Search Results for: peak transit

Back in the Air Again

By | | Housekeeping
8 Comments

The Antiplanner is flying to DC today to give presentations in four cities over the next six days. First, on Friday, I’ll join Ron Utt of the Heritage Foundation in a briefing on rail transit and transportation reauthorization in Rayburn House Office Building room B-339. Lunch will be provided.

On Monday from 9 to 11, the Antiplanner will join several other speakers on transportation issues at the Holiday Inn in Concord, New Hampshire. This event is sponsored by the Josiah Bartlett Center for Public Policy.

On Tuesday at 4:30 the Antiplanner will speak about Gridlock at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut. This event is sponsored by the Yankee Institute for Public Policy.
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On Wednesday at 6 pm, the Antiplanner will join James Howard Kunstler to discuss the question, “Who should control urban growth?” This presumably lively program will take place in room 001 of the Solomon Center at Brown University.

If you are in Washington, DC or New England, I hope to see you at one of these events.

Social Security, CalTrains, Going Broke

By | | News commentary
15 Comments

It is hard to imagine that anyone inside the DC beltway is not feeling a rising sense of panic over the news that Social Security is out of money. As the New York Times graphic shows, Social Security revenues were expected to exceed receipts through 2016, but in fact are expected to be less than receipts from 2010 on.

The year 2016 is comfortably far enough away that elected officials whose terms are no longer than six years don’t bother worrying about it. But if social security is out of money now, then the entire federal edifice — much of which has been funded by borrowing from the social security surplus — is on the brink of collapse.

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Yglesias Is Baffled

By | | Follow up, Regional planning
69 Comments

Matthew Yglesias is baffled by reality. At least, he finds the Antiplanner’s post about how zoning codes actually work, as opposed to how Yglesias imagines they work, to be “baffling and bafflingly long.”

He boils his case down to three simple statements:

  1. Throughout America there are many regulations that restrict the density of the built environment.
  2. Were it not for these restrictions, people would build more densely.
  3. Were the built environment more densely built, the metro areas would be less sprawling.

Reality is never so simple. As you can see, it all depends on statement 1: are there regulations throughout America that restrict density? As evidence that there are, Yglesias cited the Maricopa County Zoning Code, which he claimed allows development no denser than duplexes. Apparently, he didn’t read (or was baffled by) chapter 7, which allows housing at 43 units per acre, or chapter 10, which allows anyone with 160 acres to build as dense as they want.

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Wisconsin’s High-Cost, Low-Speed Rail

By | | Transportation
18 Comments

Wisconsin was the fourth-highest (after California, Florida, and Illinois) recipient of federal high-speed rail money, receiving $823 million to initiate Milwaukee-to-Madison service. The state’s application proposes to use this money to operate six trains a day between the two cities as a continuation of service from Chicago to Milwaukee.

The proposal does not call for high-speed (faster than 125 mph) or even moderate-speed (faster than 80 mph) rail. Instead, the top speeds will only be 79 mph until even more money is spent improving signaling to allow for “positive train control” (which insures trains will automatically stop when necessary even if the engineer fails to stop the train).

With three stops between Madison and Milwaukee, the average speed will be just 58 mph. That’s a bit higher than the current Badger Bus, which averages 42 to 52 mph depending on which bus you take. But the rail route is longer than the bus route, which means the train will take longer (1 hour 40 minutes) than the fastest bus (1 hour 30 minutes).

In addition, the bus stops in the middle of the University of Wisconsin campus in Madison, while current plans call for the train to terminate at Dane County Airport on the edge of town, with transit connections to downtown and the university. This gives even the slower (1 hour 50 minute) buses a huge competitive advantage.

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Auto Dependent or Auto Liberated?

By | | Transportation
42 Comments

The Antiplanner’s faithful ally and American Dream Coalition director Ed Braddy argues that transit — at least as we know it — is an unsustainable form of transportation.

Which reminds me that the American Dream Coalition’s next annual conference is Some of the things that can be heard from the recordings are all-natural remedy that can soothe back pains, relaxation methods to eliminate spasms, truth about the effectiveness of pain-killers and viagra price online many more. If left untreated, erectile dysfunction can give rise to physical as well as psychological complications. online viagra sales Though psychological viagra 100 mg factors are concerned in the causation of migraines. Both of them are sildenafil citrate medications, which are easily available from various online stores across the world. purchase levitra is one such drug that has already helped many smokers quit smoking for life. scheduled for June 10-12 in Orlando. The conference will feature lots of exciting speakers plus a tour to see, among other things, the Selmon Expressway, which consists of three lanes built in a six-foot-wide median strip of an existing highway.

