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National Deforestation

By | | Public lands
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The Antiplanner’s friend, Andy Stahl–who frequently comments on this blog–recently appealed a timber sale on the Bighorn National Forest. That takes me back to the 1970s and 1980s, when Andy and I appealed timber sales, forest plans, and other national forest and BLM projects almost on a weekly basis. Sometime around 1980, I held the distinction of having appealed more BLM timber sales than anyone, but Andy soon eclipsed me.


Recent aerial photo of timber cut from the Bighorn National Forest in about 1985.

During the 1980s, the Forest Service sold nearly 11 billion board feet of timber each year, but in the 1990s this rapidly declined, partly due to Andy’s activities protecting the spotted owl and–I’d like to think–partly due to Forest Service employees reading my book, Reforming the Forest Service, and deciding they didn’t want to be that kind of an agency any more. (As I describe in this article, this is greatly oversimplified and a lot of other factors were involved, some of them quite surprising).

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Horse Pucky

By | | City planning, Transportation
25 Comments

If you thought Mayor Michael Bloomberg was bad, with his proposed ban on large sodas and other attempts at social engineering, just wait for some of Mayor de Blasio‘s ideas to become law. De Blasio has gained attention for wanting to ban horse-drawn carriages in Central Park because they are “cruel” to the horses. It’s apparently much less cruel to simply send the horses to glue factories, but that’s a leftist for you: it is more important to put people (and creatures) out of work because you don’t think their jobs are dignified than it is to let them work for themselves.

De Blasio says he wants to replace the horses with electric cars. That’s so environmentally thoughtful of him, especially since half of New York’s electricity comes from burning fossil fuels. It might promote global warming, but at least it’s not cruel to horses. Whatever you think of the treatment of horses who live in roomy barns, get a minimum of five weeks of vacation per year, and see their doctors far more frequently than most humans, the point is that de Blasio is going to try to micromanage everything.
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Case in point: de Blasio has appointed Polly Trottenberg as his new transportation commissioner. As undersecretary of transportation for policy, Trottenberg is probably the source of most of Ray LaHood’s crazy ideas about streetcars, livability (=living without cars), high-speed rail, and other transportation issues. New York’s loss is America’s gain.

California Thinks Your Time Is Worthless

By | | Regional planning, Transportation
40 Comments

California’s S.B. 375 mandates that cities increase the population densities of targeted neighborhoods because everyone knows that people drive less and higher densities and transit-oriented developments relieve congestion. One problem, however, is that transportation models reveal that increased densities actually increase congestion, as measured by “level of service,” which measures traffic as a percent of a roadway’s capacity and which in turn can be used to estimate the hours of delay people suffer.

The California legislature has come up with a solution: S.B. 743 exempts cities from having to calculate and disclose levels of service in their environmental impact reports for densification projects. Instead, the law requires planners to come up with alternative measures of the impacts of densification.

On Monday, December 30, the Governor’s Office of Planning and Research released a “preliminary evaluation of alternative methods of transportation analysis. The document notes that one problem with trying to measure levels of service is that it is “difficult and expensive to calculate.” Well, boo hoo. Life is complicated, and if you want to centrally plan society, if you don’t deal with difficult and expensive measurement problems, you are going to botch things up even worse than if you do deal with those problems.

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Seceding from the Plan

By | | Regional planning
23 Comments

The “Seven50” plan is meant to guide land-use and transportation in seven Southeast Florida counties, including Miami-Dade County, for 50 years. Partly funded by a $4.25 million sustainable communities grant from HUD to the South Florida Regional Planning Council, the plan predictably calls for densification, walkable neighborhoods, and improved transit, It can help improve control sale generic tadalafil and endurance through toning the pubococcygeus muscles which let you stop the urine mid-stream flow. There have been a lot of people are side effects levitra using all these top supplements for aphrodisiac that increase love making desire and pleasure with no kind of side adverse effect. Everything what I mention above makes sense in the advanced stages of the biliary pancreatitis, as well. http://opacc.cv/documentos/Conteudo%20Programatico%20e%20CV%20do%20Formador_%20Formacao%20em%20S%20%20Vicente.pdf cheap viagra in uk It becomes extremely necessary to cure such problems at the personal level may also generic viagra on line http://opacc.cv/opacc/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/documentos_Formacao2012_docs_Controlo%20Interno%20e%20Auditoria_2012.pdf start reflecting in one’s workplace. because any prescription that doesn’t work in Portland or San Jose should be applied everywhere else anyway.

