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Fair-Weather Transportation

By | | News commentary, Transportation
32 Comments

Some of the Antiplanner’s faithful allies are chortling over the closures of rail lines — advertised as “all-weather transportation” — due to snowstorms, including parts of the the Washington Metro system, the The study, which was viagra generic uk done in Finland, followed 989 men for five years and questioned them about any ED symptoms. Testosterone is additionally in charge of the bone thickness, muscle quality and the vitality level generic cialis without prescription of the body. Penegra is usually substituted by men who are also prescribed to take other types of medications. cialis generic pills If you are suffering from heart diseases or if you have not encountered one yet, then viagra ordination http://www.slovak-republic.org/zilina/ it is advisable to follow eating this drug after the consultation with the health expert. href=”http://www.mtamaryland.com/status/index.cfm?service=Light%20Rail”>Baltimore light-rail system, and New Jersey light rail.

And don’t forget the shutdown of the Eurostar high-speed trains through the Channel Tunnel. How does weather shut down train service in a tunnel?

Make the Kiddies Pay

By | | News commentary, Transportation
28 Comments

New York City has the greatest transit system in America. It carries a third of all transit rides, and well over half of all rail transit rides in the U.S. Fares cover close to two-thirds of its operating costs, more than any other transit system. New York’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) is what every other transit system aspires to be.

Broke.

So broke that the MTA is planning “service cuts that would affect nearly every bus, subway and commuter rail rider in New York.” These include the complete elimination of two subway lines and many bus routes, along with reductions in frequencies on many other routes and cuts in services to disabled riders. These cuts are deemed necessary to close a $383 million gap in the agency’s 2010 budget — more money than the entire annual budgets of most transit agencies.

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Blame Government Mismanagement on Climate Change

By | | News commentary
31 Comments

People in Bolivia are going thirsty, and the New York Times blames it on climate change. But, in fact, the glaciers have been retreating for well over 100 years.

The real problem in Bolivia, as the Times admits well down the page, is that the government declared water to be a “human right” and took over the private water company. But because the government is inept, not to mention broke, it has failed to provide water to those who need it or to adjust to long-term changes in water flows.


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Simply declaring something a human right doesn’t automatically mean everyone will get some. As Bremerton, Washington, blogger Keli Carender points out in the video above, someone has to pay for it.

Bolivia no doubt hopes that, by blaming the problem on climate change, it will guilt-trip wealthy nations into providing billions in foreign aid, thus compensating for its own ineptitude. If the United States nationalized health care, who are we going to guilt-trip to fund our future health costs?

Death of an Economist

By | | News commentary
22 Comments

No economist influenced the economics profession in the second half of the twentieth century as much as Paul Samuelson, who died Sunday at the age of 94. As the New York Times noted, “Samuelson was credited with transforming his discipline from one that ruminates about economic issues to one that solves problems, answering questions about cause and effect with mathematical rigor and clarity.”

Unfortunately, Samuelson’s influence was not as positive as the Times would have it. Samuelson turned economics from a social science that tried to figure out how the world worked into an pseudo-science that tried to turn the world into a mathematical model — a model that failed to account for the realities of individual human desires, incentives, and diversity. As a result, by 1960, economists, politicians, and would-be central planners were misled into viewing the economy as a machine that could be controlled by pulling levers, i.e, passing laws, issuing regulations, and setting tax and discount rates.

The economy is not a machine. As Michael Rothschild showed in his book, Bionomics, the economy is more like an ecosystem. One implication is that the economy is so complex that, when you pull a lever (pass a law, issue a regulation, create a tax), the unintended consequences are likely to be far greater (and far more negative) than the intended ones.

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Climate as an Indicator of Faith in Government

By | | Follow up
34 Comments

The Antiplanner wrote last Friday’s post in a rush after four days of dealing with near-record low temperatures, so it was probably a bit jumbled. Yet it set off a healthy debate that was both polite and instructive. So let’s continue a bit further.

On Sunday, Chris Matthews asked his guests — Dan Rather, Kelly O’Donnell, Helene Cooper, and Andrew Ross Sorkin — why it is that roughly 80 percent of liberals believe we need climate change legislation while 80 percent of conservatives don’t. Since Matthews and all of his guests are liberals who believe we need climate change legislation, they couldn’t figure it out.

