Supermarket Trends

A retailer develops a new format for distributing and selling products that turns out to be wildly successful. Spreading like a juggernaut across the country, the company goes from being an insignificant regional chain to the world’s largest retailer in little more than a decade, leading frantic competitors to seek protection through government regulation.

Walmart in the 1990s? Could be, but I am specifically referring to the Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Company (A&P) in the 1910s and 1920s. Founded by George Huntington Hartford, he left the company in trust to his five children when he died in 1918. Two of those children, George Ludlum and John Augustine Hartford, led the company through its growth years.

November 13, 1950 cover of Time. Note the gold chain around the photo representing A&P’s position as the largest chain store in the world. (Click for a larger image.)

George was the financial manager; John was the innovator who developed the “economy store” (a tiny cash-and-carry store run by only one clerk) in 1912, which multiplied into nearly 16,000 stores by 1930. When supermarkets became popular in the 1930s, John designed A&P’s first supermarket and over the next fifteen years built nearly 5,000 more, closing several economy stores for each supermarket opening.

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APA Gives VisionPDX an Award

In keeping with its tradition of judging programs based on their intentions rather than results, the American Planning Association has given its 2008 Award for Public Outreach to Portland’s Mayor, Tom Potter, for his VisionPDX program. This was a strange program to begin with, as Portland planners had already endlessly solicited residents for their opinions through hearings, open houses, and charrettes (not that any of the surveys were scientific).

Stranger still, since Potter was elected to a four-year term, was the timetable. It took more than two years just to collect and collate public opinions, and more time yet to make sense of it all (not that much of it made sense). This left Potter, who leaves office in January, little time to do anything about it.

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Charging for Pollution

Last Friday, some of the Antiplanner’s readers were outraged at my suggestion that owners of studded snow tires should be required to pay a tax equal to the amount of damage their tires do the roads. Somehow, asking people to be responsible for the costs they impose on others was considered to be an antilibertarian threat to personal freedom.

Just for the benefit of those who still don’t get it, libertarianism doesn’t mean freedom to do whatever you want. It means freedom to do whatever you want provided you don’t hurt anyone else and you pay the full cost of what you do including paying to use other people’s property at a price that they are willing to accept. For the record, roads are the property of state, county, or city road agencies, and you have the freedom to use them so long as you obey those agencies’ rules. Libertarians might prefer the roads be private, but the rules apply whether they are private or public.

Meanwhile, other commenters asked why the Antiplanner wants to fix the studded tire externality but not the pollution externality. Of course I want to fix the pollution externality, but I want to do it right. Raising gas taxes to deal with toxic pollutants, for example, is the wrong way to go because emissions of carbon monoxide, hydrocarbons, and other toxics are not proportional to the amount of gasoline consumed.

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New Transportation Secretary

Obama’s pick for transportation secretary, outgoing Illinois Represenative Ray LaHood, was a surprise, since the early rumors focused on liberals from large urban areas such as San Francisco or Portland. Instead, LaHood is a Republican representing Peoria, whose urbanized area population is only about a quarter million people.

Not counting Defense Secretary Gates (who considers himself Republican but is not registered in any political party), LaHood will be the token Republican in Obama’s cabinet, just as Norman Mineta was the token Democrat in Bush’s first cabinet. Though LaHood has called himself a “true conservative” — which could mean just about anything — he is highly praised by liberals such as Mark Shields.

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Portland Commuter Rail 25% Over Budget

Portland’s Westside commuter rail is $33 million over its planned budget of $133. Although just $8 million of that is due to the cost of the commuter rail cars, a recent article in The Oregonian blames the manufacturer of those cars for having “cost TriMet millions.”

The Westside commuter rail line goes from nowhere to nowhere. Actually, it goes from Wilsonville to Beaverton, but neither endpoint is a major job center. That means commuters who use the commuter rail will probably change in Beaverton to a light rail train. Faithful Antiplanner ally John Charles says this line is a loser. It is so bad that Oregon’s congressional delegation had to pass a law exempting it from Federal Transit Administration cost-effectiveness criteria restricting funding to projects that only waste a lot of money instead of a whole lot of money.

Colorado Railcar’s original demonstrator unit.
Flickr photo by AaverageJoe.

