Advice for the Coming Reckoning

If you can keep your head when all about you Are losing theirs and blaming it on you, If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you, But make allowance for their doubting you; If you can wait and not be tired by waiting, Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies, Or being hated, don’t give way to hating, And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise:... If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue, Or walk with Kings—nor lose the common touch, If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you, If all men count with you, but none too much; If you can fill the unforgiving minute With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run, Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it, And—which is more—you’ll be a Man, my son!
Rudyard Kipling (1865–1936), Rewards and Fairies (1910).

BLS OER, Lions and Tigers and Bears Oh My!

Wishing everyone a solemn Alban Arthan as we honor the souls of the trees we sacrifice then deify in our living rooms. Hang the revered kerm-oak, drink the blessed wassail. "Yule" feel so much better. The Norse had the right idea taking 12 days for Jole. Oh and all the recent religion adherents that have since renamed these Christmas, Christmas Trees, holly, sacramental wine and the 12 days of Christmas as if changing the name makes a difference; Merry Christmas.

Wishing everyone Prop 13 protection.

Wishing everyone a secret decoder ring to translate Fedspeak into reality.

Wishing I understood inflation formulas. OER (owners equivalent rent) questions are tricky. I am going to try but I probably have this wrong so don't trust it. The BLS in computing the CPI realized that using actual housing costs was going to give false inflation indications. This because housing content was changing. The sad part is that they decided for seriously poor political reasons to err in the opposite direction. Just like the morally indefensible way they do not count all taxes. Anyway, they calculate what the fair market rent would be for any particular house which turns out to be the mother of all lagging indicators. I've posted extensively on this elsewhere. Market rents are reflecting purchase costs in some instances (mine) 18 years ago. Just going over my year end tax avoidance notes this one place cost me out of pocket a whopping $1100 in 2005 before deductions. I don't charge $90/month but neither do I charge as if I bought last year and was paying a $1300/month mortgage while trying to recover the original transaction costs. Like I said, talk about your lagging indicators. This is why everyone on the ground sees so very much inflation and the BLS doesn't see it in the data. They are acting as if the were the 1960s with one car and a 1200 sq ft house with 2.5 kids who walk to their fine neighborhood school and mom stays at home. What this does mean, and everyone already hates me for this, is that OER will rise and continue to rise "stubbornly" for a great many years even as housing prices tank. Everyone loves it here when I say the bubble popped Oct 6th '05 and cheer my labelling the next few months "The Silent Spring" but I'm a shill for the forces of darkness when I predict rising rents for the exact same reasons. There's a lot of inflation and that will show up in rents. There's very high costs for an increasing portion of the rental owners that perforce will affect median rental charges. The equlibrium of falling house prices and rising rents are what partly drive my prediction of 5% per year declines in prices as rents rise to reestablish some congruence in OER and purchase pricing.

Anyway, We got the Druids covered and I need to add Joyous Saturnalia so the pagans are taken care of as well so all that remains is;

Happy Holy-days!

Wealth Winners (aka behaving rich)

People who believe in passive income are also known as -former- trust fund babies. Money and asset -management- is a -management- function. Do the -managers- you know work for free? Same thing, you have to pay yourself.

Wealth Winners:

Clip coupons. Earn $80-$100 per hour in your own home in front of the TV watching Suze Orman (sorry) and entertaining your cat with the detrius. Besides the $80-$100 being after tax, tax free money, by organizing your coupons the trip to the grocery store goes faster, smoother and is not as distracted by what they want to sell you as what you want to buy. You eat better too. Subsequent health benefits accrue. Tertiary, the forced planning/organization allows for less waste and taking advantage of sales, not only furthering savings but reducing dining expenses. How many times do you open the fridge at 6:15 only to say there's nothing good and then go out and blow $60 on dinner for two of angel hair pasta in a sundried tomato garden veggie and shrimp sauce? $8 worth of ingredients and a dozen dishes? You can whip this up in less time that it takes to find your cel phone and drive at $0.62 per mile to stand in line when you could instead be videotaping how your cat reacts to a piece of pasta on his back and filming it for the $10,000 prize on America's Funniest Animals. Oh and let's be clear here, you are not being propitious if you ever pay for deodorant, toothpaste or toothbrushes again.

Then there's that car you "deserve." Get over it. What is the true cost per mile? Most people can save lots of after tax, tax free money here but I'd ned to know the details before venturing an estimate.

Cable service? HBO & Showtime? Free money.

