Is the Tea Party Falling Apart?
The New York Times Magazine has discovered what everyone who has ever been to a Tea Party meeting already knew: tea parties are a coalition of social conservatives and libertarians. Both are fiscally conservative and so the tea parties focus on fiscal issues and agree to disagree on social issues. Does this mean the tea […]
Predictably Stupid
The Obama administration’s rejection of the Keystone pipeline was predictably stupid and will do little to protect the environment other than by slightly increasing world oil prices. Opponents made it clear that they didn’t care about the negligible environmental impacts of the pipeline; they just wanted to “keep the tar sands in the soil.” The […]
When We Don’t Build It, We Won’t Build It Here Instead of There
Once the envy of much of the rest of the United States, the California high-speed rail project is increasingly viewed as being run by a bunch of buffoons who can’t see the handwriting on the wall. Actually, a few of them may see it: last week the authority’s executive director and board chair both resigned. […]
Brouhaha in Grants Pass
As if to show that even small cities can waste gobs of money on transit infrastructure, Grants Pass, Oregon (population 35,000) recently debated the wisdom of spending more than $100,000 each for several modest three-seat bus shelters to serve the Josephine County Transit system. As The Oregonian notes, this is roughly the cost of building […]
Not Learning from History
Last week, the Washington Post commemorated the 30th anniversary of a horrific Air Florida plane crash with an article about how that crash has led to huge improvements in airline safety. In response to that crash, airlines have improved deicing formulas and have strict rules about how quickly aircraft must take off after being deiced, […]
Not Build It?
The cost of one of Denver’s FasTracks lines has gotten so high that RTD, the transit agency, is actually considering not building it. The press kindly reports the cost of the Longmont-to-Denver “Northwest” commuter-rail line as rising from $895 million to more than $1.7 billion, but that ignores the actual initial cost projections. As the […]
2010 Transit Data Update
The Antiplanner has reposted the consolidated spreadsheet for the 2010 National Transit Database. The revision of a file I posted last month fixes an error in the calculation of the total number of seats and standing room provided by each transit agency and mode of travel. More important, the revised file includes some calculations, including […]
Are Corporations People?
One of the Occupy Wall Street slogans was “corporations are not people.” But what does this mean? People have a variety of rights, including the right to sign (and be obligated by) contracts, the right to free speech, and the right to vote. When the Supreme Court decided that corporations are persons (as it did […]
A Lesson for California
Buyers of bonds for the Las Vegas monorail are suing Citibank for fraud. The buyers claim Citibank misled them by not revealing a report by faithful Antiplanner ally Wendell Cox questioning the ridership and cost projections made for the project. The lawsuit charges that Citibank knew that Cox’s report was “much more reliable” but concealed […]
The Three Republican Parties
The Iowa caucuses highlighted a little-known fact about the Republican Party: it is really a coalition of three different groups. First and best-known are the “conservatives,” represented by Rick Santorum and the 25 percent of Iowa caucuses who voted for him. Conservatives tend to be fiscally conservative, but are more reliably socially conservative, meaning they […]
One More Nail in the Coffin
The California high-speed rail funding plan is “not financially feasible” says a peer-review committee created by the state legislature to review that plan. Various media reports suggest that this finding significantly reduces the likelihood that the legislature will approve the plan. This is after the rail authority admitted that it inflated job estimates, claiming that […]
Another Year, Another Set of Transit Lies
“For the average American driver, the time wasted in traffic jams has more than doubled in 30 years,” reports Eleanor Randolph in the New York Times. “The best way of easing that gridlock — not to mention saving gas, curbing pollution and finally finishing that novel — is public transit.” Two simple sentences; two complicated […]
