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For the Benefit of the Bureaucrats and the Spite of the People

By | | News commentary, Public lands
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Remember when park rangers were nice people who would go out of their way to help you if you needed it? Neither do I, but it now appears they are going out of their way to hinder you even if you don’t plan to visit a national park. Moreover, at least some these orders come from “above the department,” meaning the White House.

It is well known that the Park Service is closing access to parks and monuments that cost little or nothing to allow access to. For example, it has posted guards around things like the Lincoln Memorial and Jefferson Memorial to make sure people don’t enter, because otherwise it would have to post guards in the memorials themselves to make sure people don’t do inappropriate things like (gasp!) dance inside one of the memorials.

But the Park Service is also attempting to force the closure of state parks, apparently on the theory that some state parks have received federal funding in the past. At least one state governor has refused to go along with this.

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A Red-Letter Day in American History

By | | Transportation
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Today is the 100th anniversary of first moving assembly line for making automobiles. This new production process democratized mobility by making cars available to the masses rather than just an elite.


The moving assembly line at Ford’s Highland Park plant. Click image for a larger view.

The Wall Street Journal celebrated this day early with an article in its weekend edition, “Honk If You Love the Mass-Produced Automobile.” The Antiplanner did not write the headline, but it is appropriate. (If the link doesn’t work, try Googling “Honk If You Love the Mass-Produced Automobile.”)

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Motoring Enthusiasts Elect Senator

By | | News commentary
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The Motoring Enthusiasts Party elected its first senator this week. That’s the Australian Motoring Enthusiasts Party, and they elected Ricky Muir to the Australian Senate representing Victoria. To earn that seat, Muir attracted a total of 11,390 votes, or 0.5 percent of voters.

How does someone become a senator with just 0.5 percent of the vote? This is partly a result of Australia’s preferential voting, which allows voters to enter their first, second, third, and more preferences. This leads to instant run-offs: if no one gets 50 percent of first-preference votes, then the second-preferences are counted from voters whose first-preference candidates did not come in first or second.

That alone would not be enough to elect someone with 0.5 percent of first-preference votes. But the Australian Senate decided to set aside six seats for micro parties. Other micro parties that elected senators this election included Palmer United; Australian Sports, whose goal is to get every Australian involved in sport and recreation; and Family First.

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Spitefully Closed

By | | Follow up, News commentary
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The Antiplanner went for a hike yesterday on a national forest, and nobody tried to keep me out because the government was shut down. National parks, however, are closed to the public during the shutdown.


Flickr photo taken at Saguaro National Park on October 1 by 666ismoney.

Some might argue that national parks have more at stake that shouldn’t be left to the mercies of unsupervised tourists. That may be true in some cases, though not in others. Moreever, when I visit a Forest Service web site, it offers me access to all of the documents and information that were available before the shut down. But when I try to access a Park Service web site, I get a message saying, “Because of the federal government shutdown, all national parks are closed and National Park Service webpages are not operating.”
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Thanks for My Present

By | | News commentary
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Today happens to be the Antiplanner’s birthday, and I’ve always appreciated Congress for changing the first day of the fiscal year to my birthday back in 1977. This year, Congress appears poised to give me an extra-special present: a smaller government, even if only temporarily.

If the federal government shuts down, transportation and land-use will be among the major bones of contention in the debate. In August, Republicans worked hard to successfully prevent the Senate from passing the Democrat’s $54 billion transportation and housing budget (S. 1243). This bill would have spent at least $10 billion more than Republicans think is responsible, partly by funding a number of smart-growth programs.

One of those programs is called the “Choice Neighborhoods Initiative,” which provides $250 million for turning low-income neighborhoods into “sustainable mixed income neighborhoods with appropriate services, schools, public assets, transportation and access to jobs”–in other words, a smart-growth urban renewal program. The Democrat’s bill also provides more money for Amtrak, rail transit, and other questionable programs.

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Back from the Grave

By | | Transportation, Urban areas
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Once declared dead, the $3 billion Columbia River Crossing may yet be built. Despite the Washington legislature’s decision not to fund its share of the boondoggle project, Oregon’s governor is twisting arms and holding a special session of the state legislature today to gain approval (and $450 million in state funds) for the bridge.