Regular lightbulbs? In the closets? What? are you crazy? We in SoCal pay some of the highest rates in the lower 48. Rite Aid occassionaly sells 4paks of 60w equivalent flourescents for a buck. ROI a month. Bag up the old bulbs and donate them to the Restore Store or Habitat. Laugh all the way to the bank, feel good about yourself, save the environment. What could be better? Well, screwingSoCalEdision but that ain't gonna happen. The energy you save increases their overhead ratios and they aren't gonna invest so you'll pay more and still have shortages in the future. Face it, we've done to utilities what we did to transit. Sad.

Nautical Frugality, Discard Rescue and Experienced Goods. Otherwise known as; Yard Sales, Dumpster Diving and Thrift Stores. Just last Wednesday I added to my polo shirt collection. Wed is 25% discount day at the rescue mission thrift store in Oxnard. I pick up 4 shirts, Large and Medium (manufacturers don't standardize their sizes) that I know will fit because these had already been washed at least a few times for $4.92. Top quality, preshrunk major labels.

Realtor Christmans Presents

Replacement rose colored glasses.
Realtime digital For Sale sign: $450k... $430k...
"The Money Pit" on DVD... er make that VHS.
Shredder.
Comfortable shoes.
Vaseline. [think about it]
Really thick paperbacks.
Housewarming gifts, say home heating oil.
Lots and lots of glycerine (makes bubbles last longer).
Botox to erase worry lines.
Hip wadders.
A new HP12c to replace the one that is obviously broken.
Tickets to the new TV show "Desperate Housesellers."
A -real- rolling doughnut.
"It's Only a Hobby" Tshirt.
Tap shoes.

Why Flip? Because it Pays

Let's try some numbers from another blog:

An investment house in Palm Springs. Purchase $475,000 in Jun '05. Tear out the kitchen, granite countertops, etc. Add a second sliding glass door to the pool. Minor landscaping, minor paint/patch. $75,000 improvements.

$550,000 total investment
$699,000 listed
- $40,000 commission, fees, opex
= $109,000 profit

What is wrong with this picture? First they didn't pay cash. For the sake of discussion let's assume 20% down 30yr fixed 6%. So for 6 months investment is not $550k but approx $210k. That's an amazing a 100% annualized return on your money.

But of course even this isn't true. Flippers don't put 20% down and take out 30yr fixed mortgages. And who-in-the-hell pays cash for $75,000 in home improvements? These things were all debt purchases so let's look at something closer to the real financing.

Bring $40k to the table in June. Finance interest/only or intro ARM $450k so the payments are $2300/month. A $75,000 HELOC would probably cost $3,000 to start so we are paying on $0 to start up to $78,000 by the 5th month. Call it $700 by he end. So, how much have we "invested" in the last six months?

$40,000 down plus the lost opportunity 6mos interest, $1,000
6mos taxes $2,300
6mos payments $13,800
HELOC repayments $2,300
Total+10% misc = $65,000 while carrying $528,000 in debt instruments.

Sales price to get out even? $640,000
At the $699,000 sales price $56,000 cleared on $67,000 invested in 6 months. A lot more than 100% returns. The theory of OPM strikes. OPM = other peoples' money.

Kalifornia Uber Alles

Random thoughts inspired by someone who claims to need to leave ca.

Koastal Kalifornia. Let's be clear. It is one of the very best places on the planet to live... except, it is expensive. Very, very expensive and even in the worst cases it will only crash to being very expensive.

Want to live in Koastal Kaliforina on the cheap? Easy, buy in 1965, '75, '85, '95 not 2005. Maybe buy in 2008? Sorry, won't know until 2010 or later.

I've never met the honest "never looked back" ex-californian. They've say they "made the right decision at the time," "done alright," all that but they can't get back in at the level they left.

There's a reason why California ends up with the majority of immigrants illegal and legal. Immigration is a huge social commitment, Kalifornia has been a good place to invest social capital.

Robert Kennedy was killed here. His assasination site has recently been razed for a new LAUSD High School. The title of this blog article is a song by the Dead Kennedys. Camera obscura my ass, we talkin' blogeria cultural obscura.

The Market Part of Housing Markets

In the last two weeks enough observations have come inm to confirm an ongoing gut wrenching price decline in the housing markets. I personally feel about $200k poorer but couldn't care less since I didn't care about the last $400k of increase. Anyway, what we are in now is best described as a freefall. We need to know what the market clearing price for housing may be. We won't know that number until houses start to sell again. I've called the next few months "the silent spring" because I don't think we'll see any sales.

Future History 2005-2012

Mortgage rates are low because of the velocity of money and the lack of risk premium built into the cost structure.

