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Washington Metro Surrenders

By | | Transportation
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New York City was harder hit by snowstorm Jonas than Washington, getting 27 inches of snow compared with 18 or 19 inches in Washington. Yet New York’s subways kept running and commuter trains and buses operated for as long as they could, while Washington Metro shut down its system before the storm got serious.


This is what it takes to shut down Metro subways. Flickr photo taken Sunday morning after the storm by Ted Eyten.

Sunday morning, New York sprang back to life while Washington remained shut down. By this morning, the vast majority of the New York system, including most commuter-rail lines, almost the entire subway system, and some buses will be operating. Washington, meanwhile, will operate the subway portions of its rail lines and just 22 out of 325 bus lines.

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The Good-Weather Transportation System

By | | Transportation, Urban areas
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Weather forecasters predict that Washington, DC will get as much as two feet of snow tonight through Sunday morning. Fortunately, Washington has Metrorail, an “all-weather” transportation system.


Some buses might get stuck, so we’ll shut the whole system down. Photo taken during 2009 snowstorm by Mr.TinDC.

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The Next Recession

By | | Housing, News commentary
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Many signs indicate that the economy is headed into another recession. The stock market is dropping. China’s growth is slowing. The Baltic Dry Index is at its lowest level in history, which means there is less international trade. Many predict that housing prices are about to collapse again.

While progressives such as Naomi Klein blame capitalism for these problems, the reality is that our current economic doldrums are the fault of too much government. As investment analyst Lacy Hunt points out, all of the economic tinkering since the 2008 crash has failed to spur the economy.

Some of it has done more harm than good. Remember when Chrysler and General Motors were taken over by the government to prevent them from going bankrupt–and then the government immediately forced them into bankruptcy? In a normal corporate reorganization, bond holders have first claim on the assets of the company. But the Obama Administration zeroed out Chrysler’s bonds in favor of its labor unions. That meant automakers would have to pay a premium for any future bond sales. Inconsistent government policies make investments risky and drive investors to less productive areas of the economy.

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It’s the Old Folks Fault

By | | Housing
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Usually, The Economist lives up to its name in analyzing important issues. But it misses the point in its latest article on housing affordability. The article notes that the British government has set a target of building enough homes so that real housing prices rise only 1 percent faster than inflation.

That’s an idiotic target. First, why should housing prices rise faster than inflation at all? In a market unhampered by government regulation, housing prices will rise and fall with incomes, and rising incomes lead to higher prices because people buy bigger or more luxurious homes, not because homes themselves rise in price faster than inflation.

Second, the idea that government planning can control housing prices is as bad as the idea that government should plan housing in the first place. The government’s plan is to relax some housing regulation, which is good, and to subsidize new homes, which just transfers the burden from one group of people to another. What the government should do is get out of the way entirely.

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Don’t Blame Inequality on the Rich

By | | Housing, News commentary
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Paul Krugman asks, “Is vast inequality necessary?” His answer is that some inequality is “inevitable,” but “the rich don’t have to be as rich as they are.”

But maybe the problem isn’t the rich are too rich. Maybe the problem is the poor aren’t rich enough. Like Bernie Sanders, who accuses Trump of being a demagogue and then spends most of his speeches lambasting the wealthy, Krugman wants to blame the wealthy for being rich. But the wealthy aren’t the ones who put policies in place that keep the poor oppressed.

The Antiplanner recently met Alan Graham, who helps homeless people in Austin. He says the homeless have too many health problems to make good employees, but they are very entrepreneurial. But the only entrepreneurial activity they are legally allowed to engage in is begging, because the courts have ruled that begging is a First Amendment right. Anything else they would like to do, even just open a lemonade stand, requires fees they can’t afford and permits from a bureaucracy they can’t understand. These rules were made by middle-class bureaucrats and progressive elected officials, not the wealthy.

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It Won’t Do Any Good, But Let’s Do It Anyway

By | | News commentary
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Oregon has a plan to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by forcing electric companies to stop burning coal and to get half their energy from renewable resources. It sounds like a great plan, but like so many government plans, it has a few flaws.

