Bullets in a Railway Heart
This “news” is a couple of months old, but Caixin Weekly, a Chinese business magazine, has published an extremely critical article about that country’s high-speed rail program. This report probably inspired similar but shorter articles in the Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, and other publications.
Driving Alone without a Vehicle
According to census data, about 4 percent of American workers–5.9 million–live in households that have no automobiles. Conventional wisdom suggests that these are people who are either too poor to own a vehicle, and we should pity them; or people who for environmental or other reasons have learned to live without a vehicle, and we […]
Meet Smokey
The Antiplanner visited Austin over the weekend to pick up Smokey, an 8-week-old Belgian Tervuren puppy. Smokey is actually a nephew (several generations removed) to Chip. While waiting for the return plane, we visited a city park where I was reliably informed by several young girls that Smokey “is the cutest dog in the world.” […]
Suburbs Are Still Growing
Next time someone tells you about how everyone is returning to the cities, point them to these maps based on the 2010 census. Available for the forty largest urban areas in the United States, they show, almost without exception, the central cities losing population and the suburbs gaining. According to the mapmakers, “deep blue indicates […]
A Parking Garage Even (Some) New Urbanists Can Love
Architects, even New Urbanist architects, seem to love a parking garage recently built in Miami. In the video below, Andres Duany–the Antiplanner’s favorite New Urban architect–praises the garage as being as “beautifully designed a place as any piazza.” In fact, Duany adds, “it is a piazza; it’s a public square in the air” where you […]
State of the Subways
About thirty years ago, the Antiplanner’s first visited the East Coast, traveling there by Amtrak and riding rail transit lines in as many cities as possible. The Washington DC subway looked like a set from Stanley Kubrick’s 2001, with gleaming trains quietly zooming into and out of clean stations that mostly featured high arch ceilings. […]
Finally: The Truth About High-Speed Rail
“OF ALL the high-speed train services around the world, only one really makes economic sense,” The Economist observed last week, that one being the Tokyo-to-Osaka route. “All the other Shinkansen routes in Japan lose cart-loads of cash, as high-speed trains do elsewhere in the world. Only indirect subsidies, creative accounting, political patronage and national chest-thumping […]
In Memory of Freedom
Today we are supposed to remember the people who sacrificed themselves for our freedom. We also need to remember freedom itself, including freedom of mobility, freedom to use your own property as you like so long as you don’t harm your neighbors, and freedom to dance in a memorial to Thomas Jefferson, himself a support […]
Senate Reauthorization Proposal
Bipartisan leaders of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee have reached an agreement on a broad outline for surface transportation reauthorization. This agreement includes: Fund programs at current levels to maintain and modernize our critical transportation infrastructure; Eliminate earmarks; Consolidate numerous programs to focus resources on key national goals and reduce duplicative and wasteful […]
Two Ways of Preventing the Crisis
One of the more common notions about the housing bubble is that it was caused by political pressures to increase homeownership. The Antiplanner’s view is that it would be more accurate to say that the bubble was caused by the conflict between policies aimed at increasing homeownership and policies aimed at reducing homeownership (or, at […]
California HSR Fading Fast
You know you are in trouble when a liberal bastion such as the Washington Post questions your big-government program. So last week’s editorial questioning the California High-Speed Rail Authority for being “bound and determined to start building the railroad before its long-term funding is clear” should be one more sign that the rail project is […]
Top Down or Bottom Up?
America’s transportation system needs more centralized, top-down planning. At least, that’s what the Brookings Institution’s Robert Puentes advocates in a 2,350-word article in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal. If that seems like an unlikely message from America’s leading business daily, perhaps it is because Puentes couched it in terms such as “spending money wisely,” solving congestion, […]
