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Monthly Archives: February 2014

No Obesity Epidemic After All

By | | News commentary
16 Comments

“There is no childhood obesity epidemic,” writes Paul Campos in an article in the New Republic. Campos bases this on a recently published study that found that obesity rates have not increased in the last decade, and in some age classes they’ve actually declined.

This is vindication for Campos, whose 2004 book, The Obesity Myth, argued that claims of an obesity epidemic were not only overblown but could lead to policies that were hazardous to people’s health. Campos points to a more recent book, End of the Obesity Epidemic, by Michael Gard, that uses worldwide data to show that obesity rates are leveling off.

This doesn’t mean obesity isn’t a problem. But, Campos states, “No one knows why the average weight of Americans was relatively stable in the 1960s and 1970s, or why it went up significantly in the 1980s and 1990s.” If no one knows why these things happened, then any policies aimed at reducing obesity are no more than shots in the dark. Unfortunately, the collateral damage from the shots is likely to be far greater than any possible benefits.
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Why Doesn’t Amtrak Have Metal Detectors?

By | | Transportation
12 Comments

After bomb threats twice forced the evacuation of Amtrak trains in Eugene, Oregon, a local television station asks, “If the airport has screeners and metal detectors, why don’t train stations?” The answer they got from Amtrak? Such measures “would slow down the entire system and reduce the travel flow for passengers” (listen to the video starting at 4:00).

Needless to say, worries about slowing down the air travel system certainly haven’t prevented the government from forcing an onerous screening system on airline travelers. The television reporter points out that trains have been bombed in London and Madrid and a train station has been bombed in Russia, so perhaps Amtrak needs to do more than just rely on passengers reporting suspicious activities.

The truth is that Amtrak is protected by what might be called the “Macintosh effect.” A few years ago, computer viruses attacked mainly Windows machines and Macintoshes seemed to be immune. But they weren’t; in fact, there were just too few Macintoshes around for hackers to bother with. In the same way, the fact that American airlines carry almost a hundred times as many passenger miles a year as Amtrak makes them a much more tempting target.
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Shutting Down Businesses

By | | News commentary, Regional planning
28 Comments

When Oregon land-use laws and rules were written back in the 1970s, timber companies cut down trees, hauled them to the mill, cut them into boards, and sold them to homebuilders. Now, some homebuilders go into the forest, cut down trees, piece together a home on site, then carefully dismantle it to take to the homebuyer’s lot for final assembly.

The problem is that piecing together the home is considered secondary forest processing, which is illegal under Oregon land-use rules for land zoned “timber resource.” As a result, some log homebuilders are being regulated out of business.

The reasons for these rules are nonsensical. Oregon is not going to run out of forest land. According to the Department of Agriculture’s 2007 National Resources Inventory, all of the developed land in Oregon, including both urban and rural developments, amounts to just 2.2 percent of the state. The density of Oregon urban areas is only about 20 percent greater than the national average, so if those rules didn’t exist, the amount of developed land would probably only be about 2.6 percent of the state. Half the land is federal and most of it is never going to be developed.
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Sign Me Up

By | | Transportation
15 Comments

Amtrak has so many empty seats on its trains that it is creating a writers-in-residence program offering free long-distance train rides to writers provided that they tweet their journeys. Despite my skepticism for government subsidies to trains, I love trains and have always dreamed of living on one. So I’m ready to take up my residency.

For Amtrak, the rationale for this program might be that the marginal cost of carrying someone a train that is already going somewhere with empty seats is not a whole lot more than zero. (It’s much more than zero if they ride in a sleeping car, but presumably all Amtrak is offering is coach.) The potential downside is if the train is significantly late or has other problems, which are all-too-frequent on certain Amtrak routes, the negative publicity would outweigh the positive.

On the other hand, where does this end? Should Amtrak offer residencies to photographers? Painters? Model railroaders? On average, Amtrak trains only fill half their seats, so there is plenty of room for this program’s expansion.

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Killing High-Speed Rail Even Deader

By | | News commentary, Transportation
11 Comments

Even as the prospects of stopping Honolulu’s $5 billion low-capacity rail project grow dim, the prospects for ever building the California high-speed rail system grow even dimmer. This week, California’s Lieutenant Governor, Gavin Newsom–once a strong rail supporter–has come out against the project. As theSan Diego Union-Tribune says, this is “another nail in the coffin of high-speed rail.”


At the 2010 groundbreaking ceremony for what was supposed to be San Francisco’s high-speed rail station, then-San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom (left) tells then-Secretary of Immobility Ray LaHood that he is “extraordinarily excited” about the future of the train. Flickr photo from Mayor Gavin Newson‘s photostream.

