Who Should Be Allowed to Live in Rural Areas?

“Only those who need property for growing crops or keeping animals and livestock not allowed in urban areas should be allowed to build homes in rural areas,” writes a reader of the Oregon Statesman-Journal. Though the Census Bureau does not keep track of exurbanites, many demographers believe that exurbia is the fastest-growing part of America. Naturally, anti-sprawl forces want to stop this growth.

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Let Forest Planning Wither Away

In 1976, Congress passed a law requiring all national forests to write long-term, comprehensive management plans. I remember attending a 1980 meeting of newly hired planners who were all excited about the opportunity to shape the future of 193 million acres of the nation’s public lands.

Their spirits were somewhat dampened when Professor Richard Behan, who later became dean of the Northern Arizona University school of forestry, predicted that planning would fail. He urged the Forest Service to simply ignore the law. The Forest Service ignored him. A decade and at least a billion dollars later (Behan thinks it was a lot more), some of the plans were still unfinished and those that were finished were ignored by forest managers who quickly realized they were worthless.

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Welcome to the Antiplanner

They say someone starts a new blog every second, so let me present one of the first 80,000 blogs of 2007. The Antiplanner is the public face of my new mission: to promote the repeal of all federal and state planning laws and the closure of all state and local planning offices.

Seventeen years ago, most Americans celebrated the fall of the Soviet empire as a victory of free markets over central planning. Yet most American cities and counties have planning departments and Congress requires that most federal agencies prepare costly, time-consuming, and ultimately worthless plans.

It is time for someone to say that the planning emperor has no clothes. The Antiplanner will show why government planning fails, document planning disasters, comment on planning news, and present new research and information related to transportation, urban areas, and public lands.

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Judging Transportation Planners by Their Intentions

As a certified rail nut, I regularly read Trains magazine. One of the more political columnists in the magazine is Don Phillips, a writer who for his day job covers transportation issues for Washington Post.

In 2005, the Post sent Phillips to Europe to write for the Herald-Tribune, a Post subsidiary. After arriving, Phillips wrote an article for Trains gushing over the European Union’s plans to take freight off the highways and put it on the rails where, most Trains readers fervently believe, it belongs.

Money-making Swiss train.

“Europe is trying to be a planned economy as far as transportation is concerned,” said Phillips approvingly, while “the U.S. continues to be a crisis economy.”

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