On Monday, the Antiplanner rode a high-speed train from Tokyo to Nagano, probably the most expensive high-speed rail route in the world. According to one source, it cost more than half a billion dollars per mile in 1997 dollars, no doubt because much of the route is in tunnels. The train I was on was practically empty, and I understand that is the usual condition for that route except in high tourist season.
The Nagano high-speed rail route is a perfect example of why the U.S. shouldn’t build high-speed rail. Even if the Boston-to-Washington or California routes made sense (which they don’t), once a government starts on a project like this it can’t stop until all the most powerful politicians have one in their states and districts. The Nagano and other Japanese high-speed rail routes were built not because they make financial or transportation sense but because of politics.
My friend Wendell Cox says that, if you really want to get to know a region (or a country), you have to rent a car because relying on public transportation alone will give you a skewed view of the country. I am sure he is correct, yet I personally hate driving and love trains, so in both Korea and Japan I bought a rail pass. Here in Japan, my goal is to ride as many trains as possible in the few days I am here. So far I’ve been riding 6 or 7 trains a day.
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The Tokyo-to-Osaka Shinkansen are truly impressive. I boarded one in Nagoya, roughly the midway point. The platform had two tracks going in each direction, and when one train pulled out another one arrived just 5 or 6 minutes later. Ten or more trains per hour in each direction must be an interesting dispatching problem, but they handle it well. Each train has a capacity of about 1,300 passengers, so the line can handle roughly 13,000 people per hour in each direction. That’s not as much as a freeway lane full of buses, but is still a respectable number. Though the trains aren’t full, they are full enough for this route to cover both its capital and operating costs.
Of course, the United States doesn’t have any routes with the populations found in the Tokyo-to-Osaka corridor, and Japan only has one, which is why nearly all other Japanese high-speed rail lines fail to cover their capital costs.
The other thing noticeable about Japan, especially after visiting Korea: very few high-rise residential towers. Lots of Japanese in Tokyo live in mid-rise mixed-use areas, but I wouldn’t be surprised if a majority of Japanese live in single-family homes. At least, that seems to be true outside of Tokyo, and I saw lots of single-family homes in Tokyo as well. The mushrooming of high rises in Korea must have something to do with the fact that the nation was under a military dictatorship for about three decades, the same decades that many soviet nations were building high-rises for their residents. It must have seemed the thing to do.
They sound like impressive train rides. It brings back the wonder of riding the monorail at Disneyland.
The Autoplanner: I personally hate driving and love trains
THWM: Bullshit!
Interestingly, the famous busway in Curitiba Brazil was only possible with concentrated high rise housing. Made possible by a military dictatorship!
Maybe that is the key to making smart growth & transit work: a dictatorship. (That seems to fit well with the average city planner’s philosophy.)
Thanks
JK
JimKarlock wrote:
> Maybe that is the key to making smart growth &
> transit work: a dictatorship. (That seems to
> fit well with the average city planner’s
> philosophy.)
When I mentioned that Communist dictatorships (such as the Stalinist regime in North Korea – and the former Soviet Union and the defunct East Germany) built Smart Growth communities (based on high-rise apartment buildings and rail transit), at least one of the regular posters here objected.
Wonder why?
The Antiplanner wrote:
> The Nagano high-speed rail route is a perfect
> example of why the U.S. shouldn’t build
> high-speed rail. Even if the Boston-to-Washington
> or California routes made sense (which they
> don’t), once a government starts on a project
> like this it can’t stop until all the most
> powerful politicians have one in their states
> and districts.
Doesn’t this describe the current Amtrak network reasonably well?
Speaking of East Germany, on the 3rd of October 2010, it was 20 years ago that the former German “Democratic” Republic officially and finally went out of business.
Good riddance.
One major problems with dictatorships and communist governments is that they think they can anticipate the future and design their cities and industries to better take advantage of that future than democracies can. However, for the last century or more, the future has been very difficult to predict.
One major problems with dictatorships and communist governments is that they think they can anticipate the future and design their cities and industries to better take advantage of that future than democracies can. However, for the last century or more, the future has been very difficult to predict.
Any chance of convincing our planners of that fact of life?
Thanks
JK
Karlock:
Any chance of convincing our planners of that fact of life?[e.g., the commies failed at society-wide planning]
What does the Soviet Union have to do with community land use planning where citizens of a given jurisdiction have a say about what they want their community to look like?
Hey Jim, of course, “planners” know that it is very difficult to predict the future more than 2-3 years in advance. So do business people who “plan” ahead, too.
