The Oregonian is ending the year by listing Portland’s ten biggest transportation “lemons,” which is a family-friendly way of saying screw ups. Most of them were caused by various government agencies whose goals seem more oriented to reducing people’s mobility than enhancing it.
The lemons include: Continue reading
Los Angeles Times architecture critic Christopher Hawthorne–who claims to be an “unabashed supporter” of high-speed rail–reviews Anaheim’s new train station and finds it “oddly antiseptic.” Hawthorne doesn’t care that taxpayers spent $2,764 per square foot for what is essentially a big glass tent. He is a little disturbed that the design is so dysfunctional that train passengers “exit onto an uncovered platform, take the elevator or stairs [up] to a pedestrian bridge, and then enter the building at its highest interior level” only to have to go back down again to get to ground level.
What really bothers Hawthorne is that the building is “empty of context and obvious character,” and–most devastating of all–“placeless” meaning it would be “equally at home in Tacoma, Wash., or St. Louis.” The architects, he thinks, should have adapted regional forms, similar to the way L.A. Union Station used the Spanish Mission style.
While Hawthorne’s critique is pretty negative, it is also naive. He thinks that reducing “California’s reliance on the automobile is going to require architectural as well as infrastructural leaps of faith.” Sorry, even the most perfect architectural design won’t overcome rail’s inherent disadvantages over the convenience of cars and the low cost of flying.
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Supporters of Portland’s authoritarian planning have responded to Portland State University professor Gerard Mildner’s critique of that planning in the spirit of the Christmas season. They welcomed his report, “Density at Any Cost, with open arms, agreeing to have a free and open discussion of the issues.
Just kidding. Instead, they responded like little children, calling Mildner names. “UGB denier.” “Libertarian activist.” “An outlier, unrepresentative of most of our relevant experts.” And that’s just what his fellow academics at Portland State University called him.
Mildner in fact agreed that his views were unrepresentative of others at PSU’s urban planning school. “Hiring in the School of Urban Studies and Planning self-selects for people sympathetic with Oregon’s urban planning system,” he suggests, so it’s clear his views aren’t going to align with others in that school. An economist himself, Mildner works at PSU’s Center for Real Estate, which has one foot in the urban planning school and one foot in the business school–and the Antiplanner suspects Mildner’s views have more support at the latter.
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The American Petroleum Institute has a web page showing how much of the price you pay for gasoline goes to the government in each state. They include ordinary gas taxes as well as sales taxes on gasoline, but not taxes paid by the oil companies themselves.
Click image to go to the API web site for more detail.
Their goal, I suppose, is to show that the oil companies aren’t making anywhere near as much profit off of gasoline as the government is. But the map also shows some clear geographic differences. First, the lowest taxes are in the sunbelt, while the highest are in ultra-blue states on the coasts and upper Midwest. Second, the range in gas (excise) taxes is quite wide, from 10.5 cents per gallon in New Jersey to 37.5 cents in Washington state.
The Economist reports that housing in China is “cheaper than you think.” The magazine-that-calls-itself-a-newspaper’s measure of affordability is the average price of a 100-square-meter (1,076-square-foot) home divided by average household income.
Older mid-rise homes in Shanghai are torn down and replaced with high rises. Flickr photo by Paolo Vasta.
In megacities such as Beijing and Shanghai, such a house costs nearly 15 times the average incomes of those cities. Not to worry, says the Economist: in medium and small cities, housing is only about 8 times average incomes. As of November, the national average is 8.9 times.
BMW has announced that it will demonstrate a valet-parking car at the 2015 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas next month. This is more than a car that can parallel park by itself. Instead, it is a car that can cruise through a parking garage until it finds an empty space and park there until recalled on a smart phone (or smart watch), at which time it will drive itself to the car’s owner.
Official BMW photo of a car supposedly demonstrating self-parking capabilities. Click image for a larger view.
BMW hasn’t said yet when this feature might be available to actual car-buyers. Some suggest that it might be available on BMW 7-series cars in 2016, but that is only speculation.
Secretary of Transportation Anthony Foxx wants you to go on a diet–a road diet. “A typical road diet takes a segment of four-lane undivided roadway and reconfigures it into three lanes with two through lanes and a center two-way left turn lane,” he says.
The theory behind a road diet is simple. From now on, order all of your clothes at least one full size too small for you. Pretty soon, you’ll be able to fit into those clothes.
Foxx argues that road diets can make roads safer and don’t reduce travel times despite a lower capacity. But do they really do that, or do they just force the traffic to go somewhere else, like the excess flesh that hangs out of someone’s too-tight clothes?
Last week, Portland’s city auditor discovered that the city had been overstating streetcar ridership by 19 percent. It turns out that the Portland Streetcar isn’t the only government-sponsored transportation enterprise that has problems with simple arithmetic.
The January issue of Trains magazine reports that Amtrak has been overcounting its riders for years (the story, “Ridership down, revenue up,” isn’t available on line). It had to reduce its F.Y. 2014 ridership numbers by 705,000 because it actually started counting the number of people who ride its trains using “uncollectible multi-ride tickets” rather than just estimating them. That’s only about 2.3 percent of total 2014 ridership, but it meant that it had to show a decline from 2013 instead of the expected increase. (This is also noted in a footnote on page A-3.5 of Amtrak’s September, 2014, performance report.)
This 2.3 percent isn’t as drastic an overcount as 19 percent, but it spurred me to look at Amtrak’s historic numbers. When counting the number of trips people take on Amtrak each year, the railroad’s business has grown by nearly 40 percent since 1990. But when measured in passenger miles, the growth has been less than 10 percent. This means that the average length per trip has declined from 273 miles in 1990 (and a peak of 286 miles in 1993) to just 215 miles in 2014.
Brutality on the part of overly militarized police forces. Too many people in prison due mainly to a war on victimless crimes. Routine torture. The national surveillance state. A president who believes he can remotely kill anyone he wants without trial or due process.
Assett forfeiture. States and cities that routinely take away people’s property rights without compensation or take people’s property with compensation to give to private developers on the pretext that, because the new owners will pay more taxes than existing owners, it is in the public interest.
These are a few of my least-favorite things about America today. This list heavily overlaps eleven reasons why liberal Dave Lindorff is ashamed to be an American. On most of these issues (except, perhaps, regulatory takings), liberals and libertarians are in full agreement.
