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Passing the Test

By | | Transportation
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This week, the new Republican-dominated House passed one of the first tests of its ability to promote fiscal sanity in the face of interest-group lobbying. On Tuesday, the House voted in new rules that govern its own operations, and one of those rules struck at the heart of recent transportation pork barreling.

Even though federal highway funding comes out of gas taxes, Congress must take two steps before the money can be spent. First, a bill must authorize the spending. Then a second bill must actually appropriate the money–and appropriations normally can be, and often are, less than authorized.

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Have We Reached “Peak Travel”?

By | | Transportation
9 Comments

The New Year brings a number of news reports fretting (or hoping) that the amount of travel we do has peaked or plateaued. Given that cars are becoming more fuel-efficient, that means that the total amount of energy we use driving will significantly decline. However, the real implications of the claim are far more dire.

The news reports are actually based on a paper published by researchers at Stanford University more than a year ago. The researchers followed the time-honored technique of looking at past data trends, drawing a dotted line into the future, and claiming it as a prediction. Reality is somewhat more complicated.

A much more interesting report, published more than a decade ago by the Minnesota Department of Transportation, compared population and job densities with travel behavior in 31 cities. “Land use, at least at the aggregate level studied here, is not a major leverage point in the determination of overall population travel choices,” the study found. “On the one hand, certain relationships emerge which correspond to generally held beliefs, for example that high residential concentration increases transit share,” though it did not reduce driving or congestion. “On the other hand, aggregate land use characteristics had little or no discernable impact on other measures of travel behavior.”

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Driverless Cars and the Law

By | | Transportation
6 Comments

The Center for Automotive Research at Stanford (CARS), which has done much of the development of driverless cars, may join with Stanford’s law school to review the legal changes needed for driverless cars to take the road. The most important (and most difficult) change will probably be to liability law: true no-fault insurance systems would be more welcoming to driverless cars than the systems found in most states today.

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The Vision of the Urbanites

By | | Why Planning Fails
36 Comments

As the Antiplanner has traveled and visited people all over the country, I’ve noticed an interesting phenomenon. Though I’ve met thousands of suburban and rural residents who are very happy with their homes and lifestyles, I’ve never met one who thinks the power of government should be used to force others to live in the same lifestyle. Yet I’ve met lots of urban residents who openly admit that they believe their lifestyle is so perfect that government should force more if not most people to live in dense, “walkable” cities.

Do cities turn people into liberal fascists? Or do liberal fascists naturally congregate into cities, and if so, why?

A general description of the phenomenon I’ve observed can be found in Thomas Sowell’s 1995 book, The Vision of the Anointed. Sowell says that America’s liberal elites view themselves as smarter or more insightful than everyone else, and thus qualified to impose their ideas on everyone else. The process of doing so, says Sowell, follows four steps (p. 8):

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Happy New Year

By | | Housekeeping
6 Comments

Best wishes from the Antiplanner to all my faithful friends and loyal opponents. I hope you had a good year this year and that 2011 turns out to be even better.


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I know I’ve featured my late friend, Chip, here three times already this year, but I’m going to indulge myself and do so just one more time. I’ve put together some of my favorite photos and a few little stories about him, which you can read here or, if you have a slow connection, here. He was a good friend and I still miss him every day.

Yes! Forest Plans Make Decisions!

By | | Public lands
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A recent decision by the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals has upended years of forest planning that were based on a Supreme Court decision made back in 1998. The Supreme Court had ruled that forest plans didn’t really make decisions, so even though the Forest Service spends hundreds of millions of dollars a year writing these plans, no one had the standing to challenge them in court.

Forest Service photo showing a lake in the Huron-Manistee national forests.

The Forest Service continues to spend money revising plans that supposedly make no decisions, but an attorney named Kurt Meister, representing himself, challenged the plan for Michigan’s Huron-Manistee forests. Meister lost at the district court level, but he persuaded the Sixth Circuit Court that forest plans made decisions after all, and that decisions made in the Huron-Manistee plan were arbitrary, so the court ordered the Forest Service to redo the plan.

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Movie Review: North by Northwest

By | | Book reviews
15 Comments

The somewhat tongue-in-cheek movie review earlier this week reminds me of one of my favorite movies. Not many people realize that North by Northwest was actually based on a true story, though of course Hitchcock changed many of the details to make his action/adventure movie.

As cinemaphiles will remember, Cary Grant plays Roger O Thornhill, a man who makes prominent use of the fact that his initials are ROT. In the course of fighting evil government agents, ROT takes a ride on the Twentieth Century Limited, the famous train from New York to Chicago. There he hooks up with Eve Kendall, a blonde woman played by Eva Marie Saint, with whom he has numerous adventures in Chicago, Mt. Rushmore National Monument, and elsewhere. Tension is increased by ROT’s uncertainty about who is really evil and who is good, especially when it appears that Kendall already has a boyfriend. In the end, however, the evil government agents get their just desserts, ROT gets the girl, and (as shown by the closing credits) they end up on a train in California.

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Welcome to the Blogosphere

By | | Housekeeping
3 Comments

Martin Engel is a typical northern Californian who says he is “not a Libertarian or absolute free market idealist.” But he has become skeptical of high-speed rail, and through his email list has kept people up-to-date on the various shenanigans at the California High-Speed Rail Authority.

Now he has started a blog, High-Speed Train Talk, which he claims is the “only blog that totally opposes high-speed rail in California.” While some might take exception to that, his may be the only blog that is solely dedicated to stopping high-speed rail in California.
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But he also covers other regions, including Britain and China, all with reference, of course, to California. Engel’s new blog is the antidote for the fawning California High-Speed Rail Blog, and the Antiplanner looks forward to Engel’s future newsgathering and essays.

Movie Review: Road House

By | | City planning
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The Antiplanner doesn’t ordinarily review movies, but then, not many movies cover the dark side of urban renewal. Someone once called Road House, featuring the late Patrick Swayze, the “cheesiest movie ever made,” but they must not have been aware of the political subtext.

In the movie, Brad Wesley (played by Ben Gazzara) is the evil executive director of the urban-renewal district for a small town named Jasper, Missouri (which he calls an “improvement district”). The district taxes all of the businesses in the town and uses the money to make investments that attract new businesses. Like most advocates of tax-subsidized economic development, Wesley takes credit for all the good things that happen in town. “J.C. Penney is coming here because of me,” he brags, as if J.C. Penney didn’t ordinarily locate in small towns like Jasper.

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Seasons’ Greetings

By | | Housekeeping
15 Comments

The Antiplanner is taking tomorrow off for the holiday. So today I wish a Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah, fabulous Festivus, or whatever is your holiday of choice to all my faithful allies and loyal opponents.
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We have a lot of snow here this year and I took this photo at nearby Lake Creek last Sunday. It is actually eight photos stitched together in Photoshop, and each of those eight photos in turn is three different exposures merged together in Photomatix. (Click on the photo for a larger view.) The full-sized photo is 7400×4800 pixels, but it is also 24 megabytes so I won’t try to post it here.