The Antiplanner » Home Page

It’s a Matter of Class

By | | News commentary, Regional planning
7 Comments

The British are more aware of class than Americans. So when Paul Dacre, the editor -in-chief of the working-class Daily Mail, says, “there is an unpleasant intellectual snobbery about the Mail in leftish circles, for whom the word ‘suburban’ is an obscenity,” the Brits know what he means.


While some Brits may be ashamed to admit it, more live in suburbs than central cities, though thanks to highly restrictive land-use laws, they tend to live on small lots or in semidetached homes. This suburb is southeast of London. Flickr photo by diamond geezer; click for a larger view.

Suburban hostility among British elites actually preceded that in the United States by at least a couple of decades. As Clive Martin, the former Lord Mayor of London, observes, there may be no “aspect of the British experience that comes in for more derision than suburbia,” a lifestyle that is “relentlessly mocked” as “an acquired taste for people with no taste.”

Continue reading →

You Call This Success?

By | | Transportation
17 Comments

Yesterday, someone told the Antiplanner that rail advocates in their city cited five rail transit lines as successful examples of commuter rail. These five–Utah’s FrontRunner, Dallas-Ft. Worth’s Trinity Railway Express, the northern Virginia Railway Express, the Puget Sounder, and Denver’s Eagle 3P project–are all examples of transit agencies spending gobs of money on projects that accomplish very little.

Here is an alternate view of each project. Unless noted, transit data not taken from the briefing paper are from the National Transit Database published by the Federal Transit Administration. Data on the percentages of commuters riding transit are from the decennial censuses.

FrontRunner: From 1999 to 2011, the Utah Transit Authority (UTA) spent more than $1.7 billion (in 2011 dollars) in capital expenditures on its commuter rail lines. It now has two lines: Ogden to Salt Lake and Provo to Salt Lake, over which it runs 27 trains each way each weekday. Although some trains run through from Ogden to Provo, counting the Ogden-Salt Lake and Provo-Salt Lake trains as separate trips, there are 108 trips per day.

Continue reading →

Transit and Urban Growth

By | | Regional planning, Transportation
18 Comments

Transit advocates often argue that a particular city or region must spend more on urban transit in order to support the growth of that region. To test that claim, the Antiplanner downloaded the latest historic data files from the National Transit Database, specifically the capital funding and service data and operating expenses by mode time series. These files list which urbanized area each transit agency primarily serves, so it was easy to compare these data with Census Bureau population data from 1990, 2000, and 2010.

The transit data include capital and operating expenses for all years from 1991 through 2011. I decided to compare the average of 1991 through 2000 per capita expenses with population growth in the 1990s, and the average of 2001 through 2010 per capita expenses with population growth in the 2010s. In case there is a delayed response, I also compared the average of 1990 through 2000 per capita expenses with population growth in the 2000s. Although it shouldn’t matter too much, I used GNP deflators to convert all costs to 2012 dollars.

I had to make a few adjustments to the population data to account for changes in the Census Bureau’s definitions of urbanized areas. Between 1990 and 2000, the San Francisco-Oakland and Los Angeles urbanized areas were split into several parts, so I added up the various parts for 2000 and 2010 data. At the same time, the Miami, Ft. Lauderdale, and West Palm Beach urbanized areas were merged, so I added these three for 1990. The Oklahoma City urbanized area was radically reduced in size, with the apparent but incorrect result that it had lost population between 1990 and 2000. I used the growth rates for the Oklahoma City metropolitan statistical area instead. Since they are served by the same transit agencies, I combined Boulder and Denver data as well as Salt Lake, Ogden, and Provo-Orem data.

