After the 2003 Preserving the American Dream conference in Washington DC, we had a series of annual conferences in a different city each year: Portland, the Twin Cities, Atlanta, San Jose, Houston, Bellevue, and Orlando. Although I invited most of the speakers and knew what they were going to say in advance, I found them very educational, especially on housing and land-use issues.

The highlight of the Portland conference was a speaker from England named Stephen Town, who was an expert on policing neighborhoods of different densities and designs. In fact, he was a policeman.

It so happened that, in 2001, the American Planning Association published a book titled SafeScape, which purported to show how neighborhoods could be designed to reduce crime. “At last a book that tells us exactly what we have to do to make our cities safe!” enthused a cover blurb written by a Portland police chief. Continue reading →

In December, 2004, France opened the Millau Viaduct, which by some measures is the largest bridge in the world. More than a mile-and-a-half long, supported by pylons that are as much as 1,100 feet tall, the bridge carries auto and truck traffic as high as 900 feet above the Tarn valley below, reducing the journey across the valley from many minutes to barely more than 60 seconds.

The bridge cost 394 million euros, well over half a billion dollars in today’s money. What was most interesting to me is that not a penny of public money went into construction (though some was spent on planning). Instead, this was a public-private partnership, meaning the public granted a private company, in this case a construction company called Eiffage, a franchise to build, operate, and collect tolls from users of the bridge. After a certain number of years, in this case 40 to 75 depending on the amount of tolls collected, ownership of the bridge reverts to the public. Continue reading →

Not long after the Preserving the American Dream conference, I was approached by Jon Caldara, who had attended the conference and encouraged me to form an American Dream Coalition. But now he wanted me to come work for his organization, the Independence Institute, Colorado’s free-market think tank.

Jon came to lead the Independence Institute via an unusual path. He had a business doing stage lighting for rock-and-roll bands when he decided to run for the board of directors of Denver’s Regional Transit District (RTD), whose fifteen members are elected from individual districts. Jon got himself elected by the Boulder district in 1994 and was later named board chair. Although he was unable to prevent RTD from putting light rail on the ballot in 1997, he led a successful campaign against the tax increase. As a result, the institute offered him the job of being its director in 1998.

At the time, Denver already had one light-rail line that, ironically, had been built as the indirect result of the Independent Institute’s actions. The institute’s founder, John Andrews, helped persuade the state legislature to require that RTD contract out a portion of its bus routes—initially 20 percent, later half—to private operators. This reduced costs by almost 50 percent per vehicle mile. Andrews expected RTD would spend the savings expanding bus service. Instead, it used the funds to build the region’s first light-rail line, which in the long run proved to be more wasteful than letting RTD operate all of its buses. Continue reading →

Sales of the Vanishing Automobile went really well. Although my publicity was limited to a web site and speaking engagements, it sold faster than my previous book, Reforming the Forest Service.

This made me realize that there was a lot of grassroots opposition to urban planning fads such as smart growth and light rail. To promote that opposition, I decided to bring experts and activists together in a national conference.

Previous conferences that I had held, such as the 1984 Mission Symposium, had been backed up by a staff of at least four or five other people. But I organized this conference, which I called Preserving the American Dream, by myself. Continue reading →

While I was in transition from working primarily on public lands issues to working primarily on urban issues, the Forest Service was in transition from focusing primarily on timber to focusing on something else, but it wasn’t quite sure what. Chief Thomas suggested that it should focus on ecosystem management, but ecosystem management doesn’t pay the bills, especially since no one was quite sure what it meant.

My reform proposals called for the federal land agencies to be allowed to charge market prices for all resources and be funded exclusively out of a fixed share of those revenues. I suspected that, on most national forests, this would lead to recreation becoming the most important use, though there would still be room for timber and other uses. The main obstacle to this was that Congress didn’t allow the agencies to charge for most recreation.

That began to change in 1996 when Congress created the Recreation Fee Demonstration program, allowing each of the four main public land agencies (Forest Service, Park Service, BLM, and Fish & Wildlife Service) to begin up to 100 experiments with recreation fees each and letting the agencies keep the revenues. The Park Service approached this with a complete lack of innovation, instead merely increasing entrance fees on 100 parks that were already charging fees and keeping the increased income (the fees that were previously being collected went into the Land & Water Conservation Fund). Continue reading →

I first met Randy Simmons when we were both graduate students at the University of Oregon. He was seeking a Ph.D. in political science, but like me when I was in urban planning, he decided to get a different view of things by taking a course in urban economics. I was in my first term as a student in economics and they assigned me to be a teaching assistant in the course he was taking.

