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Privatizing Fish Makes Iceland Rich Enough to Lose It All

By | | Meltdown, News commentary
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Vanity Fair has a fascinating story about Iceland, a nation whose economy is far worse off than our own. Its no wonder: until last month, the nation’s central banker was a poet, the finance minister a veterinarian, the business minister a philosopher.

Iceland: Beautiful and broke.
Photo by stuckincustoms.

How did this happen? Back in the 1970s, the nation privatized its ocean fisheries by giving percentage shares of fishing rights to fishermen. This gave the fishermen an incentive to promote, rather than overfish, the fisheries. Plus, they could sell their shares or borrow against them. “In a single stroke the fish became a source of real, sustainable wealth rather than shaky sustenance,” says writer Michael Lewis.

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Taking Back the Land

By | | News commentary
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Vermont passed a law saying that any unused and undocumented old public roads will, after July 2015, revert to private ownership. As a result, groups of volunteers are joining city officials to examine old records to see if they can find “ancient roads” and return them to public ownership.

Is this someone’s private yard, or a public road? In Vermont, some homeowners won’t know until July, 2015.
Flickr photo by paul+photos=moody.

One person bought land after a complete title search plus assurances from the town clerk that there were no public rights of way on the land. But then someone unearthed “hand written set of surveyors notes from 1793 hidden in an old leather ledger in the town office vault” that showed a road on the property. This was made into “an encumbrance on our deed,” and as a result, “Our life has been put on hold, our farm has been put on hold, and our business has been put on hold. It’s the ultimate nightmare.”

Meanwhile, other people find it “thrilling” to “to sift through records for two or three days and find a road.” The hope is that, by making these roads public, they can give more public access to Vermont’s natural scenic beauty.

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How Depressing: Portland Is Number One Again

By | | News commentary, Urban areas
11 Comments

City officials are probably not going to brag about this one. Business Week wanted to find out which are the the nation’s unhappiest cities. It used criteria such as green space, crime rates, unemployment, and divorce, but weighted things like depression (based on antidepressant sales) and suicide rates more heavily. Oh, yes, it also considered the number of cloudy days per year.

Portland is number one! And not just on number of cloudy days, but also on antidepressants. It is pretty high up on suicide rates too.

By comparison, Detroit, which nobody would use as a model city, has the lowest suicide rate and one of the lowest rates of depression. The magazine still ranks Detroit number 4 based on its high crime and unemployment rates.

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This Explains a Lot

By | | News commentary
9 Comments

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Privatize Transit? Horrors!

By | | Transportation
6 Comments

Who could possibly suggest such a thing?

Speaking of which, I seem to have fallen behind on these bits of shameless self-promotion. Here is an article on infrastructure stimuli, one on light rail in San Antonio, and most recently one about turning NYC’s Broadway into a pedestrian mall. I also had an op ed on rail transit in the late-lamented Rocky Mountain News, but its last edition was last Friday, and no one seems to know how long its web site will be maintained.
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Final Edition from Matthew Roberts on Vimeo.

Obama Proposes $5 Billion More for HSR

By | | News commentary, Transportation, Wildfire
8 Comments

Page 91 of the President’s 2010 budget proposes “a five-year $5 billion high-speed rail state grant program.” It also proposes to increase “funding for public transit to support commuters, improve air quality, and reduce greenhouse gases.”

The Antiplanner is all for improving the environment. But these are not the ways to do it. My research on public transit shows that transit does as much or more harm to the environment than autos. My research on high-speed rail shows that it is not much better — and any environmental benefits are entirely speculative since we have very little high-speed rail in the U.S.
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In other news, pages 47 and 77 of the budget propose to take care of public land wildfire problems by dumping more money on them. Of course, that is what created the problems in the first place.

Denver Transportation Plan

By | | News commentary
3 Comments

There’s been a lot of hand-wringing lately about the future of the newspaper industry. The Seattle Post-Intelligencer and Denver Rocky Mountain News both appear on the verge of going out of business. Without newspapers, “corruption will rise, legislation will more easily be captured by vested interests and voter turnout will fall.”

Funny, I’ve always found that the big-city daily newspapers were the ones doing the most to cover up corruption and protect special-interest groups. Meanwhile, the weekly papers, like Portland’s Willamette Week are the ones doing the investigative journalism breaking the stories like the Goldschmidt and Adams scandals.

In any case, here is a lengthy article from a Denver newsweekly about the city’s strategic transportation plan.

Obama’s Model for High-Speed Rail: Crédit Mobilier

By | | News commentary, Transportation
7 Comments

“History reminds us that at every moment of economic upheaval and transformation, this nation has responded with bold action and big ideas,” President Obama told Congress last night. “In the midst of civil war, we laid railroad tracks from one coast to another that spurred commerce and industry.”

The rails meet. Many versions of this photo, such as the painting below from the U.S. Capitol, sanitize it by removing the bottles of alcohol.

Aside from the simple factual issue that most of the first transcontinental railroad was constructed after, not during, the war, most of Obama’s audience would have forgotten that its construction caused one of the first and biggest financial swindles of the nineteenth century. That scandal was the result of a simple fact: such a railroad made no economic sense in the late 1860s.

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Flaws in the HSR Plan

By | | Follow up, News commentary, Transportation
17 Comments

When President Obama persuaded Congress to include $8 billion for high-speed rail in the economic stimulus, he had in mind upgrades to existing freight and Amtrak tracks that would allow trains to go as fast as 110 miles per hour. In a lot of places, the main upgrades that are necessary are improvements to grade crossings.

Under Federal Railroad Administration rules, no grade crossings are allowed when trains go above 125 miles per hour. At 110 to 125, an “impenetrable barrier” (such as this four-gate crossing) must block traffic at grade crossings. From 60 to 110, the FRA allows conventional two-gate crossings, that is, the gates only need to block the “entering” lanes of the road.

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The other good news is that none of the 20 passengers on board the train were hurt either. Twenty passengers? Why are we spending more than a billion dollars a year subsidizing Amtrak trains, much less considering spending tens of billions on high-speed rail, when some of those trains carry fewer than half as many passengers as could fit on a typical intercity bus?

We Can’t Afford to Run What We’ve Got, So Let’s Go to China

By | | News commentary, Transportation
7 Comments

Transit ridership is supposedly up, so naturally Denver’s Regional Transit District is eliminating 10 transit routes, including one light-rail route and several express bus routes. This bold move will cover less than 20 percent of the agency’s $23 million gap in its budget, suggesting Denver transit riders can expect lots more route cuts in the near future.

Meanwhile, RTD board members are letting taxpayers pay for their trips to China, $329 per night beachfront hotel rooms, and $70 dinners (unsupported by receipts). Due to declining sales tax revenues, the agency has imposed salary freezes on staff — except, of course, General Manager Cal Marsella, whose contract probably makes him the highest-paid public official in the state of Colorado.

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