Continue reading →

That Explains It

By | | News commentary
10 Comments

As reported in the New Yorker, an OECD study finds that Americans have some of the worst problem-solving skills in the developed world. For 16-65 year olds, only Spaniards are less numerate, The problem of ED was cialis cheapest https://regencygrandenursing.com/post-acute-sub-acute-care/orthopedic-rehab increasing among men and the treatments which he finds shy to discuss with others. The massage of Overnight oil will get for men a highest pleasure and enjoyment in lovemaking sessions. levitra prices You can gain online generic cialis rock hard erection during the lovemaking time. The discontinuation of the medication should also be done as right on time as cialis prices would be prudent. and only Spaniards and Italians are less literate (see pages 259 and 264).

No wonder so many voters support billion-dollar rail projects aimed at addressing problems that could be solved by million-dollar bus projects.

Maglev: The Next Generation of Boondoggles

By | | News commentary, Transportation
18 Comments

A group in Maryland is promoting magnetically levitated trains in the New York-Washington corridor. “Superconducting” maglev, says the group, is the “next generation of transportation.”


Superconducting maglev train being tested in Japan. Wikimedia commons photo by Yosemite.

Get real. Japan is proposing to build such a line from Tokyo to Osaka: 320 miles for a mere $112 billion. That’s $350 million per mile, or twice as much as the current estimated cost of California high-speed rail boondoggle (about $100 billion for 440 miles). Except for contractors, nobody is too happy about the cost of that line.

Continue reading →

Conference Wrap-Up

By | | Transportation
1 Comment

Transportation blogger Jim Bacon attended the American Dream conference and has a few words to say about Dale Moser’s presentation about Megabus. Bacon also comments on the debate that took place Sunday night over the proposition that Congress should abolish New Starts and distribute the same amount of money using a formula based on transit ridership or fares.

This debate was supposed to be about the ethics of Congress giving transit agencies incentives to choose high-cost transit systems when lower-cost systems would work just as well. But it descended into a debate over rail transit. I argued that, with a formula fund, transit agencies would be free to spend their share of the formula on rail transit if they wished, but would not be rewarded for choosing rail over less-expensive buses.

My opponent, Art Guzzetti, of the American Public Transportation Association, argued that capital projects can’t be built with formula funds; they require dedicated funds. I responded that all federal highway funds are formula funds and have been used on such capital projects as the Interstate Highway System. The difference is that the Interstate Highway System was built with user fees in the form of gas taxes, and only built at the pace that gas tax revenues allowed, while transit agencies want to build expensive rail lines regardless of the fact that user fees will not pay for the capital, maintenance, or even much of the operating costs.
What it comes down to is how many webmasters have learned to market davidfraymusic.com sildenafil delivery a service or product appropriately. God is purchase cheap cialis browse around for more a loving and forgiving being. For men, infertility can happen due to varicocele or cialis generika 40mg damage in the reproductive system. You are also advised to practice less strenuous exercises like walking, weight lifting, yoga, jogging and meditation. viagra france http://davidfraymusic.com/events/dresden-frauenkirche/
Continue reading →

The Megabus Revolution

By | | Transportation
17 Comments

One of the many excellent speakers at this year’s American Dream conference was Dale Moser, CEO of Coach USA and Megabus. Coach USA is owned by Stagecoach, one of the two large private transit companies that emerged when Britain privatized much of its transit industry. (The other is First Group, which among other things owns Greyhound.)


Just seven years after it began, Megabus covers scores of cities in the East, South, and Midwest as well as several in the California market. Click image for a larger view.

Today you can easily cialis pharmacy get nettle leaf extract from market in the form of tea powders. About 6,400,000 Prescription had been filled in U.S for Sildenafil in Nov 1998, dispensing 500,000,000 tablets world wide.Buy viagra mg from Shoppharmarx.com. cialis is the best medicine to treat Erectile Dysfunction in men. As endothelial damage causes low nitric oxide, and decreased blood flow, the erectile function viagra prices is impacted. These anti-erectile dysfunction medicines are some of the flavors. buy cialis online Moser’s presentation describes how Megabus expanded from a few Midwest routes in 2006 to dozens of routes serving more than 80 cities today. Megabus truly revolutionized the intercity bus industry, which had steadily declined since the 1960s but has been growing since 2007.

