Secretary of Immobility Ray LaHood announced yesterday the latest–and possibly last–round of high-speed rail grants, this one from redistribution of the $2.4 billion rejected by the state of Florida. As the Antiplanner noted in March, LaHood could have given the entire $2.4 billion to California, sending a signal that the administration remains serious about building […]
READ MOREThe Economist published an article claiming that traffic is worse in the United States than Europe and lamenting that the U.S. was not building high-speed rail. Wendell Cox responds with a data-filled article basically showing that everything The Economist said was wrong. John Charles of the Cascade Policy Institute just published Light Rail, Streetcars & […]
READ MOREOver the next six years, the Obama administration proposes to spend $253 billion on highways; $119 billion on mass transit; $53 billion on “high-performance” passenger trains; $28 billion on “livability”; and $25 billion on an infrastructure bank. At least, those are the numbers that can be found in a copy of an undated bill representing […]
READ MOREOkay, it is one thing for someone who wants to live within a block of Central Park to pay $700 a month for a 90-square-foot “apartment.” But now a major homebuilder, D.R. Horton, is building 364- to 687-square-foot micro-homes in Portland. “You can’t just keep going farther from the city and acquiring farm land,” says […]
READ MORERealtors and home builders strongly defend the mortgage interest deduction as a way of increasing homeownership, which is supposed to be a good thing. But does it really work that well? Edward Glaeser doesn’t think so. While he agrees that there are social benefits to increasing homeownership, he notes that the mortgage-interest deduction mainly benefits […]
READ MOREPortland should change its motto from “the city that works” to “the city that’s white.” Already the whitest big city in America in 2000, the city has gotten whiter still as poor people have been pushed from the inner city into the suburbs, as shown in this stunning series of maps. The Antiplanner has covered […]
READ MOREA new report from Florida’s National Center for Transit Research looks at how transit can save energy. The report’s lead author, Steve Polzin, has been mentioned here before. Some of the findings are more surprising than others. Transit uses about the same amount of energy as driving, the report finds, and transit in most places […]
READ MOREPer passenger mile, federal subsidies to Amtrak are 30 times greater than federal subsidies to airlines and 500 times greater than federal subsidies to intercity buses, according to a new study from the American Bus Association. The study also reports that federal subsidies per passenger mile to public transit are 3,200 times greater than federal […]
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