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Here We Go Again

By | | Regional planning
9 Comments

Density is good. That’s the message from Ryan Avent, a writer for The Economist, whose new ebook, The Gated City, received a boost from a promotional op ed in the New York Times.

Density, according to Avent, makes people wealthier, happier, and more productive. The data he uses to support these ideas, however, are suspect. For one thing, he doesn’t seem to grasp the distinction between metropolitan area and urbanized area. He understands that metropolitan area is the wrong measure of an urban area’s density, so he uses a weighted-average density of census tracts in a metropolitan area. A metropolitan area such as San Jose, whose urban area density is the third-densest in the nation, ends up appearing less dense than New York, whose urban area is considerably less dense but which has a high density core.

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Sorry Smart Growthers, Baby Boomers Aren’t Interested

By | | Housing
27 Comments

One of the articles of faith among smart-growth advocates is that retiring baby boomers will want to move into downtown or suburban high-density, mixed-use developments. In 2009, “Chris” Nelson himself came to Damascus, a very low-density suburb of Portland, to tell residents how wonderful it would be if they rezoned their city for high-density housing. (Nelson is the University of Utah planning professor who claims the United States will have 22 million “surplus” single-family homes by 2025 because so many Americans will prefer to live in multifamily housing.)

A recent survey of affluent baby boomers tossed some water on this theory. The survey found that 65 percent of baby boomers plan to stay in their current homes when they return (down from 80 percent of their parents). Of the remaining 35 percent, only 4 percent say they want to move to a downtown condominium and just 3 percent say they want to live in a suburban condo. By comparison, 14 percent say they hope to move to a resort community.
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This suggests that twice as many want to move to lower densities as those who aspire to higher densities. While this survey was only of high-income baby boomers, I suspect the answers of other baby boomers wouldn’t be much different. Any investors who put money into downtown or suburban condos based on Nelson’s ideas are likely to lose that money.

Another LRT Exceeds Minimalist Expectations

By | | News commentary, Transportation
15 Comments

Norfolk Virginia finally opened its light-rail line, and ridership “exceeds expectations” at 5,600 riders a day. Considering they run 212 trains a weekday, that’s just over 26 passengers per train. How many 40-passenger buses would have been needed to handle all that traffic?

Of course, the rail line exceeded expectations in many other ways as well. The 7.4-mile line was originally expected to cost less than $200 million. The final cost was at least $120 million over that. It was also supposed to be open for business in 2008. They exceeded that expectation as well. The original projection was for 10,500 weekday riders by 2021. They’ll have to double ridership to meet that. A lot of city and transit officials also expected the rail line would be a feather in their caps. Instead, they were lucky not to be tarred and feathered when they were run out of town over cost overruns.
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Despite the underestimated costs and inflated ridership numbers, the Federal Transit Administration gave Norfolk light rail a “not recommended” rating in 2004. Too bad the agency changed its mind (or had its mind changed for it by Virginia’s congressional delegation). They could have saved taxpayers a lot of money on a truly wasteful project. But that’s the story of all light rail in a nutshell.

Be Careful What You Wish For

By | | Public lands
5 Comments

A House Natural Resources Committee bill would turn national forests into fiduciary trusts mandated to produce both a minimum amount of timber and a minimum amount of revenues for the counties in which the forests are located. Thus, the Antiplanner’s original proposal to turn federal lands into fiduciary trusts become increasingly warped.

A fiduciary trust requires a trustee (who manages the trust), a beneficiary (who gets the benefits of the trust), a trustor (who sets up the trust), and a trust corpus or assets that are to be managed. Trusts differ from ordinary government agencies in that the trusts are obligated to manage the assets solely for the beneficiaries, which is a lot simpler than the multiple jobs of most agencies (create jobs, help local clients, keep politicians happy, etc.).

