The Antiplanner » Home Page

Antiplanner Books #6: The Black Swan

By | | Book reviews
12 Comments

“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.

Continue reading →

Obsessed With Regional Centers

By | | News commentary, Regional planning
15 Comments

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.”

Continue reading →

Toronto Transit Going Bust

By | | News commentary
1 Comment

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.

Continue reading →

Why Housing Is Expensive

By | | Planning Disasters, Regional planning
13 Comments

I previously posted about a growing antiplanning movement in Britain and a conference held on the impact of planning on housing prices. Someone sent me a PowerPoint show (7.2 MB) that was given at the conference that graphically demonstrates the problem with finding a place to build a home in England.

Click the image to see a larger picture.

The show is a bit large but worth the download. It was presented by Kate Moorcock Abley, who is affiliated with Audacity, one of the groups that put on the conference. Audacity’s director, James Heartfield, will be speaking at this November’s American Dream conference in San Jose.

Continue reading →

Just How Bad Is Sprawl?

By | | Regional planning
8 Comments

Back in 2001, National Geographic published an article on urban sprawl. The magazine included a map that purported to show the extent of sprawl in the U.S.

Click on the map to download a printable pdf.

At the time, I described this map as a deceptivegraphc because it greatly exaggerated the extent of urban development. For example, the map showed that one-third of Vermont was apparently covered with sprawl. In fact, U.S.D.A. data indicated that only 3 percent of the state had been developed.

Continue reading →

Why Are Government Files So Large?

By | | City planning
6 Comments

Recently I downloaded an environmental report by a city planning agency and was appalled to find that the table of contents alone was 20 megabytes. The entire report totaled 170 megabytes. The city’s web site didn’t even have the decency to warn users how big each file would be.

Anyone who has made PDFs should know that they are quite easy to shrink by reducing the resolution of photos and other graphics. Commercial sites tend to keep files as small as possible or to provide multiple resolutions so that they are accessible to as many potential customers as possible. For example, the trailers pages for web sites advertising most movies offer “small,” “medium,” and “large” formats.

Continue reading →

Scaling Transit, Part 2: Buses to Rail

By | | Transportation
2 Comments

Yesterday, I described how an effective private transit system could be designed for all but the smallest urban areas by simply scaling up the taxicab association model to buses. Rather than use this model, many of America’s subsidized transit agencies have tried a different sort of scaling upwards: from buses to rail. This has led to numerous planning disasters.

Too many public officials imagine that running a rail transit system is just the same as running a bus system, only with bigger vehicles. Jonathan Richmond’s paper (since expanded to a book), The Mythical Conception of Rail Transit in Los Angeles quotes the Los Angeles Times: “One of the arguments made most often for the rail line is that it will be cheaper to operate because a single driver on a train can carry up to five times as many passengers as a bus.”

These are, as they say, famous last words. The reality is that a bus system does not scale up to a train system: they are quite different beasts, and running a train system not only requires a completely different set of skills, it entails a much higher risk — a risk that transit agency officials can ignore because they simply impose it on taxpayers and, in the worst cases, transit riders.

Continue reading →

Scaling Transit, Part 1: Taxis to Buses

By | | Transportation
29 Comments

People in the transit industry often tell us how fortunate we are that they are spending billions of dollars of our money each year, because otherwise there would be a lot more cars on the road and a lot more congestion. This is simply untrue.

In most cities, most transit riders are transit dependent — for one reason or another, they can’t drive. If government subsidized transit didn’t exist, private operators would take up the slack and serve these people. The fares might be a little higher (though not necessarily), and they might not serve some low-density suburbs (where you see buses that are empty most of the time), but the service would be there. Plus, anyone who was a “choice” rider — that is, they can drive but would prefer not to — could use these services too.

Continue reading →

Migration from the Cities

By | | News commentary
2 Comments

Congratulations to faithful ally Wendell Cox for getting quoted in Forbes magazine about the “great American migration”. The article describes how many of America’s major urban areas are losing population as people move to the suburbs of a variety of smaller cities.

Wendell has been following this migration on his Demographia web site. (Find “domestic migration” on the home page.) He shows that census data put the lie to claims that Americans are moving out of the suburbs and back into downtown areas. Instead, they are moving out of expensive suburbs and into smaller, more remote, and definitely more affordable suburbs.
If any negligence happens during consumption then this may develop various threatening like headaches, stomach cialis viagra levitra pain, tiredness, dizziness, cough, sinus, swelling, anxieties, depression, behavior change or muscle weakness. Mandibular advancement device assists the snorers with managing the jaws in frontward placement tadalafil generic online supplying a space between the air passages while producing the soft palate constant. Unfortunately, the once buy super viagra abundant crop of Eurycoma Longifolia trees has diminished. Reason why these many people do not go sildenafil generico online for the treatment of erectile dysfunction.
Of course, as Forbes notes, a few people are moving to downtown areas. That’s fine for them (though we should always ask how much their million-dollar homes are subsidized). But, as Wendell shows, their numbers remain small compared with suburban growth.

You Can Build Your Way Out of Congestion (But Watch Your Back)

By | | Transportation, Urban areas
17 Comments

The 2007 Preserving the American Dream conference will be in San Jose this year, so I’ve been taking a close look at that region. San Jose definitely practices smart growth, so I presumed that, like Portland, congestion there would have greatly increased as planners tried to discourage driving.

When I examined the Texas Transportation institute’s data file for San Jose, however, I was surprised to find this was not the case. In fact, between 1989 and 1997, the amount of time the typical rush-hour commuter wasted sitting in traffic actually fell by a whopping 50 percent. During this same period, Santa Clara County (of which San Jose is the seat) gained well over 100,000 new jobs.

Who wouldn’t envy a place that could absorb that many new commuters and still cut congestion in half? How did they do it? Simple. They built new roads.

Continue reading →