The good news is that three of the counties have decided to opt out of the plan. Congratulations to the American Coalition 4 Property Rights for successfully killing at least three-sevenths of the plan.

$12.2 Billion Bike Path

By | | Transportation
19 Comments

Some bicycling nut in London has proposed 135-mile “skycycle,” meaning a three-story tall exclusive bikeway, around the city. The headlines to the story say it will cost £220 million, but that’s just for the first four miles. At that rate, the entire 135-mile system would cost nearly £8 billion, or some $12.2 billion.

Meanwhile, the Washington Post reports that most American states are increasingly controlled either by people who think this would be a good idea or those who think it would be a bad idea. Red states are doing better economically, argues Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal, but Illinois Governor Pat Quinn argues that red states leave too many people behind.

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High-Speed Rail in England

By | | Transportation
4 Comments

High-speed rail fortunately appears to be dead in the United States, but it is still alive and kicking taxpayers in England. In the last decade, the country spent 11 billion pounds (about $18 billion) building high-speed rail about 67 miles from London to the Channel Tunnel, a project known as High Speed 1. Ridership was disappointing: the private company that operates it expected revenues would cover operating costs, but instead has required government subsidies of more than 100 million pounds per year.


Click image for a larger view.

Despite this, politicians and rail contractors want to spend at least 43 billion pounds (more than $70 billion) on High Speed 2, from London north to Manchester and Leeds. Manchester is about 200 highway miles from London, and the rail line promises to cut a bit more than an hour off of people’s highway journeys. However, the train will take about the same amount of time as flying, and by my count there are currently 13 flights a day between London and Manchester.

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Portland’s Continuing Disaster

By | | Regional planning, Urban areas
55 Comments

The Oregonian‘s latest coverage of Portland’s densification disaster focuses on outer Southeast Portland, a neighborhood that lacks sidewalks on three out of four streets and has poor roads and transit service to boot. When the city proposed to densify the neighborhood in 1996, residents hotly protested, but the city promised to add sidewalks and improve other services.

Since then, the city has added not an inch of sidewalk, roads are in worse shape than ever, and transit service is even less frequent than it was in 1996. But the city has permitted the construction of more than 14,000 new dwelling units. One homeowner (presumably not the home’s occupant) built five three-story duplexes in his or her backyard.

This is the fate that was planned for Oak Grove, a neighborhood the Antiplanner lived in until 1998. Oak Grove was one of 36 neighborhoods targeted by Metro, Portland’s regional planning agency, for densification. Metro also gave Portland and 23 other cities and three counties population targets that they had to meet by densifying neighborhoods. Oak Grove residents protested loudly enough that they avoided densification, but that just meant that some other neighborhood had to be densified to meet the population targets.

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Seasons’ Greetings

By | | Housekeeping
10 Comments

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Keeping the Poor Out of the Suburbs and Off Our Lawns

By | | Mission
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Mother Jones frets that moving “poor people to the suburbs is bad for the environment.” After all, it’s pretty meaningless if all these millennials moving to desirable inner-city neighborhoods to live low-impact lifestyles are merely forcing poor people to move to the suburbs where they will have to waste energy by driving a lot and heating their large homes.

The solution, the magazine suggests, is eliminating urban zoning that limit heights and densities. “Why are all the buildings [in Washington DC] merely six or 10 stories tall? Why not 40, when the prices indicate that the demand is there?” After all, polls of poor people show that “They would rather live in the projects than in a shelter.”

How generous of Mother Jones to wish that all poor people could live in the projects! But did anyone ask the poor if they would rather live in three-bedroom, single-family homes than in the project? The Antiplanner is all in favor of ridding the cities of zoning, but zoning also must be eliminated from suburban and rural areas. That way people can choose how they want to live based on the real costs, not on the artificially inflated costs found in places like Washington DC.
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Drive by Wire

By | | News commentary, Transportation
15 Comments

“I found myself driving the Infiniti on surprisingly long highway stretches without touching the accelerator, brake pedal or steering wheel,” writes New York Times auto expert Lawrence Ulrich in his review of the Infiniti Q50. “The Q50 charts a course toward the self-driving cars of tomorrow.”

As shown in the 2010 video above, the technology to allow cars to detect lines on the pavement and steer themselves between those lines–known as lane keeping–has been available for several years. But most auto companies selling in the United States have used a weakened version of the system known as lane keep assist that alerts drivers if they inadvertently cross the stripes, but isn’t designed to do all of the steering independently.

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