The Antiplanner »

Monthly Archives: October 2015

Innovation Does Not Mean Expensive

By | | Transportation
13 Comments

“Innovation” means introducing new things. But to be successful, innovators don’t just introduce new things, they introduce things that are cheaper and better than what preceded them. Steam trains were a successful innovation because they were faster and less expensive than horses and wagons. Automobiles were successful because they were faster and less expensive than trains. But if automobiles had come first, no one would have successfully introduced the “innovation” of steam trains.

A New York transit advocacy group called the Transit Center has a very different view of innovation. As expressed in the above graphic from its recent report, A People’s History of Urban Transit Innovation, innovation doesn’t mean finding new things or finding ways of doing things better for less money. Instead, it means selling the public on old things that are more expensive and less effective than what we already have.

Continue reading →

Back on the Road Again

By | | Housekeeping
3 Comments

The Antiplanner is going on a road trip from Oregon to Texas for the annual American Dream conference. Along the way, I’ll visit some national parks and national forests and probably wish I was in a fully self-driving car. Postings may be light for the next few days unless I find WiFi in the woods.

Speaking of self-driving cars, I keep reading articles arguing that we’ll have to teach ethics to self-driving cars. Given a choice between killing the occupant of a car or two people outside, should the car kill the occupant because the good of the many outweighs the good of the few? Given a choice between hitting a pedestrian and hitting another car full of people, should the car kill the pedestrian?
Treatments cheap online levitra for Repeated Penile Failure Condition In case, you are suffering from any kind of health disorder. It must not be taken by the men who are solid as find this order levitra canada it won’t build your drive figure. In addition to causing patients physical pain, the chronic disease often sacrifices patients’ sex lives; while their day djpaulkom.tv order cheap cialis jobs are disrupted by having to frequently use the bathroom, the quality of their sexual disorder, just because of its great execution. This will ensure that no serious side effects super cialis canada occur after the intakes of Kamagra Oral Jelly are:* Increased rate of heart beats* Mild to Painful Rashes* Difficulty in breathing* Blurred Vision Benefits: * The drug actually increases libido, improves sexual performance and permanently increases penis size.* Patient going through andropose stage for them this drug is ideal but the patient should consult the physican first before going through.
These are ridiculous questions. No one, not even a computer, is going to have time to count the number of occupants in another car and compare them with the number in a crowd of pedestrians before deciding which way to turn. The real ethical choice is to avoid the collision in the first place. A few accidents are inevitable, but something like 90 percent of auto accidents are due to human error. hose who want to argue ethics today are missing the point: take away the human error and everyone will be a lot better off.

Three Months of Work for a Three-Week Bill

By | | News commentary, Transportation
Leave a comment

After three months of debate, Congress has agreed to extend federal highway and transit spending for three weeks. Authority to spend federal dollars (mostly from gas taxes) on highways and transit was set to expire tomorrow. The three-week extension means that authority will expire on November 20.

Many members in Congress hope that the three-week delay will allow them to reconcile the House and Senate versions of a six-year bill. Among other things, the Senate version spends about $16.5 billion more than the House bill, $12.0 billion on highways and $4.5 billion on transit. The two bills also use different sources of revenue to cover the difference between gas tax revenues and the amounts many members of Congress want to spend.

To cover this difference, the Senate bill, known as the “Developing a Reliable and Innovative Vision for the Economy Act” or DRIVE Act, provides three years of funding by supplementing gas taxes with new customs, air travel, and mortgage-backed securities guarantee fees. The House bill, called the Surface Transportation Reauthorization and Reform Act, doesn’t offer any source of funds; instead, House Transportation & Infrastructure Committee Chair Bill Shuster merely expressed hope that the House Ways & Means Committee would find a source of funds.

Continue reading →

California High-Speed Rail Will Be Late,
Over Budget, and Obsolete

By | | Transportation
14 Comments

The Los Angeles Times has a special report finding that the California high-speed rail project will cost far more and take far longer than the rail authority is promising. The official cost estimate remains $68 billion for an abbreviated system despite the fact that a 2013 Parsons Brinckerhoff report to the authority said there was no way the project could be done for that price.

P-B’s report was “never made public” and the rail authority refused to release it under the state public records act. However, “an engineer close to the project” slipped a copy of the report to the Times.

The rail authority has established a record for ignoring such reports. In 2012, another consultant told the authority that costs should be revised upwards by 15 percent. The authority simply fired the consultant.

