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Monthly Archives: October 2015

Turning Portland into San Francisco

By | | Housing, Regional planning
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A couple of decades ago, the planning mantra in Oregon was “don’t turn Portland into Los Angeles,” meaning don’t make it more congested. So planners were a bit chagrinned to discover that their plans actually aimed to turn Portland into Los Angeles (see p. 7), meaning a dense urban area (L.A. is the densest in the nation) with a low number of freeway miles per capita (L.A. has the lowest of the nation’s fifty largest urban areas). Since then, Portland-area congestion (measured in hours of delay per commuter) has reached the Los Angeles’ 1985 level.

Today, the mantra is “don’t turn Portland into San Francisco,” meaning an extremely unaffordable housing market. So it should be no surprise that Portland planners are following exactly the policies that will turn Portland into San Francisco.

“We have a crisis of housing affordability in this city,” says Portland Mayor Hales. But expanding the urban-growth boundary is not the answer, he claims. “It’s not true that new housing at the edge is affordable,” he argues. “Maybe it once was when there was cheap land, cheap money and cheap transportation. That’s not true anymore.” Yes, but the reason it isn’t true is the urban-growth boundary. Get rid of the boundary and associated planning restrictions, and vacant land becomes cheap, and new homes built on the urban fringe will cost a lot less. In turn, that will force prices down throughout the city and region.

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Top Down vs. Bottom Up

By | | Transportation
5 Comments

The Brookings Institution’s Robert Puentes takes a look at infrastructure procurement and reaches exactly the opposite conclusions as the Antiplanner. Puentes says that successful infrastructure needs 1. visionary leadership; 2. public sector expertise; 3. standardization; and 4. public-private collaborations.

To the Antiplanner, all of these goals and recommendations are exactly wrong. My recommendations would be: 1. get the incentives right; 2. rely on user-fee driven processes; 3. let hundreds of flowers (or at last 50) bloom; and 4. gradually turn infrastructure planning and management to the private sector.

Leaders follow incentives. No matter how visionary the leaders are, bad incentives will lead to bad outcomes. Get the incentives right and the visionary leaders will follow.

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Platitudes Won’t Solve Metro’s Problems

By | | Transportation
17 Comments

The Washington City Paper asked “thirteen riders, advocates, and experts” how to fix the Washington Metro Rail system. Former Metro general manager Dan Tangherlini and former DC DOT director Gabe Klein offered banalities about “putting the customer first.”

Smart-growth advocate Harriet Trepaning thinks Metro “needs a different kind of leader,” as if changing the person at the top is going to keep smoke out of the tunnels and rails from cracking. She admits that “I don’t think we’ve been straight with anybody, including ourselves or our riders, about what it really takes to [keep the rails in a] state of good repair.” But her only solution is to have “a dedicated source of revenue,” i.e., increase local taxes for a system that already costs state and local taxpayers close to a billion dollars per year.

Coalition for Smarter Growth director Stewart Schwartz and former APTA chair Rod Diridon also want to throw money at it. Others dodge the money question and suggest that Metro do all sorts of things that it can’t afford and doesn’t have any incentive to do anyway.

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Which One Lives in a Rent-Controlled Apartment?

By | | Housing
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The progressive’s “preferred two-pronged housing approach . . . is government-owned real estate plus restrictions on private-sector developers,” notes Reason magazine’s Matt Welch writes in the Los Angeles Times, but this strategy will only “make a bad problem worse.”

Though California cities spend hundreds of millions of dollars trying to subsidize “affordable” housing, Welch notes, that money has only helped build 5 percent of the new homes constructed in the state. This is a mere “a rounding error in the total supply of housing stock.”

Meanwhile, high developer fees, lengthy permitting processes, rent control, and statutory limits on housing growth in some cities all do far more to make housing unaffordable than subsidized housing does to make it affordable. Welch cites Paul Krugman saying, “The analysis of rent control is among the best-understood issues in all of economics, and — among economists, anyway–one of the least controversial. In 1992, a poll of the American Economic Assn. found 93% of its members agreeing that ‘a ceiling on rents reduces the quality and quantity of housing.'”

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Self-Driving Cars in the News

By | | Transportation
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60 Minutes covered self-driving cars last Sunday and CBS News took a look at Mercedes’ vision of the car of the future. General Motors, which cut its R&D when it went bankrupt in 2008, now plans to get into self-driving cars in a big way.

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Tight-lipped Apple is rumored to be developing a self-driving car; at least, it is meeting the California DMV about getting a license for one. Toyota, which has been less enthusiastic about self-driving cars than many other companies, now promises to have them in the showrooms by 2020.

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Still Not Carrying Passengers

By | | Transportation
7 Comments

Washington DC’s H Street streetcar ran down a police car last week. But, as the Washington Post headline notes, it’s “still not carrying passengers.”


Still in the testing stage a year after construction was supposedly complete. Wikimedia photo by Michael J.

The District Department of Transportation began testing the streetcar about a year ago, and the result was so many accidents that the DC council seriously considered scrapping the whole thing. Instead, it asked for an expert peer review by the American Public Transportation Association (APTA). Since APTA has never met a rail transit project it didn’t like, the review’s conclusion was pretty much predetermined.

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Setting an Unaffordable Target

By | | Housing
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Portland and San Francisco are not the only urban areas with housing affordability problems. Where the 2013 ratio of median home prices to median family incomes was 7.0 in San Francisco-Oakland and 3.8 in Portland, it was a wallet-busting 9.6 in Auckland, New Zealand.

In response, Chris Parker, the Chief Economist for the Auckland city council, has published a report that correctly identifies the problem as “excessive planning constraints” and a “limiting supply of greenfield land.” Unfortunately, his timid recommendation is that the city seek to reduce the value-to-income ratio to 5.0.

That’s like the Federal Reserve setting an inflation target of 50 percent. A 50 percent rate of inflation sounds pretty good compared with Zimbabwe’s peak inflation of 79.6 billion percent, but as a way of life, 50 percent inflation is still pretty awful.

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The Nation’s Worst-Managed Transit Agency

By | | Transportation, Urban areas
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Eight years ago, the Antiplanner argued that San Jose’s Valley Transportation Authority was the nation’s worst managed transit agency, a title endorsed by San Jose Mercury writer Mike Rosenberg and transit expert Tom Rubin.

However, since then it appears that the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority (WMATA or just Metro) has managed to capture this coveted title away from San Jose’s VTA. Here are just a few of Metro’s recent problems:

  1. Metro’s numerous service problems include a derailment in August that resulted from a flaw in the rails that Metro had detected weeks previously but failed to fix;
  2. Metro spent hundreds of millions of dollars on a new fare system but now expects to scrap it for lack of interest on the part of transit riders;
  3. One of Metro’s power transformers near the Stadium/Armory station recently caught fire and was damaged so badly that Metro expects to have most trains simply skip that station stop for the next several weeks to months;
  4. Metro’s fleet of serviceable cars has run so low that it rarely operates the eight-car trains for which the system was designed even during rush hours when all the cars are packed full;
  5. WMATA’s most recent general manager, Richard Sarles, retired last January and the agency still hasn’t found a replacement, largely due to its own ineptitude;
  6. Riders are so disgusted with the system that both bus and rail ridership declined in 2014 according to the American Public Transportation Association’s ridership report;
  7. Metro was so unsafe in 2012 that Congress gave the Federal Transit Administration extra authority to oversee its operations;
  8. That hasn’t fixed the problems, so now the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) wants Congress to transfer oversight to the Federal Railroad Administration, which supposedly has stricter rules.

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