"Foreign investment" has always been around. If you were a rich capitalist pig Nouveau Riche ChiComm would you entrust your money to the mainland financial system? NFW. And balance of payments data are broken. No longer reliable. It isn't as bad as it seems.

What long term is gonna kill low interest rates is the necessity to inflate our way out of paying back all the SocSec money that isn't there but that's 8-10 years away.

In order of occurance:
1 Velocity of money slows down (M3 no longer reported, coincidence?)
2 MBSecs fall out of favor in the secondary markets.
3 Commodities pricing finally honestly shows up in the inflation data.
4 The Republicans (re)capitulate on taxes (again).
5 The Fed screws up one time too many.
6 The boomers start drawing down earlier than ever expected at the same time the extended lifespans of their parents so dearly bought both radicalize health care and push assetst onto the markets. Property and stocks, etc.

Welcome to a short history of 2005 through 2012.

CNU Charter Translated

The Congress for the New Urbanism advocates:

disproportionate government investment in central cities,

government restrictions on choice of home or neighborhood,

government mandated forced integration by race and income,

increased government protections of the environment by limiting choice and use of private property,

and the application of government policies to return to old city form and dominance.

Restore density in the old cities, increase density in the new suburbs and place prohibitions on any land use policies that result in either lower densities or investment outside the dense urban areas.

We recognize that intense limits on personal liberty and private property rights are necessary as physical solutions by themselves will not solve social and economic problems inherent in our prefered urban patterns, but neither can economic vitality, community stability, and environmental health be sustained without a coherent and supportive physical framework.

We advocate the restructuring of public policy and development practices to support the following principles: neighborhoods should be diverse in use and population; communities should be designed for the pedestrian and transit as well as the car; cities and towns should be shaped by physically defined and universally accessible public spaces and community institutions; urban places should be framed by architecture and landscape design that celebrate local history, climate, ecology, and building practice.

We seek to impose our extremeist and extreme minority views on the general population with force of government upon broad-based citizenry, composed of public and private sector leaders, community activists, and multidisciplinary professionals. We are committed to reestablishing the relationship between the art of building and the making of community, through citizen-based participatory planning and design. In short, we want to direct.

We dedicate ourselves to reclaiming our homes, blocks, streets, parks, neighborhoods, districts, towns, cities, regions, and environment.

Don't Do What I Do

Least affordable housing markets:

http://www.cbia.org/documents/public/05-0825%20HOI.pdf

Here's where my extended family lives:

Honolulu
Ventura
Naples, FL
Boston

Yep, all on the list.

Greedy Developers?

I honestly don't understand the claim of "greedy homebuilders." Irresponsible lenders and unscrupulous real estate sales sure but what about building homes in response to demand in a open market is so horrible? Criticize builders for shoddy workmanship where appropriate. Complain about sweetheart deals with municipalities as long as the municpalities get most of the blame. But greed? Where does greed come into the things homebuidlers do? Are we ready to call them wonderful giving sharing pillars of the community when they start next year selling at below cost just to stay in business? If not why not as we seem all too ready to excoriate them with the conditions reversed.

Homebuilders and the Bubble

[N.B. I have declared the housing bubble over as of Oct 6, 2005]

I can think of three industry factors that each are interesting and together tell a story. First go to http://insidercow.com/ and look up any/all the big builders Toll, KB, Lenar, etc. Their execs are bailing big time. On the plus side as a business not as a stock play they've learned some expensive lessons. Price depreciation and falling demand is not the disaster it used to be. They can cut 10% by accepting lower profits in exchange for continued sales volume. They can cut 10% even 20% by reducing the fluff they build into their homes, ugrades. They can tighten supply these days with far less exposure to sitting on unsold inventory. No quite build to order but a lot closer than in 1990. The builders have also gone vertical meaning they won't get as squeezed by lenders/financiers or undercut by realtors looking for the next sale.

For all the doom and gloom however remember anyone who bought a home for the purpose of living there anytime more than 2 years ago is still going to be looking at handsome short term appreciation even if prices fall 20%. People who didn't buy for the traditional purposes of living there and participating in the community are called "investors/speculators" and have every expectation of the possiblity of losses. "They bought their airplane tickets, they knew what they were getting into, I say let 'em crash."

"Limits" to Freedom?

The right to privacy isn't mentioned in the Constitution because the founding Fathers in their worst nightmares never imagined a government so pervasive that it would ever even get close to infringing upon the fundamental concept. The Constitution doesn't presume to define all human rights, only to describe the maximum extent to which some of those specific rights may be limited for the protection of rights in general.

