American Dream

Facing a $50-million deficit on its $500-million operating budget, BART is raising fares by 10 cents a ride, charging for parking at ten park-and-ride stations, and cutting service. Despite these changes, the budget adopted by the BART board of directors is still in deficit, and it assumes that union workers will accept zero pay increases when the unions are demanding 6-percent increases.

BART ridership peaked in 2001 and dropped by 10 percent since then due to the recession. The recession also reduced the tax revenues that support the agency. Although BART carries a lot of riders each day, mainly middle-class suburbanites, total transit ridership in the San Francisco Bay Area was greater in 1984 than in any year since. BART's critics say this is because BART is taking funds that could otherwise be used to improve bus services for low-income workers in Oakland and other parts of the Bay Area.

BART's actions show that even popular transit systems are not sustainable as long as they rely on subsidies that are themselves unreliable.

Oregon's land-use planning process doesn't provide elitists with enough tools for preventing other people from shopping at Wal-Mart, so the state legislature is proposing to add more. Under current Oregon law, people can challenge new developments based on their impacts on sewers, water, traffic, wetlands, scenery, farmlands, or a seemingly endless list of other issues. Beyond these rules, Metro, Portland's regional planning agency, has set more rules limiting the number of stores that can be larger than 100,000-square feet.

But that's not enough for Representative Charlie Ringo (D-Beaverton), who calls Oregon's process "a rubber stamp." So he has proposed a bill that would allow people to object to a new store based on its impact on other stores or if its "not compatible with the community." Ringo's bill only applies to one parcel in Beaverton, which just happens to be where Wal-Mart proposes to build a 149,000-square-foot store. But it would set a precedent for anyone else who wants to stop a Wal-Mart to go to the legislature and ask for a similar bill for their area.

Despite the supposed rubber stamp, the Portland area is currently thinly supplied with Wal-Marts. There are only three Wal-Marts serving the 1.5 million people living inside the region's urban-growth boundary, none of them supercenters (meaning none sell groceries). This has been to the benefit of Kroger subsidiary Fred Meyer, Safeway, and Albertsons, each of which have dozens of stores in the Portland area that don't have to compete with Wal-Mart. That means everyone in Portland who doesn't want to drive 50 miles to the nearest Wal-Mart supercenter has to pay higher food prices to subsidize the inefficiency of these older chain stores.

And just what does "not compatible with the community" mean for a store when the main objection is that so many people would use it that it would increase traffic congestion? That sounds like a lot of members of the community find it very compatible. But those who go to legislative hearings and planning commission meetings don't represent the people who want to shop at Wal-Mart, only those who want to deny people the right to shop there.

Representative Ringo says his goal is to make sure that "Oregonians have as much say in this process as does some company in Arkansas." If that is true, then he should allow Wal-Mart to build and let Oregonians vote with their feet.

A new study by Centers for Disease Control researchers found that only about 112,000 Americans die from obesity-related diseases each year, not the 365,000 claimed by earlier reports. Moreover, the new study found that people who are underweight suffer about 33,000 "excess deaths" a year, while people who are a little overweight suffer from no excess deaths.

To counter the effects of this study, CDC Director Julie Gerberding held a press conference saying that being overweight is a health risk no matter what the research says. "What we don't want is for this debate to continue to confuse people," she said. Rather than get confused by reading the research, people should just listen to the politically motivated claims of CDC press releases.

No doubt someone at CDC is more than dimly aware that the agency's funding depends on keeping the alarm bells ringing on obesity and other health-related issues. Any research that claims the problems aren't as bad as the CDC thought -- even (or especially) if it is the CDC's own research -- must be dismissed or Congress will lose interest in supporting the agency.

In CDC's defense, most press reports erroneously say that the new study found that obesity causes only 25,000 (or 25,814) deaths per year. This is based on subtracting 86,094 lives supposedly saved by people being slightly overweight from the 111,909 excess deaths due to obesity. The study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association doesn't make this subtraction, but reporters did.

The most accurate reports stated that being overweight causes 25,814 deaths a year, but most say that obesity causes 25,814 deaths. Perhaps a press conference to clarify this was worthwhile -- but if so, it didn't work because the press accounts of the press conference still use the 25,814 figure. Instead, the CDC comes off as appearing to challenge the validity of its own study in order to scare people into losing more weight than the study found was safe.

One of the more amusing parts of Portland's smart-growth plan was a mandate to turn the parking lots around the region's largest shopping mall into apartments and greenspaces. The mall was rezoned so that the owner would have to comply with this mandate if ever it expanded the mall. Parking garages were to replace the parking lots, but garages cost about ten times as much per space as surface parking, so who would pay for them?

The answer, not surprisingly, is taxpayers. Clackamas County just agreed to use urban-renewal funds to pay for a parking garage at the shopping mall as a part of a major remodel/expansion of the mall. SUch urban-renewal funds come from tax-increment financing, so they presume that there will be increased property tax revenues resulting from the investments of those funds. While tax revenues will increase as a result of the mall expansion, they would have increased even without the parking garage, so the county is effectively taking taxes that should be going for schools and other services and using them to achieve planners' smart-growth dreams.

This Oregonian article doesn't say anything about apartments, but some of the county money will go towards "plazas" and "other amenities." The county investment will total $20 million. I bet a lot of schoolrooms could be funded for $20 million!

Sydney commuter trains carried 9 million fewer rides last year than in 2001-2002. This is despite the fact that the Sydney metro area is denser than the New York urban area. Public bus ridership is stagnant, but private bus operators report increasing ridership. Toll road operators are also gaining customers.

Part of the problem is that trains often run late. But the government is also cutting service on some lines due to rail transit's high cost. Two of the few rail lines that actually had an increase in ridership have had, or are earmarked for, service cuts.

Australia is running out of land, so the government of New South Wales has announced legislation to ban the construction of "McMansions" and other large homes, which government leaders consider a waste. It also plans to ban cul de sacs from new suburbs and mandate three-story apartments and mixed-used developments.

The government feels it can impose such measures because it owns much of the land around Sydney, which--after Los Angeles and San Diego--has the least affordable housing in the New World (USA, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand). The government plans to charge developers impact fees of up to AU$65,000 a lot (US$49,000) to help pay for "essential services."

No doubt American planners will soon be going to Sydney to find out how well urban planning works there.

'The Stewards of the Range' have been in a 13 year legal battle (Hage) over the taking of their ranch The have produced an interesting movie concerning the Environmentalist and Property Rights. http://www.Takingliberty.us