I started this blog 17 years ago today and since then have put up nearly 4,000 posts. Today, I’m taking the next step towards retirement by ending my practice of posting nearly every weekday.
Is this the origin of the phrase “pulling the pin”? Maybe not but as a railfan it is nice to think so. Photo by Ben Franske.
I still have more posts planned. I’ve written two more major reports that I hope will be published soon and will post them here. I expect to continue monitoring new releases of transportation, housing, and census data and report on them here. I also need to write at least one more chapter in The Education of an Iconoclast.
When Cato fired me two years ago, it was more of an insult than an injury as I had planned to retire from Cato ten months after that anyway. But I found retirement to be boring so I ended up writing more reports in 2023 than in any year since 2009. At the same time, I have other things I want to do: more cycling, more wilderness hikes, and more writing on other subjects such as a book about the history of western passenger trains. I’ve been using my habit of daily postings to the Antiplanner as an excuse for not doing those other things.
Quitting is bittersweet as my objective of stopping wasteful government planning is far from accomplished. People too young to remember the fall of the Soviet Union and those old enough to remember but not willing to understand what it meant still cling to the idea that central planning can solve all kinds of problems when in fact it makes most of them worse. At the least, I have given some ammunition to others that object to government control of their daily lives.
I appreciate all of the comments people have made over the years, especially those correcting errors or adding to the information in my posts. I hope this site has been as useful to others as it has been to me. But it is time to move on. If you have been reading this site daily, check back every week or so to see if I’ve posted new data or an update to one of my other projects.
?
What was supposed to be a sad face emoji came out as a question mark. The comment was supposed to express sadness. I’ll miss your daily postings.
My weekday mornings started with making coffee, reading the WSJ and reading The Antiplanner in that order.
I look forward to your upcoming “new data” and “other project” updates.
Meanwhile in Indonesia, one million passengers in two months on their new high speed rail line; apparently they don’t read the Antiplanner, or they would have realized the folly of their ways. Hopefully transitioning to a less frequent posting will increase his Indonesian readership before more negative consequences follow like these:
“According to Dwiyana, passenger surveys indicated that 48 percent of Whoosh users were private car users. Dwiyana suggested that the introduction of Whoosh had supported the government’s initiative to transition people from private transportation to a safer and more environmentally friendly public transportation system.”
“Dwiyana said there had been a positive response toward Whoosh, citing that the average occupancy rate of passengers had consistently reached 90 percent of the total available seats for each train.”
https://www.thejakartapost.com/business/2023/12/26/whoosh-records-1-million-passengers.html
1. Is Woosh paying its actual cost?
2. Why is it a good thing to get people to quit using cars? (did you fall for Al Gore’s climate scam?)
3. I note the high percentage of riders claimed to have cars. Does this suggest that only high income people can afford to ride the thing?
Thanks so much for your blogging over the years. I’m someone who’s pretty pro-transit and I find your blog an important balance to the groupthink I encounter in the transit community.
Can you provide advice as to where we might find a similar balance now that you’re stepping back?
duke,
Can’t really help you. I used to be a part of a large group of transit critics, but most have retired now or at least aren’t blogging in public. The best I can suggest is Baruch Feigenbaum at reason.org.
janehavisham,
You mean the Indonesian high-speed rail project that was supposed to cost $5.0 billion then cost $6.1 billion and ended up costing $7.3 billion? Or do you mean the high-speed rail project in the country that has one-tenth as many motor vehicles per capita as the U.S.? Indonesian ridership isn’t relevant to us, but the costs sure are: $82 million a mile, not much less than the California line is costing.
I’ll miss your frequent blogging as I have learned so much from them. Thank you for imparting your wisdom through them and enjoy your time doing the things that give you joy!
Thank you Antiplanner. I’ve enjoyed reading for years. The push of libertarian organizations to support yimby has been annoying and I appreciate you pointing out the obvious. The yimby movement must think “being a nimby is terrible, unless your backyard happens to be on the urban growth boundary, then being a nimby is of utmost importance.”
Thanks for all the posts.
“Can’t really help you. I used to be a part of a large group of transit critics, but most have retired now or at least aren’t blogging in public.”
It’s almost as if they are dying out.
“Indonesian ridership isn’t relevant to us..”
Oh I beg to differ, a million rides in 2 months is very relevant to us.
Why is 16,666 per day so relevant to us?
I miss the years of daily postings and the many conferences in the past.
I don’t always post but I do read the blog for the latest news it has always been a great resource for what is going on in housing, transit and government waste.
Enjoy your part time retirement.
Thank you
I’ll really miss you postings but I can’t fault you for deciding to retire. I hope you have a great retirement!
enjoy….
in another bout I’m not pro or anti transit.
What I am is pro-mobility.
Whatever technology offers that mobility in the geographic constraints that be.
Walking, biking are “Fundamentally Inferior” forms of transportation; no they’re slower forms but sidewalk improvements and EV bikes take guess work out equation. It took while Amsterdam and EU cities to hammer out biking difficulties but now Millions people bike for sustained transportation.
There’s something odd about a society that gets into a car to drive to a gym to work up a sweat….
Case in point, rise and sales of Peloton bikes, connect thousands of people to internet videos to essentially communicate and bike. Why not just bike outdoors and meet people?
I tried to post yesterday, and may have screwed up. It’s sad to read this, of course, but a slowdown is entirely deserved. Like a lot of other readers, I think, this blog was one of the first things I looked at just about every day – sometimes even in the middle of the night. I live in Toronto, in Ontario. The city and the province have had urban growth boundaries and density requirements in place for two decades, and both have been mostly at war with the automobile since the early 1970s. Housing is now too expensive for almost everyone and the city is gridlocked. Why? The Antiplanner explained why. And entertained.
janehavisham,
Just for the record, what I meant to say is that passenger train ridership in a country with 82 motor vehicles per thousand people is not a good guide to potential passenger train ridership in a country with more than 900 motor vehicles per thousand. The real question about Indonesia is why a country that is so poor that it only has 82 vehicles per thousand spent more than $80 million per mile on a rail line.
What’s the relation in your thinking between trains and car ownership? Are you saying trains are good in Indonesia because they have a tenth of the rate of car ownership compared to the US?
Thanks again for your prolific output of insightful reports, this time for your second retirement. I’ll look forward to your occasional posts, but mostly you should enjoy your retirement – you earned it!
“Why is 16,666 per day so relevant to us?”
Why is it not?