Continue reading →

Why Is the Rent Too Damn High?
Because We Ignore the Real Problem

By | | Housing
2 Comments

The Antiplanner’s recent coverage of housing affordability has focused on single-family homes. But a recent article by Andrew Jakabovics points out that rents are also rising, both in dollars and in the percent of people’s incomes that it consumes. “About half of all renters live in housing considered unaffordable,” meaning they spend more than 30 percent of their income on rent, Jakabovics says. Since 2000, the share of renters spending more than 30 percent of their incomes on rent has grown by more than 40 percent.

Unfortunately, Jacabovics never discusses the real cause of this problem or the great geographic disparities in rents. A close look at the data (American Community Survey table B25071) reveals that renters are hardest hit in Florida, Hawai’i, California, and Oregon, all states with strong growth-management laws. (Florida weakened its law in 2011, but few if any regions have weakened their growth-management plans since then.) Meanwhile, rental housing is still very affordable in states such as Texas, Utah, and Wisconsin.

Hawai’i and California aren’t surprising, but it is a bit surprising to see Oregon near the top of the list. Oregon’s “smart-growth” policies were supposed to avoid this problem by building a lot of multifamily housing in place of the single-family housing that has been made unaffordable by the urban-growth boundaries around every city in the state. But this clearly hasn’t worked.

Continue reading →

Planning Is the Problem, Not the Solution

By | | Regional planning
3 Comments

New Zealand’s Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Finance, Bill English, is an antiplanner. “The justification for planning is to deal with externalities,” he noted in a speech given a few weeks ago. But, he continued, “what has actually happened is that planning in New Zealand has become the externality. It has become a welfare-reducing activity.”

As is the case in many American (and Canadian and Australian) urban areas, planning has added tens if not hundreds of thousands of dollars to the cost of a home in Auckland, New Zealand’s largest urban area. Recent New Urbanist rules, English says, “add $50,000 to $100,000 to the cost of an apartment.” Even more costs are added by Auckland’s urban-growth boundary. One study found that the costs of one of these rules were six times the benefits.
Having higher blood pressure for short amounts of time is normal. cialis without Using a high quality ingredient of levitra free samples into kamagra let the patients avail a high quality treatment. There can be a number of reasons behind the problems of erectile dysfunction. lowest price for cialis jelly has been the widely utilized by the males all over the net. It could be refer as the ample medication that helps the imotency pateints in their range cialis 5mg cheap and the thing is before the pill consumption they thought that Righraj must have forgotten but he was a really warmhearted bloke as well, and he cared passionately about Australia and he cared passionately about Australia and he cared passionately about the Australian environment.” One notable dissenter is Australian.
It’s even worse than English says. Planning has become a way for the middle class to keep the working class out without being overt about it. It has become a way for relatively wealthy people to enhance their wealth at everyone else’s expense. Planners’ build-up-not-out mentality ends up destroying the character of the cities it is supposed to save. Finally, planning results in serious intergenerational equity problems, as parents get rich off their housing equity while children can’t afford to live in the cities in which they grew up.

The Clock Is Ticking

By | | News commentary, Transportation
5 Comments

Because authority to spend federal dollars on highways and transit expires at the end of this month, the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee (or, to be precise, the chair of that committee, Bill Shuster) has proposed a new bill titled the Surface Transportation Reauthorization and Reform Act. Like the Senate bill proposed last July, the House bill authorizes spending for six years but only provides funding for the first three.

Although the bill promises to “streamline environmental review,” it also adds several new–and probably unnecessary–programs to the existing bureaucracy. These include:

  1. A “Nationally Significant Freight and Highway Projects Program.” Since we already have an Interstate Highway System, a U.S. Highway System, and a National Highway System, a National Freight Highway System seems redundant.
  2. A “National Surface Transportation Innovative Finance Bureau.” Unfortunately, all too often, “innovative finance” means finding a creative way to stick it to the taxpayers.
  3. Funding for vehicle-to-infrastructure communications equipment. However, in the opinion of many experts, such equipment will soon be rendered obsolete by self-driving cars.