First, it won’t reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Second, it will increase energy prices, thus reducing the viability of Oregon’s economy.

At least, that’s the conclusion of Oregon’s Public Utility Commission, the three-member board that is supposed to regulate electric utilities. The only problem is that the commission was never consulted about the energy plan, suggesting that the state is listening only to groups who are already true believers.

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Big Brother Wants to Run Your Self-Driving Car

By | | Transportation
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As a part of his 2017 budget proposal, Secretary of Transportation Anthony Foxx proposes to spend $4 billion on self-driving vehicle technology. This proposal comes late to the game, as private companies and university researchers have already developed that technology without government help. Moreover, the technology Foxx proposes is both unnecessary and intrusive of people’s privacy.

In 2009, President Obama said he wanted to be remembered for promoting a new transportation network the way President Eisenhower was remembered for the Interstate Highway System. Unfortunately, Obama chose high-speed rail, a 50-year-old technology that has only been successful in places where most travel was by low-speed trains. In contrast with interstate highways, which cost taxpayers nothing (because they were paid for out of gas taxes and other user fees) and carry 20 percent of all passenger and freight travel in the country, high-speed rail would have cost taxpayers close to a trillion dollars and carry no more than 1 percent of passengers and virtually no freight.

The Obama administration has also promoted a 120-year-old technology, streetcars, as some sort of panacea for urban transportation. When first developed in the 1880s, streetcars averaged 8 miles per hour. Between 1910 and 1966, all but six American cities replaced streetcars with buses that were faster, cost half as much to operate, and cost almost nothing to start up on new routes. Streetcars funded by the Obama administration average 7.3 miles an hour (see p. 40), cost twice as much to operate as buses, and typically cost $50 million per mile to start up.

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Time to Reconsider

By | | Transportation, Urban areas
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Portland’s first light-rail line turns 30 years old this year, which is about the expected lifespan of a rail line. Not by coincidence, the system was highly unreliable last year, being “plagued with delays and disruptions” and having terrible on-time performance.

The line between Portland and Gresham originally cost more than $200 million to build, which in today’s dollars is around twice that. It is likely it will cost roughly that amount of money to restore it to like-new condition.

But Portland has a choice. Instead of sinking a bunch of money into an already-obsolete transit system, it could scrap it and replace it with buses. Before building the rail line, the parallel freeway had HOV lanes; restoring those lanes (or turning them to HOT lanes) would give the buses an uncontested route to fallow. We know that the buses would be faster than the rail, because the rail line was slower than the buses it replaced.
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Tug-of-War over Federal Lands

By | | Public lands
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The Hammonds case in eastern Oregon is the result of a political tug-of-war between ranchers and environmentalists. Congress’ willingness to cater to whichever happens to be most politically powerful has left public land management in a shambles and subject to repeated disputes like this one.

Two acts of Congress, one passed in 1978 and one in 2000, played hidden but key roles in the Hammonds’ case. The Public Range Improvement Act (PRIA) of 1978 was passed at the behest of ranchers, but ultimately it may have worked against them. The Steens Mountain Cooperative Management and Protection Act of 2000 was passed in response to environmental lobbying, and it probably generated much of the Hammonds’ hostility to the federal government.

When the Forest Service and later the Grazing Service (forerunner of the BLM) started regulating grazing, they established rules that were similar to rules the ranchers themselves had developed years before the agencies were created. These rules were much like those for mining and water, and included first-in-time, first-in-right and use-it-or-lose-it.

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No, We Don’t Have to Sacrifice Neighborhoods to Save the Planet

By | | Regional planning, Urban areas
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Here’s a video of Portland City Commissioner Steve Novick saying the city needs to “sacrifice” its single-family neighborhoods in order to stop climate change. We’ve known that planners feel this way, but rarely do they say it in so many words.


From portland politic on Vimeo.

Previously, many Portland politicians have promised to preserve existing neighborhoods by keeping all high-density developments within a half mile of light-rail and other major transit lines. The unspoken truth was that nearly all single-family homes were within a half mile of a major bus corridor, and Portland wants to build so many rail lines that soon most homes would be within a half mile of one of those lines as well.

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