New York Transit Unfair to Riders?

New York’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority expects to have a “gap” in its 2008 budget of $345 million, climbing to more than $1.1 billion in 2009, nearly $2 billion in 2010, and more than $2 billion per year after that. To close the gap, it proposes to cut service, including some trains and several buses, and raise fares by 23 percent.

Does this deserve your subsidy?
Flickr photo by Jenniferrt66.

Even after these changes, it projects losses of $266 million in 2010, $454 million in 2011, and more than $600 million in 2012 (see page 18). The big problem is that the city and state of New York are both tapped out — “Neither the city nor the state has any money,” says Mayor Bloomberg. Governor David Paterson adds the state has “vast budget problems.”

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Bad News BART

Last week, the Antiplanner reported that it appeared that the BART-to-San-Jose proposal had lost the necessary two-thirds of the votes needed for funding. Now it appears that absentee ballots made up the difference.

According to the latest results, measure B won 66.74 percent of the votes. A few thousand remained to be counted, but with the measure ahead of the required two-thirds by 481 votes, it seems unlikely to lose.

That’s good news for those who believe that every nutty rail proposal, no matter how expensive, should be funded. Yet this proposal was so bad that even, the real rail advocates in California, including the Sierra Club, opposed it.

Today, you can viagra no prescription find a wide array of ginseng products in market. Both work for everybody – elderly people, women and others, according to the findings viagra 100 mg my link of the National Institute of Health (NIH), 30 million men in the U.S. and 2.3 million men in the UK suffer from this problem. He is expected to be replaced, at least in the sale levitra interim, by Sir Michael Rake, an experienced City figure who is currently the bank’s senior independent director. In modern society, the weight loss is not only used to treat impotence, it has also proven to be effective in staving off Alzheimers disease as well as dementia in certain people. http://respitecaresa.org/?plugin=all-in-one-event-calendar&controller=ai1ec_exporter_controller&action=export_events&ai1ec_post_ids=950&xml=true female viagra cheap Continue reading

J.C. Penney, Entrepreneur

J.C. Penney was, in many ways, the Sam Walton of his age. While many of Penney’s chief competitors came from the big cities — Sears and Montgomery Wards started in Chicago, Macy’s started in New York City — Penney, like Walton, began in a small town in a backwater state.

James C. Penney at about the time he started his first store in 1902.

From there, he built Penneys into the nation’s largest drygoods chain. By the 1920s, Penneys was able to advertise itself as a “nationwide institution.” Before Penney died in 1971, there were nearly 1,700 Penneys stores, and his company also owned the Thrift Drug chain, a discount chain known as The Treasury, and had 1,400 outlets to its catalog store.

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Upgrading

You may have noticed that this blog was down for a few hours yesterday. The Antiplanner’s ISP says someone was trying to hack the site and so they shut it down. They recommended that I install up-to-date software, which I am doing. In the meantime, no new posts until tomorrow or when I sort things out, whenever comes last. Feel free to leave comments and let me know if anything isn’t working properly.

I can already see something screwed up the links in the righthand column (except on the Plain theme). Unfortunately, I never really learned how to do cascading style sheets, so it may take me awhile to fix it. Are there any CSS experts out there willing to give me a hand?

Update: Fixed the righthand column. It is not exactly the way it was before, but it works. WordPress apparently no longer uses the tag I was using for that column, and the replacement tag works a little differently. Someday I’ll learn CSS. Just like someday I’ll master Illustrator, bicycle around the world, and read the complete works of James Joyce.

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New London Redevelopment

In June, 2005, the Supreme Court infamously decided that cities could condemn peoples’ land to give to private developers provided the government had written an economic development plan for the project. In response to arguments that many previous such plans had failed, the Supreme Court merely said that “we decline to second-guess the City’s considered judgments about the efficacy of its development plan.”

Susette Kelo, who fought New London’s plan for her Fort Trumbull neighborhood.
Flickr photo by cereza juana.

Three years after the decision, no one had to second-guess the city’s judgments. Instead, it was clear that they were wrong. The homes of Susette Kelo and her neighbors have all been torn down or removed. But, except for the remodeling of one government building into another government building, virtually no new development had taken place in the Fort Trumbull district by May, 2008.

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Will Obama Declare War on the Suburbs?

The Washington Post reports that Barack Obama will be our first president whose heritage is from the central cities since Grover Cleveland, who left the office in 1897. Prior to becoming president, Cleveland had been a reform mayor of Buffalo, and then governor of New York. I think they missed one: Theodore Roosevelt grew up in New York City and represented part of the city in the legislature. But presidents since then have been from suburbs or small towns.

Obama, however, was born in Honolulu, went to school in Jakarta, Los Angeles, and New York, and got his famous job as a community organizer in Chicago. His only “suburban” time was getting his law degree in Cambridge, MA.

From one perspective, the war on sprawl is really a war between central cities and suburbs. The central cities see the suburbs growing and want some of that growth (and the tax revenues that come with it) for themselves. By demonizing the suburbs, at the very least they have a chance to grab more than their share of federal and state funds for housing and transportation.

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Bailout Boondoggle

Remember when TreasSec Henry Paulson got down on his knee to beg Nancy Pelosi to support his $700 billion recovery plan? He said he would use the money to buy mortgage securities in order to set a floor on their value and restore faith to the credit markets. Treasury Department wonks talked about reverse Dutch auctions and other fancy ways of making sure that the bailout would succeed and maybe even earn a profit for taxpayers.

Immense pressure was put on Congress to pass the bill authorizing Paulson’s plan. “If there is even the slightest chance it will work,” one congressman said, “we should do it.”

Now, a mere seven weeks after Paulson bent his knee, not only is there not the slightest chance it will work, there is not even the slightest chance that Paulson is going to do it. Paulson now admits that “it was clear to me” as early as October 3, the date the President signed the bailout bill, “that purchasing troubled assets” would not work. But he waits almost six weeks to tell us?

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Sellwood Bridge DEIS

Sellwood Bridge is falling down
falling down, falling down
Sellwood Bridge is falling down
My unfair planners

Portland has finally issued a draft environmental impact statement (DEIS) for Sellwood Bridge, Portland’s oldest and most hazardous bridge over the Willamette River. Not only is the DEIS about six years late, it is a mish-mosh of confusing alternatives that allow planners to manipulate the public to get what they want rather than what the public needs.

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Too Late for the Election

Just days after voters approved the California high-speed rail plan, the rail authority posted a new business plan to its web site. They also posted a summary, but frankly the “business plan” is so superficial that the summary isn’t really necessary.

“It’s very pretty and has nice photographs,” says Jon Coupal of the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association. “But as a business plan to present to venture capitalists to convince them to invest, it falls far short.”

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The Progressive Fallacy

Remember those transit agencies that are in trouble because of the credit crisis? It turns out this is all the fault of “public-private partnerships.” At least, that’s what U.S. Representatives James Oberstar (who chairs the House Transportation Committee) and Peter DeFazio (who chairs the Highways and Transit Subcommittee) said in a letter to Secretary of Transportation Mary Peters last week.

Recall that transit agencies decided to exploit a loophole in federal tax law (since closed) that allowed them to “leverage” their capital investments to get an extra 3 percent out of those investments. They “sold” their capital investments to some bank, then leased them back. The banks would get to depreciate those investments on their taxes (which the transit agencies, not being taxpayers, couldn’t do), saving about $6 million out of $100 million. They split the savings with the transit agencies.

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