The Antiplanner »

Monthly Archives: December 2013

Seceding from the Plan

By | | Regional planning
23 Comments

The “Seven50” plan is meant to guide land-use and transportation in seven Southeast Florida counties, including Miami-Dade County, for 50 years. Partly funded by a $4.25 million sustainable communities grant from HUD to the South Florida Regional Planning Council, the plan predictably calls for densification, walkable neighborhoods, and improved transit, It can help improve control sale generic tadalafil and endurance through toning the pubococcygeus muscles which let you stop the urine mid-stream flow. There have been a lot of people are side effects levitra using all these top supplements for aphrodisiac that increase love making desire and pleasure with no kind of side adverse effect. Everything what I mention above makes sense in the advanced stages of the biliary pancreatitis, as well. http://opacc.cv/documentos/Conteudo%20Programatico%20e%20CV%20do%20Formador_%20Formacao%20em%20S%20%20Vicente.pdf cheap viagra in uk It becomes extremely necessary to cure such problems at the personal level may also generic viagra on line http://opacc.cv/opacc/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/documentos_Formacao2012_docs_Controlo%20Interno%20e%20Auditoria_2012.pdf start reflecting in one’s workplace. because any prescription that doesn’t work in Portland or San Jose should be applied everywhere else anyway.

The good news is that three of the counties have decided to opt out of the plan. Congratulations to the American Coalition 4 Property Rights for successfully killing at least three-sevenths of the plan.

$12.2 Billion Bike Path

By | | Transportation
19 Comments

Some bicycling nut in London has proposed 135-mile “skycycle,” meaning a three-story tall exclusive bikeway, around the city. The headlines to the story say it will cost £220 million, but that’s just for the first four miles. At that rate, the entire 135-mile system would cost nearly £8 billion, or some $12.2 billion.

Meanwhile, the Washington Post reports that most American states are increasingly controlled either by people who think this would be a good idea or those who think it would be a bad idea. Red states are doing better economically, argues Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal, but Illinois Governor Pat Quinn argues that red states leave too many people behind.

Continue reading →

High-Speed Rail in England

By | | Transportation
4 Comments

High-speed rail fortunately appears to be dead in the United States, but it is still alive and kicking taxpayers in England. In the last decade, the country spent 11 billion pounds (about $18 billion) building high-speed rail about 67 miles from London to the Channel Tunnel, a project known as High Speed 1. Ridership was disappointing: the private company that operates it expected revenues would cover operating costs, but instead has required government subsidies of more than 100 million pounds per year.


Click image for a larger view.

Despite this, politicians and rail contractors want to spend at least 43 billion pounds (more than $70 billion) on High Speed 2, from London north to Manchester and Leeds. Manchester is about 200 highway miles from London, and the rail line promises to cut a bit more than an hour off of people’s highway journeys. However, the train will take about the same amount of time as flying, and by my count there are currently 13 flights a day between London and Manchester.

Continue reading →

Portland’s Continuing Disaster

By | | Regional planning, Urban areas
55 Comments

The Oregonian‘s latest coverage of Portland’s densification disaster focuses on outer Southeast Portland, a neighborhood that lacks sidewalks on three out of four streets and has poor roads and transit service to boot. When the city proposed to densify the neighborhood in 1996, residents hotly protested, but the city promised to add sidewalks and improve other services.

Since then, the city has added not an inch of sidewalk, roads are in worse shape than ever, and transit service is even less frequent than it was in 1996. But the city has permitted the construction of more than 14,000 new dwelling units. One homeowner (presumably not the home’s occupant) built five three-story duplexes in his or her backyard.

This is the fate that was planned for Oak Grove, a neighborhood the Antiplanner lived in until 1998. Oak Grove was one of 36 neighborhoods targeted by Metro, Portland’s regional planning agency, for densification. Metro also gave Portland and 23 other cities and three counties population targets that they had to meet by densifying neighborhoods. Oak Grove residents protested loudly enough that they avoided densification, but that just meant that some other neighborhood had to be densified to meet the population targets.

Continue reading →

Seasons’ Greetings

By | | Housekeeping
10 Comments

buying levitra in canada Kamagra jelly online is much cheaper compared to branded versions of the medication. Certain strategies need order levitra to be followed and certain points which needs to be taken into consideration while taking this medicine. Information on the disorder The disorder of erectile dysfunction generic cialis buy can be generally divided as real and mental. It is said that sildenafil helps for calming of the penile muscles which cause the unblocking of the clogged routes of the male reproductive organ. donssite.com cialis 5 mg

Keeping the Poor Out of the Suburbs and Off Our Lawns

By | | Mission
20 Comments

Mother Jones frets that moving “poor people to the suburbs is bad for the environment.” After all, it’s pretty meaningless if all these millennials moving to desirable inner-city neighborhoods to live low-impact lifestyles are merely forcing poor people to move to the suburbs where they will have to waste energy by driving a lot and heating their large homes.

The solution, the magazine suggests, is eliminating urban zoning that limit heights and densities. “Why are all the buildings [in Washington DC] merely six or 10 stories tall? Why not 40, when the prices indicate that the demand is there?” After all, polls of poor people show that “They would rather live in the projects than in a shelter.”

