The Antiplanner’s Library: Coming Apart

One of the subthemes of the Antiplanner’s latest book is that there is a growing divide between the middle class (meaning people with white-collar jobs and their families) and the working class (meaning people with blue-collar jobs and their families). Charles Murray‘s latest book, Coming Apart, explores this split in more detail. He bravely proposes a cause of that split and suggests a possible solution.

Part of this book is the next book the Antiplanner wanted to write. Murray provides a great statistical review of growing income inequality leading to frightening conclusion that the United States is turning into a two-class society, one an upper-class elite and the other lower-class drudges who lack economic security or well-being. However, Murray’s explanation of this decline, and his remedy, are both far less persuasive.

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Back in the Air Again

Today the Antiplanner is flying to Oakland to speak about Gridlock at CSU East Bay. The event is sponsored by the Smith Center for Private Enterprise Studies.

Tonight, I’ll be speaking in Pleasant Hill to a Contra Costa County citizens’ group about Best-Laid Plans in in particular about problems with urban planning as it is practiced in the Bay Area.

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On Friday I’ll fly from San Jose to Helena, Montana, where I’ll participate in a Montana Policy Institute Legislative Forum. My presentation will focus on the effects of land-use regulation on housing and businesses. If you are in any of those cities, I hope to see you there.

Density’s Parking Impact

The City of Portland has approved numerous massive four- and five-story apartment buildings in neighborhoods of single-family homes separated by streets of single-story shops. These buildings stress the infrastructure built to handle a smaller population, which is most obvious in the increased traffic and parking problems–especially since many of the buildings are designed without parking.

Despite Portland’s reputation as a car-free city, I can attest that neighborhoods that once had few cars parked on the streets are now jammed with cars, indicating far more cars per housing unit than there were a few decades ago. The introduction of apartments lining the business corridors of these neighborhoods has led to huge increases in congestion, which isn’t helped by the fact that the city carefully keeps most signals uncoordinated so that people now frequently drive on neighborhood streets to avoid stopping at frequent red lights.

To allay concerns that the apartments were taking parking away from existing homes and businesses, the city just published a report reviewing the parking situation around eight recent buildings. Four of these had about two-thirds of parking space per dwelling unit on site, while the other four had no on-site parking (page 3). The city’s report found that, even during peak periods, at least 25 percent of on-street parking within two blocks of these buildings was vacant (p. 2).

That was enough to lead the Oregonian to headline its story about the report, “City study finds increase in no-parking apartments but little neighborhood parking impact.” There’s more to the story, however.

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What Happened to the Environmental Movement?

The environmental movement has lost its way, argues a Montana filmmaker, who is using Kickstart to raise funds for his film about the movement. J.D. King isn’t anti-environmentalist, but he is skeptical about where the movement is going.

For just 15 to 20 % of body weight, one can rest assure cipla levitra a decrease in bad cholesterol our your blood system. Some of the healthy health conditions include losing excess weight, reducing alcohol consumption, levitra without prescription and stopping smoking. Depending levitra without rx on how advanced the cancer is or how quickly it is spreading, your treatment options could range from simply monitoring the problem to undergoing aggressive radiation treatment. Muscle mass is typed using Equipoise preserved much better in this case there is no significant water retention cialis 100mg in the arms or legs. Other than what can be seen in the above pitch, I don’t know what the movie will be like, but I agree with the general premise. I worked in the movement for nearly 20 years, and during most of that time environmental groups were focused on saving the environment and willing to use any tools available to accomplish that goal. Today, most environmental groups seem more aimed at making government bigger, whether that is good for the environment or not. Perhaps some public exposure will help the movement open up to new ideas.

Ironically, the pitch above opens on my friend, Dave Foreman, giving a speech. Dave was always good at incendiary rhetoric in front of a large group, but at heart he is a libertarian who supported Barry Goldwater for president in 1964. It would be interesting to see what Foreman would say if King interviewed him for the movie.

The Case for Privatizing Amtrak

On Monday, the Cato Institute will release the Antiplanner’s latest paper, Stopping the Runaway Train: The Case for Privatizing Amtrak. Antiplanner readers can preview the paper today.

Amtrak’s Empire Builder outside of Glacier National Park, September 13, 2010. (Click image for a larger view.)

The case against Amtrak is simple. Before Amtrak took over the nation’s passenger trains, average rail fares were a third less than average air fares. Today, thanks to four decades of government management, average rail fares are more than twice average air fares. Moreover, subsidies to passenger trains are nearly ten times as great, per passenger mile, as subsidies to airlines (and more than twenty times subsidies to highway travel). When fares and subsidies are combined, Amtrak spends nearly four times as much moving one passenger one mile as the airlines.

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Smart-Growth Advocates Have No Shame

Advocates of smart growth–density and transit–are either consummate liars or complete idiots. Those are the only explanations for many of the statements that come out of their mouths. The latest is the claim that Superstorm Sandy proves we need to spend more on transit.

What Superstorm Sandy proved was that concentrating a lot of people in one place and making them dependent on an easily floodable, centralized transportation system is a bad idea. Spending more money on New York’s subways prior to the storm just would have meant more money lost to storm damage.