Some of the twisting appears to have been done in the Washington, DC office of the Coast Guard, which granted the bridge a permit despite the fact that it will interfere with navigation. The DC office apparently did an end run around the Coast Guard’s Seattle regional office, which had opposed the permit. Oregon has agreed to pay $90 million in compensation to three shipping companies whose operations will be affected by the bridge.

The Columbia River Crossing is a plan to build a new Interstate-5 bridge across the Columbia. The new bridge would have more and wider lanes than the existing one and would also have room for light rail. Some bridge opponents object to the added road capacity; others object to the light rail. All the opponents agree that a replacement bridge isn’t necessary as the existing bridge is in sound condition.

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The Social Cost of Carbon

By | | Regional planning, Transportation
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How much should we spend to reduce greenhouse gas emissions? McKinsey & Company says the United States can reduce its emissions to well below recent levels by 2030 if it invests in programs and technologies that cost no more than $50 per metric ton of abated carbon dioxide equivalent emissions. But some might argue that won’t be enough; others may say it is too much.

To provide another answer, the Obama administration has estimated the social cost of carbon. As shown in the above chart, the cost depends on the year the gases are emitted; the discount rate; and whether you believe the average cost estimate or an estimate at the 95th percentile of the high end of costs. Costs rise for gasses emitted in the future because they are supposed to have more serious and irreversible consequences.

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Should Obama Veto O&C Lands Bill?

By | | Public lands
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The Obama administration has threatened to veto a bill that would put western Oregon forest lands in a trust to be managed for the benefit of Oregon counties. The Antiplanner agrees that this is a bad bill, but for different reasons than Obama.


A sign of the 1980s–BLM clearcuts were even more aggressive than those of the Forest Service. Although this photo was taken in 2006, the BLM has sold far less timber in the last two decades than the two decades before that. Flickr photo by Francis Eatherington.

The Oregon & California (O&C) Railroad land grant lands have a long and sordid history. Way back in 1866, Congress granted millions of acres to anyone who built a railroad from Portland to San Francisco, on the condition that the railroad sell them to actual settlers in amounts no more than 160 acres for no more than $2.50 an acre. Most of the lands were not really suited for farming, so the railroad sold larger parcels and sometimes for more money. As a result, in 1916 Congress took back about 2 million acres of as-yet unsold land from the railroad. Despite the O&C name, the lands are exclusively in Oregon.

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It’s the Economy, Stupid!

By | | Housing, Transportation
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At least once a week, the Antiplanner encounters an urban plan that assumes that millennials and other young people will be much less inclined to drive cars and own their own homes than Americans have been in the past. But a new study from researchers at UCLA reaches the same conclusions as other researchers reported by the Antiplanner: young people drive less because of the weak economy, not because they prefer to walk and take transit.


Is this the American Dream?

Similarly, a 2013 survey from PulteGroup, a home builder, finds that the vast majority of people between 18 and 34 aspire to own their own homes. Among those whose incomes are above $50,000, 65 percent say they hope to buy a home in the next year. Similar results were found from a 2012 poll by Better Homes & Gardens Realty and a 2011 survey by the National Association of Home Builders. Far from appreciating multifamily housing, the greatest fear of young people in New Zealand is that they will be stuck in apartments.

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Piling Subsidies on Subsidies

By | | City planning
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Portland has a history of piling on subsidies to support subsidies. Depending on who you talk to, it either subsidizes rail transit to support subsidized high-density developments or it subsidizes high-density developments to support subsidized rail transit.


Like so much of Portland’s government-funded infrastructure, the twin towers of Portland’s convention center have no structural function but exist–at who knows what cost–solely because they are pretty. Wikimedia commons photo by Cacophony.

Now it is about to decide to build a subsidized hotel in order to support a subsidized convention center. Advocates imply that the hotel will pay for itself, but the truth is that an $80 million subsidy to Hyatt will come mostly out of taxes paid by other hotels in the city. Hyatt will pay another $120 million, getting a $200 million hotel for 60 percent of the cost.

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