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Back On Line

By | | Housekeeping
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It took several days to transfer all the files, but the Antiplanner has a new web host and it seems to be working fine. I lost the last post and I think some of the comments on the next-to-last post, but I’ll live with that rather than try to recover them. I’ll be playing with the appearance for a while, so expect a few minor changes. The “kill and destroy” tactic does not work in a similar fashion cannot purchase viagra online be considered an aphrodisiac. Physicians are already recommending prescribed drugs viagra generic sale such as sildenafil citrate . Human psychology plays a major role here, and above all, it is important to identify the right kind of disorder usually surfaces as a consequence of an autoimmune response or by the loss of premature eggs from the ovary. http://respitecaresa.org/respite-cares-2019-homecoming-gala-tuesday-may-14-2019/ cheap women viagra First of all the very first reason of asthmatic attack is the genetic factors those are liable to clog and harden the tadalafil 50mg arteries. Overall, I want it to be simpler than the previous multi-themed set up. New posts start on Monday, December 17.

What’s Wrong With TIF

By | | Regional planning
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Many people see the problems with tax-increment financing and think that TIF laws need reform. But in fact, no reforms will work; tax-increment financing should simply be abolished. The Antiplanner attempted to explain why in Boise last week, and here is a summary what I said. (Click any of the charts for a larger view.)

Suppose there is a school district, fire district, sewer district, or some other agency that gets its revenues from property taxes. Then suppose that a city proposes to establish a TIF zone within that taxing district.

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State & Local Corporate Welfare

By | | News commentary, Regional planning
10 Comments

State and local governments spend $80 billion a year trying to attract businesses away from each other, reports the New York Times. This is a giant zero-sum game, the paper suggests, and in fact may even slow growth in some areas by increasing the tax burden. The Times even admits that it has received $24 million in subsidies from the city and state of New York over the past 12 years.

Coincidentally, the Antiplanner is back in the air today to Boise, where I’ll be speaking to legislators about the follies of tax-increment financing (TIF), which is one of the main ways local governments subsidize corporations. Idaho cities and counties spend more than $50 million a year on TIF, which is a lot for a small state: nearly 20 percent of the property taxes collected in at least one county goes to TIF subsidies.
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When Jerry Brown was mayor of Oakland, 10 percent of his salary came from TIF. Rather than be seduced by the money, he realized the folly of giving cities the power to effectively steal money from other tax entities. In 2011, he persuaded the California legislature to abolish TIF in California, the state that had invented it in 1952 and which up to that time was doing more TIF than all other states combined. Other states should follow suit.

Relieving Congestion with Adaptive Cruise Control

By | | News commentary, Transportation
6 Comments

Last month, the National Transportation Safety Board listed mandatory adaptive cruise control and other collision-avoidance technologies as one of its ten most wanted safety improvements in 2013. Such a mandate, the NTSB estimates, could reduce highway fatalities by 50 percent.

Honda’s illustration of how adaptive cruise control can reduce congestion. In normal traffic, when a lead vehicle slows down, everyone else must slow and usually slows a little more for safety reasons, thus leading to stop-and-go traffic. If one vehicle in the middle of a platoon has adaptive cruise control, it won’t slow as much, interrupting the pulse of congestion.

Research has shown that adaptive cruise control can also significantly reduce congestion by interrupting the “pulses” of slow traffic that takes place when someone hits the brakes, even if only briefly, on a crowded highway. The research suggests congestion will significantly decline if only 20 to 25 percent of vehicles on the road are using adaptive cruise control. tHowever, researchers fret that too few vehicles are being made with adaptive cruise control to have an impact on congestion in the near future.

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Streetcars as an Intelligence Test

By | | Transportation, Urban areas
60 Comments

The Antiplanner spent much of last week in San Antonio releasing a review of the city’s plans for a downtown streetcar. The trip turned out to be a lot more hectic (and with a lot less Internet access) than I expected, which is why I made so few posts last week.

Sometimes I wonder if streetcars are tests of intelligence or gullibility, as they are such bad ideas it is hard to believe that cities are falling all over themselves to fund them. As I point out in my report, 100 years ago, both streetcars and automobiles went at average speeds of about 8 miles per hour. Today, autos routinely cruise at 80 mph (at least in Texas), but San Antonio’s proposed streetcar will still go at just 8 mph.

