News commentary

Another Light-Rail Success Failure 0
- February 20, 2012
Hampton Roads Transit is claiming success six months after opening its light-rail line in Norfolk. The line is carrying an average of 4,642 riders each weekday, which is far greater than the 2,900 that had been forecast. “Crowds” of as many as dozens of people look bored and apathetic at the opportunity to take free […]
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Crushed to Death by Red Tape 0
- February 7, 2012
The Antiplanner’s friend, Ann Brower, barely survived last February’s earthquake in Christchurch when a building fell on her bus, killing the driver and seven other passengers as well as four pedestrians. Now it turns out that the building had been known to be unsafe for nearly 30 years. The owner wanted to demolish it but […]
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One Down, 48 to Go 0
- February 6, 2012
“Building better communities” was the slogan of the California Redevelopment Association. But the critics charged that redevelopment agencies “deprived tens of thousands of working and lower-income residents of their homes and livelihoods while granting vast subsidies to billionaires.” In the end, the social justice questions didn’t matter, but the subsidies did, so to save the […]
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Mica Introduces Surface Transportation Bill 0
- February 1, 2012
House Transportation & Infrastructure Committee Chair John Mica introduced a proposed surface transportation bill yesterday. Titled the American Energy & Infrastructure Jobs Act, the bill contains something to make everyone happy as well as things to make everyone unhappy. To please Senate Democrats, who want to keep spending more than the government is collecting in […]
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Breaking Down the Barriers 0
- January 30, 2012
Leave it to the New York Times to put the most negative spin on a conference about driverless cars. “Collision in the Making Between Self-Driving Cars and How the World Works,” reads the headline. As the Antiplanner wrote three years ago, the main barriers to driverless cars are institutional and bureaucratic, not technological. So it […]
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Warren Buffet’s Secretary Needs a New Accountant 0
- January 26, 2012
“Asking a billionaire to pay at least as much [tax] as his secretary is plain common sense,” says President Obama. When Warren Buffett announced that his secretary paid a higher rate than he did, some people calculated that he must pay her at least $200,000 a year to put her in an (average) 19 percent […]
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