August 2013

It’s Not an Affair; It’s a Committed Relationship

By | | Transportation
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USA Today asks, “Is USA’s love affair with the automobile over?” The Antiplanner is always irked when someone calls people’s use of cars a “love affair,” because it implies that driving is irrational. In fact, people’s use of cars is entirely rational, as they are the fastest, most-convenient, least-expensive of getting between most places inside of an urban area as well as for journeys up to a few hundred miles.

Ironically, USA Today quotes a study from the Department of Transportation (previously cited here) that pretty much concluded that the very slight (2.4%) decline in driving since its 2007 peak was almost entirely due to the economy, and not a change in tastes. USA Today pretty much ignores that conclusion so they can underscore opinions by car-haters from US PIRG who want to divert even more highway user fees to transit and other modes of transportation.

If there is any reason for a decline in driving other than the economy, it is demographics. Baby boomers are retiring and retired people don’t drive as much, especially during rush hour. The ratio of workers to non-workers is declining, so rush-hour traffic might be a little better. That doesn’t mean there is no reason to try to fix congested roads; roads that are congested today are bound to remain congested in the future unless something is done such as implementing congestion pricing.

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Dreaming of Economic Progress

By | | News commentary
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Today is the 50th anniversary of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “I have a dream” speech, and some people see lots of progress for black Americans since then. But that progress is only partial, and one of America’s shames is that the descendants of people who were slaves still don’t get a fair break today.

The main progress has been political. One of King’s dreams was that “even the state of Mississippi, a state sweltering with the heat of oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice.” Today, more than a quarter of the Mississippi legislature is black, up from approximately zero in 1963. Nationwide, the number of black elected officials has grown from less than 1,500 in 1963 to more than 10,500 today.

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Sustainable = Subsidies

By | | City planning
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Having abolished tax-increment financing (TIF) as a drain on the state treasury, California looks set to bring it back again in the name of “sustainable communities.” Senate Bill 1, the “Sustainable Communities Investment Authority,” would allow cities to use TIF in order to make neighborhoods more “sustainable,” meaning filled with more high-density, mixed-use housing.

SB 1 is a necessary follow-up to 2008’s SB 375, the “Sustainable Communities and Climate Protection Act,” which required cities to plan for high-density, mixed-use transit-oriented developments (TODs) in transit corridors. The author of that law, Darrell Steinberg, no doubt assumed that cities would use TIF to subsidize TODs. Legislative abolishment of TIF in 2011 left cities with few tools to carry out SB 375.

SB 1 not only allows TIF in blighted areas, but effectively defines “blight” as “inefficient land-use patterns,” means, in essence, neighborhoods of single-family homes. While the old law required cities to actually prove an area was blighted before they could use TIF, SB 1 specifically states that any agency that wants to redevelop an “inefficient land-use pattern” “shall not be required to make a separate finding of blight or conduct a survey of blight within the project area.” In addition, anywhere within one mile of a planned high-speed rail station is also considered suitable for “sustainable” redevelopment.

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Boom Towns

By | | Regional planning
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The Antiplanner enjoyed a few days in Montana last week attending a conference on boom towns, and the busts that often follow such booms. We learned about the Bakken Shale boom in eastern Montana and western North Dakota and took a trip to Butte, a city that has declined from more than 42,000 people (some say over 100,000, but it seems unlikely that many people could hide from the census takers) in 1920 to 34,000 today.

In both places–the booms and busts–the question is raised: what should government do? Should it take action to provide affordable housing when towns are booming? Should it subsidize communities when they are busting?

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FIre Spending Tops $1 Billion

By | | Wildfire
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The wildfire season still has a month or so to go and the Forest Service says that it is running out of money for fire suppression. Having already spent about a billion dollars, it is “diverting $600 million from timber, recreation and other areas to fill the gap.”

So far, about 3.4 million acres have burned, which isn’t a lot by recent standards. According to the National Interagency Fire Center, more than 8 million acres burned in every year from 2004 through 2007, as well as 2011 and 2012. Yet the Forest Service spent less than $1 billion on fire suppression in 2005 and just over a billion in 2004.

