The House Republican transportation bill ends gas tax subsidies of transit and requires that any new rail projects receiving “New Starts” grants meet strict financial tests and not simply be awarded on the basis of some vague concept such as “livability.” In response, Secretary of Livability Ray LaHood says it is vital to keep funding […]
READ MOREConstruction on Honolulu’s ill-conceived rail line–at least $5.7 billion, and more likely at least $7 billion, for a 20-mile elevated line–is supposed to start next month. Polls indicate that voters who once supported the project have turned against it. Fortunately, Hawai’ians have one more chance to stop this idiotic project before too much money is […]
READ MOREToday, the Antiplanner is in North Carolina, where transit agencies seem to be competing to plan the wackiest, most-expensive rail transit lines that few people will ever use. Right now, the leading contender must be Raleigh, which (according to a paper by UNC-Charlotte transport professor David Hartgen and transit accountant Tom Rubin) is planning a […]
READ MOREThe 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 […]
READ MORE“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 […]
READ MOREMargin Call opened four months ago, so this review isn’t exactly timely, but for readers who haven’t seen it, it purports to be about the 2008 financial crisis. Since the Antiplanner has written extensively about this crisis, I found the movie intriguing enough to watch the DVD. The entire picture takes place during about 27 […]
READ MORELeave 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 […]
READ MORE“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 […]
READ MOREHonolulu has the best bus system in America, taking a higher percentage of commuters to work and carrying more daily riders per capita than any other bus system. But just having the best bus system isn’t good enough for some people, who just have to have a rail line to have “real transit.” So the […]
READ MOREThe Economist suggests that sending a woman to the moon would have a more positive impact on the economy than building high-speed rail. Certainly, a trip to the moon would use more modern technology as the first high-speed rail line was built in 1964 but we didn’t send a man to the moon until 1969.
READ MOREThe hit of last week’s Detroit Auto Show was the 2013 Ford Fusion. This was a surprise because the car was merely a stylistic upgrade of an existing model. The real significance of the Fusion is not the “strong personality” or the fact that Ford will offer both hybrid and plug-in hybrid versions, but that […]
READ MOREThe New York Times Magazine has discovered what everyone who has ever been to a Tea Party meeting already knew: tea parties are a coalition of social conservatives and libertarians. Both are fiscally conservative and so the tea parties focus on fiscal issues and agree to disagree on social issues. Does this mean the tea […]
READ MOREThe Obama administration’s rejection of the Keystone pipeline was predictably stupid and will do little to protect the environment other than by slightly increasing world oil prices. Opponents made it clear that they didn’t care about the negligible environmental impacts of the pipeline; they just wanted to “keep the tar sands in the soil.” The […]
READ MOREOnce the envy of much of the rest of the United States, the California high-speed rail project is increasingly viewed as being run by a bunch of buffoons who can’t see the handwriting on the wall. Actually, a few of them may see it: last week the authority’s executive director and board chair both resigned. […]
READ MOREAmy Oliver Cooke, Director
Email: Amy@i2i.org
Phone: 303-279-6536, ext 107
Amy Oliver Cooke, Director
Email: Amy@i2i.org
Phone: 303-279-6536, ext 107
Foster and kinship children too often miss out on supplemental services and activities. A new breed of program called a Supplemental Educational Support Account (SESA) would provide a set amount of annual funding for each student that can be used for services such as tutoring, therapies, music lessons, specialized programs, transportation, and a wide variety
READ MOREWho knew it would be such a busy week? Before I head off to go play in the snow or jump in a pile of leaves or two — you never know with the weather here in Colorado — I thought you’d like to see the new results from the Association of American Educators nationwide […]
READ MOREAs explained by author Marya DeGrow, conflict between some Colorado public school districts and parents led to the adoption of a 1988 legislative bill that established guidelines for home education.
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