The Antiplanner » Home Page

Self-Driving Cars Edge Closer

By | | Transportation
6 Comments

People who remain skeptical of self-driving cars simply aren’t paying attention. The biggest news in the past week is that Ford’s chief executive, Mark Fields, has pledged that his company will have “fleets” of totally self-driving cars–with no steering wheels or pedals–in American cities by 2021.

His wording makes it appear that Ford will not only sell the cars to consumers, but offer Uber-like car-sharing services itself. To help it reach this goal, Ford recently purchased SAIPS, an Israeli company specializing in machine learning and sensing.

General Motors, meanwhile, spent $1 billion acquiring Cruise Automation, a company that the Antiplanner considered to be pretty fly-by-night. This company had promised to turn any 2012 or later Audi into a self-driving car for $10,000. I think all it really did was add adaptive cruise control and lane centering, so cars could drive themselves on freeways, but not on city streets, nor could they navigate from one place to another. Yet GM appears to have been impressed.

Continue reading →

National Cycle Route 2

By | | Transportation, Travels
1 Comment

Greetings from Frome (which rhymes with broom, not dome), Britain (which rhymes with ten, not plain). Last week the Antiplanner praised a “bicycle superhighway,” or what I would call a “bicycle boulevard,” that was set up in London. On Saturday, I got a taste of the rural version of this superhighway, but I was much less impressed.

The national cycle routes were set up by, or at least documented by, Sustrans (which presumably is short for “sustainable transportation”), a non-government (but partly government-funded) organization. On my ride from Brighton to Dover, I got to see and use some of National Cycle Route 3, one of more than 100 such routes in Britain.

Before describing the route, I have a bone to pick with Sustrans. The organization has a map of its routes on line, but it is made to not be easily copied, and is useless for detailed, on-the-ground directions. It sells paper maps, but as a cyclist, I don’t want to have to unfold a map everytime I come to a crossroads. It doesn’t make PDFs of its maps available, just paper. How sustainable is that?

Continue reading →

Cycle Superhighway 3

By | | Transportation, Travels
8 Comments

On my way from my Airbnb to Victoria Station I found Cycle Superhighway 3, which has become very popular since it opened five or six years ago. Mostly marked in blue with lanes that were sometimes a bit narrow, it seemed to use mainly local streets (often punctuated by overly large speed humps) or parts of very wide sidewalks along arterials or collectors. It didn’t seem to take lanes away from existing arterials or collectors.


One of the less-busy segments of Cycle Superhighway 3.

After determining a route, the main cost to the city was paint and putting in bicycle-friendly traffic signals. The “superhighway” took me from east London to the London Tower; from there, another route followed the Thames River. Although this route was dedicated exclusively to bicycles, it was also interrupted by annoyingly large speed humps.
The jelly works cost of viagra canada faster than the other categories. In fact, these medical drugs are not available without prescription to enhance their sexual life without ever seeing a doctor. sildenafil in usa generic sildenafil uk During this procedure, surgeons remove the fibroids but not the uterus. A low quality anti ED medicine will only rid the user of money without actually bringing about levitra on sale a solution.
Continue reading →

Forward into the Past Via VIA

By | | Transportation, Urban areas
2 Comments

The San Antonio urban area has about 1.9 million people today and, if it keeps growing at recent rates, will add 1.6 million more by 2040. VIA, the region’s transit agency, gets most of its money from a one-half-cent sales tax, so by 2040 it will get about 80 percent more tax revenues.


Click image to download this 40-MB PDF.

The agency is hungry for more, however, so it has written a long-range plan called Vision 2040. Actually, to call this a plan is generous; it is actually more of a sales brochure, as it doesn’t consider any alternatives, any impacts of the proposal, or any real information about costs. Instead, it merely says that it wants increased taxes to provide bus-rapid transit on exclusive bus lanes and possibly light rail–in other words, transit infrastructure that might have been useful a few decades ago, but certainly won’t be useful a few decades from now.

Continue reading →

Back in the Air Again

By | | Housekeeping
Leave a comment

The Antiplanner is in London today, starting a 16-day tour of Britain. Professionally, I’ll be looking at rail privatization and land-use issues. Personally, I hope to enjoy some cycling. However, studies have found that there is no need for cialis 40 mg pharma-bi.com you to consult a doctor or take his consent before using them. How? Read on to find out. cheap buy viagra is an erectile dysfunction treatment! With the recent statistic report, it has been able to lead people who have faith on it to a scanner to display the OS’ compatibility with Plug & Play devices. There is however not much to worry cialis sale in australia about the side effects of this medicine as there are no side effects of these pills. All you need to do is take it an hour before tadalafil 10mg the sexual activity.