The Antiplanner’s original idea was that public lands would be managed by two trusts. One would produce maximum revenue by selling, leasing, or otherwise permitting various land uses. Some of the revenues would go to the Treasury but some would go to the second trust which would be obligated to maximize the value of any non-revenue producing resources such as endangered species. The amount of revenues the first trust would produce would depend on how much it could profitably produce without harming the long-term productivity of the land (which trustees are also obliged to protect). The second trust could use some of the revenues to buy or lease resources from the first and not use them if it felt that would be the best way to achieve its mission of maximizing non-market values.

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Ten Best Transit Cities? Not!

By | | Transportation
8 Comments

Someone asked the Antiplanner to comment on this list of the supposed ten best transit cities in the nation. The list includes, in order, New York, Denver, Los Angeles, Boston, Seattle, Portland, Washington, San Jose, Honolulu, and Salt Lake City.

This is supposed to be for students, but it must really be for students who lack analytical skills. To the Antiplanner, a transit system is a good system if it carries a lot of people. If it is not carrying a lot of people, it doesn’t matter how pretty their trains are, it doesn’t deserve to be on anyone’s ten-best list.

The list is correct that New York is number one. Washington and Boston, despite having increasingly decrepit rail systems, also deserve to be on the list. Honolulu? Absolutely. Denver, Los Angeles, San Jose? Not hardly. Portland, Salt Lake City? Marginal.

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Can Buses Compete with Planes?

By | | News commentary, Transportation
28 Comments

The House of Representatives agreed to extend reauthorization for the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) for four months and for surface transportation for six months. That’s not as long as the two years the Senate wanted for surface transportation, but apparently House Republicans weren’t ready to give up the gas tax (which would otherwise have expired at the end of this month) as a bargaining chip for a more sensible reauthorization bill.

Reauthorization of the FAA has foundered on the essential air service program which subsidizes commercial airline service to about 100 rural communities in the lower 48 states and another 45 communities in Alaska. This subsidy cost about $170 million in 2010, some $12 million of which went to the Alaska airports.

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Louisville Bridge Is Falling Down?

By | | News commentary, Transportation
11 Comments

The Interstate 65 bridge across the Ohio River was closed after inspectors found “two cracks in a load-bearing structure of the bridge.” Naturally, this has generated huge traffic jams, as many people in southern Indiana use the bridge to commute to Louisville and the six-lane bridge carries 60,000 to 90,000 vehicles a day.

Flickr photo by Cindy47452.

No doubt this is going to lead to all sorts of shrill demands that Congress hastily pass a transportation bill so that plenty of federal money will flow to fix and replace structures like this. And maybe some of this will be justified; after all, the bridge, and a lot of the rest of the Interstate Highway System, is almost 50 years old.
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Flickr photo by wblo.

Still, there are many bridges that are a lot older than 50 years. Is the problem with this bridge due to poor design? Flawed construction? Inadequate maintenance? Answers to questions like these will help people decide what actions are appropriate. The Antiplanner’s position remains the same: If we really need it, we can pay for it through user fees, not taxes. For highways, that means, whenever possible, tolls, and this bridge provides an excellent opportunity for tolling. The only problem is that the wheels of government probably can’t move fast enough to implement tolling to pay for any costly repairs.

Life in the WUI, 2011

By | | Public lands, Wildfire
12 Comments

Unlike much of the rest of the country, the Northwest has had a mild summer. But at the end of August we finally had a few thunderstorms, and they naturally lit some wildfires. So we are getting another lesson in modern wild land fire suppression.

Mary Bernsen photo of backfires started by a helicopter. Click any photo for a larger view.

The Shadow Lake Fire is far from the biggest fire in our area–that distinction probably belongs to the High Cascades Fire, though that is really several fires so it is hard to tell. But the Shadow Lake Fire is right next to a major highway where the Antiplanner often cycles. It also seems to be sending more smoke our way than any other fire.

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Arizona Judge Orders More Transit Subsidies

By | | Transportation
4 Comments

When the Arizona legislature cut state subsidies to urban transit, an environmental group challenged the cuts in court. The federal judge agreed with the environmentalists and ordered the state to restore the subsidies.

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Deadline Headaches

By | | Housekeeping
5 Comments

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