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 […]
READ MOREBetween 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 […]
READ MOREEveryone 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 […]
READ MOREThe 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 […]
READ MORETualatin, 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 […]
READ MOREA couple of years ago, the Antiplanner described a Portland program of accepting carbon-offset funds to do traffic signal coordination. While I support signal coordination, the claimed benefits seemed outlandish. When I found out that the money came from an organization called Climate Trust that was co-founded by the director of Portland’s Office of Sustainable […]
READ MOREJohn Stossel says new roads should be built by private entities and paid for with tolls. He supports the privatization of existing roads as well. Subsidies to roads are small, but we don’t need to subsidize them at all and private owners would manage them better, says Stossel. The Antiplanner spent Wednesday in New York […]
READ MOREInstead 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 […]
READ MOREHere’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 […]
READ MOREIn a stunning move, the Oregon Land Use Board of Appeals, which reviews citizen challenges to zoning and other local land-use decisions, has ruled that a zoning code in the Portland suburb of Hillsboro is unconstitutional. The decision applies to an zone that required that all owners of land within 6,000 feet of the Hillsboro […]
READ MORELos Angeles’ rail transit system is now 20 years old, but the Antiplanner’s faithful ally, Tom Rubin, questions whether it should have been built at all. “The push for rail has forced transit ridership down,” says Rubin, who was the chief financial officer of L.A.’s transit agency when the rail lines were planned in the […]
READ MOREReaders may have noticed that the Antiplanner was down Wednesday morning and almost all day Thursday. Apparently, our web host was completely down as I couldn’t even access their web site. Does anyone have any recommendations for a new web host? I am backing up the entire web site so I don’t have time to […]
READ MOREIt turns out that urban planners really did cause the housing bubble. What’s more, even leftist bloggers like Matthew Yglesias appear to be persuaded by the evidence.
READ MOREAs the nation’s transit industry slowly implodes from the weight of political control, the replacement for transit is getting some attention in the press. Researchers from the University of Parma are sending two driverless cars from Italy to Shanghai. Researchers at Ohio State University have received a $1.5 million National Science Foundation grant to develop […]
READ MOREA new report from the Federal Transit Administration says that America’s transit agencies need $77.7 billion to bring their systems up to a state of good repair. This report is an update to a previous report that just looked at seven of the nation’s leading transit systems (Boston, Chicago, New Jersey Transit, New York, Philadelphia, […]
READ MOREIn 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 […]
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
Who 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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One of the Education Policy Center’s primary goals is to educate local education leaders about important education policy issues, thereby equipping them to make intelligent, well-informed decisions in their school districts. Biennially, we update our K-12 policy issues school board member handbook to provide leaders with historical and current information from a common-sense perspective on
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