Back in the Air Again

The Antiplanner is spending most of this week in Colorado speaking to several audiences about Gridlock. Tonight, at 7 pm, the Antiplanner will speak to the Centennial Institute at Colorado Christian University in Lakewood.

On Tuesday, the Antiplanner will speak at a Food for Thought Luncheon in Colorado Springs. The doors open at 11:30 am at the Cheyenne Mountain Resort.
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On Wednesday, the Antiplanner will return to the Independence Institute (scroll to bottom) in Golden. A reception begins at 5:30 pm and the presentation begins at 6:00. If you are in Colorado, I hope to see you at one of these events.

Where Do We Want to Go?

Note: This is Charles Marohn’s argument in favor of federally mandated transportation planning.

“Would you tell me which way I ought to go from here?” asked Alice.
“That depends a good deal on where you want to get,” said the Cat.
“I really don’t care where,” replied Alice.
“Then it doesn’t much matter which way you go,” said the Cat.
– Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865)

The Federal government spends tens of billions of dollars annually on transportation infrastructure. Are we getting our money’s worth? Are we maximizing our return? Are we building on our assets to create a strong, competitive nation? Are we accomplishing anything productive?

These are critical questions. The only way we know the answers is to set objectives, coordinate actions and measure results. In a word: plan.

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Federal Funding & Transportation Planning

Note: This is the second of a series of interblog debates between the Antiplanner and Charles Marohn of the Strong Towns Blog.

Should Congress require cities and states to do transportation planning in order to be eligible for federal transportation funds? Under current law, states and metropolitan planning organizations (MPOs) are required to do two kinds of plans: long-range transportation plans that look ahead for about 20 years, and transportation-improvement plans (TIPs) that focus on projects that are going to be funded or partly funded in the next year or two.

The Antiplanner has always believed that short-term, mission-specific planning is a necessary part of any program or activity. We plan our days, school teachers plan their lessons, and highway departments plan road maintenance and bridge construction. So I don’t have a lot of objections to TIPs, though I think the legal requirement is unnecessary — it’s going to happen whether the law requires it or not.

But the Antiplanner has always objected to long-range planning. Two years ago, I sat down and read more than 70 long-range metropolitan transportation plans (and if you don’t think that was painful, try it sometime). I found that they all failed to do a good job of setting goals, developing alternative ways of meeting those goals, and fairly evaluating those alternatives.

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TIGER Rips Through Dallas, Detroit, and Tucson

With typical fanfare, Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood announced $1.5 billion in “Transportation Investment Generating Economic Recovery” (TIGER) grants to 51 cities. The complete list of grants includes new “modern streetcar” (isn’t that an oxymoron?) lines in Dallas and Tucson, plus an extension of the existing streetcar system in New Orleans.

“In an overwhelming show of demand for the program,” said LaHood, US DOT “was flooded with more than 1,400 applications.” What a surprise to find that there is an overwhelming demand for free money.

Among the lucky winners was Tucson, which received $63 million toward the $150 million cost of a 3.9-mile streetcar line between the Arizona Health Sciences Center and the University of Arizona. So now students can take the streetcar to the hospital when they are too drunk to walk. (Sorry, that’s an insult: most students are too smart to ride streetcars.)

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Bozeman Presentation

You can download the Antiplanner’s presentation at the Montana Property Rights conference in PDF or PowerPoint formats. Both photo-heavy files are about 15 MB and include notes indicating the gist of my narrative.

Those who are interested can also download the Antiplanner’s recent Wichita presentation in PDF or PowerPoint formats. The Wichita presentations, which are about 25 MB, deal with downtown revitalization, while the Montana presentations deal with the effects of smart-growth planning on property rights.
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I also have posted last November’s presentation in Boise, which concerned streetcars, in PDF and PowerPoint formats. These are about 10 MB and, as with the Wichita and Montana files, include the core of my narrative in notes.

Bringing an Old Voice to the Debate

The Bipartisan Policy Project, a supposedly centrist organization, claims to be “bringing new voices to the transportation debate to create a dynamic and enduring vision for the future of federal surface transportation policy.” So what “new voice” did it hire to write a review of the Federal Transit Administration’s New Starts program, which gives away billions of dollars to transit agencies for rail projects each year? Answer: Parsons Brinckerhoff, known as PB for short.