The Antiplanner’s Library: The Great Society Subway

By | | Book reviews, Transportation, Urban areas
17 Comments

Most DC visitors and residents consider the Washington Metrorail system to be a great success. Among them is Zachary Schrag, author of The Great Society Subway: A History of the Washington Metro. But, as Schrag clearly documents, by the standards of Metrorail’s original planners, it is a dismal failure.

Back in 1962, planners projected that a 103-mile rail system would cost less than $800 million — or about $4.6 billion in 2009 dollars. Moreover, they expected that fares would cover all of the operating costs and nearly 80 percent of the capital costs (pp. 53-54).

As it turned out, the actual 103-mile system that was completed in 2001 covers all of the basic routes of that original plan, yet cost $17.6 billion in 2009 dollars, close to four times the initial projection. Fares cover only about 60 percent of operating costs and, of course, none of the capital costs.

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Dueling PowerPoint Shows

By | | Regional planning
29 Comments

Last week, the Antiplanner engaged in a cordial debate with Chuck Kooshian of the Center for Clean Air Policy about whether smart growth — compact development combined with transit improvements — is a cost-effective way of reducing greenhouse gas emissions. You can watch the video below and download the slideshows used by Mr. Kooshian and the Antiplanner.

Mr. Kooshian made a good point in his rebuttal. The Antiplanner critiqued a study called Growing Cooler, which assumed that new cars built after 2020 would always average just 35 mpg, when much higher averages were possible and even likely. Mr. Kooshian pointed out that his own study assumed that new cars in 2030 would get 55 mph.
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Still, the Antiplanner pointed out, Mr. Kooshian’s study did not compare the cost-effectiveness of smart growth vs. even more fuel-efficient cars, and one MIT study estimated that building new cars average 69 would be cost-effective by 2030. Beyond this, I’ll let the video and presentations speak for themselves.

The Ultimate Transportation Antiplanning Book

By | | Book reviews, Mission
48 Comments

This is a bit premature, but booksellers such as Amazon and reviewers such as the Globe and Mail have already let the cat out of the bag. So I might as well announce the forthcoming publication of a new book: Gridlock: Why We’re Stuck in Traffic and What to Do About It. This book is to transportation planning what The Best-Laid Plans is to government planning in general.

Regular readers of the Antiplanner will be familiar with some of the arguments in the book: Mobility is valuable, and the personal mobility provided by the automobile is not only convenient and inexpensive, it is available to nearly every family in developed countries. Mass forms of transportation such as intercity trains and urban transit cannot substitute for the automobile, so efforts to restrict automobility can cause grave harm to society.

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Stuck in the 1960s

By | | Useful Data
16 Comments

Each year, about one out of 40 households receive a letter from the Census Bureau demanding that they fill out an American Community Survey asking such nosy questions as how much money each person in the household earns each year, how they heat their house, and whether they have a flush toilet. Though some have suggested that people should boycott the decennial census as too “intrusive,” the Antiplanner is a voracious consumer of census data, and so I was proud to receive and fill out the 28-page survey form form this year.

This survey is an annual extension of the Census Bureau’s so-called long form, which has been given to one out of six households each decennial census since at least 1960 (including the Antiplanner’s in 2000). As I filled out the 2009 form, it occurred to me that some of the questions have not been significantly updated since 1960.

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Back in the Air Again

By | | Housekeeping
6 Comments

The Antiplanner is flying to Texas today for a busy week of conferences and speeches. My presentations will vary but all will at least touch on a variety of recent transportation and land-use issues including housing affordability, rail transit, and curbing greenhouse gas emissions.

Tomorrow, I’ll join faithful allies Wendell Cox and Sam Staley in speaking to the Home Ownership and Land Affordability Coalition tomorrow. The event will take place at the San Antonio Country Club from 11:45 to 2:00 pm. My particular talk will focus on problems with Portland’s smart-growth policies. If you would like to attend, contact Jeff Judson at 210-822-1292 or email jeff@jeffjudson.com.

On Wednesday, Wendell, Sam, and I will be joined by Ron Utt and Texas Commissioner of Agriculture Todd Staples in speaking at an afternoon conference sponsored by Houstonians for Responsible Growth. My talk will focus on free-market alternatives to smart growth. If you are in Houston, please register for the conference.

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