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Monthly Archives: December 2013

Infill Equals Demolition of Existing Homes

By | | Housing, Urban areas
30 Comments

When urban planners talk about infill, they make it sound so benign. “We’ve identified some vacant lands, and we’ll direct growth there instead of sprawling at the urban fringe.”


Portland builders often demolish one home and replace it with four “skinny houses” like this one.
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In reality, infill can mean a complete transformation of neighborhoods, one house at a time. Hundreds of homes are being demolished each year to be replaced with either larger houses (such as this one that is four times the size of the house it replaced) or multifamily housing. Either way can be way out of character for the neighborhood.

This is happening in wealthy neighborhoods as well as working-class neighborhoods. The Antiplanner doubts that this is what people thought they were signing up for when they agreed to give a regional planning agency authority over their zoning codes. Residents of other regions need to beware of local officials offering the bring them the wondrous benefits of Portland-style planning.

Why Slate Is Bad for Your Intellect

By | | City planning, News commentary
15 Comments

Slate posted an article yesterday by someone named Charles Montgomery who has fallen, hook, line, and sinker to the design fallacy–the idea that urban planners can shape human behavior by shaping urban design. The title of the article says it all: “Why cul-de-sacs are bad for your health.”

Montgomery’s thesis–expressed at length in his book, Happy City–is that people who live on cul-de-sacs drive more and walk less, so therefore cul-de-sacs must be at fault. Gee, could it be the other way around? Perhaps people who don’t want to walk to go shopping choose to live on cul-de-sacs because they offer the best combination of privacy and security they can find. After all, numerous studies have shown that neighborhoods with cul-de-sacs have significantly less crime than neighborhoods with the gridded streets favored by planning advocates like Montgomery.
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Studies have also shown that plenty of people who live in the suburbs get exercise doing things other than walking to shops or cycling to work. Who are urban planners like Montgomery to tell them they are doing it wrong? Meanwhile, while urban planners continue to have faith in the design fallacy, most economists believe that the trends planners think they see (such as people walking more in dense, mixed-use communities) are the result of self-selection, not urban design.

Back in the Air Again

By | | Housekeeping
3 Comments

The Antiplanner is flying to Washington DC today to testify at a hearing tomorrow on federal grants for transit capital projects, also known as New Starts. My testimony will summarize my recent paper on the subject: that the New Starts grant-making Choose a sports Osteopath you feel comfortable with-someone whom order tadalafil online you can examine your disease. It is not cosmetic enhancement procedure, in fact it includes grafting of tendons and muscles from viagra online ordering other parts into the base of penis which makes it look big in size. Be sure to tell your doctor if you have had a hearty or fatty meal, tadalafil 20mg uk as this could slow down the positive effects. Enjoy life with the healthy and natural foods! If you are looking to better maintain your sexual function and appropriate levitra purchase cholesterol levels. process gives transit agencies incentives to choose high-cost solutions; that buses are superior to rails in almost every place agencies want to build new rail lines; and that transit riders suffer when agencies cannibalize their bus systems to pay for the rails.

Obama: A Threat to Freedom & Prosperity

By | | Housing, News commentary
17 Comments

The Obama Administration hates wealth and success. That’s the only explanation for recent actions it has taking to bring down those who are wealthy and successful.

First, the administration is plundering J.P. Morgan of $13 billion, partly for actions taken by Washington Mutual and Bear Stearns, financial institutions that went broke and which J.P. Morgan took over as a favor to the federal government. These fines are for things WAMU and Bear Stearns did that no one thought were illegal at the time. The Obama administration has effectively made them retroactively illegal and fined a company that hadn’t engaged in similar activities itself. Normally, when a bank goes broke, the government asked another bank to take over so that people don’t lose access to their savings. Good luck convincing a bank to do that now. As J.P. Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon says, “A Bear Stearns deal would not happen again that way, we simply wouldn’t undertake it.”

Second, the administration has charged Apple for acting as a monopoly price fixer for selling ebooks at certain prices. Never mind that Apple was entering an already competitive textbook market and offering to sell ebooks for far less than its competitors sell hard-copy books. The judge in the case has appointed as an inquisitor someone who has no experience in antitrust law, but is charging Apple more than $1,000 an hour to go through its books and question its employees.

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Stalling out? Try Dead

By | | Transportation
25 Comments

Sam Stein at the Huffington Post frets that “Obama’s vision for high-speed rail is in danger of stalling out.” Where has he been the last three years? High-speed rail was in danger of stalling out in 2010, when Florida, Ohio, and Wisconsin elected governors who turned back funds for their states’ programs. Today, Obama’s “vision” is dead, and so is high-speed rail in this country.


Unlike air and highway travel, with Obama’s high-speed rail vision, you won’t be able to get from anywhere in the country to most other places in the country.

Like other rail nuts, Stein tries to make it appear we are in some kind of race for supremacy with Japan and other countries. “With countries like Japan already investing in the newest form of rail technology –- magnetic levitation, which LaHood called “way too expensive” for the U.S. –- the nation is very much set to be left in the proverbial dust.” The problem is that “the newest form of rail technology” is just as obsolete as the previous form. Stein might as well worry that we aren’t keeping up with the Japanese on floppy disk technology.

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2012 National Transit Database

By | | Useful Data
6 Comments

A few days ago, the Federal Transit Administration posted the 2012 National Transit Database. Data are downloadable in three formats. First, you can download profiles for every transit agency (21.3 MB). These give basic data such as trips, passenger miles, fares, and costs broken down by type of transit. If you don’t want to download the whole book, you can also download profiles for individual agencies by entering the agency name, city, or ID number in a search box (scroll down and look for “Individual Profiles” on the righthand column).

Second, you can download data tables, which present the data for all transit agencies in fairly user-friendly spreadsheets. All of the tables at once can be downloaded in a self-extracting exe file (4.1 MB), but my Macintosh doesn’t want to extract the spreadsheets. One problem with the data tables is that there are separate tables for trips, fares, operating costs, capital costs, and other data, so comparing the numbers is difficult.

Third, you can download database spreadsheets. These are more difficult to read than the data tables, but are easier to manipulate on a computer because every row on each spreadsheet follows a consistent format. Like the data tables, these spreadsheets can also be downloaded as one self-extracting exe file (5.1 MB).

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New Threat to Transit: Obamacare

By | | Transportation
20 Comments

One of the many inane things about Obamacare is the Cadillac tax, which punishes employers who provide their employees with “too much” health insurance. The Democrats who supported this are now having to deal with the fact that the employers most guilty of providing Cadillac health insurance are public agencies. Of these, transit agencies have some of the most expensive plans of all.

The Cadillac tax, which takes effect in 2018, is 40 percent of health insurance costs above $10,200 for individuals and $27,500 for families. As of 2013, Portland’s TriMet reported it was providing health coverage averaging $21,000 a year for individual plans. The agency asked employees to accept a cut to $19,000, but even if the union accepted, this remained well above the federal limit. The recent BART strike was over the same issue.

Even if TriMet negotiated a lower rate, it is likely to rise by 2018 due to inflation. Assuming most employees are on the family plan, paying the Cadillac tax for TriMet’s 2,400 employees could cost as much as $20 million per year, which is about 5 percent of the agency’s operating budget. TriMet was already threatening to cut service by 70 percent if unions did not agree to lower benefits. The Cadillac tax could make this even worse.

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