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Monthly Archives: February 2014

Gentrification: Good or Bad?

By | | City planning, News commentary
31 Comments

Gentrification is in the news. Protesters against Google buses in San Francisco who object to the fact that mobility allows high-paid Silicon Valley workers to gentrify San Francisco neighborhoods have been joined by Seattle anti-gentrification protesters who object to Microsoft buses for the same reason. In Portland, Trader Joe’s has backed out of plans to build a store on Martin Luther King, Jr. Boulevard because protesters believed the store would contribute to the area’s gentrification.


Photo by Owen G. Richard.

Meanwhile, New York magazine argues that gentrification can actually be good if it is the “more natural, humane kind” rather than the “fast-moving, invasive variety.” Similarly, NPR points to studies claiming that gentrification can actually be good for long-term residents.

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Idiots Didn’t Build California

By | | Mission, Transportation
8 Comments

“Wimps didn’t build California,” claims this pro-high-speed rail video. Instead, California was built by “people with grit”: people like Walt Disney, who hated subsidies so much that he paid extra to have Disneyland get its electrical power from a private company rather than the public power company that served Anaheim.


If you have trouble viewing this video here, see it on Youtube.

“People said the Golden Gate Bridge was impossible,” the video says. It turned out to be possible because it was paid for entirely out of user fees, unlike high-speed rail whose costs would come mainly from people who would never use it.

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Subsidies Here, Subsidies There, Subsidies Everywhere

By | | News commentary, Transportation
7 Comments

The Port of Portland plans to spend up to $4 million giving shipping companies incentives to send containers through Portland, rather than another West Coast port. The subsidies would pay shippers $20 per container that is shipped through Portland.

This is a classic zero-sum game: If Portland attracts any containers that would otherwise have gone to Seattle, Vancouver, or some other West Coast port, the other ports will merely match Portland’s subsidies to get the business back. The shipping companies earn a little extra profit, taxpayers lose,and consumers probably won’t save enough to measurably increase purchases of imported goods.

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Light Rail & Low-Income Transit Riders

By | | Transportation, Urban areas
11 Comments

When Denver’s Regional Transit District (RTD) opened its West light-rail line last April, it naturally cancelled parallel bus service. But, for many people, riding the light rail cost a lot more than the bus. This effectively made transit unaffordable for some low-income workers, who now drive to work.


Click image to download a 2.6-MB PDF of this report.

A group called 9to5, which represents working women, formally surveyed more than 500 people who live near the West light-rail line, and informally interviewed hundreds more. It found that the light rail had put a significant additional burden on low-income families. In one case, someone who was commuting to work by bus for $2.25 per trip now has to pay $4.00 per trip to take the light rail, a 78 percent increase in cost. 9to5 points out that the cost of gasoline to drive the same distance would be about $1.25.

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Overcounting Transit Riders

By | | Transportation
25 Comments

The Antiplanner has argued that Congress should abolish New Starts and other mass transit grant making programs and distribute the money through formulas instead–preferably formulas that reward transit agencies for increasing ridership. However, I warned, the formulas probably should be based on fares rather than ridership counts as the latter are far easier to fake.

Case in point: Knoxville Area Transit (KAT) has its bus drivers count every boarding rider, and it was foolish enough to have the driver ring a bell for each count. A television news team decided to ride some KAT buses to see if the bells correlated with actual passengers.

On one trip, for example, the reporter heard “the driver hit the bell almost 30 times – when only seven riders had boarded. A short time later, two passengers were counted as 10.”

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Farm Bill Slashes Spending by Minus 49%

By | | News commentary
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Members of Congress patted themselves on their collective backs for saving taxpayers’ money by passing a farm bill that cuts spending by minus 49 percent. Of course, astute arithmeticians realize that a minus 49 percent cut is equal to a 49 percent increase. The 2008 farm bill had an average cost of $64.0 billion per year; this one has an average cost of $95.6 billion per year.

The New York Times reports that food stamps were cut, but in fact this was a cut only when compared with expected spending, not to recent actual spending. The $8 billion “cut” over ten years sounds big, but it is only 1.7 percent of what was expected under the old bill. Food stamp spending under the new bill will average $74.8 billion per year, which, even after adjusting for inflation, is more than the total annual cost of the 2008 bill.

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Vehicle-to-Vehicle Communications

By | | News commentary, Transportation
3 Comments

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) says it wants to require auto makers to build vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communications systems into new cars. Calling V2V “the next generation of auto safety improvements,” the agency says such devices would “improve safety by allowing vehicles to “talk” to each other and ultimately avoid many crashes altogether by exchanging basic safety data, such as speed and position, ten times per second.”


The government wants every vehicle on the road to transmit its location to every other nearby vehicle–as well as any other receivers that happen to be in range.

Supposedly, “the system as contemplated contains several layers of security and privacy protection.” However, privacy advocates should be far more suspicious of V2V than of electronic vehicle-mile fee systems. The big difference between them is that V2V systems by definition incorporate both a receiver and a transmitter, while it is possible to design vehicle-mile fee systems that do not include a wireless transmitter. No transmitter means no invasion of privacy is possible; on the other hand, despite whatever privacy protection is included in V2V, a transmitter necessarily allows someone to receive the signal.

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Rolling Over the Competition

By | | Transportation
17 Comments

The big news yesterday was that one side completely dominated the other. The Antiplanner doesn’t mean Seattle vs. Denver, but buses vs. trains.

This was supposed to be the mass transit Superbowl. Some dimwit dedicated more than half of the stadium’s parking lot to security and television equipment. The stadium–the largest in the NFL–normally hosts 80,000 people several times a year. But for the Superbowl, most ticket holders were supposed to go the big game by transit.

Eager to cash in on people willing to spend thousands of dollars for a seat at the game, New Jersey Transit generously offered gridiron fans rides on its trains for a mere $50. The NFL also chartered numerous buses to the stadium.

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