I had already taken urban economics, but the course I took was for graduate students and the course he was taken was for undergraduates and included a lot more basic economics while the graduate course focused on modeling. As a result, I was a terrible T.A. because I didn’t yet know much about basic economic concepts such as elasticity. Yet Randy and I got along because we were both interested in environmental issues.

By 2000, Randy was the chair of the Utah State University political science department. He had studied and written about public lands, endangered species, and wilderness (and since then has written much more). But he really thinks more like an economist than a political scientist, and today he is in Utah State’s economics department. Continue reading →

Between the end of fall semester at Yale and the beginning of spring semester at UC Berkeley, we had time to drive across the United States, spend a few days at our Oak Grove home that was still for sale, find housing in the Bay Area, take a trip to the Oregon Coast, and move the things we needed from Oregon to our temporary home in Walnut Creek. I had looked for housing in Berkeley and quickly decided that housing on the other side of the Berkeley Hills in Contra Costa County was more affordable. I lucked out in finding a serviceable home that was scheduled to be torn down and replaced with apartments, so the owners rented it for a reasonable price.

This meant that, for the first time since high school, I commuted by transit instead of by bicycle or foot. From the house in Walnut Creek, I walked a short distance to the BART station and took the train to Berkeley. With a change of trains, I could get off within two blocks of my office. If I took my bicycle, which was allowed during non-rush-hours, I could avoid the change of trains and cycle about two miles to the office.

On the walk to the BART station I passed through a neighborhood of pre-war homes that realtors would describe as cute or cozy. Most were about 1,000 to 1,600 square feet on small, irregularly shaped lots. A few for-sale signs indicated asking prices of around $400,000, which seemed astounding for someone used to Oregon’s prices. However, I learned, that was only the starting price, as the homes sold rapidly after bidding wars that could easily add $100,000 to the price. This was the result of the urban-growth boundaries in Contra Costa and all other Bay Area counties (except San Francisco, which was entirely urbanized). Continue reading →

Membership in PRPA inspired me to go to a rail restoration conference at the California Railroad Museum and to become active with rail history groups all over the country. One person I met, Benn Coifman, was a student in transportation engineering at UC Berkeley. On the side, he had designed a variety of railroad fonts, including both lettersets such as the unique font used by the Great Northern’s streamlined Empire Builder as well as graphics of such objects as locomotives and railcars. He soon added an SP&S 700 to one of his graphic fonts.

I even inquired about getting a master’s degree in the history of technology at a major university, thinking I could become a museum curator of some type. After visiting the school, however, I decided I was no longer willing to put up with all the red tape involved with being a student that I had accepted as a necessity two decades before.

After the 700’s triumphant return from the Washington Central, the Sacramento Railroad Museum invited PRPA to join them for a railfair they were planning for 1991. One way to help pay for such a trip would be to sell space on passenger cars. The 4449 had a fleet of ex-Southern Pacific cars that it used for such trips. Except for our crew car, we didn’t have any passenger cars, but the Pacific Northwest Chapter of the National Railroad Historical Society did, so we met with them to plan the trip. Continue reading →

Forest Planning/Watch had many excellent editors over the years, and I can’t really rank them. But a case could be made that the best editors were people who were writers themselves. One of those was Jeff St. Clair, who had led the group that brought me to Indiana to review the Hoosier Forest plan (his group was called Forest Watch, after which we named the magazine) and then decided to move to Oregon City at about the same time I was moving from Eugene to Oak Grove. He took over as editor in August, 1990.

Soon after that, the CHEC staff was joined by Karen Knudsen, a Colorado native who said she had climbed all of Colorado’s 14,000-foot peaks by the time she was 21, a claim I found fully believable after trying to keep up with her cycling in the mountains of Utah. She had a degree in economics from Colorado College, which forever endeared me to that school as I have always felt she was the smartest person I’ve ever had the privilege of working with.

I could tell her to work on a particular topic and soon she would have a full report. She wrote reports on such topics as the Knutson-Vandenberg Act. I cried a little when she told me she was moving to Montana because its snow was better for skiing than Oregon’s. After she moved there, I received a phone call from the Clark Fork Coalition asking for a job reference. I told them if they didn’t hire her they should shoot themselves. She now is the group’s executive director. Continue reading →