These are not bubble bites

From:
http://money.cnn.com/2005/08/18/real_estate/buying_selling/overvalued_housing_markets/

"Most of the most overvalued markets, according to DeKaser, are in California and Florida. Number one is Santa Barbara, where home prices, at a median of $564,100, are 69 percent higher than they should be."

From:
http://money.cnn.com/best/bplive/snapshots/48478.html

Santa Barbara is one of the Best Places to Live 2005!

Anyone who claims the median Santa Barbara home should sell for only $340,000 is incompetent.

Bump, bump bump, another one bumps the bus

...And another one gone,
and another one gone,
Another one hits the bus.

Brian is sure going to be busy. Regardless it is too early to say just
how dangerous the Orange Crusher Line is going to be. First we need to
slow down to realistic speeds and thereby disavow the promised running
times. Then we'll need to spend a lot of money on safety improvements
thus disavowing the promised construction costs. Then we'll need to
further change signaling and auto control functions thereby increasing
congestion. Finally we'll need to use all these as the excuse for the
poor ridership and poor it is make no mistake. That's okay, all part of
the master plan. All these combined will be used to justify some very
expensive grade separations, a few crossing closures and conversion to
light rail. The camel has its' nose in the tent.

Maybe some transit fan is inclined to follow the lead of Houston and put
up a Wham Bam Tram Collision Counter on their website?

Top of the first inning BangerBus 2 hits 0 errors* 16 taken out 0
retired. RollingThunder 0 hits 2 errors 1 taken out 0 retired.

* Note: It will -almost always- be an error charged against
RollingThunder no matter who screws up.

Congestion Versus CAFE

An SOV hybrid and a two occupant gas guzzling SUV are both privledged classes. Why is that? It isn't enough to claim some vague greater public good. Demonstrating greater public good would give food share [http://www.foodshare.com/] trucks access to HOT/HOV lanes. Heck, can the Walmart trucks full of disaster relief goods use the reserved lanes?

We already have enough incentives/disincentives to mold behavior. Like the congeston charge, HOV lane access is double incentive/disincentive for certain specific actions.

Hey little girl, if you climb this pole I'll give you a quarter.

Megaopoli

I live in Ventura County near the city of Camarillo where we have some of the most
democratic growth controls in the nation. Note; I did not say strictest. I also live about 14 miles from
William Fulton, (Reluctant Metropolis) the author/city councillor who talks about cities like most
urbanists do but lives in the burbs like I do. Hmmm. Can't be that bad a
place eh? It's a very rich place. Personally I live on a golf course
surrounded by protected open space and protected agricultural land. I look
directly north as far as the California Condor Sanctuary and Topa Topa Mtns.
My driveway probably deserves it's own 3di designation but my cul-de-sac
street off of a tertiary road sees about 10 AADTs.

Topo: http://tinyurl.com/8yy7w

I for one paid attention to the Census trial balloon megapolitan/macropolitan "proposal."
For everyone else:
---------------
MASRC has recommended a Core-Based Statistical Area (CBSA)
Classification to replace the current MA classification. The cores
(i.e., the densely settled concentrations of population) for this
classification would be Census Bureau-defined urbanized areas and
smaller densely settled ''settlement clusters'' identified in
Census 2000. CBSAs would be defined around these cores. This CBSA
Classification has three types of areas based on the total
population of all cores in the CBSA: (1) Megapolitan Areas defined
around cores of at least 1,000,000 population; (2) Macropolitan
Areas defined around cores of 50,000 to 999,999 population; and (3)
Micropolitan Areas defined around cores of 10,000 to 49,999
population. The identification of Micropolitan Areas extends
concepts underlying the core-based approach to smaller population
centers previously included in a ''nonmetropolitan residual.''
---------------

The first time some previously independent region finds themselves annexed
to the "big bad place down the road" all hell is gonna break loose. Our
regional MPO is called SCAG. It roughly corresponds to megapolitian in
description. Attempts to acquire regional planning authority along with
their regional planning coordinating function has been met with reactions
from elected officials usually reserved for plague carriers. The joke
that went around was; "Q: What do you get when you combine Vent, LA,
San Berdo and Orange Counties? A: LA."

We don't do new communities anymore. We add to existing until the
become dysfunctional. Like the Valley. Adding TO, Moorpark and Simi
(and Malibu) to the Valley is that joke about the fat man averaging is
weight with a skinny neighbor.

Make no mistake. Megapols are a backdoor attempt at regional governance
specifically designed to be controlled by and oriented towards the core
OPAC.

