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St. Louis Transit Competing with San Jose

By | | Follow up, Transportation
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St. Louis’s Metro (formerly Bi-State) seems to be seeking the title of nation’s worst-managed transit system, an honor the Antiplanner has previously accorded to San Jose’s Valley Transportation Authority. After carrying 55.6 million trips in 1998 — the highest level since 1983 — ridership in the St. Louis area declined to a low of 46.7 million trips in 2004.

The Antiplanner previously featured Larry Salci, the head of Metro, when he lost a lawsuit over cost overruns with light-rail contractors. It turned out that particular failure — or his big mouth — cost him his job, as he “left effective immediately” by mutual agreement with the agency’s board a week after the court decision.

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Sticking It to Light Rail

By | | Transportation
12 Comments

The Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007, which President Bush signed last month, is exactly the kind of top-down, centralized planning that the Antiplanner opposes. The act bans incandescent bulbs after 2014, mandates that auto fleets achieve an average of 35 miles per gallon by 2020, and requires that biofuels be substituted for at least 36 billion gallons of gasoline (about one-quarter of today’s consumption) by 2022.

While many auto opponents have congratulated themselves that the new law “sticks it to Detroit,” the reality is just the opposite. While Detroit may or may not be able to keep up with the Japanese in building fuel-efficient cars, the real effect of an auto-industry wide standard is that it raises the goal posts for people’s fantasized alternatives to the automobile. In essence, this is sticking it to light rail.

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Seeing the (Red) Light in Cincinnati

By | | Transportation
18 Comments

Peter Bronson, a columnist for the Cincinnati Enquirer, is seeing red: red-light cameras, that is. The Cincinnati city council wants to install red-light cameras, even though the Virginia Department of Transportation found that such cameras lead to a 29-percent increase in accidents. The Cincinnati council, Bronson suggests, may be more motivated by ticket revenues than safety.

Even worse, Bronson goes on to say, is a city proposal to spend $100 million building a four-mile streetcar line. Bronson then quotes the Antiplanner at an embarrassing length, even including a sidebar of quotes about the effects of streetcars on taxes and other issues.

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Are We Facing Collapse?

By | | News commentary
23 Comments

Is Jared Diamond, the Malthusian alarmist about our future prospects, arithmetically challenged or economically challenged? That’s the first question I asked when I read his op ed in January 2’s New York Times.

“The average rates at which people consume resources like oil and metals, and produce wastes like plastics and greenhouse gases, are about 32 times higher in North America, Western Europe, Japan and Australia than they are in the developing world,” says Diamond. Based on this, he calculates that, if everyone in the world consumed as much as we do, “It would be as if the world population ballooned to 72 billion people.”

Of course, it is perfectly obvious — to Diamond — that the world cannot support this. So he “is certain that within most of our lifetimes we’ll be consuming less than we do now.”

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American City Suite

By | | Regional planning
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Back in 1972, a one-hit singing pair named Cashman & West released an ode to New York City called American City Suite. The song reflected back on the city’s happy days and mourned its then-current decay. Although a 7-3/4-minute version was produced for radio, the full version of the song was 12 minutes and it became an “anthem” for New Yorkers in the 1970s.

At that time, many people believed that the problem with the cities was that the wealthy and middle-class had fled to the suburbs, leaving only the poor behind. Big-city officials viewed the suburbs as parasites, because they benefitted from the city but paid no taxes to it. They hoped to remedy this by imposing some sort of commuter tax on suburbanites.

Having grown up in a city, I remember repeating this viewpoint as a high-school student to a suburban relative. He vehemently responded that there was no way he would pay taxes to a corrupt city government. The notion that modern government officials might be corrupt, at least outside of Chicago, had never occurred to me.

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Happy New Year

By | | Housekeeping
5 Comments

And happy anniversary, this being one year since the Antiplanner’s first post. I would like to extend my best wishes for 2008 to Jim Karlock, Aynrandgirl, John Galt, and all my other faithful allies, as well as to DanS, D4P, MSetty, and all my other loyal opponents who have worked so hard to keep me honest. It has been good to have all of you join me for past year’s investigations into the trials and tribulations of government planning.

The Antiplanner’s best friend, Chip, wishes you a Woofy New Year.
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When I began this blog, I promised to “post to this blog at least five days a week.” I pretty much kept that promise (I missed March 1st because I misdated a post March 2 that was supposed to be for March 1). But this has been hard work. Because I like to thoroughly research and document the issues I discuss, many posts take several hours to write.

For 2008, I promise to write several posts a week, but not necessarily a post every weekday. I am going to try to cover some new issues — light rail and Portland are easy targets, but attacking them is getting repetitious. And more of my posts might be shorter, more blog-like, rather than the op-ed lengths that I usually produce. Nevertheless, I hope this blog will remain as entertaining and thought-provoking as ever.

The Biased FTA Won’t Give Portland Its Streetcar Subsidies

By | | Transportation
18 Comments

Pity the poor city of Portland. It wants to build more streetcar lines, and its Godfather Earl created a special slush fund small starts program in the recent transportation bill for such new rail lines.

Only now the evil Federal Transit Administration (no doubt goaded by the evil Bush Administration) says that it will only give out small starts grants if cities can show that streetcars are more efficient than buses. Waahhh!

Portland’s streetcar passes through the Pearl District, which received hundreds of millions of dollars of federal and local subsidies thanks to Portland’s former godfather, Neil Goldschmidt.
Flickr photo by NeiTech.

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How Is Abolition Like Land-Use Planning?

By | | Regional planning
35 Comments

Yesterday, one of the Antiplanner’s loyal opponents left a comment comparing land-use regulation with the abolition of slavery, implying that it would just as absurd to compensate landowners for such regulation as it would be to compensate slaveowners for ending slavery. The comparison is apt. Those who make it in favor of land-use regulation apparently think the solution to land-use debates is to have a civil war and kill hundreds of thousands of people.

I’ve heard this comparison before with regard to endangered species. Slavery was immoral, so we didn’t compensate slaveowners. Making a species go extinct is equally immoral, so we shouldn’t compensate owners of habitat when we regulate away their right to use it.

This attitude betrays a profound misunderstanding of both history and economics.

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So Much for Getting Even

By | | Regional planning
31 Comments

Dorothy English will probably never get to subdivide her land. She and her husband bought 20 acres of land outside of Portland in 1953, when there was no zoning on the land. After her husband died, she wanted to divide it into eight parcels to give to her children and grandchildren.

By that time, however, the Oregon legislature required counties to zone all land, and Dorothy’s was outside of Portland’s urban-growth boundary. She fought hard for the right to subdivide, once testifying before the legislature that, “I’m 91 years old, and I plan to live to be 100 because there are some bastards I want to get even with.”

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The Truth About Santa Claus and Prices

By | | Mission
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Another Christmas has come and gone. Watching my niece and nephew open their presents reminded me of when I was dazzled by the Christmas tree lights and dreaming about the possibilities of all the things under the tree. To this day, the best present I’ve ever received was a model train that I had received the year before but that my father had expertly repainted in the colors of my favorite railroad, the Great Northern.

I remembered asking all sorts of questions at that age: What is the fastest train in the world? How does Santa Claus fit in the chimney? And why do things cost money? Why doesn’t the government just give people what they need?

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