Search Results for: plan bay area

Omaha’s Unlivable Plan

By | | Regional planning, Transportation, Urban areas
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Three years ago, the Antiplanner reviewed the regional transportation plans for the nation’s 70 largest metropolitan areas and found that 40 of them had some form of “smart-growth,” anti-auto policies built in. One that did not was for Omaha.

Omaha planners are eager to rectify that situation. Perhaps in response to Ray LaHood’s direction that all metro areas incorporate “livability” into their next round of long-range plans (which are revised every five years), Omaha’s new plan, which is now being prepared, has an unhealthy dose of this inane idea.

So far, the planners are merely at the PowerPoint stage. The most offensive part of their presentation is page two of this show, which says they want to “manage congestion.”

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Planning Student Proves Consultants Are a Waste of Money

By | | News commentary, Transportation
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Spending around $1,000, 20-year-old Daniel Jacobson, a Stanford University undergraduate student, has written a 140-page streetcar feasibility study for Oakland, California. The city of Oakland itself had already spent $300,000 on a streetcar study back in 2005, and planned to spend another $330,000 for further study this year.

Of course, the Jacobson’s study is filled with fabricated data, false assumptions, and phony calculations. But most readers will be too dazzled by the beautiful graphics to notice. Besides, any $300,000 professional feasibility study would contain the same fabricated data and calculations.

The biggest fabrication, of course, is the inevitable claim that building a streetcar will lead to economic redevelopment. There is not a chance in hell that spending $100 million or more on a 2-1/2-mile streetcar line would lead to any economic development, and even if it did, it would only be development that would have taken place somewhere in the Oakland area anyway. But any streetcar study is going to make this claim because that is the only way to justify spending tens of millions of dollars on a nineteenth-century technology that is slower, less flexible, and more dangerous to have on the streets than buses that cost far less.

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The Planning Solution Is Wrong, As Usual

By | | Regional planning
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Speaking of housing (as the Antiplanner was doing yesterday), San Jose State University economist Edward Stringham gave a great lecture at the Preserving the American Dream conference in San Jose a couple of weeks ago. Dr. Stringham’s presentation (3.7MB PowerPoint file) focused on inclusionary zoning, which is the traditional urban planning solution to high housing prices.

Keep in mind that urban planning is usually the reason why prices are high in the first place (though there are a few exceptions, such as Las Vegas, where land shortages are the result of the government owning most of the land in Nevada). But the planners try to deflect the blame to greedy developers. Their solution is to require those developers to sell or rent a fixed share — usually 15 percent — of new homes at below-market prices to low- or moderate-income families.

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Coos Bay: Still Living in the 1950s

By | | Regional planning
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Thirty to one hundred years ago, Coos Bay was a thriving port, shipping coal, timber, fish, dairy products, and other natural resources to Asia and other seaports all over the world. Today, most of those resources are gone or are no longer being mined or harvested.

The most valuable resource in Coos County now is the scenic beauty of its coastline, forests, rivers, and mountains. This beauty attracts vacationers, retirees, and long-distance telecommuters (like the Antiplanner). But the Port of Coos Bay, which exists for shipping, doesn’t want to accept this.

Is Coos County’s best hope for the future as a scenic wonderland. . .

If Coos County becomes a vacation/retirement/knowledge worker paradise, there isn’t any reason for the Port of Coos Bay to exist. So the Port has come up with one crazy scheme after another to spend other people’s money to try to restore its former glory.

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Anti-Town Planning #2: San Ramon City Center

By | | City planning
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In our continuation of Anti-Town Planning Week, we turn to San Ramon, California, where the city council wants to build a new “City Center.” Incorporated less than 24 years ago, San Ramon is a thriving suburb in the San Francisco Bay Area that is built around an office park started in the 1970s.

Flickr photo of San Ramon by Jeff L. Used by permission.

The city is the world headquarters of Chevron-Texaco and also has North American or California headquarters of such companies as Toyota, AT&T, and UPS. Local retailers include Costco, Whole Foods, Borders, and the usual collection of supermarkets and other shops. The average household income in 2000 was $96,000, putting it well above the rest of the country.