Flat Tax -Not-

A 'flat tax" is: government expenditure (expenses plus obligations) divided by population. That would be about $5000 per person at the Federal level and in my case $3400 for California and $1600 locally or $50,000 for my nuclear family of 5. What you normally hear being called a flat tax is actually a "flat tax RATE" an entirely differnt animal. More important is rate of "what?" Income? What is income? Dollar denominated equivalent transactions? Is your paycheck one of those transactions? Is a corporate division a seperate entity so that shipping parts to the assembly plant becomes a transaction? What about having your trash hauled away? What about recycling then? Think about it. Is recovering some previous expense another transaction or is it a completed transaction? With the latter, if you refuse to recycle is the transaction completed or are you trying to transfer wealth to somebody else who eventually recycles your "waste."

What we really need is the first baby step. Consistent taxation of things, actions and efforts. Other countries call the things part of this a VAT. If VAT lived up to its' name it might work but consider an auto purchased for $20,000 taxed a 5% and sold to a second private party two years later for $15,000 . Is there a 25% VAT rebate? Or is there another VAT on the $15,000. Or is there a complex deterimination that the buyer cleared $1000 over value and owes another $50? Or the buyer underpaid? You get the idea.

Don't get me wrong, I'm all for blowing up the tax laws and starting over. No doubt the eventual outcme will be rational and more fair after a period of irrationality and intense unfairness but that's a different matter.

While we are at it what is this crap about property taxation based on book value? And which services should be funded through the property tax mechanism? The SCOTUS says not education. Sales taxes in Kalifornia increasingly support public safety. What about Community Colleges? Then there is the 500lb gorilla, Prop 13.

Prop 13 correctly protects people and businesses against arbitrary government distortions of the market. That's one point of government regulation in the first place isn't it?

I have no truck with the market aspects nor even the speculative portion of home buying decisions. I just think Prop 13 does a good job of capitating some of the non market risks with no external costs. I'm sure others feel otherwise and I'm only expressing an opinion among many. Perhaps we can go about this in reverse. I've got a 4 bed 2.5 bath SFR California ranch. How much should I be paying in taxes? California has 36.6 million people and spends/incurs $116 billion. That's a whopping $3400 per person. How much of that should come from property taxes? It isn't easy to answer in part
because of for instance what happens to the property tax that is sent off to Sacramento so that from there lots of money can be transferred from the high performing school districts to the worst school districts. You see in 1978 the same year as Prop 13 it was deemed illegal to spend different amounts locally as previously when California was 4th in the nation for school
performance. So now we spend different amounts locally as directed by the State as commanded by the Supremes and are now lowered to the 4th worst in terms of results.

Sorry, I got distracted. Were we talking about investments and government meddling?

How to Tell You are Effective

When people who disagree with you are reduced to replies like:

M Setty: "Cote is one lazy mu--r-fu-k-r."

W Lynch: hate filled thought controlling pathological Nazi role model

J Coviello: thick skulled, hypocrite with a closed mind; a joke, snide and devoid of content, unimportant, indescent, disrespectful, humorless, and full of shit

Land Use and Illegal Immigration

Afforbable housing for the worker class. This is the big "problem" where I live now. You cannot purchase a SFR for less than $500k that you would let your child live in. This months' (Sept '05) MEDIAN (not average): $635k.
http://www.dqnews.com/ZIPLAT.shtm {Ventura County at the bottom]

Supposedly this is going to mean our housekeepers and gardeners and even bookkeepers are going to be "lost" and we idle rich will be helpless. Quite the opposite. Instead we will buy Roombas, Rainbirds and Quicken thereby employing robotocists, Landscape Architects, electrical engineers and software programmers who can afford to live here. This IMHO is "A Good Thing."

What's this got to do with illegal immigration? A lot through a connection most people see in reverse. I'd much rather pay for a civil engineer, GIS coordinator, software vendor and robot crop picker machinery salesman each getting a living wage rather than tolerate the barely better than slave wage illegal immigration generating handpicking system we use now. The problem is we are subsidizing the slave worker market and taxing and regulating the technology fields mentioned above.

LEEDs

With all the alphabet soup being tossed around this is a relatively new one. LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) sounds like just another insidious inroad but the principles are sound even if the advocates are unprincipled.

