Financial Reform or Social Engineering?
Everyone agrees that, by lowering credit requirements, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac played an important role in the recent financial crisis. Now the Obama administration has promised to reform those “government-sponsored enterprises” (GSEs). However, as faithful Antiplanner ally Ron Utt warns, Obama’s idea of reform is more focused on changing American lifestyles than on preventing […]
Congestion-Priced Parking
The Antiplanner has never considered parking “subsidies” to be the serious problem that Donald Shoup thinks they are. At the same time, there is nothing wrong with cities pricing curbside parking at market rates. Toward that end, San Francisco’s plan to install parking meters whose rates vary depending on demand sounds just fine. Unfortunately, the […]
Despite TIF, the Bells Don’t Toll
Tualatin, a distant suburb of Portland, is the proud owner of three large and expensive bells that may never toll (there were supposed to be four, but one was stolen). The bells were purchased with TIF (tax-increment finance) money as a part of a $12 million subsidy to Tualatin Commons, a New Urbanist development. But […]
Subversive Idea: We Can Keep Our Lifestyles
Instead of giving up our cars, says the August issue of National Geographic, we can simply scrub the skies of CO2. The article describes a process of removing carbon from the atmosphere that is technologically feasible. Though it is hard to guess how expensive it will be, the article suggests it will be a lot […]
Private Bus Takes Over from Taxpayers
Here’s a heartwarming story: Late last year, Clayton County, Georgia (a suburban Atlanta county) decided to terminate its subsidized bus service to Atlanta, saying it was costing $10 million a year but only bringing in $2.5 million in revenue. Despite protests from bus riders, the service was duly ended on March 31, leaving many riders […]
Washington Metro Takes Action!
In an article worthy of The Onion, the Washington Post proclaims that “Dupont Circle escalator incident prompts Metro to take action.” The incident in question was the breakdown of the giant, 130-foot escalators at the Dupont Circle Metro station, which forced patrons to walk or, in some cases, crawl over handrails to adjacent escalators. The […]
Airfares Taking Flight?
Delta and Northwest have merged, and now United and Continental are merging. So naturally someone raises the specter that airfares are going to go up. “Concentration in any industry leads to higher prices,” says someone who claims to have analyzed the airline industry for 40 years. I don’t know what industry they have been analyzing, […]
Is Portland’s Plan Working?
A new census of downtown Portland employers reveals that, for the first time since the annual census began in 2001, the number of downtown workers taking transit to work exceeded the number driving in 2009. This isn’t because the number taking transit to work increased — it declined by 6 percent — but because the […]
Demonizing Mobility
Planners have tried to demonize the freedom people gain from auto ownership by calling them “auto dependent.” Now they are demonizing air travelers by calling them “binge flyers.” As energy efficient as trains? So what? We’re still going to demonize it. We know binge drinking consists of drinking so much for so long that the […]
Are the Rich the Biggest Defaulters?
Last week, the New York Times published an amazingly shallow article saying the “biggest defaulters on mortgages are the rich.” This contention is supported by a single pair of data: the owners of about 14 percent of homes worth more than $1 million are delinquent on their mortgages, while only “about” 8 to 9 percent […]
LaHood Acts Like a Hood — Again
Not content to just threaten any airlines that might oppose heavy subsidies to high-speed rail aimed at putting their unsubsidized operations out of business, Secretary of Immobility Ray LaHood is now threatening railroads that are supposedly dragging their wheels in response to federal plans to run moderate-speed (up to 110 mph) trains on their freight […]
Clouding the Debate
Amid the conservatives blaming the oil spill on Obama and liberals blaming it on America’s auto addiction, journalist Robert Samuelson gets it right, noting that one of the most worrisome consequences of the Gulf oil spill is a “more muddled energy debate.” All the proposals to end oil consumption, such as one to convert the […]
