After the 2003 Preserving the American Dream conference in Washington DC, we had a series of annual conferences in a different city each year: Portland, the Twin Cities, Atlanta, San Jose, Houston, Bellevue, and Orlando. Although I invited most of the speakers and knew what they were going to say in advance, I found them very educational, especially on housing and land-use issues.

The highlight of the Portland conference was a speaker from England named Stephen Town, who was an expert on policing neighborhoods of different densities and designs. In fact, he was a policeman.

It so happened that, in 2001, the American Planning Association published a book titled SafeScape, which purported to show how neighborhoods could be designed to reduce crime. “At last a book that tells us exactly what we have to do to make our cities safe!” enthused a cover blurb written by a Portland police chief. Continue reading →

In December, 2004, France opened the Millau Viaduct, which by some measures is the largest bridge in the world. More than a mile-and-a-half long, supported by pylons that are as much as 1,100 feet tall, the bridge carries auto and truck traffic as high as 900 feet above the Tarn valley below, reducing the journey across the valley from many minutes to barely more than 60 seconds.

The bridge cost 394 million euros, well over half a billion dollars in today’s money. What was most interesting to me is that not a penny of public money went into construction (though some was spent on planning). Instead, this was a public-private partnership, meaning the public granted a private company, in this case a construction company called Eiffage, a franchise to build, operate, and collect tolls from users of the bridge. After a certain number of years, in this case 40 to 75 depending on the amount of tolls collected, ownership of the bridge reverts to the public. Continue reading →

Sales of the Vanishing Automobile went really well. Although my publicity was limited to a web site and speaking engagements, it sold faster than my previous book, Reforming the Forest Service.

This made me realize that there was a lot of grassroots opposition to urban planning fads such as smart growth and light rail. To promote that opposition, I decided to bring experts and activists together in a national conference.

Previous conferences that I had held, such as the 1984 Mission Symposium, had been backed up by a staff of at least four or five other people. But I organized this conference, which I called Preserving the American Dream, by myself. Continue reading →

While I was in transition from working primarily on public lands issues to working primarily on urban issues, the Forest Service was in transition from focusing primarily on timber to focusing on something else, but it wasn’t quite sure what. Chief Thomas suggested that it should focus on ecosystem management, but ecosystem management doesn’t pay the bills, especially since no one was quite sure what it meant.

My reform proposals called for the federal land agencies to be allowed to charge market prices for all resources and be funded exclusively out of a fixed share of those revenues. I suspected that, on most national forests, this would lead to recreation becoming the most important use, though there would still be room for timber and other uses. The main obstacle to this was that Congress didn’t allow the agencies to charge for most recreation.

That began to change in 1996 when Congress created the Recreation Fee Demonstration program, allowing each of the four main public land agencies (Forest Service, Park Service, BLM, and Fish & Wildlife Service) to begin up to 100 experiments with recreation fees each and letting the agencies keep the revenues. The Park Service approached this with a complete lack of innovation, instead merely increasing entrance fees on 100 parks that were already charging fees and keeping the increased income (the fees that were previously being collected went into the Land & Water Conservation Fund). Continue reading →