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Monthly Archives: April 2014

Self-Driving Car Update

By | | Transportation
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Google reports it has run its self-driving cars nearly 700,000 miles, and the cars are mastering all kinds of situations in city traffic, including dealing with bicycles and detours. For example, as detailed in this article in Atlantic Cities, Google originally programmed its cars to know where every permanent stop sign was located, but not how to deal with temporary stop signs (such as signs held by flaggers of road maintenance crews). Now, the cars know how to spot and react to such signs.


With a Google engineer watching in the background, some guy wearing a funny tie examines a Google self-driving car in Washington, DC.

These improvements have encouraged Google to set a target of having driverless cars on the market by 2017. That’s a pretty ambitious goal considering that six years ago the auto industry’s best engineers were predicting the first self-driving cars wouldn’t reach consumers until 2018.
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Streetcars Pro and Con

By | | Mission, Transportation, Urban areas
8 Comments

Last week, the San Antonio Express News published a pair of op eds for and against construction of a downtown streetcar. In opposition was Representative Lamar Smith, whose congressional district includes parts of both San Antonio and Austin.

A streetcar, he wrote, would be expensive, impractical, and would “likely make congestion worse.” “There are better uses for the hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars now slated for streetcars,” Smith observed, adding that most residents of San Antonio seem to oppose it and should at least have the chance to vote on it.

Writing in support of the streetcar was planner Bill Barker of Imagine San Antonio, a smart-growth group. Barker was previously the Senior Management Analyst in the City of San Antonio’s Office of Sustainability. Barker’s argument in favor of the streetcar was simple: the people who oppose the streetcar are evil, so should be ignored.

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Posts Disappearing

By | | Housekeeping
3 Comments

On Sunday, April 27, the Antiplanner decided to try to do something about the 58,000 phony users (sometimes called “sploggers”) who have signed up on this site, so I installed a new plug-in. Today, I received a few comments on this morning’s post about Christchurch, but this evening, that post is gone. Last week’s post about traffic in Ethiopia is also gone.

I don’t know if the new plug-in caused the problems or if my server somehow lost the posts in a back up. I checked Google’s cache, the Wayback machine, and other sources; Google remembered that there was a Christchurch post but no longer had it in its cache. I apologize for any problems and hope that more posts don’t disappear in the future.
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If anyone cares, I can probably re-create the Christchurch and Ethiopia posts, though of course I can’t re-create everyone’s wonderful comments. Are any other posts missing? Has anyone seen any other problems on this site I should be aware of?

Government Planning Impedes Christchurch Recovery

By | | City planning, News commentary
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It’s been more than three years since much of Christchurch, New Zealand, was devastated by an earthquake, and recovery is far from complete. Now, a new report from the New Zealand Council for Infrastructure Development blames the government for hampering the recovery.


Government meddling has not only hampered recovery, it made the effects of the earthquake worse. The owner of the building that collapsed onto this bus, killing all but one of the occupants, had wanted to demolish it before the earthquake, but the city held it up because it was considered a historic structure.

This is a familiar tale: after a natural disaster, instead of letting people rebuild, government planners attempt to impose their ideals of what the city should look like on the supposedly blank landscape. The same thing happened in New Orleans: people from New Urban architect Andrés Duany to the free-market Mercatus Center agree that government planners have impeded recovery of that city after Hurricane Katrina.

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Ethiopians Need Traffic Lights

By | | Transportation
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“Who needs traffic lights?” is the name of the YouTube video shown below. It shows an intersection in Ethiopia in which some fourteen lanes of traffic cross six more, with pedestrians wandering amidst vehicles turning right, left, and going straight unhampered by signals, signs, or seemingly any conventions other than to drive on the right.

This video seems to support proposals by many urban planners that streets would be safer if there were fewer, not more, signals and signs. At the extreme is the late Hans Monderman, a Dutch traffic planner who advocated getting rid of street signs, signals, and crosswalks.

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Seattle Votes Down Transit Tax

By | | Transportation, Urban areas
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Voters in King County, Washington, soundly rejected a proposed tax increase that King County Metro said was needed to maintain bus service. With the failure of the ballot measure, the transit agency says it will have to make cut bus service by about a sixth.