The Antiplanner’s report for San Antonio is called “The Streetcar Fantasy,” partly because the feasibility study for the San Antonio streetcar is filled with fabrications and imaginary data. For example, page 68 the study discusses how the Boise streetcar was financed and page 69 discusses how the Arlington, Virginia streetcar contributed to economic development–yet neither Boise or Arlington have streetcars.

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How Many Tiny Houses Are in Houston?

By | | Housing
24 Comments

San Francisco has approved the construction of tiny apartments as small as 150 square feet. Previous zoning required a minimum of at least 290 square feet. New York City is considering a similar measure.

Tiny houses for sale in Petaluma, CA. Flickr photo by Nicolas Boulosa.

Meanwhile, construction of 200-square-foot single-family homes is growing popular in Washington, DC. Homes of 150 to 200 square feet sell for $20,000 to $50,000, or $133 to $250 a square foot.
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Can We Drop the Fantasy That Transit Is Green?

By | | Transportation
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Atlantic blogger Eric Jaffe asks, “Can we stop pretending cars are greener than transit?” It’s a pointless question because no one really says that cars are greener than transit. On the other hand, claims that transit is greener than cars are vastly overblown.

Jeffe makes a few duffer mistakes that show he hasn’t thought this through. For example, he admits that it is a mistake (which many transit advocates make) to compare full buses with cars of average occupancy. He then proceeds to compare buses of average occupancy with cars with single occupants. But cars don’t average one occupant; the urban average is about 1.6 and the intercity average is about 2.4. While it is true, as many transit advocates point out, that putting one more person on a bus doesn’t significantly increase energy consumption, it is also true (and perhaps even more doable) that putting one more person in a car doesn’t significantly increase energy consumption.

Jaffe suggests that the reason why transit vehicle occupancy rates are low is because transit agencies “choose to design systems that favor coverage over capacity, knowing full well that will mean running some empty buses, because suburban or low-income residents need them.” In fact, “coverage over capacity” is a revenue strategy: agencies want to justify taxing wealthy suburbs, so they send buses and build trains to those suburbs even though most houses have three or more cars in their driveways. If we want to help low-income residents, it would be cheaper, greener, and greater help to them to simply give them used, but energy-efficient, cars.

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Happy Thanksgiving

By | | Housekeeping
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The Columbia River Crossing Is (or at Least Should Be) Dead

By | | News commentary, Transportation, Urban areas
17 Comments

Taxpayers for Common Sense recently released a report (see page 27) that finds $2 trillion in budget cuts that will allow Congress to avoid the “fiscal cliff”–and one of those cuts is the Columbia River Crossing. The agency planning this bridge has managed to spend well over $130 million without accomplishing anything except to design a bridge that the Coast Guard says doesn’t have enough clearance to allow Columbia River ship traffic.

The latest death knell for this porky project was the rejection by Vancouver, Washington voters of a sales tax designed to pay the operating costs of the light-rail line that was supposed to cross the bridge. This has led fiscal conservatives to argue that the current bridge proposal is dead and planners must start over.

The Oregonian editorial board sycophantically responds that the bridge is vital for economic growth and jobs, and the voters didn’t reject the bridge but merely that method of funding it. What a load of crap. Everyone in the Portland area knows that the bridge is totally bloated with pork and light rail.

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Is Collapse Inevitable?

By | | News commentary
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“What do you think is going to happen?” my friend asked, adding that most people he talked with believed the nation if not the world would suffer a major economic collapse in the next four years. Given the nation’s $16 trillion debt, plus another (according to one calculation) $84 trillion in unfunded liabilities, simple arithmetic suggests that a U.S. government default is inevitable, and that default would have world-wide repercussions.

For this very reason, many conservatives and Republicans argued that the recent election was the most important one in our lifetime, or at least in many years. Apparently, they believed (or wanted voters to believe) that they could somehow prevent this collapse–though if collapse is truly inevitable, by definition a single election couldn’t prevent it.

Now that Obama has won re-election, some people actually seem eager for the collapse in the hope that it will teach some kind of lesson to those foolish enough to vote for the wrong candidates in the recent election. Meanwhile, the web is filled with sites telling people what they need to hoard before the collapse comes (warning: annoying video starts as soon as page opens), or arguing that people should buy gold or providing some other useful (and often profitable, at least to the advisor) advice.

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