And guys like you say “social engineering” doesn’t work! Well, it did “work” in the case of roads, and then some!
I think the real conflict here is that you just don’t like transportation objectives that don’t genuflect at the altar of the almighty motor car. But you don’t seem to have any problem with the results of the gummit social engineering undertaken at all levels in transportation in the 1940’s, 1950’s, and 1960’s for roads, leading to their current domination.
I find it continually annoying that auto apologists don’t get that the current system was heavily social-engineered by the gummit and corporate interests, in the same manner as our centralized government school system. For a rather provocative study of how schools were socially engineered starting in the 19th Century, see anything written by John Taylor Gatto.
“…apologists don’t get that the current system was heavily social-engineered by the gummit and corporate interests, in the same manner as our centralized government school system.”
Couldn’t agree with you more.
“planners†know that it is very difficult to predict the future more than 2-3 years in advance.
I will tip my hat to those planners who know that it is very difficult to predict the future more than 2-3 years in advance.
However, there are far too many planners who think they know what the future will be 10, 20, 50 or 100 years ahead. It is especially ironic to hear planners criticize planners of past generations, but now they think that this generation of planners have it all figured out.
Borealis said:
However, there are far too many planners who think they know what the future will be 10, 20, 50 or 100 years ahead.
Examples with links, please.
To msetty:
Sorry, but I am not your paralegal. But I take it that you will be castigating all the planners comments on this website that portend to know what the future will be 10, 20, 50 or 100 years ahead.
Borealis spake:
Sorry, but I am not your paralegal…
So you have no facts, even just a few to support your blanket statements.
Without any evidence–apparently you can’t come up with even a thin thread–you’re just shooting off your mouth, er, keyboard…
But I take it that you will be castigating all the planners comments on this website that portend to know what the future will be 10, 20, 50 or 100 years ahead.
No, that’s YOUR job! I don’t know if you are The Autoplanner’s answer to Glenn Beck, or is it Karlock, or Scott, or other purveyors of hot air on this blog? There are so many candidates.
Yes yes. The planners who stop at nothing to engage the public, integrate their needs, desires, and concerns into their their plans are anti-democratic. I know let’s let the captains of American industry, you know, Madoff, Skilling, Financial sector CEO’s, speculators and the likes just fix the problems for us (because of their impressive track record). Now that’s democracy!
msetty – Please send me the billing address for my paralegal, whose research showed hundreds of examples of planners predicting the future, just four of which are:
http://ti.org/antiplanner/?p=2918
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kyoto_Protocol
http://ti.org/antiplanner/?p=493
http://ti.org/antiplanner/?p=2934
If you want any more research, then please fill out a client application form.
Borealis, you mean “attempting” to predict the future, as virtually EVERYONE tries to do, not just “planners.”
There may be a few, particularly politicians and lawyers, who are arrogant enough to think they know EXACTLY what is “going to happen” 10, 20 or 50 years from now, but you’ll also note that ANY wise prognosticator, urban or transportation planner, or anyone in any other profession for that matter, will also hedge their forecasts with the details of their assumptions and caveats, if they’re intellectually honest, that is.
I think your comments come down to the fact that many planners are putting forward VISIONS of things you don’t like, such as less sprawl, more transit, and denser cities. These are issues that will be decided POLITICALLY in the end, certainly not by “planners” though they’ll lobby for their visions, of course, as ANYONE will, including libertarians, Randoids, etc.
OF COURSE there are arrogant planners, as there are arrogant libertarians, Randoids, etc. What else is new?
However, there is one thing I can predict with a high degree of certainty: Lawyers and politicians will still be held in general contempt 50 to 100 years from now, though I doubt no denizens of The Autoplanner’s blog will be alive to collect any bets on this. This will highly likely hold true for the usual reasons, which you ought to know about first hand.
This line of cross examination is becoming a bore, and increasingly pointless.
Wonder why?
I was slightly less blunt when I explained, but it is simpleton reasoning (I called it low end at the time). Apparently some are incapable of being embarrassed at using such phrasing.
Wonder why?
DS
Apparently poor borealis is unfamiliar with the 2 millenia-old standard of evidence in rhetoric that when A makes a claim, the burden of proof is on A, not B.
Wonder why?
DS
msetty made a very good point:
These are issues that will be decided POLITICALLY in the end, certainly not by “planners†though they’ll lobby for their visions, of course, as ANYONE will….
As the Antiplanner continuously demonstrates, planners often do not provide objective analysis of their favorite development projects. Is that the professional norm of planners, to advocate for their pet projects and skew the analysis to sway the political decision?
