Relieving Congestion with Adaptive Cruise Control
Last month, the National Transportation Safety Board listed mandatory adaptive cruise control and other collision-avoidance technologies as one of its ten most wanted safety improvements in 2013. Such a mandate, the NTSB estimates, could reduce highway fatalities by 50 percent. Honda’s illustration of how adaptive cruise control can reduce congestion. In normal traffic, when a […]
Streetcars as an Intelligence Test
The Antiplanner spent much of last week in San Antonio releasing a review of the city’s plans for a downtown streetcar. The trip turned out to be a lot more hectic (and with a lot less Internet access) than I expected, which is why I made so few posts last week. Sometimes I wonder if […]
How Many Tiny Houses Are in Houston?
San Francisco has approved the construction of tiny apartments as small as 150 square feet. Previous zoning required a minimum of at least 290 square feet. New York City is considering a similar measure. Tiny houses for sale in Petaluma, CA. Flickr photo by Nicolas Boulosa. Meanwhile, construction of 200-square-foot single-family homes is growing popular […]
Can We Drop the Fantasy That Transit Is Green?
Atlantic blogger Eric Jaffe asks, “Can we stop pretending cars are greener than transit?” It’s a pointless question because no one really says that cars are greener than transit. On the other hand, claims that transit is greener than cars are vastly overblown. Jeffe makes a few duffer mistakes that show he hasn’t thought this […]
Happy Thanksgiving
The Columbia River Crossing Is (or at Least Should Be) Dead
Taxpayers for Common Sense recently released a report (see page 27) that finds $2 trillion in budget cuts that will allow Congress to avoid the “fiscal cliff”–and one of those cuts is the Columbia River Crossing. The agency planning this bridge has managed to spend well over $130 million without accomplishing anything except to design […]
Is Collapse Inevitable?
“What do you think is going to happen?” my friend asked, adding that most people he talked with believed the nation if not the world would suffer a major economic collapse in the next four years. Given the nation’s $16 trillion debt, plus another (according to one calculation) $84 trillion … Continue reading
The Antiplanner’s Library: Coming Apart
One of the subthemes of the Antiplanner’s latest book is that there is a growing divide between the middle class (meaning people with white-collar jobs and their families) and the working class (meaning people with blue-collar jobs and their families). Charles Murray‘s latest book, Coming Apart, explores this split in … Continue reading
Back in the Air Again
Today the Antiplanner is flying to Oakland to speak about Gridlock at CSU East Bay. The event is sponsored by the Smith Center for Private Enterprise Studies. Tonight, I’ll be speaking in Pleasant Hill to a Contra Costa County citizens’ group about Best-Laid Plans in in particular about problems with urban planning as it is […]
Density’s Parking Impact
The City of Portland has approved numerous massive four- and five-story apartment buildings in neighborhoods of single-family homes separated by streets of single-story shops. These buildings stress the infrastructure built to handle a smaller population, which is most obvious in the increased traffic and parking problems–especially since many of the buildings are designed without parking. […]
What Happened to the Environmental Movement?
The environmental movement has lost its way, argues a Montana filmmaker, who is using Kickstart to raise funds for his film about the movement. J.D. King isn’t anti-environmentalist, but he is skeptical about where the movement is going. Other than what can be seen in the above pitch, I don’t know what the movie will […]
The Case for Privatizing Amtrak
On Monday, the Cato Institute will release the Antiplanner’s latest paper, Stopping the Runaway Train: The Case for Privatizing Amtrak. Antiplanner readers can preview the paper today. Amtrak’s Empire Builder outside of Glacier National Park, September 13, 2010. (Click image for a larger view.) The case against Amtrak is simple. Before Amtrak took over the […]
