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Is the U.N. Taking Over America?

By | | Mission
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At a recent meeting about Oregon’s land-use planning system, someone asked how much Agenda 21 has influenced Oregon’s laws and rules. The answer the Antiplanner gave was a big, fat zero. Agenda 21, after all, was written in 1992, while Oregon’s legislature passed the state’s land-use law in 1973. The most radical conception of that law was first conceived in 1989 by 1000 Friends of Oregon.

This point is made by a recent article from the Antiplanner’s faithful allies at the Heritage Foundation. All of the ideas known as smart growth, compact development, new urbanism, or whatever were developed in the United States decades before Agenda 21 was written in 1992. If anything, American planners influenced Agenda 21 far more than they were influenced by it.

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Fast Spending on FasTracks

By | | News commentary, Transportation
15 Comments

The projected cost of the Denver-to-Longmont, or Northwest, rail line–one of six approved by Denver-area voters in 2004–has risen from the 2004 estimate of $462 million to $1.4 billion. For all that money, RTD won’t even get to own the rail line, but will merely rent it from BNSF. Moveover, most of the route from Denver to Boulder and Longmont will parallel a much-less-expensive bus-rapid transit route from Denver to Boulder.

The original cost projection for this corridor, made back in 2001, was just $211 million, an estimate published in a document called the Major Investment Study. This is the only study that seriously looked at alternatives other than rail transit (though it didn’t look at many alternatives), and a cost of $211 million may have seemed reasonable compared to, say, building new highway lanes.

According to this document, by 2004 the estimate had risen to $565 million (in 2002 dollars). (My copy of RTD’s 2004 financial plan says $594 million.) By 2007 the cost had risen once again by $120 million, and by 2008 it had reached $707 million.

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Moving in for the Kill–or to Be Fleeced?

By | | News commentary, Transportation
7 Comments

The Voice of Orange County reports that opponents of California’s high-speed rail boondoggle are “moving in for the kill.” But the article presents no clear path for killing the train to nowhere. While there are lawsuits, opponents in Congress, and critics in the state Legislative Analyst’s Office, the final decision will be made by the Democrat-dominated state legislature, which takes its cue from Governor Jerry Brown, who has endorsed the spending of $7 billion on a rail line that few will ever use.

The latest objective poll shows that 37 percent of the people who voted for high-speed rail in 2008 have changed their minds and would vote against it today now that the cost has doubled and the admitted benefits declined. (Only 3 percent of people who voted no say they would vote yes today.)

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Driverless Cars Take Off

By | | News commentary, Transportation
10 Comments

Self-driving cars will transform mobility, says Sebastian Thrun, the engineer who led the development of the Volkswagen and Google self-driving cars. The fact that Thrun’s article is featured in the New York Times constitutes a major endorsement from America’s “newspaper of record.”

This is the only major endorsement for driverless cars as represented by Thrun. The Huffington Post counts them as one of “18 great ideas of 2011.” Fast Company magazine declared Thrun number 5 on its list of the 100 most creative people in business in 2011 (and Thrun isn’t even a businessman).
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Maybe now we’ll be able to talk about real mobility instead of the artificial mobility provided by such obsolete technologies as streetcars and high-speed rail. “I envision a future in which our technology is available to everyone, in every car,” says Thrun. “I envision a future without traffic accidents or congestion. A future where everyone can use a car.” Sounds great to the Antiplanner.

Remember When Transit Used to Be Efficient?

By | | News commentary, Transportation
30 Comments

Arlington County, Virginia wants to spend $261 million building a streetcar line that, just four years ago, was expected to cost $100 million less. The streetcar’s costs are now expected to average $50 million a mile.

That’s quite literally insane. When San Diego built the first modern light-rail line, which opened in 1981, it cost about $15 million a mile in today’s dollars. But as more cities built light rail, costs soon rose to $50 million a mile on the average, with some coming in at more than $200 a mile.

Then, in 1999, Portland decided to built a streetcar line, which was billed as a “low-cost alternative” to light rail. Yet Portland’s original line cost $20 million a mile, more than San Diego’s original light-rail line. Now $50 million a mile is considered “comparable to similar projects across the nation.”