Courtesy of the U.S. Green Building Council and your tax dollars naturally:
http://www.usgbc.org/default.asp?CMSPageID=94&

I'm all for it. LEED is the codification of several disciplines each using careful thought in the design, approve, build, operate process for any construction. I've little doubt that most "points" awarded when pursuing sliver/gold/platinum status will generally end up in the total cost of ownership as being near or better than break even -but- (you knew there was a but in here someplace) it is not correct to imply inital costs are going to be within a few percent of conventional development costs. For but one instance mentioned is the following; adding 18 inches to ceiling heights. At first blush this appears to be a no-brainer; heating and cooling and general HVAC peak loading are all reduced. That is until you think about the plan changes, zoning compliance research, special orders, lighting re-calculations, preparations of special instruction bid packets for everything from sprinklers to duct work. The design/engineering alone is going to add several percent to the up front price before the first watt is "saved." And it gets more complex, cement production contributes about 12% of all endogenous CO2 in the atmosphere, in the case of a tilt-up with concrete walls how long until the "savings" makes up for having all that 18 inches of extra wall? There are examples of this kind all through the process. I personally strongly favor minimum site disturbance but that is often a very expensive decision if one less home or even a small percentage of leasable space is lost in the process.

Total cost of ownership is another interesting problem. Time is money and no doubt LEED is more time consuming. Money is (unsurprisingly) money and the extra upfront money is just another lost opportunity. There's little evidence that expensive infrastructure investments in these types of things can be recovered in the sales price thus preventing speculative properties from taking advantage of LEED. If the market is mixed with LEED and Conventional Development projects it naturally narrows the list of potential clients for the more expensive LEED. Lowest common denominator perhaps but in my opinion any cure is worse than the disease.

Free Parking

"Free Parking" is too vague to ever discuss in these situations
with any prospect of agreement. Think about what each of the words
individually and combined mean to each interested party. Free to whom?
Parking or amenity? Bundled cost or subsidy or business investment?
Tax dodge? Cost of doing business? Then we get to the current
subspecies; education. Boston College or UMass Boston? Different?
Holy Cross? Is on street parking a violation of Church and State?

Look; parking is paid for. It cannot remain "free" for long to the
users or payers no matter who is paying or using.

There's no such thing as free parking (with one exception noted below).
Adequate bundled transportation infrastructure. I'm not just picking
nits with the phrase. Free parking is inaccurate on many levels. As
I've tried to say in other posts there's a case for what some are
calling free parking to actually be called non-parker parasitism. We
don't need perfect reasoning because the accidental market arrives at
the same result through brute force methods that produce local maximums.
If we were able to inhibit political meddling global maximums would
equally result. I am astounded by people who deny the obvious evidence.
The giant parking lot at the Costco is why gin is 50% cheaper inside.
Without the parking, the cachement area for potential customers shrinks
faster than overhead. No more Beefeaters 1.75l gin in pallet quantities
and next thing you know its' back to the corner package store (aka
bottle shop) and higher prices. For the readers with more respect for
their livers feel free to substitute the commodity item of preference.
Anyone who makes the claim of free parking is only identifying
themselves as being unfamiliar with the subject. And the exception?
Transit park-n-rides. Ample free parking is an absolutely necessary
bundled cost of modern efficient economic activities. Think Vegas,
Ontario Mills, Disneyland. This is the fatal flaw of NURB. Pleasant
places that conform to their dogmas and with a vital economic base are
mutually exclusive goals. Exactly, free parking exists only in one
place; Transit. Amazing that the only truly free parking is also the
one that transit advocates support. It seems to me that "free parking"
is is the new version of pickled eggs and sandwiches at the saloon in
order to sell beer. Imagine how much more "revitalized" "downtown" Los
Angeles would be if the money poured into the big red hole had gone
towards parking subsidies instead. This is directly applicable to my
situation. Having just received my season tickets for the Hollywood
Bowl I look forward to riding the LAMTA's only profitable service. Bus
#653 from Chatsworth Station to the Bowl and back; $5. Cheap, fast,
convienient and wickedly efficient by every measure. Just don't tell
the BRU that it has the most non-hispanic non-black ridership in the
county. Probably the fastest regular bus service in the nation as well.
I've seen 85 on the speedo. Point being that Chatsworth parking is free
and despite the highest fares in the LAMTA system it is still a bargain
because of this.
I would like to make the case for the financial -benefits- of free
parking. The interesting thing I find is the inside out economics of
Walmart and big box or megamall skeptics. Their model is to increase
cachement areas in order to keep prices lower. That means that
traditional mom & pop walkup customers are only getting lower prices
BECAUSE of the parking lot not IN SPITE OF the parking lot. Of course
SoCal is the original large cachement model so it was a big suprise to
Sam Walton and the Smith Bros (grocery) when their big boxes weren't
dominant. Luckily for them (but not for the General area) both went to
Oxanrd and got city deals so generous that their poor performance
wasn't detrimental to their corporate bottom lines.
Then there's the "Snout House" aka attached two car garage controversy.
This is nothing more than a failure of planning. Some of us like baths,
some like showers, some like both. The mega-bathroom retreat/spa is
more evidence of cocooning. One factor driving this trend is an ongoing
shift to owning luxury rather than communal sharing. And some of that
is the increasing barriers to mobility. Who wants to fight traffic and
then find a parking space just to go to the gym? The same money can pay
for a well equipped home gym. Provided you have the space. Thus homes
are getting larger. Making cocooning easier. All that "stuff" needs an
SUV to take home from the Walcostdepot but congestion makes it
impractical for daily travel, so two vehicles and a correspondingly
bigger driveway. Bad transportation decisions result in snout houses.
I thought the connections were obvious.

