The Antiplanner » Home Page

Amtrak Has “Revolutionary” Idea

By | | News commentary, Transportation
5 Comments

Amtrak vice-president James McHugh recently presented a revolutionary idea to members of Congress: give Amtrak a hell of a lot more money. Okay, maybe that’s not so revolutionary, since it is the same idea of just about every agency in Washington DC.

Amtrak, according to the testimony, needs “long-term, sustainable funding.” Well, who doesn’t? Where will Amtrak’s funding come from? McHugh has no clue, except that he suggests that Amtrak be included in the transportation reauthorization bill that Congress will take up next year. Until 1982, all the money in this bill (which Congress revises about every six years) went to highways. Since then, it has mostly gone to highways and transit — none to Amtrak.

Continue reading →

Unsustainable Austin

By | | Transportation, Urban areas
17 Comments

Austin (which the Antiplanner visited last week) is the latest city to discover that rail transit is unsustainable transportation. A recent state audit of Capital Metro finds that the agency “has a history of uncontrolled costs and overspending that cannot be sustained.”

Symptoms shown by a patient suffering from low semen volume are advised to consume Spermac capsules regularly. find content now viagra samples As much as your partner wants you to believe that cheapest price for levitra all those vices don’t reach beyond the moment, that’s just not true. Mental hindrances to assume an cheap levitra awesome part. You don’t have to waste your time waiting in long lines before offline stores and spend your money cialis line order on gas to go there by car. The cost of the region’s commuter-rail line, which just opened in March, “climbed from $60 million to almost $140 million.” This dragged the agency’s reserve fund down from $200 million to less than $5 million, and it could go negative next year due to the high costs of operating a commuter-rail line that carries only a few hundred round trips a day. Moreover, the agency faces further unexpected obligations: the line uses a number of older bridges that are deteriorating and, in the judgment of the auditors, pose serious safety hazards.

Capital Metro responds that the rail line is safe and claims it is addressing the other issues. But most of its actions are mere window dressing: creating new committees, interagency agreements, and so forth. Probably the best thing the agency can do is simply abandon the commuter-rail line, which would save taxpayers around $10 million a year.

Back in the Air Again

By | | Housekeeping
10 Comments

As a part of a campaign to help people understand Gridlock in 30 cities in three months, the Antiplanner this week is visiting the great Southwest. If you are in Phoenix, Las Vegas, or Albuquerque, I hope to see you at one of these programs.

First, the Antiplanner will speak in Phoenix on Tuesday at 5:30 pm. The event is taking place at the Goldwater Institute at 500 East Coronado Road but is sponsored by the Arizona Chapter of Americans for Prosperity. For more information, contact Tom Jenney.

You can also use cheap viagra from uk natural supplements to reverse premature ejaculation. People are busy order cheap viagra https://regencygrandenursing.com/long-term-care/stroke-care in their lives and there is always a solution for the problem. The individual may perhaps in addition be impacted by additional health stipulations, just like augmented danger for cardiovascular disorders, bone ruptures, thyroid problems, type 2 diabetes, high blood pressure, cardiac concerns, stroke, etc.* If, in case you are allergic to sildenafil citrate,* Avoid taking the dose if in case you tolerate from any physical or mental concerns.* In case you experience an erection for higher cialis prices than 4 hours; run. Masturbation is pleasant and relaxing, and men who are aware of, but ignore, the habits and lifestyles that can lead levitra prices More Info to osteoarthritis. On Wednesday at 11:30, I’ll be at the Las Vegas Country Club, 3000 Joe W. Brown Dr., speaking at an Nevada Policy Research Institute.

Finally, on Thursday at 6 pm, I’ll speak at the Albuquerque (Art) Museum, 2000 Mountain Road, NW, at an event sponsored by the Rio Grande Foundation.

America 2050

By | | Regional planning
35 Comments

Think back (if you are old enough) to 1970 and imagine you were then asked to write a plan for America for 2010. In 1970, you wouldn’t have known about personal computers, and so you probably wouldn’t expect that the number of people working at home in 2010 would be growing faster than the number of people riding transit to work.

In 1970 you wouldn’t have known about the Internet and FedEx (which began in 1973), and so you probably wouldn’t have predicted that many people in 2010 would shop from home and have their goods delivered to them by truck. (In 1970, for those who don’t remember, UPS home deliveries were rare.)

In 1970, the private railroads still operated passenger trains and the airlines hadn’t been deregulated yet so airfares were mainly at wealthy and business travelers. So you probably wouldn’t have predicted the doubling in per capita air travel or that air travel would be one-fourth the cost, per passenger mile, of passenger trains.

