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Land of the Free and Home of the Government-Protected Cartels

By | | Transportation
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You are buying groceries when a woman asks you if you know how she can get a ride home. Does she need to call a taxi? You say, “No, I’ll give you a ride home.”

When you drop her off, she says, “Can I pay you something for your trouble?” You say she doesn’t need to, but she insists.

The next thing you know, you are surrounded by police who impound your car and give you $2,000 worth of tickets for running an illegal taxi service.

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Another Day, Another 2 Million Dollars

By | | News commentary, Transportation
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Rail transit construction is so farking expensive that the people overseeing lose all sense of proportion. Take Denver’s FasTracks program, which is supposed to build about 119 miles of rail transit over eight years for $6.2 billion. That’s more than $2 million a day, seven days a week, 52 weeks a year.

So its not surprising that Denver’s transit agency, RTD, would casually spend $15 million on land it doesn’t need. That’s $50,000 an acre for land that is pretty similar to other land in the area that normally sells for $10,000 to $15,000 an acre.

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Economists Rule!

By | | News commentary
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Before the weekend, Hillary Clinton was expected to win Indiana by 5 percent and lose North Carolina to Barack Obama by only about 8 percent. Then, on Sunday before the election, Hillary made the mistake of offending a group of people who she thought were irrelevant.

You know the rest: Hillary barely won 1 percent more votes than Obama in Indiana and lost North Carolina by more than 14 percent.

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What Popped the Housing Bubble?

By | | Regional planning, Useful Data
29 Comments

High gas prices burst the housing bubble, says an economist from Oregon. The economist’s detailed report goes much further than this, saying that high gas prices have led to “a tectonic shift in housing demand,” namely that suburban homes are now worth less while central city homes are worth more.

Based on this claim, the economist concludes that cities that promote more compact development will be more “successful than places that continue to follow sprawling development.” He urges cities to “promote land use patterns that enable mixed-use development and provide more bikeable, walkable neighborhoods served by transit”

This is, of course, a repeat of James Kunstler’s “the suburbs are doomed” argument. “Vehicle miles traveled—a key driver of energy demand and greenhouse gas emissions—are
down,” says the report breathlessly, “reversing a 20-year upward trend.”

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Thoughts on the Oregon Primary

By | | News commentary
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Another Tuesday, another primary that won’t resolve the Democratic nomination. For the first time since 1972, my home state’s primary is likely to take place before all the decisions are made. While Oregon’s votes won’t be counted for two more weeks, our mail-in ballots are already in hand. To date, the Antiplanner has only skirted the presidential campaign, but since I am about to vote, it seems worthwhile going over my reasoning.

For me, the biggest issue today is the war in Iraq. This war was a mistake in almost every possible way. It reduced our standing in the international community, made no sense at all as a part of the war on terror, ignored the Powell Doctrine of when and how we should go to war, and probably made life worse for most residents of Iraq (though better for the Kurdish minority). Domestically, the war’s high cost has dramatically reduced the value of the dollar, from 1.10 euros in 2002 to 0.64 euros today. You can yak about peak oil and Chinese demands for energy, but it was this devaluation more than anything else that has been responsible for the run up in fuel prices.

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The Antiplanner’s Library: The Myth of the Rational Voter

By | | Book reviews
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I once met a government-employed economist who believed that, because democracy is the most perfect form of government, any decision made by a democracy is automatically the best possible decision. Apparently, some people still believe that, or George Mason University economist Brian Caplan would not have had to write The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies.

Winston Churchill once said, “democracy is the worst form of government except all the others that have been tried.” Henry David Thoreau was even more skeptical, saying, “A wise man will not leave the right to the mercy of chance, nor wish it to prevail through the power of the majority. There is but little virtue in the action of masses of men.”

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Yes, Smart Growth Caused the Mortgage Meltdown

By | | Planning Disasters
44 Comments

Wendell Cox, one of the Antiplanner’s faithful allies, argues in a new paper that “smart growth exacerbated the international financial crisis.” Of course, the Antiplanner has said this at least since last December (and The Best-Laid Plans predicts such an outcome), while some of the Antiplanner’s loyal opposition remains skeptical.

Skeptics probably won’t be persuaded by Cox, simply because his arguments are similar to those previously made here. “Excessive land-use regulation,” says Cox, led to artificial housing scarcities. This drove up prices and led people who would otherwise have been able to afford a mortgage at prime rates to turn to subprime loans. Of course, the loosening of the credit market contributed, but without smart growth, we would currently have a “subprime mortgage problem” rather than a full-blown international economic crisis.

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No Wimpy Transportation Bill Next Year

By | | News commentary
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Vying to become the new Don Young (he of the bridge to nowhere), House Transportation Committee chair James Oberstar promises that the next transportation reauthorization will cost $450 billion over six years. Don Young wanted to spend $350 billion in the 2005 reauthorization, but hardliners in the Bush Administration forced him to keep it to $286 billion.

“We’re not going to do a wimpy bill” like in 2005, Oberstar promised. Notably, he was not talking to transportation users, but to U.S. steel makers, and he pointedly added that, “We’re talking about a lot of steel.”

Increasing spending to $450 billion will require either about a 9-cent-per-gallon increase in the gas tax or deficit spending at a level never before contemplated in federal transportation measures. We know from previous statements that Oberstar supports at least a 5-cent increase in federal gas taxes.

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