Engineering, design, construction, right of way, and signals for the project cost about $22 million more than expected, which The Oregonian mentions only in a tiny chart. Instead, the story focuses on Colorado Railcar, a company that has been promoting the idea of Diesel multiple units (DMUs), which more or less means a light-rail-like car powered by a Diesel engine powerful enough to also tow one or two unpowered cars.

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Swedes Find Rail Transit Not the Best Way to Lower Emissions

A report from the Swedish Institute for Transport and Communications Analysis (SIKA) finds that rail transportation may reduce greenhouse gas emissions, but at an extremely high cost. The report, which was prepared at the request of the Swedish government, is available only in Swedish, but an English summary is in this news report.

The report found that rail transportation emits about 20 percent less greenhouse gases than autos, but rail service is so expensive that it would be more effective to simply improve auto technologies. Reducing one ton of greenhouse gases with rail costs $6,500, said the report, while reducing it with auto improvements can cost less than $40 per ton. Nonetheless people should also know that this will provide you with the joy of sexual pleasure as an important part of a person’s healthy life. tadalafil online in uk see for more info Ejaculation time more than 4 minutes is normal and for the most part related to men levitra generic cheap who are sixty years and above. If taken 30 minutes to 1 hour before the sexual intercourse and works better if the stomach is empty. sildenafil pfizer is widely used by millions of men throughout the world suffer from erectile dysfunction. Your physician will probably see this link low priced viagra be the one particular to determine whether you should continue making use of the drug can be harmful and it can leave bad impacts to user. The news report does not make clear whether the SIKA report accounted for greenhouse gas emissions during rail construction, but if it did not, then rail’s cost per ton would be even greater.

Bailouts and Stimuli

The Antiplanner doesn’t always agree with Nobel-prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz, but his take on the auto bailout makes sense. Too many bailout proponents speak as though the bailout is the difference between life and death for the Big Three. In fact, all it may mean is life or death for the value of the Big Three’s shares.

Chrysler ecoVoyager fuel-cell hybrid-electric concept car.

Most of the nation’s airlines were in bankruptcy sometime in the past decade — you probably flew one when it was in chapter 11. Shareholders were wiped out, but the planes kept flying and airline workers kept working.

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One-Acre Lots? Horrors!

The city of Tualatin, a suburb of Portland, zoned about 300 acres of land within its borders in a low-density zone allowing 1 to 6 homes per acre. This raises the specter of up to 300 new homes on one-acre lots, a notion that is sending regional planners into fits.

“We don’t enjoy getting into this type of confrontation,” says planning professor and Metro councilor Carl Hosticka. But “it’s not fair to the other jurisdictions,” meaning the ones the complied with high-density housing goals set by Metro, Portland’s regional planning authority.

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Manchester Rejects Cordon Charges

Last Thursday, voters in Manchester, England soundly trounced a proposal to charge a fee every time they entered the city and spend the tolls on some expensive transit projects. Under the proposal, planners drew two rings around the city. Crossing the outer ring inbound during morning rush hours or outbound during evening rush hours would cost 1 pound. Crossing the inner ring would cost 2 pounds inbound in the morning, and 1 pound outbound in the afternoon. Commuters would potentially pay as much as 5 pounds ($7.50) a day.

Flickr photo by Gene Hunt.

The money was all going to go towards transit. Almost half of it — 1.2 billion pounds (about $1.8 billion) — would have been spent on an 18-mile tram (light-rail) line. Meanwhile, a variety of other alternatives that would have done more to relieve congestion at a lower cost were left unfunded.

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Studded Tires: Ban or Tax?

It is supposed to snow this weekend, so a couple of days ago I drove to the central Oregon Costco to have my all-weather tires replaced with snow tires. A lot of other people had the same idea so I got to go shopping for several hours while I waited. Walking through the parking lot from the Barnes & Noble to the Whole Foods, I met several cars that audibly had studded tires, and every time I did, I would get a little angry.

First used in the U.S. in the 1960s, studded tires were supposed to provide better traction on ice than all-weather tires. However, they actually provide worse traction in most other pavement conditions. Meanwhile, “traction tires” or snow tires, whose rubber is softer than all-weather tires, work as well as studded tires on ice but much better than studded tires in other conditions. Snow tires were once much more expensive than studded tires, but now are competitively priced.

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