BART Strike Today?

San Francisco BART employees were going to go on strike a couple of months ago, but Governor Brown invoked a “60-day cool-off period.” It seems unlikely that 60 more days of negotiations could resolve the issues–and they didn’t, as workers are expected to on strike today.

BART says that it needs $15 billion to rejuvenate its system over the next few years. To cover this cost, it wants workers to pay more into their pension and health care plans. Despite a proposed 12 percent pay raise over four years, the workers refused. Unions offered to go into binding arbitration, but BART management–probably fearing that arbitrators wouldn’t see BART’s maintenance problem as having anything to do with worker pay–refused.
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Even Bay Area commuters who used to love BART are beginning to understand the problems. First, BART employees, like most transit employees, have a cushy deal to begin with, and arbitrators would be reluctant to cut it back. More important, rail transit is just too damn expensive, and the costs never go away. Outside of places with Tokyo- or Hong Kong-like densities, nobody can really afford to run a passenger rail system, and those who try are going to find themselves in the same bind as BART is in today.

The Politics of Gridlock

The Antiplanner is glad to see that Republicans decided to take my advice and back off on the showdown over the debt ceiling. But this still leaves the question of why our government is suffering from so much gridlock and how we can prevent it in the future.

Fortunately, left-leaning journalist Ezra Klein over at the Washington Post has some answers. Apparently, gridlock is all the fault of the tea parties. The tea parties forced the House to pass a “no-earmarks” rule, which means Congressional leaders can’t use earmarks to bribe members of Congress to vote for stupid laws.

Second, tea parties (and others) have forced Congress to make its decisions transparent, that is, open to public scrutiny. The inability of members to make back-room deals is apparently reducing Congress’ ability to function.

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Debt Crisis? What Debt Crisis?

A few weeks ago, pundits were predicting dire consequences if the government shut down. As near as I can tell, except for the National Park Service acting more thuggish than usual, nothing really happened. People are still getting their social security checks. American soldiers are still getting killed in Afghanistan. Some government web sites have annoyingly shut down, as if it costs more to run a web site that provides information than it does to operate a site that only says it will refuse to provide that information.

national debt
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This debt clock seems to be off, as the current debt ceiling is just under $16.7 trillion. But it shows how fast Congress is spending money.

Now the predictions about what will happen if Congress refuses to increase the debt ceiling are even more dire. I don’t really buy that either. Investors know that this is just a political spat; if they believe that the United States can support more than $16.7 trillion worth of debt, they’ll believe it just as much a few weeks from now as today.

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Why Is This Even a Question?

Denver’s Regional Transit District (RTD) has a tough decision to make. Should it spend under $300 million on bus-rapid transit and get an estimated 16,300 to 26,600 daily riders? Or should it spend $600 million to $700 million on a commuter train that is projected to attract 2,100 to 3,400 daily riders?

To officials in the cities of Boulder and Longmont, this is a no-brainer. Every other major city in the Denver urban area is getting a train, so therefore they need a train too, no matter what the cost and how few the riders. RTD’s general manager piously says, “we want to reach a consensus with the stakeholders,” referring to the fact that Boulder, Longmont, and other city officials only agreed to RTD’s multi-billion-dollar “SlowTracks” rail scheme in the first place on the condition that every major city would get a rail line.

While it seems absurd to spend twice as much money on a technology that will attract barely a tenth as many riders, the truth is that bus-rapid transit would perform better than trains in all of the region’s major corridors. RTD simply ignored that option in those other corridors, even when its own analysis showed that buses were better than trains (which it did every time RTD did a complete alternatives analysis).

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Why Detroit Is Blighted

Forbes has an article about a home builder who is reducing blight in Detroit by raising money to demolish homes and other abandoned structures. However, the article gives some clues about why those neighborhoods are blighted in the first place.


Abandoned home in Detroit.

As everyone knows, large swaths of Detroit are in a blighted condition, with close to 80,000 abandoned homes and other structures as the city has lost a quarter of its population in the last decade alone. In 2010, the city set a goal of trying to remove 10,000 homes in three years, but met only half this goal at a cost of $72 million, or close to $15,000 per home.

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Do We Need New York City?

In Triumph of the City, Harvard urban economist Edward Glaeser argued that dense cities were still important even in the age of telecommuting and the Internet because of the importance of face-to-face contacts. For this reason, while Glaeser didn’t support subsidies for density, he still expected to see dense cities well into the future.

The Antiplanner disagreed. “Thanks to the automobile, we can have such face-to-face contact with far more people, and a greater diversity of people, than those who are within walking distance of a Manhattan high rise. Thanks to the Internet, we can dispense with face-to-face contacts when doing such routine things as shopping and many types of work. In other words, the economic forces that built dense cities such as London and New York are far weaker today.”

In this light, it was interesting to read yesterday’s report in the Wall Street Journal that New York banks are moving many employees well out of Manhattan (if this link doesn’t work, Google “New York Banks Cut and Run”). After the financial crisis, the city’s ten largest banks reduced their Manhattan rental space from 38 million to 32 million square feet. Property owners hoped that they would pick up that space as the economy recovered, but instead they are moving people to lower-cost areas such as Florida.

“The new reality is that you do most of your work by phone,” says an employee of Deutsche Bank who works in Jacksonville (if this link doesn’t work, search for “Deutsche Bankers Warm Up to Florida”). “Why can’t we do that in a location with a better cost of living?”

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Learning the Wrong Lessons

Matthew Yglesias observes that, because of the government shutdown, farmers don’t know how much pigs are worth. The USDA normally keeps track of and publishes pork prices. Yglesias concludes that the government shutdown is threatening our farm economy.

The correctly conclusion, however, is that we should let the unreliable government do things that can be done by private parties. If USDA weren’t publishing pork prices, someone else would, and they would not have to rely on a continued flow of tax dollars to keep them going.
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Despite the government shutdown, the Antiplanner managed to safely get to Bakersfield, California yesterday to give a presentation on why high-speed rail won’t relieve congestion and what we should do instead. Interested people can download a 14.6-MB PDF of this presentation with notes summarizing my narration. Although the original presentation included videos of driverless cars, I didn’t include them in the PDF, but you can download them in this 10-MB zip file.

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

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

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

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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