The answer, as I was trying to get across last Friday, is that liberals believe government is good and they want more of it. The climate issue is just one more excuse to justify a bigger government. Conservatives believe government is bad and they want less of it. So, even those who agree that anthropogenic climate change is real are not going to accept that government has a role to play in solving the problem.

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The Ideal Environmental Issue

By | | News commentary
69 Comments

There is some kind of meeting going on in Copenhagen this week. Most of what the Antiplanner might say about it has already been said by others, such as this article or this one.

Aside from these stories, one of the reasons I’ve always been skeptical of anthropogenic climate change is that it is tailor-made for a greedy environmental movement. I spent nearly two decades immersed in that movement, and during that time everyone seemed to be looking for the Ideal Issue that would win them the debate over whatever little piece of earth they were trying to save.

The Ideal Issue is one that appears scientifically valid but is actually scientifically irrefutable. The Ideal Issue represents a major crisis, but — like the end-of-the-world predictions made by religious prophets — not one that will happen soon enough that its failure to take place will prove the issue invalid. For some, the Ideal Issue was a true public good, which meant it could only be solved through massive government interventions.

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Dueling PowerPoint Shows

By | | Regional planning
29 Comments

Last week, the Antiplanner engaged in a cordial debate with Chuck Kooshian of the Center for Clean Air Policy about whether smart growth — compact development combined with transit improvements — is a cost-effective way of reducing greenhouse gas emissions. You can watch the video below and download the slideshows used by Mr. Kooshian and the Antiplanner.

Mr. Kooshian made a good point in his rebuttal. The Antiplanner critiqued a study called Growing Cooler, which assumed that new cars built after 2020 would always average just 35 mpg, when much higher averages were possible and even likely. Mr. Kooshian pointed out that his own study assumed that new cars in 2030 would get 55 mph.
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Still, the Antiplanner pointed out, Mr. Kooshian’s study did not compare the cost-effectiveness of smart growth vs. even more fuel-efficient cars, and one MIT study estimated that building new cars average 69 would be cost-effective by 2030. Beyond this, I’ll let the video and presentations speak for themselves.

Off the Grid

By | | Housekeeping
14 Comments

When I was in DC last week, someone asked if my home in Oregon was off the grid. Not usually, but at 11 am today the power came back on after being out for about 30 hours.

Temperatures the night before last fell to 16 below zero, and the strain of numerous electric furnaces trying to compensate overwhelmed our local power coop. We made do with wood heat, cooked on the wood stove (which boils water and toasts bread a lot faster than electric appliances), and washed with water heated on the stove.
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About the only thing we missed was the Internet, and we didn’t miss that very much — my biggest regret was not being able to post to this blog. So here is my post for the day. Tomorrow I’ll get back to my usual rants.

Living the Dream

By | | Regional planning
38 Comments

David Owen, a writer for the New Yorker, thinks that New York City is the greenest place in America. He urges everyone to live like New Yorkers do: smaller, closer, and driving less.

New Yorkers certainly drive less than other Americans. But that doesn’t necessarily mean they live greener. For one thing, their transit system uses lots of energy and the power for it emits lots of pollution and CO2. I haven’t reviewed Owen’s book, so I don’t know how much analysis went into his claim that New York is greener than elsewhere.

But here are two people who are living Owen’s dream: they own a 175-square-foot room that used to be the maid’s room of someone’s luxury apartment. They eat out for all of their meals, “store” their clothes at the dry cleaners (which must mean they have they dry cleaned every night — how green is that?), and look forward to the day when they can afford a Murphy bed so as to free up the one-third of their room that is devoted to a bed.

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The Antiplanner’s Library: The Panic of 1907

By | | Book reviews, Meltdown
2 Comments

The U.S. economy had grown rapidly for more than a decade, and even seemed to absorb a major natural disaster in stride. But then an unpredictable event triggered a panic, and suddenly banks closed, stock prices collapsed, and the entire world economy went into turmoil.

The many parallels between the panic of 1907 and the crash of 2008 suggest that this book — written just before the recent turmoil — deserves a close reading. The authors — two professors at the University of Virginia business school — provide an hour-by-hour account of the collapse and how New York bankers, led by J.P. Morgan, responded. But the book also provides a broad view of the conditions that led to the panic and how policy makers can respond to such panics.

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