Asked about his former support for the project, he said it was “a $32 billion project then, and we were going to get roughly one-third [each] from the federal government and the private sector.” Now, “We’re not even close to the timeline, we’re not close to the total cost estimates, and the private sector money and the federal dollars are questionable.”

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Faith, Love, and Family

By | | News commentary, Public lands
1 Comment

On Saturday morning, February 8, we awoke to find three feet of snow outside. Our delight ended the next day, when newspapers reported that 61-year-old Tim Lillebo had collapsed and died shoveling his driveway Saturday evening.

Tim helped lead an incredible group of people dedicated to saving Oregon wilderness in the late 1970s and 1980s and centered on an organization then known as the Oregon Wilderness Coalition (OWC). We were more like family than co-workers, putting in long hours for nearly no pay, sharing rooms, cars, meals, and just about everything else. In mourning Tim, I find myself mourning someone who was nearly a brother but also the loss of the family itself.

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Courts Approve High-Cost, Low-Capacity Transit

By | | News commentary, Transportation
23 Comments

The Ninth Circuit Court dismissed objections to the plan for Honolulu’s 20-mile, $5 billion rail line. Though proponents call it a high-capacity rail line, in fact it uses trains whose capacity is actually lower than light-rail–which term really means “low-capacity rail.”

A line with three-car light-rail trains can move about 9,000 people per hour. The maker of the Alstom trains Honolulu wants to run claims they can move 15,000 people per hour, but that’s at crush-capacity. At crowding levels that Americans will accept, the capacity is probably less than 7,000 people per hour.

By comparison, the Antiplanner estimates double-decker buses can move 17,000 people per hour on a city street and more than 100,000 people per hour on a freeway lane. Buses are faster too: Alstom trains in other cities average just 20 mph.
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Streetcar Lobbyists

By | | Mission
22 Comments

Lobbying for streetcars has become a “rare growth spot in an otherwise difficult business environment,” reports Politico. At least thirteen different lobbying firms are trying to help cities get federal money for building clunky, obsolete rail systems.

The article repeats the usual drivel about how streetcars revitalize neighborhoods and lead to billions of dollars of economic development. Since there’s absolutely no evidence of that outside of Portland, and the only redevelopment along Portland streetcar lines was supported by hundreds of millions of dollars in subsidies, all the Antiplanner can say is that a lot of cities are going to be surprised when nothing happens where they build streetcars unless they sneak in their own subsidies to developers.

Imagine how proud the streetcar lobbyists will be as city after city clogs up its streets with slow-moving vehicles that carry hardly any riders because they are slower than walking for most people and slower than bicycling for just about everyone. Yes, they’ll be able to tell their grandchildren, they are the ones responsible for saddling the cities with high taxes in order to pay to operate streetcars that cost twice as much to run as buses and to spend even more maintaining rail lines that were obsolete almost a hundred years before they were built.

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Saving Rustbelt Cities

By | | City planning, Regional planning
16 Comments

What should be done about the nation’s rustbelt cities–or, as they are being repackaged by marketers, “Legacy Cities“? The populations of at least a dozen major cities declined by more than 10 percent between 2000 and 2010, including Buffalo, Cincinnati, Cleveland, and of course Detroit and New Orleans (whose population decline has little to do with the rest of them). In many cases, such as Pittsburgh and St. Louis (which declined between 8 and 9 percent in the 2000s), recent declines are merely a continuation of trends since 1950.


Click image to download the report (7.6 MB).

A new report from the Lincoln Land Institute offers a set of prescriptions for these cities. While they may sound good at first glance, close scrutiny reveals that they are the same tired policies that have been trotted out by urban planners for decades.

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Another City Gets Conned into Building a Stupid Rail Line

By | | Transportation
7 Comments

Mumbai opened a monorail last week, the first 12 miles of what is planned to be an 84-mile system costing a total of US$2 billion. A high-density city like Mumbai may be one of the few places in the world where rail transit makes sense. But the Mumbai monorail has a design flaw that makes it as stupid as the most idiotic rail lines in the United States (of which there are many candidates).


Not only are the monorail trains small, their average speed is just 20 mph. Wikimedia commons photo.

That flaw is that the trains are no more than six short cars long, and can run only every three minutes. Even at crush capacity, the system can move only 7,400 people per hour. That’s a tiny fraction of what a real high-capacity rail system can move. New York’s Eighth Avenue subway line can move 30 ten-car trains per hour, and each car has a crush capacity of 240 people, making it capable of moving 72,000 people per hour. Americans won’t accept crush-capacity conditions, but even at American levels of crowding, New York subways can move at least six times as many people per hour as the Mumbai monorail.
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