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Forthcoming Book: American Nightmare

By | | Housing, Mission
18 Comments

The American dream of families owning their own homes has become a victim of class warfare, with the middle class attempting to suppress homeownership among the working class and other people they view as undesirable neighbors. That, at least, is one of the major themes of American Nightmare: How Government Undermines the Dream of Home Ownership, which the Cato Institute will publish next May.

The Antiplanner’s work on this book is the major reason why I haven’t posted as regularly this year as in previous years. I began research for the book in January, started writing in July, and submitted the final manuscript to Cato on November 4. Though this was my third book since starting this blog, it was the most time-consuming because it required so much new research and analyses.

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If You Don’t Like the Data, Attack the Messenger

By | | News commentary, Transportation
2 Comments

California’s Legislative Analyst’s Office announced this week that the state is about to waste $6 billion or more starting construction on a high-speed rail line that will never be completed. “The availability of funding to complete a usable segment is highly uncertain,” said the report, to which the Antiplanner responds, “Duh!”

Yet some people aren’t ready to hear the truth. Assemblyperson Cathleen Galgiani, who claims to have authored the law that is now expected to cost taxpayers more than $100 billion, “decries” the new report as “misleading and biased.” Her complaint seems to be that there must be some sinister conspiracy against high-speed rail, but the Legislative Analyst’s Office won’t tell her who is behind this conspiracy.

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Remember When “Transit” Meant “Transportation”?

By | | News commentary, Transportation
31 Comments

Portland’s TriMet transit agency is spending more than $370,000 to install solar panels on a downtown building. This will initially save the agency less than $3,700 a year, and even if the savings increase over time, when interest is counted there will be something close to a 100-year payback period.

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TriMet is doing this because it had the money left over after building a light-rail line to Clackamas, Oregon. It’s not like it could have returned the money to the taxpayers, or at least spent it on improved bus service or something that has an actual transportation benefit. In Portland, image is far more important than reality.

Detroit Light Rail

By | | Transportation
11 Comments

Detroit’s plan to spend $550 million building a nine-mile light-rail line on Woodward Avenue would be laughable if it weren’t wasting so much money that could actually do something useful if spent on something else. Detroit leaders have convinced themselves that light rail is world-class transportation, that it will be the lynchpin of Detroit’s recovery, and that it will keep young people in the city.

A shadowy group of so-called private investors known as the M-1 Rail group have actually agreed to put up $100 million of the cost of the project. They aren’t expecting any financial return on this money; more than a third of this amount is coming from the S. H. Kresge Foundation and is being donated as an act of charity. Strangely, the arrangement almost foundered on the seemingly trivial question of whether the tracks should go down the middle of Woodward Avenue (as local residents preferred) or be in the curbside lane (as the M1 group preferred). One pundit went so far as to call this the “Lincoln-Douglas debate of our time.” So serious is this debate that one more transit agency leader has lost his job over rail transit.
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Somebody in Detroit should ask some more serious questions about light rail. If light rail can help urban revival, why did Portland need to spend hundreds of millions of dollars subsidizing development along its light-rail lines? If light rail keeps young people in the city, why does Portland need an urban-growth boundary to do the same? Except for the claim that light rail is far more expensive than buses, about all the other claims for light rail are a bunch of lies aimed at draining the taxpayers (and, in Detroit’s case, some gullible foundation directors) of their money.

A Recipe for Decline

By | | Regional planning
23 Comments

Thanks to high housing prices and a poor economy (which is also partly due to high housing prices), more Americans are leaving California than are moving to the state. In the last decade, 1.5 million more people moved out than moved in from other states, and the poor economy is also reducing foreign immigration, leaving the state’s future in doubt. For the first time in more than a century, a majority of the state’s population was actually born in California.

Back in the 1970s, when California cities were adopting anti-growth policies, it was all the rage for people to talk about a “steady-state” economy rather than a growth economy. But, says historian Mike Davis, “A steady-state California is both a contradiction in terms and a recipe for decline.”

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California Governor Jerry Brown persuaded the state legislature to eliminate local redevelopment agencies, and now the state is trying to seize $1.7 billion in assets held by those agencies. If the state is willing to take such drastic action to save itself, maybe it will also be willing to revoke some of the insane land-use laws that are the underlying cause of its economic doldrums.