More Rail Skeptics
“We need to rethink rail,” says Fred Jandt, the editor of Mass Transit magazine. After first defending his credentials as a rail and transit advocate, he admits, “Rail is expensive.” That doesn’t necessarily mean it is “prohibitively” expensive, he says, “but it may be something we need to rethink.” This need-to-rethink was inspired by Joel […]
Your Tax Dollars at Work
The owner of a beauty shop who applied for a loan from a community development fund received a response calling her “one crazy ass bitch” and suggesting that she was under a “delusion that somehow you might be credit worthy.” The author of the letter, who was suspended for a week without pay, later wrote […]
Good Luck to Lake Oswego Streetcar Opponents
Residents of Lake Oswego, Portland’s wealthiest large suburb, have hired one of the state’s leading (and most liberal) political consultants to oppose a planned streetcar between downtown Portland and their community. Who has the bucks to hire Bergstein? One of the names mentioned is Elaine Franklin, wife of former U.S. Senator Bob Packwood. As Bojack […]
Donald Shoup on Free Parking
Donald Shoup supports free parking. At least, in a response to my first post about Tyler Cowen’s op ed against free parking, Dr. Shoup points out that he only wants the price of parking to be “right,” and “the right price [for parking] will often be zero.” However, the main purpose of Shoup’s response is […]
Exaggerating the Benefits of Transit
HDR, a consulting firm that routinely misleads cities in order to get contracts promoting and designing streetcars, has written a report for the Michigan Department of Transportation that greatly exaggerates the benefits of public transit. In claiming that those benefits are “conservatively” $805 million a year, the report makes many unwarranted assumptions. The most important […]
Free Parking Revisited
Two weeks ago, the Antiplanner responded with dismay to George Mason University economist Tyler Cowen’s op ed against free parking. This led to a variety of responses in the blogosphere, none of which address the Antiplanner’s point. Instead, they all argue against the minimum-parking requirements found in many zoning regulations. In particular, Cowen himself points […]
We Want High-Speed Rail, As Long As It Is Free
Americans want high-speed rail, as long as someone else pays for it. States are chuffed upset, for example, because the federal government now says it wants the states to put up 20 percent of the capital cost. The original Federal Railroad Administration grant guidelines issued back in 2008 suggested that the feds might pay all […]
A Light-Rail Line That Pays for Itself?
Faithful Antiplanner ally Craig sends this amusing article from the Portland Oregonian in 1988. Unfortunately, a subscription to NewBank is required to view the link, but the gist of the article is that Congress gave Portland’s TriMet transit agency $6.2 million to subsidize a development on the city’s light-rail line that would make the light […]
A Free Parking Space Grows in Manhattan
The Antiplanner blew it yesterday by saying there was no free parking in Manhattan, which shows this Oregon resident doesn’t spend much time in the Big Apple. It turns out Manhattan has lots of free on-street parking, though on many streets you have to move your car to the alternate side of the street every […]
Free Markets and Free Parking
The Antiplanner is disappointed that my distinguished colleague and fellow supporter of free markets, Tyler Cowen, has fallen for the “high-cost-of-free-parking” arguments of Donald Shoup. Shoup is an excellent scholar, but like many scholars, he has the parochial view that the city that he lives in is a representative example of what is happening everywhere […]
More on Driverless Cars
Between hiking, cycling, and doing research on transportation and tax-increment financing, the Antiplanner has been too busy to write a decent column today. So I’ll just link to a couple of recent articles on one of my favorite topics, driverless or autonomous cars. First, the Kansas City Star notes that driverless cars are “just around […]
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 […]