Ample employee parking increases corporate efficiency and attracts
better employees from a larger potential pool of candidates. There's
even an argument that inadequate parking is anti-family and
anti-social. And just in case you might begin to broach the subject
that employees are unaware of the "benefit" they are earning try to
imagine if the Employee of the Month had his regular parking revoked in
appreciation. The fact that a special parking place is considered a
reward indicates employees are more aware of their own internal
economic self interest than the misguided authors of the "eliminate
subsidized parking" proposals. Free indeed.

The Vehicle License Fee

The VLF is special. What we do to auto owners is unique by any logic of
tax policy. When you buy an item you pay sales tax. That's it for
everything except vehicles. For vehicles you pay sales tax and then pay
and pay and pay forever. [There's the other major special case of real
estate but there's no sales tax and it's a distraction here.]

It's clear that the State just looks at the VLF as another funding
source. They tax because they can. A perusal of
http://www.itepnet.org/wp2000/text.pdf shows
that the authors cite Kah-Lee-Forn-Eah (the new pronunciation) as being
the most progressively taxing State in the nation. We also have the
largest budget shortfall and crisis. Coincidence? Not.

There's the old (and legitimate) claim that the liquor tax should not be
used to build breweries. The problem is California does just this for
another category. It all started in 1978 (1911 but that's another
story) when it was determined that funding local education with local
property taxes was racist. People think it was the Prop 13 rollback
that happened at the same time. This paved the way for the State to
confiscate and redistribute "education money." All of a sudden not only
were the well funded schools eviscerated but the worst schools were
flush with cash. Results are infamous. In a dozen years CA went from
the top 5 to the bottom 5 in educational outcomes. It also made real
estate property owners inlikely to vote any new taxes because they knew
the benefits would go elsewhere. Interestingly, now that the State has
it's grubby paws in the local schools it has become even more
beligerently racist in it's supposed funding formula.

What rationale is there to repeatedly re-tax the same vehicle? The
original sales or use tax was paid, the excise taxes (use fees) are
paid, all that's left is the State's legitimate pollution, safety and
registration interests. Even the smog fee is a travesty IMO.

Late model cars (<6-8yrs old) just don't have any reason
to be inspected -unless- they are modified. Anything that would cause
out of spec emissions will set off the service light and cause
noticeably bad driving. The need to make sure the vehicle is not
modified is the only legitimate reason for inspection. Surely the best
way is for the police to issue a fix it ticket for inspection when they
suspect modification but that's racist. See how these things tie
together? Just wait, it ties in more below.

The problem with remote sensing is that it works. How can that be a
problem? Well it is racist for one and it removes the need to test
every 2 years costing the State millions in fees for another.

The correct way to excercise the State's interests in vehicles via the
power of the purse is an ANTI-VLF fee. Here's how it works:

Vehicle taxes that INCREASE with the age of the vehicle so as to
encourage retirement. The sales tax for a purchase is more than enough
money to the state up front then a progressive registration fee say $50
plus 5x the year squared. $50, $55, $70, $95, $130, $175, $230, $295,
$370, $455, $550 thereafter. When a ten year old car starts sucking
down a half a grand per year there's an incentive to scrap and go
newer. Too bad it's racist.

What's all this racist stuff? Well, here in Kalifornia, there are 1.7
million unregistered and/or uninsured vehicles and more than 2 million
unlicensed drivers. Any racially tinged guesses about those vehicles or
drivers? Absolutely insane but the racism claim sticks.

Here, read what happens when you try to make the streets safer:
http://www.staronline.com/vcs/ox/article/0,1375,VCS_238_2288622,00.html

Group says Oxnard traffic stops may be using racial profiling
Police deny allegations of bias

A Latino advocacy group has called on the Oxnard Police Department to
halt traffic stops for minor violations after residents complained
officers were racially profiling drivers.