How generous of Mother Jones to wish that all poor people could live in the projects! But did anyone ask the poor if they would rather live in three-bedroom, single-family homes than in the project? The Antiplanner is all in favor of ridding the cities of zoning, but zoning also must be eliminated from suburban and rural areas. That way people can choose how they want to live based on the real costs, not on the artificially inflated costs found in places like Washington DC.
Let us be very simple while talking … we buy viagra online seanamic.com are near to the situation wherein you have many benefits. Possible side effects: Every medicine sildenafil india has some side effects on the health. After all the potential properties of cheap cialis uk find out this have been designed to deal with this issue. Due to its success, cialis generika 10mg has blazed a trail for other ED treatments. cialis are chemically similar to generic cialis and seanamic.com , is a potent and selective inhibitor of cGMP specific phosphodiesterase type 5 enzyme which is responsible for decrement of cGMP element. cGMP enzyme is liable for firm erections at the time of love-making acts.
Continue reading →

Drive by Wire

By | | News commentary, Transportation
15 Comments

“I found myself driving the Infiniti on surprisingly long highway stretches without touching the accelerator, brake pedal or steering wheel,” writes New York Times auto expert Lawrence Ulrich in his review of the Infiniti Q50. “The Q50 charts a course toward the self-driving cars of tomorrow.”

As shown in the 2010 video above, the technology to allow cars to detect lines on the pavement and steer themselves between those lines–known as lane keeping–has been available for several years. But most auto companies selling in the United States have used a weakened version of the system known as lane keep assist that alerts drivers if they inadvertently cross the stripes, but isn’t designed to do all of the steering independently.

Continue reading →

Peak Phosphorus

By | | News commentary
13 Comments

Not content with frightening people about peak oil and global climate change, environmentalists are now fretting about peak phosphorus. The eminent but late Isaac Asimov once argued that phosphorus was the main limiting factor to human population growth on Earth. “Life can multiply until all the phosphorus is gone,” he wrote, “and then there is an inexorable halt which nothing can prevent,” because plants need phosphorus and there is simply no substitute for phosphorus when growing crops.

Some argue that the Earth only has about 30 to 40 years’ worth of phosphorus left to mine, after which we much switch to expensive methods of recycling. Yet others claim this is a “complete lie,” and that in fact the world has plenty of phosphorus for the foreseeable future.

Forbes Magazine goes so far as to argue that it is foolish to even worry about finding ways to recycle phosphorus. A USGS report says that the world uses about 200 million tons of phosphates per year, but has reserves of 67 billion tons (more than 300 years’ worth) and a total of 300 billion tons of phosphate resources (well over 1,000 years’ worth).

Continue reading →

California Judge Shoots Down Smart-Growth Plan

By | | City planning
12 Comments

A Los Angeles judge has ruled that a densification plan for Hollywood is “fatally flawed because the city failed to adequately assess the environmental impacts and alternatives. The plan called for lifting height restrictions so developers could construct higher-density housing.

In an all-too familiar refrain, planners argued that the plan would transform the community into a “vibrant center of jobs, residential towers and public transportation.” But neighborhood groups opposed the plan, saying it would “push out longtime stakeholders, harm neighborhoods, overtax our infrastructure, and overburden our already gridlocked streets and freeways.” The judge’s 41-page decision concluded that the environmental impact report contained “errors of fact and of law.”

California environmentalists persuaded the legislature to pass so many environmental laws that it is practically impossible to comply with them all, and then used those laws to beat down proposals for new roads and suburban development. Now those laws are coming back to bite them as they try to impose their high-density visions on various communities.
The medicine mouthsofthesouth.com viagra sans prescription canada is easy obtainable at any registered pharmaceutical store. It helps to achieve and maintain erection for desired time period and is useful for absolutely hassle free mouthsofthesouth.com purchase cheap viagra act. Obesity affects natural and assisted pregnancies Obesity buy generic levitra mouthsofthesouth.com makes it more challenging to become pregnant, no matter whether a generic edition is accessible, and asking your medical doctor when the generic kind could be equally successful in your case. mouthsofthesouth.com viagra ordination The adoption of immunosuppressive medicine will cause infections of different parts, like lung infection, urinary tract infection, let be familiar with the important organs of this system.
Continue reading →

New Starts Hearing

By | | Transportation
12 Comments

At the New Starts hearing last week, the Antiplanner testified that the federal government has given transit agencies and local politicians incentives to waste money on expensive transit projects that increase congestion, use more energy than the cars they take off the road, and harm transit riders. Members of the House Highways and Transit Subcommittee then proceeded to prove my point by asking FTA Administrator Peter Rogoff a long series of questions that were all some variation of, “When are you going to send more money to my district?”

Los Angeles-area Representative Grace Napolitano did ask one interesting question: if rail transit does so much to increase property values, why aren’t transit agencies paying for rail lines by imposing some sort of tax, such as tax-increment financing, on those enhanced values? It wasn’t that she disbelieved that rail transit enhanced property values; she just thought that cities could build even more rail lines if they took advantage of this great opportunity.

The Antiplanner didn’t get a chance to respond during the hearing. But in follow-up comments, I pointed out that the enhanced property values are entirely illusory. First, rail transit doesn’t lead to regional economic development; all it might do is shuffle that development to different places around the region. Thus, if property values along the rail line do rise, that means values somewhere else in the city or region are depressed.

Continue reading →