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Houston Housing Prices Rise

By | | Housing, Urban areas
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“Houston Housing Hits Hurdle,” reports the Wall Street Journal. The rapid growth of fastest-growing metropolitan area in America–gaining more than 120,000 people per year in the last decade–is fueled by cheap housing, but prices rose 12 percent last year.


Housing in the Woodlands, the Houston area’s oldest and largest master-planned community. Developers usually dedicate at least 20 percent of the land in such communities to parks and open space.

What’s made rapid growth possible is the growth of master-planned communities in which developers assemble thousands of acres, install streets, water, and sewer lines, and then sell individual lots to homebuilders and homebuyers. One the infrastructure is installed, a homebuyer can purchase a lot, get construction permits, have the house built, and move in within 120 days of closing on the land.

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Courts May Have Last Word on Trains

By | | Transportation
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A county judge says the California high-speed rail project violates the law approved by voters in 2008. But he won’t decide to issue an order halting the project until after another hearing, for which a date hasn’t yet been set.


The Reason Foundation’s Adrian Moore and Antiplanner friend Wendell Cox discuss California high-speed rail.

The Contra Costa Times lists many of the ways the project as planned today violates the 2008 ballot measure: the construction cost has doubled; the projected ticket prices have gone up; the speeds are slower; and the projected opening date is already nine years behind schedule. But the judge only rules that the project had failed to complete its environmental review and find funds to finance the entire project, not just a few miles in the Central Valley.

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Cars Provide Social Benefits Too

By | | Transportation
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When the Antiplanner travels around the country, I often meet people critical of their local transit systems. “The buses/trains are empty most of the time,” they say. “I saw a bus this morning with only one passenger on board.” “They put advertising over the windows so we can’t see in to see how empty they really are.”


Socially beneficial transit? Flickr photo by David Wilson.

People shouldn’t complain about empty transit vehicles, says transit expert Jarrett Walker. People “make it sound like because transit systems run empty buses that means they’re failing,” says Walker. In fact, those empty buses are serving a socially beneficial function: they “are valued for the lifeline access they provide for the isolated senior,” disabled person, or other people who lack access to an automobile.

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Alive Again?

By | | Transportation, Urban areas
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The once-dead Columbia River Crossing, a $3.5-billion project to build a $1.0 billion bridge across the river between Portland and Vancouver, may be alive again. After the Washington legislature rejected the idea that Washington state taxpayers should contribute $400 million to the plan, Portland bridge supporters have come up with an idea: Just build the bridge, but nothing north of the bridge in Washington.

The plan basically called for a $1.2 billion bridge, a $1.0 billion low-capacity rail line, and $1.5 billion replacing all highway interchanges for miles north and south of the bridge. Although the new bridge would have more lanes than the current bridge, the highways leading to it from both directions would have no more lanes, so the total capacity would not be significantly increased.

The existing bridge is not in any danger of falling down, but Portland wants to cram low-capacity rail down Vancouver’s throat, and replacing the bridge is an excuse for doing so. To keep the plan alive, advocates suggest deleting all of the highway interchange reconstruction in Washington. If Washington decides to reconstruct those interchanges later, it can come up with the funds later. Of course, the plan still includes low-capacity rail.

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Hyperloop’s Real Problem

By | | Follow up, Transportation
10 Comments

Most reviews of Elon Musk‘s hyperloop plan focus on technical questions. Will it cost as little as he estimates? Could it move as fast as he projects? Could the system work at all?

None of these are the real problem with the hyperloop. The real problem is how an infrastructure-heavy, point-to-point system can possibly compete with personal vehicles that can go just about anywhere–the United States has more than 4 million miles of public roads–or with an airline system that requires very little infrastructure and can serve far more destinations than the hyperloop.

Musk promises the hyperloop will be fast. But fast is meaningless if it doesn’t go where you want to go. Musk estimates that people travel about 6 million trips a year between the San Francisco and Los Angeles urban areas, where he wants to build his first hyperloop line. But these urban areas are not points: they are huge, each covering thousands of square miles of land.

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