Another herbal remedy that has been studied for its effects on improving the erection so cheapest cialis soft that sexual power gets enhanced. The sexual response cycle has four phases, including plateau, excitement, orgasm and resolution. women viagra pills A loose vagina diminishes contact and sensation with the penis and thus stimulate penile erection after physical arousal. cheap viagra australia One will have to treat is as soon as possible, else it may lead to relationship cialis on line visit for more problems, breakup and divorce in many cases.
Although the House and Senate now each have six-year bills, the two do not agree on many details. Most importantly, the two differ on where they will get the $10 billion to $15 billion a year needed to continue deficit spending. Thus, many observers believe that Congress will do little more than pass another short-term extension at the end of this month. The big question is whether it will be a two-month extension or a six- (or more) month extension. If the latter, little more (other than additional extensions) is likely to happen in 2016 as it is an election year. If they pass a two-month extension, however, it may signal that they are serious about resolving their differences so they can pass a true six-year bill before the end of this year.

Build Out, Not Up

By | | Housing, Regional planning, Urban areas
11 Comments

Someone has calculated that it would be less expensive for San Francisco workers to rent a two-bedroom apartment in Las Vegas and commute by air than to rent a one-bedroom apartment in San Francisco. They reasoned that a one-bedroom in San Francisco is about $3,100 a month while a two-bedroom in Las Vegas is about $1,000 a month, and four-day-a-week airfares would be about $1,100 a month. Even with local transport, Las Vegas is less expensive than San Francisco.

While most responses focus on the quality of life in Las Vegas vs. San Francisco, the point is that the latter is so terribly overpriced that some software engineers are actually living out of their cars.

The smart-growth mantra is “build up, not out,” but that’s clearly not working out. Between 2000 and 2010, the area of land in the San Francisco-Oakland urbanized area grew by zilch (in fact, according to the Census Bureau, it declined by 0.6%), and developers only managed to build 14 percent more units of housing. Meanwhile, Las Vegas-area developers built 52 percent more housing units as developed land expanded by 46 percent.

Continue reading →

Semi-Self-Driving Tesla

By | | Transportation
3 Comments

Tesla says that next year its cars will not only steer themselves within a lane, they will change lanes to pass slower vehicles when it is safe to do so. While other high-end cars, such as the Mercedes S-class, can steer themselves (“lane centering”), Tesla is the first to promise automatic lane changing.

San Ramon, California may see the nation’s first self-driving buses next year. The buses will operate in an office park called Bishop’s Ranch. While their range will initially be limited, they will use existing infrastructure, which means all of the people who have been dreaming of pod cars should pack up their bags and go home. Pod cars and similar personal-rapid transit devices would, like Contra Cost County’s self-driving buses, have a limited range, but would require expensive new infrastructure to work at all.

Volvo’s CEO, Håkan Samuelsson, has so much confidence in his company’s progress towards completely automated vehicles that he says the company would accept full liability for any accidents that were the fault of its cars. (Google and Mercedes have made similar promises.) At the same time, Sanuelsson has urged the United States government to impose national guidelines on the states for self-driving cars. The Antiplanner isn’t so sure; I’d rather have 50 different state laws, some good and some bad with the bad ones learning from the good, than one national rule that is almost certain to be bad with little opportunity to learn because there are no other sets of rules in other states.

This viagra cheap online enzyme provides a prevention of the restriction of the penile muscles. This is cheap levitra canada the reason why the organ does not activate for occurring erection after penetration. This combination may affect heart of the viagra canada cost http://www.slovak-republic.org/history/national-revival/ sufferer. But the fast paced modern world lifestyle has its own demands and one need to be the safest drivers possible. cialis levitra online http://www.slovak-republic.org/kremnica/ Continue reading →

Back in the Air Again

By | | Housekeeping
Leave a comment

The Antiplanner is winging to Omaha today to speak tomorrow at a free-market forum sponsored by Hillsdale College. The subject of my presentation is “the effects of environmental regulation,” but I’ll focus on the type of regulation I know best: land-use regulation.

Specifically, I’ll argue that such regulation takes away people’s property rights The doctors recommend dose minimum one hour before the planned prescription levitra sexual activity. Found cheapest viagra in the flesh and rind of watermelons, citrulline reacts with the body’s enzymes when consumed in large quantities and is changed into arginine, an amino acid that has a host of benefits and providing researchers with very interesting research results which they have been in search of. Sildenafil may interact with prescription drugs known as nitrates, including nitroglycerin, and viagra cheapest price can dangerously lower blood pressure. This medicine does not stop the spread of HIV cheap discount levitra virus but this medicine Kamagra will not stop the spread of any sexually transmitted diseases. without compensation; increases the cost of housing and any businesses that need land; increases the risk of owning such homes or businesses; harms low-income people in particular; reduces homeownership; and can threaten the entire economy a la the 2008 financial crisis. If you are at the forum, I look forward to seeing you there.