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New Comments Policy

By | | Housekeeping
16 Comments

The Antiplanner has traditionally allowed anyone to post anything they want as a comment. Although I dislike namecalling and ad hominem attacks, I regard them as more reflections on the commenter. A couple of commenters — you know who they are — primarily engage in namecalling and I’ve urged others to simply ignore them.

But Friday someone took the trouble to look up personal information about another commenter and posted it in a comment. The person who the comment was about complained and asked me to delete it, which I did. I also sent an email to the address of the person who posted the comment explaining why I deleted their comment.

Instead of respecting my wishes, the person reposted the comment. Either they ignored my email or they used a fake email address when they signed up and never received my email.

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Antiplanner’s Library: Triumph of the City

By | | Book reviews
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The ideas of many urbanologists are heavily influenced by the cities in which they lived or grew up. To defend her mid-rise Greenwich Village neighborhood from “urban renewal,” Jane Jacobs extolled the virtues of such neighborhoods and excoriated both high-rises and suburbs. Many urban planners today, fresh out of college, remember the lively streets of their university neighborhoods and don’t understand why residents of quiet suburbs don’t want to see their own streets turned into such neighborhoods. I myself have been focused by my revulsion to the authoritarian dictates of “smart-growth” planners in my home state of Oregon.

“One’s own tastes are rarely a sound basis for public policy,” says Harvard University urban economist Edward Glaeser. “For the government to mandate a single style of urbanism is no more sensible than for the government to enforce a single style of literature.” While I completely agree with this point of view, his new book, Triumph of the City, is strongly colored by his own upbringing in a 1,300-square-foot high-rise apartment in Manhattan (p. 147).

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Reallocating Florida’s HSR Grant

By | | Transportation
11 Comments

When Ohio and Wisconsin elected governors who promised to cancel those states’ high-speed rail projects, Secretary of Immobility Ray LaHood redistributed the federal grants to those projects to other states (including $342 million to Florida) before the new governors even took office. Now that Florida has also cancelled its high-speed rail project, LaHood is being a little more careful with where he spends the freed-up dollars.

Instead of arbitrarily handing out the money to other states, the Federal Railroad Administration has announced a new competitive grantmaking process. As faithful Antiplanner ally Wendell Cox writes, the FRA has some very strict requirements in the grants.

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Reining in the Tax-Gobbling Menace

By | | City planning, News commentary
1 Comment

Rahm Emanuel, the newly elected fiscally conservative mayor of Chicago, wants to “overhaul” that city’s tax-increment financing program, which he says “morphed from a tool for blighted economic communities into an all-purpose vehicle.” TIF was first used in Chicago by Mayor Harold Washington in the 1980s, whose goal was to help blighted neighborhoods.

Critics say that the second Mayor Daley, however, used TIF as a “private slush fund” to reward developers and punish disobedient aldermen. Chicago’s 180 TIF districts cover nearly a third of the city and siphon $500 million a year away from schools and other programs.

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Aid and Comfort to the Enemy

By | | Regional planning
20 Comments

Later this week, the Antiplanner will review The Triumph of the City, a new book by Harvard economist Edward Glaeser. But because a crucial part of that book is based on a working paper written by Glaeser and UCLA economist Matthew Kahn, I first want to review that paper.

Titled “The Greenness of Cities: Carbon Dioxide Emissions and Urban Development,” the paper attempts to estimate household CO2 emissions from 66 major urban areas. The paper concludes that some urban areas produce substantially less emissions per household and also that suburban emissions are larger than central city emissions, especially in the case of older cities such as New York.

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It’s Still Dead

By | | News commentary, Transportation
11 Comments

Sometimes I feel like Chevy Chase proclaiming, week after week, that Franco, by which I mean Florida’s high-speed rail, is still dead. Yet people are still trying to revive Florida’s high-speed boondoggle. The latest is a just-released ridership projection showing that the rail line, if built, would earn an operating profit as soon as it opened.

