News commentary

Relieving Congestion with Adaptive Cruise Control 0
- December 5, 2012
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 […]
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The Columbia River Crossing Is (or at Least Should Be) Dead 0
- November 21, 2012
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 […]
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Is Collapse Inevitable?0
- November 20, 2012
“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 →
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Density’s Parking Impact 0
- November 13, 2012
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. […]
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What Happened to the Environmental Movement?0
- November 12, 2012
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 […]
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Smart-Growth Advocates Have No Shame 0
- November 8, 2012
Advocates of smart growth–density and transit–are either consummate liars or complete idiots. Those are the only explanations for many of the statements that come out of their mouths. The latest is the claim that Superstorm Sandy proves we need to spend more on transit. What Superstorm Sandy proved was that concentrating a lot of people […]
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