Hey Danny Boy! I am sure you miss me.
Since you think you have enough education to criticize the grammar of other people, which of the following sentences are not grammatically correct?
1. Wonder why?
2. Hence the color change.
3. Not hard to understand.
4. Not hard at all.
All use the same grammatical rule (hint: see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subject_%28grammar%29 #7), but Danny Boy only criticizes grammar (wrongly) when his puny little mind doesn’t agree with the author.
Can you spell I-G-N-O-R-A-N-T H-Y-P-O-C-R-I-T-E ?
“Examples with links, please.”
There are so many, but this one seemed to catch my attention recently.
These folks presume to know:
1) What development patterns will look like 40 years from now
2) What types of transportation modes will exist then, and
3) Which modes will be best suited to serve #1.
That’s mind-boggling in its presumptuousness.
As the Antiplanner continuously demonstrates, planners often do not provide objective analysis of their favorite development projects.
Slight correction”
The Antiplanner continuously erroneously and sometimes mendaciously tries to [demonstrate], planners often do not provide objective analysis of their favorite development projects.
HTH.
DS
That’s mind-boggling in its presumptuousness.
Write the gummints and insurers and reinsurers and engineers and militaries all across the world. They all do the same thing.
Apparently, according to the italicized …uh…”logic”, the world should stop thinking and preparing and planning. Lolz!
HTH.
DS
Dan made a funny! Did you get it? He took what somebody else wrote and then stuck some of his own words inside it, AND HE CHANGED THE MEANING! That is so funny and clever. I think Dan works on Saturday Night Live, or certainly on his junior high school comedy revue.
Dan made another funny joke today. In the nineteenth comment, Dan asserted, without any evidence, that there is a rule that every blog comment has to have evidence! That was very cute.
Borealis spewed 4th:
Dan made another funny joke today. In the nineteenth comment, Dan asserted, without any evidence, that there is a rule that every blog comment has to have evidence! That was very cute.
Well, your’s tend not to.
I don’t get it. The 4th comment was by C. P. Zilliacus about a comment by JimKarlock. What does that have to do with my comment?
So, it’s “social planning” to provide what people like? Such as, when people much prefer the convenience of personal mobility, in a car, & that needs roads.
Jeez, those hardware & software makers have been social engineering people, to like computers for years.
People really want live in UAs at 50,000/sq.mi. Really? Yep, the whole population of the US, fitting in an area, the size of the Chicago Metropolitan, is what sociopaths really want.
So, it’s “social planning” to provide what people like? Such as, when people much prefer the convenience of personal mobility, in a car, & that needs roads.
Jeez, those hardware & software makers have been social engineering people, to like computers for years.
People really want live in UAs at 50,000/sq.mi. Really? Yep, the whole population of the US, fitting in an area, the size of the Chicago Metropolitan Area, is what sociopaths really want.
Dan asserted, without any evidence, that there is a rule that every blog comment has to have evidence! That was very cute.
There is no need to make sh__ up to have play. It is obvious to anyone with two firing brain cells that you were asked for evidence and you furiously flap-flap-flapped your hands to get away from having to provide any. Trying to mischaracterize what I wrote makes your…erm…”argument” look that much more flimsy, if that is possible.
And speaking of flap-flapping, making it up, and getting back on topic, this is a hoot as well:
The older apartment blocks were indeed slapped up cheaply and quickly in the Soviet style. They are efficient and cost-effective, with a strong cost-benefit ratio and not requiring much government subsidy or money. An annieplannurz’ dream! The newer apartments have more design consideration, better placement near amenities, more energy-efficient and offer more choice which is indicated by their being in demand (thus the rents are bid up to obtain them)
DS
Write the gummints and insurers and reinsurers and engineers and militaries all across the world. They all do the same thing.
Do they plan for 40-year time horizons? And when they do, do they assume that the world will look dramatically different at the end of that horizon? Or that people’s preferences will somehow reverse themselves? And do they propose to spend billions of dollars of other people’s money in pursuit of these self-fulfilling prophecies?
Ah, so you have no idea how it works.
Huh.
DS
Why do you planners think it is funny to make fun of the way some black people say “government”? It is not acceptable behavior, even on the internet.
So the best way to get where you need to in a country/region is by driving only?
So I want to see major points of China…I should rent a car and drive only? I’ll see you in about a year when I get back and see major spots.
Pretty heavy on the definitive statements are we not?
