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Add This Acronym to Your Vocabulary: NAMFAE

By | | Transportation
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In the wake of the Minneapolis bridge disaster, every transportation journalist in the country is looking for local bridges in danger of collapse. I foresee a movement to raise taxes to replace thousands of bridges — no doubt with “a balanced share” of the taxes going for public transit. (In case anyone isn’t sure, the Antiplanner opposes spending general taxes on highways even more than on bus transit.)

Flickr photo of the I-35W bridge by Poppyseed Bandits. Click photo for a larger view. Click here for more photos of the bridge by Poppyseed Bandits.

But the problem has never been an inadequate amount of money. As Wonkette’s anonymous lobbyist points out, the real problem is that the transportation planning process has become so arcane that it takes literally decades to do anything. She gives as an example the Woodrow Wilson Bridge across the Potomac, planning for the replacement of which began in 1988. If they are lucky, the new bridge and interchanges will be completed in 2011, just 23 years later.

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The Antiplanners’ Library: The Edifice Complex

By | | Book reviews
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What makes politicians and planners try to design and control entire cities? Architecture critic Deyan Sudjic argues that it is a combination of “excess, egotism, and greed” (p. 325). His book, The Edifice Complex, reviews the relationships between dictators, presidents, billionaires, and their architects.

The book’s opening chapters about Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini, and Mao make it clear that the impulse to rebuild cities is anything but democratic. Later discussions of democratically elected leaders such as Francois Mitterand and Tony Blair are not much more generous. And Sudjic’s comments on presidential libraries — especially the one for George H.W. Bush — are, if anything, even more scathing than his assessment of Albert Speer’s Berlin.

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Bridge Collapse

By | | News commentary, Transportation
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It is too soon to know what caused the I-35 bridge in Minneapolis to collapse suddenly last night (4.9mb video). But at least one report indicated that a 2006 inspection of the forty-year-old bridge found “fatigue cracks and bending of girders that lift the approaching span.”

Another report says that federal inspectors rated the bridge “structurally deficient” in 2005, although it added that 80,000 bridges in the U.S. have earned that mediocre rating. However, as long ago as 2001, the state found that the bridge “exhibited several fatigue problems, primarily due to unanticipated out-of-plane distortion of the girders. Concern about fatigue cracking in the deck truss is heightened by a lack of redundancy in the main truss system.”

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Charlotte Light-Rail Boondoggle

By | | News commentary, Transportation
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Cost overruns on a light-rail system in Charlotte, NC, have proven so great that voters have collected enough signatures to put a measure on this November’s ballot to repeal the half-cent sales tax that supports rail. To support the program, the University of North Carolina – Charlotte (UNCC) published a supposedly independent study claiming to find that light-rail was a good investment.

The study only added to the project’s embarrassment, however. First, critics claimed that some of the data in the study were obtained from biased sources, and the authors of the study admitted that the data came from a pro-light-rail web site. Based on this, the UNCC study concluded that there were no cost overruns, which the authors later agreed was wrong.

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Is Portland Green?

By | | News commentary
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Congratulations to Portland for conning another gullible publication into declaring it a wonderful place to live based on intentions rather than results. A magazine named Grist has just declared Portland to be the second greenest city in the world.

What is the basis for this declaration? Why, Portland has a plan, you see, to reduce greenhouse gases. It also has light-rail transit “to help keep cars off the road.”

Yes, and that plus $5 will buy you a cup of coffee at Starbucks.

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It Was Bound to Happen

By | | City planning, News commentary
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Most city residents don’t want density. But they also don’t want urban sprawl. How do we deal with this conundrum? The obvious (but stupid) answer is to put all new residents in a few extremely high-density developments. That solution prevents sprawl without densifying most existing neighborhoods.

So I was not surprised when Jim Karlock pointed out to me that Portland City Commissioner Sam Adams proposed in a speech last week that Portland “should plan to accommodate our share of projected regional growth — Metro anticipates 300,000 more Portlanders by 2035 — within 1/4 mile of all existing and to-be-planned streetcar and lightrail transit stops.” This would, he said, “encourage responsible, transit-supportive development while protecting our existing single-family neighborhoods from undo growth.”

By which, I presume, he means “undue growth.” (I previously mentioned a news report of this speech but had not read the complete text.)

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The Spotted Owl and the Planner

By | | News commentary, Public lands
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Many people know that the northern spotted owl stopped the cutting of old-growth forests, but few people know why. In the late 1980s, the Fish & Wildlife Service listed the spotted owl as a threatened species because it relies on old-growth forests, which were rapidly being cut, as its habitat. This contributed to a huge decline in timber harvests from federal lands after 1990.

Fish & Wildlife Service photo.

The spotted owl is a predator whose main prey are northern flying squirrels, red-backed voles, and other species that mainly live in old-growth forests. But the spotted owl is not the stop of the food chain: it is preyed upon by the great grey owl, which especially goes after undefended juveniles and eggs. When given the opportunity, the great grey will swoop down on spotted owl nests, knocking the eggs or young out of the nests, and then feeds on them on the forest floor.

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Antiplanner Books #6: The Black Swan

By | | Book reviews
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“The Impact of the Highly Improbable” is the subtitle of this strongly antiplanning book by a Lebonese-American investment banker named Nassim Nicholas Taleb. The thesis is that the world is most heavily influenced by large, unpredictable events, so any efforts to plan based on what we know or try to forecast are doomed to failure.

The most salient example offered by Taleb has to do with investing: “In the last fifty years,” he says, “the ten most extreme days in the financial markets represent half the returns.” In other words, half the gains in the Standard & Poors 500 took place in just ten days out of fifty years (roughly 12,000 days of trading). Thus, anyone who says they have a sure-fire method of earning profits through investing (as several Nobel prize winners have claimed) is simply deluding themselves or their clients.

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Obsessed With Regional Centers

By | | News commentary, Regional planning
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I’ve previously noted (twice, it turns out) research showing that 60 to 70 percent of all jobs in modern urban areas are outside of downtown or other “regional and town centers.” Just as planners in the 1950s through the 1980s were obsessed with “saving downtowns” some fifty years after downtowns became obsolete, planners today are obsessed with town centers several decades after they were really relevant.

Portland politician and Metro council president David Bragdon says that planners don’t dare leave the development of such town centers to “laissez-faire unpredictability.” So he supports “public investment” because “planning means nothing without investment.”

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Toronto Transit Going Bust

By | | News commentary
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Toronto’s transit system is facing “financial catastrophe,” and the transit agency has proposed to shut down one of the subway lines and up to 21 bus lines, plus raise fares by 10 to 25 percent. “This is one of the darkest days that we’ve seen,” said the chair of the Toronto Transit Commission.

Dark days for Toronto transit.
Flickr photo by Neuroticjose

Some people accuse Toronto’s mayor “of trying to whip up a public panic” so that the city can get more money from the province. But there are a couple of other issues involved here.

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