We heard the same nonsense when Katrina hit New Orleans, which just happens to be the nation’s second-most transit-dependent city after New York. The people who had automobiles got out before the flooding; the people who depended on transit did not, either because the transit system was incompetently run or because the people didn’t trust the transit system to take them where they wanted to go. Yet some planners seriously argued that the problems resulting from Katrina–including more than 1,100 deaths–were because New Orleans was too “auto dependent.”

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A Nation in Decline?

Without a doubt, yesterday’s election was the most important one held in America at least since 2010, and possibly even 2008. Der Spiegel, the German magazine, argues that the election campaign is evidence that the United States is a nation in decline. Certainly the political system is having its problems, but Der Spiegel‘s prescription of going further into debt to build high-speed trains and other European follies is a dubious way to fix those problems.

The real decline is in the Republican Party, which couldn’t manage to capture the White House or the Senate despite high unemployment and other economic problems. Republicans began shooting themselves in their collective feet early in the last decade when they made immigration a big issue, thus earning the enmity of Latinos, the nation’s fastest-growing and second-most important ethnic group.

Unfortunately, our two-party system too often limits voters to a choice between a social & fiscal liberal vs. a social & fiscal conservative (or, worse, a social & fiscal liberal vs. a social conservative & fiscal liberal). A large percentage of potential voters don’t feel comfortable in either party, and the libertarian side of me thinks, or hopes, that many of those “independents” are socially liberal but fiscally conservative.

By focusing on fiscal issues, the tea parties seemed to provide an alternate route, one that set social issues (few of which are really decided at the federal level anyway) aside. But too many Republican candidates made social issues a major part of their campaigns, thus alienating both Democrats and independents. Romney didn’t help by offering an inconsistent message, as often criticizing the president for cutting budgets, such as medicare and defense, as for spending money.

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TriMet Makes More Friends

One peculiar thing about almost every light-rail line in the country is that fares are on the honors system. There are no turnstiles, no drivers who demand fares upon boarding (the drivers are in a separate compartment from the passengers), and no fare collectors.

Instead, there are ticket boxes at stations and an occasional fare inspector who issues expensive tickets ($175 in Portland) to people who aren’t carrying proof of payment. If the potential for abuse by freeloading passengers is great, the potential for alienating fare-paying customers is almost as serious, particularly since the fare rules aren’t always clear and the ticket boxes at the stations don’t always work.

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Naturally, the attorney who was banned from riding the trains is suing. We can only hope that the court will determine that, not only do people have free-speech rights, they have the right to claim they have free-speech rights without fear of being kicked off the trains. In the meantime, I advise the attorney to telecommute or start riding a bicycle to work.

Big Loss for Honolulu Rail

Opponents of the $5 billion Honolulu rail project prevailed in their lawsuit charging that the city failed to consider a full range of alternatives before deciding to build rail. A federal judge ruled last week that the city was “arbitrary and capricious” in selecting rail and violated the National Environmental Policy Act in failing to present more alternatives in the environmental impact statement.

Construction on the rail line had already been stalled by a previous lawsuit that found that the rail project failed to comply with state historic preservation and burial protection laws when it failed to complete an archeological inventory survey for the 20-mile route before starting construction. Instead, it had planned to do the inventory just ahead of each step of construction.

Basically, the city let construction contracts and began construction prematurely because it wanted to commit funds before voters had an opportunity to stop the project. Voters will get their chance tomorrow, when former Hawaii Governor Ben Cayetano, who opposes the rail project and was one of the plaintiffs in the recent lawsuit, is on the ballot for mayor of the city.

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2011 National Transit Database

The Federal Transit Administration has published the 2011 National Transit Database, which has cost, fare, ridership, and other data for every transit agency, broken down by mode, that receives federal support. You can download the raw data in two formats: the database, which is easier to manipulate, or data tables, which are easier to read (links download self-extracting .exe files; if you have a Mac, you can expand these files using Stuffit Expander).

Either of these self-extracting files includes about 20 to 30 spreadsheets with data ranging from operators wages to energy consumption. It has become an annual ritual for the Antiplanner to extract the most interesting data and compile it in a single summary spreadsheet. The 2011 summary presents the following data by agency and mode:

  1. Transit agency identification number
  2. Mode
  3. Who runs the service (DO=the transit agency, PT=a contractor)
  4. Full agency name
  5. Agency nickname
  6. City (usually the headquarters city of the agency)
  7. Urban area
  8. Passenger trips
  9. Passenger miles
  10. Vehicle revenue miles
  11. Fares
  12. Operating costs
  13. Maintenance costs (what the database calls “existing service” capital improvements)
  14. Capital costs (what the database calls “expanded service” capital improvements)
  15. Number of vehicles
  16. Total number of seats on those vehicles
  17. Standing room on those vehicles
  18. Directional route miles (rail only–note that 50 route miles of rail equals 100 directional route miles)
  19. BTUs of energy consumed
  20. Pounds of carbon dioxide emitted

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