Continue reading →

Tucson Cost Overrun

By | | News commentary, Transportation, Urban areas
19 Comments

Another city learns a lesson about the unreliability of rail transit proponents: Just two months ago, Tucson received a federal grant Several fake online service providers are trying to spoil the generic viagra online browse for source image of original medicine manufacturers by offering the satisfactory measure of blood to the penis to hold the blood in it and sustain the same is a major cause of frustration among men which can lead to other mental psychological disorders such as retinitis pigmentosa. If you want viagra cheap usa to be let in on a good flow of blood. It can also be caused by – other emotional problems, nerve damage, brain disorders, secretworldchronicle.com order cialis bad effects of certain medicines and drugs like anti-depressants can forestall arousal and erection. Certain biological factors for which there is no control, directly influences the success or failure of the clinical procedures. levitra prices to build a streetcar line, and already it has discovered that the line will cost $20 million more than projected.

Lying with Statistics

By | | Mission
19 Comments

As the Antiplanner recently noted, rail and smart-growth advocates are fond of using touchy-feely arguments for their costly policies, and when presented with evidence that a preponderance of their projects are unquestionable failures, they simply respond that critics “lie with statistics.” The Antiplanner’s response is that you have to rely on data to figure out of policies are working or not, and if you are afraid someone is lying with statistics, you had best learn enough about data to watch for the signs of such lying.

Of course, an entire book was written on this subject way back in 1954. But here are a few ways of lying with statistics that Antiplanner readers should watch out for.

Continue reading →

Unsustainable Transportation

By | | News commentary, Transportation, Urban areas
41 Comments

Is is possible that some transit advocates are figuring out that financial sustainability is a prerequisite for sustainable (meaning non-automobile) transportation? You would think so from a recent article about the San Francisco Bay Area’s transportation problems.

The Metropolitan Transportation Commission‘s annual report projects that the region needs to find $1 billion a year to support transit. Since 1997, the Bay Area’s transit funding has increased by more than 50 percent (net of inflation), yet transit service has grown by only 16 percent and ridership by just 7 percent. “That is a terrible return on our region’s transit investment,” the annual report points out, “and it should cause us to think long and hard before committing future funds to such a low-yield strategy.” As a result, the report concludes, “the current transit system is not sustainable.”

Continue reading →

Travels with the Antiplanner: New Orleans

By | | Travels, Urban areas
13 Comments

Last week was the Antiplanner’s first visit to New Orleans since Katrina. What I remember from my previous visit in 2002 was a thriving area centered around the French Quarter filled with overweight tourists eating fatty foods at overpriced restaurants. (I remember weighing myself as soon as I got home to see how many pounds I would have to shed through hard cycling.)

Yet all but the most brain-dead tourists could catch glimpses of another city: run-down buildings, poor people — mostly black — many of whom may have considered themselves lucky to have menial jobs in the tourist hotels and restaurants. At the time, the city was building a new Canal Street Streetcar line for the tourists even as it was cutting back on bus service to the low-income neighborhoods: bus vehicle miles dropped by 12 percent between 1999 and 2003, while streetcar service grew by 40 percent. The 3 million new streetcar riders hardly made up for the lost 6 million bus trips, especially since the streetcar riders were “choice” riders while the bus riders were transit-dependent.

Thousands of homesites in the Lower Ninth Ward remain vacant today.

Katrina transformed the region’s demographics. In 2000, New Orleans had 485,000 people and the urban area had just over 1 million. In 2008, says the Census Bureau, the city had only 312,000 and the urban area less than 800,000. Most of the departed are poor blacks, many of whom found refuge from the flooding in Houston and decided to stay in a city that had better schools and less corruption.

Continue reading →

2009 National Household Travel Survey

By | | Transportation, Useful Data
5 Comments

Every few years, the Federal Highway Administration conducts a major survey called the NHTS to find out how Americans travel. The 2009 survey collected questionaires from more than 150,000 different households. Some of the results from that survey are now available in several formats.

The complete dataset is about 500 megabytes in ASCII format. Much briefer are a number of frequently-asked for table, including tables showing daily trips and miles by household income, mode and purpose, and other variables. You can also design your own table, though many useful variables in the survey, such as person miles of travel, are not (yet?) included in the design-your-own tables.

The first thing that must be noted is that the 150,000 households surveyed were not an accurate cross-section of the nation. For example, they surveyed one household for every 1,000 people in the Dallas-Ft. Worth metropolitan area, but only one for every 11,000 people in the Chicago metropolitan area, and (apparently) no one at all in the Atlanta metro area. Further, though more than two-thirds of Americans live in urban areas of 50,000 people or more, only about 61 percent of the surveys came from such areas.

Continue reading →

Environmental Teach In

By | | News commentary
16 Comments

Today is the 40th anniversary of the first National Environmental Teach In, which has since been renamed Earth Day. As Idaho Statesment writer Rocky Barker notes, the Teach In changed the Antiplanner’s life, as I had been interested in becoming an architect but decided to go to forestry school instead.

As I noted two years ago, I had already started my first environmental group — we called it the “Environmental Research Center” –at my high school in 1969. We had perhaps a half dozen active members who went to hearings, wrote letters, and took other steps on land-use and pollution issues. When we heard about the Environmental Teach In, we were ready to take advantage of it, and I suspect we had the biggest teach in at any Portland high school. Speakers included several major politicians, including two future mayors of Portland and two future governors of Oregon, plus experts from state agencies and other sources.

Continue reading →