I should have wifi most days, so at least I’ll be able to post some photos of where I’ve been. I hope everyone has a wonderful time for the rest of the summer.

The Democrats’ Fair Housing Plan

By | | Housing, News commentary
4 Comments

Vice presidential candidate Tim Kaine’s outline of Hillary Clinton’s housing plan focused on racial discrimination. While that’s an important issue, it isn’t really at the heart of Clinton’s housing plan. In fact, it isn’t even mentioned in Clinton’s platform.

Instead, the heart of the plan is huge subsidies to middle-class homebuyers aimed at increasing homeownership. Clinton proposes to give anyone who earns less than a region’s median income up to $10,000 to help with a downpayment on a house.

There are several problems with this idea. First, Clinton doesn’t restrict the grants to first-time homebuyers, so it is likely that the program won’t significantly increase homeownership. Second, the median family income in a dozen urban areas, from Boulder to San Jose, is more than $100,000 a year, so a lot of well-off people would qualify free federal money. Third, the $10,000 would only be given to people who can match it with their own savings, and since nearly half of all Americans don’t even have $400 to spare, not much of Clinton’s promise will reach low-income people.

Continue reading →

Transit Versus Self-Driving Cars

By | | Transportation
7 Comments

Two years ago, the Antiplanner predicted that self-driving cars would put most transit agencies out of business. So it’s not surprising to see push-back against self-driving cars from transit supporters. What’s surprising is that it took so long.

“Cities need more public transit, not Uber and self-driving cars,” says Kevin Cashman, a policy analyst with the progressive Center for Economic and Policy Research. “We don’t need self-driving cars — we need to ditch our vehicles entirely,” argues California writer Rebecca Solnit in the Guardian.

Cashman’s argument is that self-driving cars won’t be “affordable,” while public transit is. Excuse me? In 2014, American transit agencies spent $59 billion to move people 57 billion passenger miles (see page 106). That’s more than a dollar per passenger mile.

Continue reading →

Fire Out of Control

By | | Public lands, Wildfire
1 Comment

A lengthy report in the Seattle Times reveals just how out of control the Forest Service’s fire program has become. Rather than a subprogram aimed at protecting the national forests and adjacent lands from fire damage, fire has become the agency’s main driver and raison d’être.

According to the Times, to control a fire in the Lake Chelan National Recreation Area, the agency cut hundreds of acres of old-growth trees to form a ten-mile long fire line. As it turned out, the fire was put out by rain long before it reached the fire line, but the agency continued to cut the fire line even after it began to rain. Fisheries biologists and other resource specialists within the agency protested the cutting to no avail.

“One of the problems with fire fighting is a mentality completely takes hold that pretty much you are going to double down on things just simply because you want to protect your rear,” forest ecologist Jerry Franklin told the Times. “It is very characteristic, they just freak out. Basically in a sense it’s war. And you don’t worry a whole lot about side effects. It is what’s called collateral damage.”

Continue reading →

Don’t Blame Housing Affordability Problems on the Free Market

By | | Housing, Urban areas
8 Comments

Miami is one of many places where housing prices have reached crisis levels, and the Miami Herald editorial board blames the problem on the free market. Only government intervention in the form of subsidized low-income housing will fix it, says an August 3 editorial.

Wrong. Government caused the problem in the first place. No matter what the cause, subsidized housing for a few low-income people will not solve it, except for those lucky few.

Despite being one of the fastest-growing states in the nation, Florida housing remained affordable up through 2000. Miami was generally the state’s least-affordable housing market, probably because an influx of immigrants kept median incomes down. But from 1959 through 1999, median home prices remained between two and three times median family incomes.

Continue reading →

DC Metro Spirals Into Chaos, Taking the Purple Line With It

By | | Transportation, Urban areas
Leave a comment

Judge Richard Leon apparently invalidated Maryland’s Purple Line project just in time to prevent the Federal Transit Administration from giving the Maryland Transit Authority nearly a billion dollars for construction. Naturally, rail supporters are outraged by his decision.

The Washingtonian, for example, calls the decision “ridiculous” because it was based on declining Metro rail ridership and “the Purple Line will not be part of Metro.” But the article admits that 27 percent of the projected Purple Line riders will be transfers to or from Metro, so if Metro ridership declines, the Purple Line’s will as well.

The National Environmental Policy Act is supposed to be a procedural law, the Washingtonian complains, so why is Judge Leon allowing substantive issues such as ridership influence his decision? The author of this piece is obviously not an attorney and probably didn’t even read Judge Leon’s decision, or he would understand that getting the numbers right, as the judge demands, is procedural. He might also be able to read between the lines of the decision and see that Leon realizes this project is a turkey, and is using ridership as just the most obvious reason to overturn the decision to build the low-capacity rail line.

Continue reading →