Continue reading →

Yellow Journalism at the L.A. Times

By | | News commentary, Transportation
6 Comments

Every experiment with vehicle-mile pricing that has ever been done protected driver privacy. In most if not all experiments, devices used to calculate charges did not even keep track of where users were; only what they owed. Legislation introduced in Congress to shift to vehicle-mile pricing set privacy as a top priority. Yet the Los Angeles Times ominously writes about “black boxes” that “possibly” will tell the government where you are driving or have driven.

Given concerns over the NSA and other government agencies that have admitted they are keeping track of our emails and other communications, privacy is a legitimate concern. Yet given the concerted efforts by supporters of vehicle-mile pricing to protect privacy, it is irresponsible of the L.A. Times to make a big deal of this.

The article quoted several people pointing out that gas taxes don’t work anymore, if they ever did, but ended up quoting someone saying Congress should just raise those gas taxes so that drivers won’t have to “be concerned about their privacy.”

Continue reading →

Back in the Air Again

By | | Housekeeping, Regional planning
6 Comments

The Antiplanner is flying to Washington, DC, today for the Preserving the American Dream conference. Postings may be thin next week as this conference will consume much of my time.

Coincident with the conference, the Cato Institute will release The Gateway to 10,000 Illnesses by Robert Boyd, D.O., (biocranialinstitute.com) which is a challenge to the broad world of medicine and promises a reassessment of the causative processes of many disorders, has been released world-wide in eBook form. buy viagra online Even when the condition of impotence is tied to physical issues, there can be psychological underpinnings, which must be discount pfizer viagra addressed along with successful treatment of the physical causes. We can also understand the theory of life buying cheap cialis look at here satisfaction by using the medicine. There are many institutes out there but very few that can meet your requirements. viagra prescription deeprootsmag.org my latest paper on the follies of sustainability planning. Readers can get a preview of the paper, which argues that sustainability planning is not a cost-effective way of saving energy, reducing greenhouse gas emissions, or solving other problems.

Central Planning for Freight

By | | Transportation
12 Comments

It’s not enough that urban planners are messing up passenger travel in cities. Now they want to “reduce urban impacts” of freight transport. This report, with its discussion of “modal shifts” and “Freight villages,” reads like someone took a smart-growth plan for rail transit and transit-oriented developments and simply did a bunch of finds-and-replaced.

The report includes numerous comparisons of the costs of truck vs. rail freight. Rail is less expensive than trucks–if you have high volumes moving from point A to point B. But rail simply cannot compete with trucks for low volumes moving from many origins to many destinations. That’s why most rail shipping today is coal, grain, or containers–all things that can go from one of a few origins to one of a few destinations.

The fundamental problem with this report is the same as is found in most anti-auto reports: it treats trucks as the problem rather than treating the impacts of trucks. Are trucks noisy? Yes, but muffling the noise works better than trying to limit truck traffic. Do they pollute? Yes, but we know that pollution can be cleaned up at the exhaust pipe more effectively than by reducing miles of travel. Do trucks add to congestion? Sure, but treating congestion with variable-priced roads, signal coordination, and similar road improvements works better than trying to reduce driving.
Their products are talked about in the process of growing older, purchase levitra it is not necessarily an inevitable circumstance in the actual aging process. All you have prescription cialis cost to do is rub the creme on the penis. downtownsault.org generic viagra online SOD, sphincter of Oddi dysfunction, is the medical name used for male impotence and it even happens to be the generic version of the brand name medication. Having established that vitamin D is must for the health of children and pets; so this http://downtownsault.org/downtown/nightlife/satisfied-frog/ cialis 5mg sale medicine must be kept away from the reach of young kids, females since it could lead for disastrous results.
Continue reading →