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Have a Safe and Enjoyable Holiday

By | | Mission
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The Antiplanner expects to spend this Labor Day weekend visiting various Oregon wild lands. As a result, there will be no policy Researchers tracked 42 buy generic viagra high-risk individuals that took a 25 mg tablet containing Sildenafil, and a placebo medication three times a day. When a webmaster sets out to market his or her website there are things that are commonly mistaken as good, but really end up cheap viagra http://davidfraymusic.com/buy-2231 hurting in the long run. This is Erectile dysfunction or impotence which is an inability to get enough erection for sexual intercourse purchase viagra on line is known as erectile dysfunction. Enriched with the power of Safed Musli, Musli Strong capsules act as potent sex enhancer pills with no adverse short-term or long-term side effects that can occur as a result of chemotherapy. buy levitra no prescription brief on Tuesday.

Somewhere in those hills is the Spring Basin Wilderness, which I hope to hike in this weekend.

Biden’s Smoke-and-Mirrors Housing Plan

By | | Housing
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On Wednesday, the White House introduced a four-point plan to “increase affordable housing supply” nationwide:

  1. Increase rental housing with various low-interest loan and tax credit programs;
  2. Increase federal loan programs for manufactured housing and two- to four-unit homes;
  3. Focusing existing home loan programs on individual homebuyers rather than investors; and
  4. Encouraging state and local governments to use American Rescue Plan funds to build affordable housing and to reduce exclusionary zoning.

Most of these points do nothing to increase housing supply. The first two mainly redeploy funds that are already being spent on housing into slightly different housing programs. The third assumes that speculators are driving up housing prices and denying homeownership to families when in fact the “large investors” that Biden proposes to exclude from federal home loan programs are merely responding to rising prices. Almost no new homes would be built as a result of any of these three points.

Only the last point has the potential to increase housing supply, but will do so in the most expensive ways possible. Government construction of so-called “affordable housing” is usually anything but affordable, with cities and states often spending twice as much per square foot as private builders on new homes. Continue reading →

The Usual Misinformation

By | | Wildfire
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It’s fire season again, and so we are treated to various horror stories such as gridlock as people tried to evacuate South Lake Tahoe (though they all got out by 4 pm). These stories are followed by the usual misinformation that is spread around about wildfire.

Firefighters attempted to hold the line on the Dixie Fire in this July 29 photo, but since the photo was taken the fire has grown by more than 20 times. Forest Service photo.

“Wildfires in 2021 are breaking records,” says one report. However, in the United States, only 4.9 million acres have burned so far this year, which is 14 percent less than the last ten-year average of 5.6 million acres through this date. Continue reading →

Teach That Man Some Geography

By | | Housing
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Paul Krugman needs to learn some geography. Last week, he wrote, “there’s no more room for housing” in California unless they build up. After all, he notes, “San Francisco is on a peninsula, Los Angeles is ringed by mountains.”

This is not the kind of housing Californians want, but it is the kind of housing they are going to get under restrictive policies advocated by Krugman and others who believe in “building up,” not out. Photo by Junkyardsparkle.

Yes, San Francisco is on a peninsula. But, immediately to the south of the city is San Mateo County, which — according to census data — is 68 percent rural open space. South of San Mateo is Santa Clara County, home of San Jose, which is 74 percent rural. Continue reading →

Charting Transit Values and Trends

By | | Policy brief, Transportation
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Is transit ridership growing or declining in your urban area? Do fare increases have anything to do with ridership trends? Are operating costs growing and are fares keeping up with costs? What is happening with transit speeds?

Click image to download a four-page PDF of this policy brief.

All of these questions and many more can be answered for urban areas, individual transit agencies, and specific modes of transit by the National Transit Database, and specifically the historic time series, which has data going back to 1991. Unfortunately, the database is hard to use. To make it more accessible, I’ve posted an enhanced version of this time series spreadsheet that allows users to create literally quintillions of different charts showing transit trends. Continue reading →

The Tide Celebrates Ten Years of Waste

By | | Transportation
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The Tide, Norfolk’s light-rail line, has been open to the public for ten years. As noted in this article in the Pilot, it opened 18 months late after a 60 percent cost overrun.