The original projections (see page 9) estimated that the Tampa-to-Orlando train would carry 2.7 million riders in 2015 and 3.2 million in 2020. Based on fares of about $20 a ticket and operating costs of about $50 million a year, the line would initially require an operating subsidy but would cover its operating costs after 2020.

The new projections say the train would carry 3.2 to 3.6 million riders in 2016. That’s enough riders to cover its operating costs right away–assuming the cost and fare projections are correct. The new analysis uses the same costs and fares as the state’s.

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Why Do Reporters Love Trains So Much?

By | | News commentary, Transportation
12 Comments

As C.P. Zilliacus noted in one of his comments yesterday, Slate published an article subtitled, Why Do Conservatives Hate Trains So Much?. The writer, David Weigel, covered most of the bases, but a couple of clarifications are in order.

First but not foremost, Weigel seems to confuse passengers with passenger miles when he writes, “Amtrak got $2.2 billion in pure subsidies in 2010 and carried 28.7 million people, for around 13 cents per passenger, although some researchers estimate the annual cost at closer to 30 cents. Highways got $42 billion in funds in fiscal year 2010, but far more people use them; the estimate puts cost at between 1 cent and 4 cents per driver.”

I told him that Amtrak subsidies are nearly 30 cents per passenger mile (not per passenger), and road subsidies are about a penny a passenger mile (not per driver). Even his arithmetic is wrong: $2.2 billion in subsidies divided by 28.7 million passengers is $76 per passenger, not 13 cents. I’m not even sure where he got the $2.2 billion in subsidies; I think it was closer to $1.7 billion in 2009. Maybe this is one reason why reporters like trains so much: they can’t do the arithmetic.

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The Chinese Have a Phrase for It

By | | News commentary, Transportation
10 Comments

A new trend in Chinese is to turn an active verb into a passive verb–usually with a sinister context–by prefixing the character “bei” (pronounced “bay”). For example, bloggers who have been censored will say they’ve been bei huh-shyeh, or “harmonized”–a reference to the Chinese government’s efforts to create a “harmonious society.” This new, and formerly ungrammatical, usage of bei has become so popular that Chinese education ministry declared bei to be the “character of the year” for 209.

One frequent use of this character is to combine it with Gao Tie, which means high-speed train (literally, “fast iron”). Bei GaoTie means high-speed railroaded, or “being forced to take expensive high-speed trains” because conventional (and affordable) service is not available. High-speed train fares are typically three times as much as conventional fares, but with high-speed trains taking some of the business of conventional trains, conventional train service is often reduced.

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Antiplanner’s Library: Too Big to Fail

By | | Book reviews, Meltdown
3 Comments

The Antiplanner finished reading Too Big to Fail, a 539-page tome describing the events of the financial crisis from the Bear Stearns collapse in March, 2008 to the Treasury’s forced purchase of billions of dollars worth of shares in nine major banks in October, 2008. New York Times reporter Sorkin says the book is based on “more than five hundred hours of interviews with more than two hundred individuals who participated directly in the events surrounding the financial crisis.”

With the exception of an eleven-page epilogue, the author makes no apparent attempt to interject his own opinions about what happened. As such, the book represents the best and worst of modern journalism: the best because it appears to be a frank recitation of events on Wall Street, in the Fed, and the U.S. Treasury; and the worst because the accuracy of that recitation depends on who the author interviewed (whose names he doesn’t specifically reveal).

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Selling off Assets

By | | Meltdown, Public lands
44 Comments

Back in 1993, the Antiplanner wrote a report titled Pork Barrel and the Environment warning environmentalists that the federal government could not sustain its current expenditures through 2020. Those who cared about public lands such as national forests and national parks, the Antiplanner advised, should work to fund those land entirely out of user fees, else someone else would soon propose to simply sell them.

Now, economist Niall Ferguson, writing in Newsweek, makes the case for selling most public lands as well as other federal assets. Ferguson observes that most of the debate over federal finances focuses on either raising taxes or reducing spending. He suggests that selling federal assets represents a third option.

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