King County was unable to persuade the Seattle Times to endorse the measure. Instead, the Times suggested that the agency was mismanaged, citing cushy union contracts and other excessive costs.

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Urban Planners Live in a Fantasy World

By | | Mission
28 Comments

A few recent articles reveal just how out-of-touch with reality planning advocates are today. In the New York Times, architect Vishaan Chakrabarti claims that “millions of Americans [are] gravitating toward cities,” so we need to subsidize them with “subways, great schools, innovative work spaces, affordable housing and high-speed rail.”

Thousands? Maybe. Millions? Hardly. Relying on actual data, rather than wishful thinking, demographer Wendell Cox shows that, between 2000 and 2010, only about 206,000 people moved to within two miles of city centers in the nation’s 60-plus metropolitan areas of one million or more people. But the area just a little further out–two to seven miles from downtowns–lost 272,000 people, for a net change of minus 66,000. That doesn’t sound like millions are “gravitating” to the cities.

Another article in the New York Times advocates building a streetcar between Manhattan and Brooklyn. Here is the one city in America where high-capacity rail transit could possibly make sense (though it doesn’t today, probably because it is run by the government), and they want to build a super-low-capacity rail line!

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This Land Is Whose Land? Part 2

By | | Public lands
8 Comments

The Antiplanner understands politics well enough to know that polarization is sometimes useful. But I still find it annoying when people who don’t understand an issue use it to create unnecessary hysteria. On one hand Senator Harry Reid calls people protesting federal land policy “domestic terrorists.” On the other hand, some people hope that rancher Bundy’s stand will be the first shot in a “war on federal bureaucrats.”

The Bundy issue is neither war nor terrorism. It is a simple case of trespass. It won’t be solved by turning federal land over to the states or selling it. Nor will it be solved by demonizing ranchers, property rights advocates, or federal land managers.

For one thing, we can’t give the land “back to the states,” as some people advocate, because it was never state land to begin with. With the exception of Texas and a few Spanish land grants, pretty much all land west of the Mississippi River was, at one time, federal land. When Congress made Nevada a state, it offered it 4 million randomly selected acres. The state asked if Congress would be willing to give it 2 million but let it select the acres it wanted, and Congress agreed. The state eventually sold all but 2,500 of those acres.

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Challenging the Poverty Plan

By | | Regional planning, Urban areas
31 Comments

In late February, the Twin Cities Metropolitan Council issued its draft Thrive 2040 plan for public review. No one will be surprised to learn it is a standard smart-growth plan with lots of emphasis on transit, high-density housing in transit corridors, and reducing driving. Of course, this isn’t always obvious, as the plan uses euphemisms such as “affordable housing” when it means high-density housing and “orderly and efficient land use” when it means restricting development in rural areas.


Click image to download the 3.7-MB plan.

The Met Council calls it the Thrive plan because it wants to give the impression that, without government planning, the region will wither away and die. Of course, the Antiplanner believes the opposite is true, and that it would be more accurate to call it a poverty plan, since it will likely make housing unaffordable and require higher taxes, both of which will slow economic growth.
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Is Transit Only Transit If It’s Expensive?

By | | News commentary, Transportation, Urban areas
11 Comments

Wired magazine freaks out because the Tennessee senate supposedly passed a “mind-boggling ban on bus-rapid transit.” AutoblogGreen blames the legislation on the left’s favorite whipping boys, the Koch brothers because it was supported by Americans for Prosperity, a tax-watchdog group that has received funding from the Kochs.


Not only would Nashville’s bus-rapid transit consume up to three lanes of traffic and be given priority at traffic signals, the design of stations in the middle of a major arterial will create hazards for pedestrians.

In fact, the senate did not pass a bill to ban bus-rapid transit; it passed a bill to limit the dedication of existing lanes to buses. There is no reason why buses need their own dedicated lanes, at least in a mid-sized city such as Nashville. Kansas City has shown that bus-rapid transit in shared lanes can work perfectly well and attract as much as a 50 percent increase in riders.

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