Walking, driving, trains, and air flight, all serve a purpose in a given situation. Hell, renting a Segway serves a purpose too. Renting a car to see the city of Berlin wouldn’t be best — walking and transit would, but renting a car and travelling to major cities in Germany would probably be very beneficial.
See the damn difference?
It has occurred to me that when the military engages in planning, it attempts to consider the various options that it might have to deal with and then develops plans for dealing with each of those options. It does this because history has taught all of us that we can’t know what is going to happen even two years in advance. The only way to try to be prepared for what the future will throw at you is to prepare multiple plans and then, when the time to take action arises, you select from the alternative plans already prepared the one most applicable to the reality of that time. One might reasonably assume that military planners have already worked out dozens of alternatives for dealing with a crisis in Iran. Municipal planners, on the other hand, operate on the assumption, typically mandated by local politicians, that they already know what will happen, because their charge is not to deal with what the future will throw at them. Instead, their goal is to make sure that the desired vision becomes a reality by mandating that everything that happens in the community will be in harmony with the vision they have been directed to pursue. Now enters the concept of unintended consequences. Planners repeatedly fail to take into consideration that the future never turns out the way they want it to. Because municipal planners plan for life in a tunnel, with no unintended turns allowed, they have no plan for dealing with something other than the intended outcome. Intelligent municipal planning would have plans on hand for dealing with unanticipated growth, perhaps due to a large employer moving to a community, and for unanticipated contraction of the local economy due to the failure or relocation of a major employer. Too many planners, steeped in fear of growth and sprawl, refuse to even work on a plan for dealing with growth when it happens. Reality is that if you tell everyone in a community that they have to live upstairs or downstairs from someone, for the public good of course, You know, because density helps make transit more feasible, that a large number of people will simply move into another jurisdiction in order to live the life they want to live. Unintended consequence, dramatic increase in highway traffic coming into the community, when the density plan was to reduce auto traffic. This, of course, is where dictatorships come in handy, but,fortunately, we don’t live in one yet. People will change the way they live to pursue life the way they want to live it. Planners don’t seem to get that. So for example, when planners in Madison Wisconsin wanted to make more people ride the buses to work downtown, they made it difficult and expensive to park. Unintended consequence, most of the retail in the downtown area moved to the suburbs. Today, planners are putting “traffic calming” devices in our roads, because they are deemed too wide. (These were invented, I believe by the Germans to prevent the invasion of the Normandy beaches) Of course, when the developers who paid for those roads 20 years ago complained that they were wider than they needed to be, the Planners argued they needed to be that wide. Now, of course, those same streets are just one more reason for planners to criticize greedy developers. Right? Don’t know if these count as examples, Dan or msetty. Gotta go now. My hands are tired from flapping so much.
Borealis said: As the Autoplanner continuously demonstrates, planners often do not provide objective analysis of their favorite development projects. Is that the professional norm of planners, to advocate for their pet projects and skew the analysis to sway the political decision?
THWM: Some how I’m reminded of GM’s Futurama.
Andy said:
“Why do you planners think it is funny to make fun of the way some black people say “governmentâ€? It is not acceptable behavior, even on the internet.”
Don’t put your racist b.s. in others mouth Andy. There are many people who butcher the English language of all creeds and colors. Have you seen the 99.9999% white Tea Party??? Gummint and grammar haters indeed!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RVEkLYIs7Wc
http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/galleries/teabonics_the_flawed_language_of_protest/teabonics_the_flawed_language_of_protest.html
Highman,
GM’s Futurama did show convenient & widespread that freeways would be, long before the Interstate Highway Act.
It also had visions of mass block buildings, ala LeCorbosier (sp?), which were hardly built. Many were & torn down, like in Pruitt-Igoo (sp?) & those by the CHA (Cabrini Green (Good Times) & along the Dan Ryan).
So are you glad that the central planning in the diorama model did not come to fruition?
What the fuck is it with you “libertarians” and the double standards?
Any chance of refilling your scrip, high?
DS
It’s not a double standards.
It’s distinction. There is a rhyme to the reason.
Please try to understand & differentiate.
There’s much more than different types of fruit (apples & oranges).
People are not forced to drive or use roads.
Very few people like to use public transit.
Most who ride transit regularly, are low in income.
Many commuters ride transit because not enough road lanes have been built.
There could, if user-based fees (gas tax) were higher.
Highman, Specifically, what is your unit of measure & such that is applied differently to whatever you are referring to.
I guess that you will fail in providing any substantiation for your claim. You never have any backing.
How can you even have any type of equality of comparison on free choice versus gov force? You lose.