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California High-Speed Rail Will Be Late,
Over Budget, and Obsolete

By | | Transportation
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The Los Angeles Times has a special report finding that the California high-speed rail project will cost far more and take far longer than the rail authority is promising. The official cost estimate remains $68 billion for an abbreviated system despite the fact that a 2013 Parsons Brinckerhoff report to the authority said there was no way the project could be done for that price.

P-B’s report was “never made public” and the rail authority refused to release it under the state public records act. However, “an engineer close to the project” slipped a copy of the report to the Times.

The rail authority has established a record for ignoring such reports. In 2012, another consultant told the authority that costs should be revised upwards by 15 percent. The authority simply fired the consultant.

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Why Is the Rent Too Damn High?
Because We Ignore the Real Problem

By | | Housing
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The Antiplanner’s recent coverage of housing affordability has focused on single-family homes. But a recent article by Andrew Jakabovics points out that rents are also rising, both in dollars and in the percent of people’s incomes that it consumes. “About half of all renters live in housing considered unaffordable,” meaning they spend more than 30 percent of their income on rent, Jakabovics says. Since 2000, the share of renters spending more than 30 percent of their incomes on rent has grown by more than 40 percent.

Unfortunately, Jacabovics never discusses the real cause of this problem or the great geographic disparities in rents. A close look at the data (American Community Survey table B25071) reveals that renters are hardest hit in Florida, Hawai’i, California, and Oregon, all states with strong growth-management laws. (Florida weakened its law in 2011, but few if any regions have weakened their growth-management plans since then.) Meanwhile, rental housing is still very affordable in states such as Texas, Utah, and Wisconsin.

Hawai’i and California aren’t surprising, but it is a bit surprising to see Oregon near the top of the list. Oregon’s “smart-growth” policies were supposed to avoid this problem by building a lot of multifamily housing in place of the single-family housing that has been made unaffordable by the urban-growth boundaries around every city in the state. But this clearly hasn’t worked.

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Planning Is the Problem, Not the Solution

By | | Regional planning
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New Zealand’s Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Finance, Bill English, is an antiplanner. “The justification for planning is to deal with externalities,” he noted in a speech given a few weeks ago. But, he continued, “what has actually happened is that planning in New Zealand has become the externality. It has become a welfare-reducing activity.”

As is the case in many American (and Canadian and Australian) urban areas, planning has added tens if not hundreds of thousands of dollars to the cost of a home in Auckland, New Zealand’s largest urban area. Recent New Urbanist rules, English says, “add $50,000 to $100,000 to the cost of an apartment.” Even more costs are added by Auckland’s urban-growth boundary. One study found that the costs of one of these rules were six times the benefits.
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It’s even worse than English says. Planning has become a way for the middle class to keep the working class out without being overt about it. It has become a way for relatively wealthy people to enhance their wealth at everyone else’s expense. Planners’ build-up-not-out mentality ends up destroying the character of the cities it is supposed to save. Finally, planning results in serious intergenerational equity problems, as parents get rich off their housing equity while children can’t afford to live in the cities in which they grew up.

The Clock Is Ticking

By | | News commentary, Transportation
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Because authority to spend federal dollars on highways and transit expires at the end of this month, the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee (or, to be precise, the chair of that committee, Bill Shuster) has proposed a new bill titled the Surface Transportation Reauthorization and Reform Act. Like the Senate bill proposed last July, the House bill authorizes spending for six years but only provides funding for the first three.

Although the bill promises to “streamline environmental review,” it also adds several new–and probably unnecessary–programs to the existing bureaucracy. These include:

  1. A “Nationally Significant Freight and Highway Projects Program.” Since we already have an Interstate Highway System, a U.S. Highway System, and a National Highway System, a National Freight Highway System seems redundant.
  2. A “National Surface Transportation Innovative Finance Bureau.” Unfortunately, all too often, “innovative finance” means finding a creative way to stick it to the taxpayers.
  3. Funding for vehicle-to-infrastructure communications equipment. However, in the opinion of many experts, such equipment will soon be rendered obsolete by self-driving cars.

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Although the House and Senate now each have six-year bills, the two do not agree on many details. Most importantly, the two differ on where they will get the $10 billion to $15 billion a year needed to continue deficit spending. Thus, many observers believe that Congress will do little more than pass another short-term extension at the end of this month. The big question is whether it will be a two-month extension or a six- (or more) month extension. If the latter, little more (other than additional extensions) is likely to happen in 2016 as it is an election year. If they pass a two-month extension, however, it may signal that they are serious about resolving their differences so they can pass a true six-year bill before the end of this year.

Build Out, Not Up

By | | Housing, Regional planning, Urban areas
11 Comments

Someone has calculated that it would be less expensive for San Francisco workers to rent a two-bedroom apartment in Las Vegas and commute by air than to rent a one-bedroom apartment in San Francisco. They reasoned that a one-bedroom in San Francisco is about $3,100 a month while a two-bedroom in Las Vegas is about $1,000 a month, and four-day-a-week airfares would be about $1,100 a month. Even with local transport, Las Vegas is less expensive than San Francisco.

While most responses focus on the quality of life in Las Vegas vs. San Francisco, the point is that the latter is so terribly overpriced that some software engineers are actually living out of their cars.

The smart-growth mantra is “build up, not out,” but that’s clearly not working out. Between 2000 and 2010, the area of land in the San Francisco-Oakland urbanized area grew by zilch (in fact, according to the Census Bureau, it declined by 0.6%), and developers only managed to build 14 percent more units of housing. Meanwhile, Las Vegas-area developers built 52 percent more housing units as developed land expanded by 46 percent.