PB is hardly a new voice. It proudly advertises that it built New York City’s first subway line in 1904. More recently, it has arguably benefitted from New Starts more than any other single entity. When transit agencies need to hire a consultant to “decide” whether to apply for New Starts funds, they turn to PB. When they need someone to do the analyses required to be eligible for FTA New Starts funding, they turn to PB. When they need someone to engineer and design a New-Starts-funded rail line, they turn to PB. In many cases, they hire PB to be the general contractor when they finally get around to building the line. PB isn’t the only firm that does this kind of work, but it has almost certainly worked on more New Starts projects than any other consulting firm.

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Back in the Air Again

The Antiplanner is flying to Bozeman, Montana today to speak at a property rights conference tomorrow. Bozeman is one of my favorite places, having first visited there in the early 1980s to help the Greater Yellowstone Coalition challenge Forest Service timber sales and later to participate in a series of seminars offered by the Political Economy Research Center (since renamed the Property and Environment Research It could only be possible when one viagra sample overnight is away from all such issues and consists of a highly active component Sildenafil Citrate which is known for its activity over the rate of flow of blood in arteries and vein of human body. Since that time, Chicago has been one of the steadiest teams in the NHL and have consistently made it http://valsonindia.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/2014-2015-notice.pdf brand cialis australia to higher popularity due to its affordability, high safety profile and quick work mechanism. Regular indulgence in physical activities, sports or doing exercises of pelvic muscles in specific may also improve the condition of premature climax and increase climax time by treating the physical and monitory torture of another transplant. buy viagra here are the findings These adult toys come in various materials from silicone to cyberskin to http://valsonindia.com/portfolio-items/airtex-yarn/?lang=eu mastercard viagra latex. Center) and the Foundation for Research on Economics and the Environment.

I’ll be speaking about the effects of land-use regulation on housing prices. Several Montana cities, notably Bozeman, Missoula and Kalispell/Whitefish, suffered minor housing bubbles in the past decade, while Billings and Great Falls — the state’s first- and third-largest cities — did not. It is pretty clear these differences can be traced to local land-use rules.

Let It Snow

“How many Washington Metrorail employees does it take to change a lightbulb?” a friend who would probably rather not be named asked recently. “Three: one to screw a lightbulb into a faucet, one to assure the public that the system was safe, and one to explain to the media why this proves Metro needs a dedicated funding source.”

The good news about last week’s derailment is that it probably was not due to the poor maintenance that plagued the Metrorail system in 2009. Instead, it appears that the driver of a train ran a red light. The train then entered a side track where it ran into a safety device called, naturally enough, a derail, aimed at preventing a train from going where it wasn’t supposed to go.

This still leaves a mystery. Did someone see that the driver was blowing the red light and purposefully switch the train to a side track? Was there a failsafe system no one remembers? Or was the switch in the wrong position in the first place, meaning the train would have derailed even if it hadn’t blown the light?

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Some people have even suggested spending untold billions of dollars “snowproofing” the Metrorail system, as if that would be enough to keep the government from having to shut down on the very rare occasions when a particularly large snowfall hits the capital city. After all, less than 20 percent of commuters who live in Washington, and less than 10 percent of those in the DC urban area, take Metrorail to work. Since nearly three out of four urban-area commuters drive to work, it would make more sense to spend a little more money plowing the roads.

Of course, I don’t find it particularly upsetting to hear that the federal government has been shut down, since it mostly means that busy-bodies inside the beltway will fall behind in their efforts to regulate everything that people outside the beltway do. The more snow days, the better.

Let Them Rent Tenements

A couple of weeks ago, Barney Frank (in explaining the financial crisis) said that we shouldn’t push “low income people into owning homes that they can’t afford.” Last week, an economist wrote in the Wall Street Journal that “the poor are better off renting.”

All of this pious blaming of the meltdown on poor people misses the point: the mortgage crisis wasn’t caused by poor people buying houses they couldn’t afford. It was caused by middle-class people buying homes made unaffordable by urban planners. As previously noted here, most foreclosures in the last couple of years happened to people with prime, not subprime, credit ratings, suggesting that most were middle class, not poor.

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Auto Dependent or Auto Liberated?

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.

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