But the city is suffering from an acute case of “downtown envy,” a disease the strikes many Sun Belt cities. Many people, including most urban planners, think that a city can’t be a real city unless it has a distinctive downtown or city center. But in today’s automobile age, developers no longer build distinctive city centers, so cities that have grown up since 1945 often feel they have to subsidize them.

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Anti-Town Planning #1: Vancouver Community Plans

By | | City planning
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The American Planning Association celebrates November 8 as “Town Planning Day,” so the Antiplanner will celebrate calendrically opposite May 8 as “Anti-Town Planning Day.” In fact, this is Anti-Town Planning Week, and each day the Antiplanner will present an example of bad city or town planning.

Vancouver skyline. Flickr photo by mureena.

First up is Vancouver, BC, a city of 580,000 people. Under British Columbia law, every city in the province must have a city plan, and those plans must meet a variety of goals, including supporting “the unique character of communities.”

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Bay Freeway Update: No Traffic Snarls

By | | Follow up, News commentary
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Will the tanker truck accident that destroyed a key part of the San Francisco Bay Area freeway network cost commuters millions of dollars a day? Will those commuters respond by switching to public transit? So far, the answers seem to be “no” and “maybe.”

Flickr photo by Thomas Hawk

The closure of a freeway interchange that normally sees 80,000 vehicles a day did not result in huge traffic jams yesterday or this morning. Many people may have used the free public transit offered by the state, but so far no reliable reports have said how many. (Transit was free yesterday only; today it should be back to normal fares.) Continue reading →

Will Transit Prevent Bay Area Traffic Jams?

By | | News commentary, Transportation
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A key part of the MacArthur Freeway, one of the most congested roads in the San Francisco Bay Area, collapsed in a tanker fire early Sunday morning. As shown in these graphic photos, the accident managed to put Interstate 80, 580, 880, 980, and state highway 24 out of commission.

In response, Governor Schwarzenegger announced that all Bay Area transit services will be free on Monday as commuters adjust to the new situation. BART promised to run longer trains and other transit agencies promised to increase frequencies.

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Biden Appoints Congestifiers

By | | Transportation
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Phillip Washington, the transit executive who thinks Los Angeles isn’t congested enough, has been named the leader of Biden’s transition team in charge of the Department of Transportation and Amtrak. Washington is the CEO of Los Angeles Metro, the main transit agency in Los Angeles County.

A year ago, as Los Angeles bus ridership was collapsing due to LA Metro’s insistence on building expensive light rail, Washington blamed the loss of bus riders instead on Los Angeles’ famously uncongested freeways. “It’s too easy to drive in this city,” he told the Wall Street Journal. To restore bus ridership, the city has to “make driving harder.”

“Sometimes you have to tell people what’s good for them,” Washington also told the Journal. He will clearly fit right in to Biden’s top-down view of how the world should work. Washington’s support for obsolete light-rail transit will go hand-in-hand with Biden’s support for obsolete intercity passenger trains. Continue reading →

47. Challenging Growth Management

By | | Iconoclast
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British Columbia is big. It’s really big. It’s bigger than Texas. It’s 40 percent bigger than Texas. And while Texas has four major urban areas with a combined population of more than 15 million people, British Columbia has only one major urban area with fewer than 2.3 million people.

So, naturally, Vancouver regional planners fear that urban sprawl might overrun the entire province. The plans and regulations they have written to preserve British Columbia’s supposedly scarce open space have made Vancouver the least-affordable housing market in North America, according to Wendell Cox’s latest review of housing prices. In the rest of the English-speaking world, only Hong Kong is more expensive.

In 2007, the Fraser Institute asked me to visit Vancouver to review its regional plan–or plans, actually, since the first one was written in the 1960s and later, more-restrictive plans were written periodically after that. I spent several days in the offices of the Greater Vancouver Regional District (now known as Metro Vancouver), which were located not in Vancouver but in the suburb of Burnaby. Continue reading →