The Tide light rail in downtown Norfolk. Photo by Dean Covey, Virginia Department of Transportation.

The article claims the light-rail line carried its first million rides “five months ahead of original projections,” but that’s a transit agency lie. The original projections estimated that the rail line would carry 10,400 riders per weekday in its opening year. That would be about 1 million riders in less than four months. In fact, it carried less than half that, just 4,900 riders per weekday in its first year, and took eight months to reach 1 million riders. Continue reading →

The Failure of Dallas TOD

By | | Transportation
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The Dallas Area Rapid Transit (DART), the transit agency serving Dallas and a dozen other cities, is proud of the fact that it has built the longest light-rail system in the country. It is almost as proud of the many transit-oriented developments (TODs) built near light-rail stations. Of course, it never mentions that many if not most of those developments were subsidized through below-market land sales, tax-increment financing, and other government assistance.

Apartments and condos surround the Las Colinas light-rail station in Irving, Texas, yet that station attracted only 137 round-trip riders per weekday in 2019.

To transit advocates, such subsidies are justified because they boost ridership. But is there cause for such justification? How well have transit-oriented developments worked in promoting DART ridership? Continue reading →

A Solution in Search of a Problem

By | | Regional planning
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The Antiplanner remains a skeptic of climate change not because of the evidence for or against it but because so many of its adherents are eagerly using it to impose their preconceived prescriptions for how people should live. The latest is an article in the Guardian claiming that urban densification is “one of the most impactful ways to slash greenhouse gas emissions.” If it weren’t for evil NIMBYs, the article implies, the world would be well on its way to ending carbon emissions.

This is, of course, total and complete garbage, as I showed in a Cato paper nearly 12 years ago. Claims that denser lifestyles emit fewer greenhouse gases ignore the self-selection issue (people who want to drive less choose to live in denser areas); the congestion issue (people who live in dense cities may drive less, but they drive in greater congestion and therefore end up burning as much or more fuel as people living in low-density suburbs); and the construction issue (greenhouse gas emissions from building multi-story housing are much greater than one- and two-story housing).

Beyond that, the viability of a plan that depends on completely changing the lifestyles of hundreds of millions if not billions of people is highly questionable. Finally, consider the alternatives: for the same effort, we can save more emissions by making more fuel-efficient cars than by trying to get people to stop driving and by building more energy-efficient single-family homes than by trying to get people to live in multifamily housing. Continue reading →

The Oddity of Public Transit

By | | Transportation
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“An oddity of American public transit,” says Strong Towns, a semi-New Urbanist organization dedicated to compact cities and transit, “is the prevalence of commuter rail lines designed to do one thing and one thing only: bring 9-5 office workers to and from downtown.” The Facebook post then links to an article in Governing magazine titled, Taking the Commuter out of Commuter Rail, which claims the huge decline in commuter-rail ridership is an “opportunity to reinvent the suburb-city service.”

CalTrain is a classic example of Type 1 commuter rail, having once been operated by Southern Pacific. In 2019 fares covered 75 percent of its operating costs and it used less energy per passenger mile than a Toyota Prius. But as of June its ridership was down 88 percent. Photo by Runner1928.

Before critiquing these ideas, it is important to point out that there are really two kinds of “commuter-rail” operations; call them Type 1 and Type 2. Type 1 is traditional big-city commuter trains, which were usually started by private railroads in the nineteenth century and were taken over by government agencies in the 1960s and 1970s. These brought suburban workers into downtown Boston, Chicago, New York, Philadelphia, and San Francisco. This is the commuter rail that Strong Towns and Governing are writing about. Continue reading →

Moving the Overton Window

By | | Policy brief
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Twenty years ago, South Carolina had two citizens’ groups advocating for property rights. One of the groups was highly successful, having persuaded the state legislature to pass several important laws protecting property rights. The other group had the same aims but was completely unsuccessful, and could rarely get a meeting with important legislators, much less persuade them to pass a law.

Click image to download a four-page PDF of this policy brief.

The difference was that the unsuccessful group repeatedly claimed that Agenda 21 was a threat to property rights. This totally undermined their credibility. Few members of the state legislature had ever met a United Nation’s official, and certainly didn’t see any connection between state or local policies and an accord written in Rio de Janeiro in 1992. Continue reading →