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Monthly Archives: January 2014

Reducing Greenhouse Gas Emissions

By | | Regional planning
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When the Antiplanner read the headline–“Suburban sprawl cancels carbon-footprint savings of dense urban cores”–I thought this was going to be just another smart-growth study. But the study by University of California (Berkeley) researchers actually makes some good points.

People living in dense centers of large urban areas tend to have low carbon footprints. But those dense centers are invariably surrounded by low-density suburbs, as if dense areas cannot exist in isolation from low-density areas. (The reverse isn’t true: some low-density areas, such as Phoenix and San Jose, have no dense centers.)

So is the solution to increase suburban densities, as smart-growth advocates claim? Nope. “Increasing population density in suburbs is even more problematic,” says one of the researchers. “Surprisingly, population dense suburbs have significantly higher carbon footprints than less dense suburbs, due largely to higher incomes and resulting consumption.” I was wondering when someone else would notice that: density increases land prices which makes housing less affordable for low-income people. Moreover, those dense suburbs themselves are surrounded by lower-density suburbs of their own.

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Pre-emptive Cancellation

By | | Transportation
7 Comments

The polar vortex that supposedly was caused by global warming should have been a great opportunity for Amtrak to prove the worth of intercity trains, which advocates often claim are “all-weather transportation.” Instead, Amtrak preemptively cancelled trains in both the Midwest and Northeast Corridor.

Trains between Chicago and the Twin Cities and between Chicago and St. Louis were all cancelled. The Empire Builder between the Twin Cities and Spokane was also cancelled. Then it cancelled Chicago-Detroit trains. Finally, it reduced service in the Northeast Corridor.
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Admittedly, three trains were stuck in the snow in Illinois in the middle of the night. Fortunately, Amtrak was able to rescue the passengers–with buses.

High-Speed Rail: Wrong for Europe?

By | | Transportation
7 Comments

Sustainability advocate Kris De Decker argues that “high-speed trains are killing the European railway network.” A native of the Netherlands who currently lives in Spain, De Decker is irked that the replacement of conventional trains with high-speed trains has greatly increased the costs of rail travel, thus encouraging people to drive or fly.

De Decker offers numerous examples of routes where conventional trains were replaced by high-speed trains whose fares are much higher. In some cases, the high-speed trains really aren’t significantly faster than the conventional trains, yet typical fares might be three times as high. In other cases, daylight high-speed trains have replaced overnight trains that were slower but didn’t require any business time and cost less than the high-speed trains even with sleeping accommodations.

He also notes that low-cost air service is often far less expensive than the high-speed trains. “You can fly back and forth between Barcelona and Amsterdam with a low-cost airline for €100 if you book one to two weeks in advance, and for about €200 if you buy the ticket on the day of departure,” he says. “That’s compared to €580 for what the journey would cost you if you would take the high speed train.” He adds that, “Flying has become so cheap in Europe that it’s now cheaper to live in Barcelona and commute by plane each day, than to live and work in London.”

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National Deforestation

By | | Public lands
20 Comments

The Antiplanner’s friend, Andy Stahl–who frequently comments on this blog–recently appealed a timber sale on the Bighorn National Forest. That takes me back to the 1970s and 1980s, when Andy and I appealed timber sales, forest plans, and other national forest and BLM projects almost on a weekly basis. Sometime around 1980, I held the distinction of having appealed more BLM timber sales than anyone, but Andy soon eclipsed me.


Recent aerial photo of timber cut from the Bighorn National Forest in about 1985.

During the 1980s, the Forest Service sold nearly 11 billion board feet of timber each year, but in the 1990s this rapidly declined, partly due to Andy’s activities protecting the spotted owl and–I’d like to think–partly due to Forest Service employees reading my book, Reforming the Forest Service, and deciding they didn’t want to be that kind of an agency any more. (As I describe in this article, this is greatly oversimplified and a lot of other factors were involved, some of them quite surprising).

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Horse Pucky

By | | City planning, Transportation
25 Comments

If you thought Mayor Michael Bloomberg was bad, with his proposed ban on large sodas and other attempts at social engineering, just wait for some of Mayor de Blasio‘s ideas to become law. De Blasio has gained attention for wanting to ban horse-drawn carriages in Central Park because they are “cruel” to the horses. It’s apparently much less cruel to simply send the horses to glue factories, but that’s a leftist for you: it is more important to put people (and creatures) out of work because you don’t think their jobs are dignified than it is to let them work for themselves.

De Blasio says he wants to replace the horses with electric cars. That’s so environmentally thoughtful of him, especially since half of New York’s electricity comes from burning fossil fuels. It might promote global warming, but at least it’s not cruel to horses. Whatever you think of the treatment of horses who live in roomy barns, get a minimum of five weeks of vacation per year, and see their doctors far more frequently than most humans, the point is that de Blasio is going to try to micromanage everything.
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Case in point: de Blasio has appointed Polly Trottenberg as his new transportation commissioner. As undersecretary of transportation for policy, Trottenberg is probably the source of most of Ray LaHood’s crazy ideas about streetcars, livability (=living without cars), high-speed rail, and other transportation issues. New York’s loss is America’s gain.

California Thinks Your Time Is Worthless

By | | Regional planning, Transportation
40 Comments

California’s S.B. 375 mandates that cities increase the population densities of targeted neighborhoods because everyone knows that people drive less and higher densities and transit-oriented developments relieve congestion. One problem, however, is that transportation models reveal that increased densities actually increase congestion, as measured by “level of service,” which measures traffic as a percent of a roadway’s capacity and which in turn can be used to estimate the hours of delay people suffer.

The California legislature has come up with a solution: S.B. 743 exempts cities from having to calculate and disclose levels of service in their environmental impact reports for densification projects. Instead, the law requires planners to come up with alternative measures of the impacts of densification.

On Monday, December 30, the Governor’s Office of Planning and Research released a “preliminary evaluation of alternative methods of transportation analysis. The document notes that one problem with trying to measure levels of service is that it is “difficult and expensive to calculate.” Well, boo hoo. Life is complicated, and if you want to centrally plan society, if you don’t deal with difficult and expensive measurement problems, you are going to botch things up even worse than if you do deal with those problems.

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