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Semi-Self-Driving Tesla

By | | Transportation
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Tesla says that next year its cars will not only steer themselves within a lane, they will change lanes to pass slower vehicles when it is safe to do so. While other high-end cars, such as the Mercedes S-class, can steer themselves (“lane centering”), Tesla is the first to promise automatic lane changing.

San Ramon, California may see the nation’s first self-driving buses next year. The buses will operate in an office park called Bishop’s Ranch. While their range will initially be limited, they will use existing infrastructure, which means all of the people who have been dreaming of pod cars should pack up their bags and go home. Pod cars and similar personal-rapid transit devices would, like Contra Cost County’s self-driving buses, have a limited range, but would require expensive new infrastructure to work at all.

Volvo’s CEO, Håkan Samuelsson, has so much confidence in his company’s progress towards completely automated vehicles that he says the company would accept full liability for any accidents that were the fault of its cars. (Google and Mercedes have made similar promises.) At the same time, Sanuelsson has urged the United States government to impose national guidelines on the states for self-driving cars. The Antiplanner isn’t so sure; I’d rather have 50 different state laws, some good and some bad with the bad ones learning from the good, than one national rule that is almost certain to be bad with little opportunity to learn because there are no other sets of rules in other states.

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Back in the Air Again

By | | Housekeeping
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The Antiplanner is winging to Omaha today to speak tomorrow at a free-market forum sponsored by Hillsdale College. The subject of my presentation is “the effects of environmental regulation,” but I’ll focus on the type of regulation I know best: land-use regulation.

Specifically, I’ll argue that such regulation takes away people’s property rights The doctors recommend dose minimum one hour before the planned prescription levitra sexual activity. Found cheapest viagra in the flesh and rind of watermelons, citrulline reacts with the body’s enzymes when consumed in large quantities and is changed into arginine, an amino acid that has a host of benefits and providing researchers with very interesting research results which they have been in search of. Sildenafil may interact with prescription drugs known as nitrates, including nitroglycerin, and viagra cheapest price can dangerously lower blood pressure. This medicine does not stop the spread of HIV cheap discount levitra virus but this medicine Kamagra will not stop the spread of any sexually transmitted diseases. without compensation; increases the cost of housing and any businesses that need land; increases the risk of owning such homes or businesses; harms low-income people in particular; reduces homeownership; and can threaten the entire economy a la the 2008 financial crisis. If you are at the forum, I look forward to seeing you there.

Turning Portland into San Francisco

By | | Housing, Regional planning
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A couple of decades ago, the planning mantra in Oregon was “don’t turn Portland into Los Angeles,” meaning don’t make it more congested. So planners were a bit chagrinned to discover that their plans actually aimed to turn Portland into Los Angeles (see p. 7), meaning a dense urban area (L.A. is the densest in the nation) with a low number of freeway miles per capita (L.A. has the lowest of the nation’s fifty largest urban areas). Since then, Portland-area congestion (measured in hours of delay per commuter) has reached the Los Angeles’ 1985 level.

Today, the mantra is “don’t turn Portland into San Francisco,” meaning an extremely unaffordable housing market. So it should be no surprise that Portland planners are following exactly the policies that will turn Portland into San Francisco.

“We have a crisis of housing affordability in this city,” says Portland Mayor Hales. But expanding the urban-growth boundary is not the answer, he claims. “It’s not true that new housing at the edge is affordable,” he argues. “Maybe it once was when there was cheap land, cheap money and cheap transportation. That’s not true anymore.” Yes, but the reason it isn’t true is the urban-growth boundary. Get rid of the boundary and associated planning restrictions, and vacant land becomes cheap, and new homes built on the urban fringe will cost a lot less. In turn, that will force prices down throughout the city and region.

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Top Down vs. Bottom Up

By | | Transportation
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The Brookings Institution’s Robert Puentes takes a look at infrastructure procurement and reaches exactly the opposite conclusions as the Antiplanner. Puentes says that successful infrastructure needs 1. visionary leadership; 2. public sector expertise; 3. standardization; and 4. public-private collaborations.

To the Antiplanner, all of these goals and recommendations are exactly wrong. My recommendations would be: 1. get the incentives right; 2. rely on user-fee driven processes; 3. let hundreds of flowers (or at last 50) bloom; and 4. gradually turn infrastructure planning and management to the private sector.

Leaders follow incentives. No matter how visionary the leaders are, bad incentives will lead to bad outcomes. Get the incentives right and the visionary leaders will follow.

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Platitudes Won’t Solve Metro’s Problems

By | | Transportation
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The Washington City Paper asked “thirteen riders, advocates, and experts” how to fix the Washington Metro Rail system. Former Metro general manager Dan Tangherlini and former DC DOT director Gabe Klein offered banalities about “putting the customer first.”

Smart-growth advocate Harriet Trepaning thinks Metro “needs a different kind of leader,” as if changing the person at the top is going to keep smoke out of the tunnels and rails from cracking. She admits that “I don’t think we’ve been straight with anybody, including ourselves or our riders, about what it really takes to [keep the rails in a] state of good repair.” But her only solution is to have “a dedicated source of revenue,” i.e., increase local taxes for a system that already costs state and local taxpayers close to a billion dollars per year.

Coalition for Smarter Growth director Stewart Schwartz and former APTA chair Rod Diridon also want to throw money at it. Others dodge the money question and suggest that Metro do all sorts of things that it can’t afford and doesn’t have any incentive to do anyway.

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