Denis O'Leary, district director of the League of United Latin American
Citizens, said police were pulling people over in south Oxnard for minor
infractions, such as hanging items from rearview mirrors, to weed out
unlicensed drivers and check legal status.
...
Assistant Police Chief of Patrol John Crombach said officers crack down
on high collision areas by ticketing drivers for all violations,
including broken windshields and not using turn signals.

"The target is to reduce accidents and collisions," Crombach said. "We
have used that time and time again in areas that have problems."
...
Oxnard has the second-highest number of hit-and-run accidents in the
state, compared with cities of similar size, according to the
California Office of Traffic Safety records.
...[end story]

So, where were we? Oh yes. Why there's a VLF and why it contributes to
California's problems. Yes, contributes. Hopefully from all above
there's a new sensitivity to that claim. It increases pollution,
decreases safety, and distorts rational budget priorties. California
taxation has little to do with how much is collected and everything to
do with how much and where it is spending.

The real defeat worth noting was Prop 53. 1% in 2006 rising to 3% in 2015
of the State budget for transportation infrastructure. Lost 70/30.
Many people voted no because this was a vote no message election but
people like me voted no because it's wrong to encumber electeds with
mandatory spending. Other people like me voted no because the State has
a nasty habit of turning floors like 3% into targets/ceilings. We
should be spending 20% on infrastructure and knowing Sacramento they
would interpret a yes vote as direction that the people are satisfied
with 3%. Of course other people like me voted no because we've learned
transportation infrastructure is code for private rail bailouts,
transit boondoggles, High Speed Rail, freeway ramps for private
developments, urban airport expansions and the like. And of course if
we could only find a cynic, that hypothetical cynic might go so far as
to estimate that 1% rising to 3% of the budget is almost exactly the
States' projected bonded debt service for the States' portion of the
aforementioned High Speed Rail and 2006 is when the first bonds would
be floated and 2016 when the last bonds would be sold. That
hypothetical cynic would stop there rather than comment on the
likelihood of staying on budget and all the expected matching funds
being available. Amazing, this ties into the "Bad News..." post by the
same original thread author. Told you it is all related.

At least in other States the politicians look you in the eye while
picking your pocket. There's something seriously wrong when the State
legislature is more than 400 miles away from 18 million residents.
Thursday's surprise was the budget. Turns out we didn't carry over
$8billion but $10billion from last year despite our Constitution and
the sale of operating deficit bonds is all but killed in the courts and
ongoing overspending is not the projected $7billion but $7billion
fiscal year to date! The new governator is calling for a sunshine
audit. Note to TAR, submit your bono fides to www.joinarnold.com for a
piece of that action. I can make it easy; We are spending $109
billion and collecting $69 billion. We are also encumbering by my
guess next year with $5 billion in book shuffles and another $10
billion in obligations for deferred pay, retirement and benefits
increases. There's probably another few billion in underestimating
healthcare (prevailing inflation instead of sector inflation) and
social services consumption. That's an acknowledged 9.6% and more like
12% in practice of all California personal income this year. Some 70%
higher than a decade ago.

The answers are every bit as easy as describing the problem and the
history and when I appoint myself guy in charge, I promise to fix the
budget, make the roads safer and more egalitatian and improve education.
The remaining 6 3/4 days of my one week term will be devoted to saving
wildlife.

California Almost High Speed Rail

Fast forward:
The year is 2024, after $43.1 billion (2003 dollars) the CA-AHSR is
finally running between Oakland Caltrain Terminal and Union Station Los
Angeles. Capable of speeds of up to 185 mph except where prohibited by
noise or safety the system makes nearly 20 trips per day with more than
8000 passengers.

The nice terrorist with the cell phone sees the governor get on board
one of the 8 limited stop specials that make the Oakland Los Angeles
journey in under 4 hours with only 3 stops, Fresno, Bakersfield,
Palmdale. The nice terrorist calls his buddy in the central valley
with the lettuce truck that's been waiting for just such an occasion.
Due to cost overruns and reduced service expectations the right of way
in places like Delano is only 100 feet and large portions are nothing
more than 12ft cyclone fence (mostly to hold back tumbleweeds from
fouling the pantographs) criss-crossed by numerous semi-automated
private at grade crossings. These were concessions to saving money
rather than using emminent domain against the very powerful Central
Vally Agricultural Industry. The lettuce truck has been working the
fields for six months and by now is well known to all the rail
monitoring cameras. Perfect; $43 billion, 400 people, a governor and
America's newest societal icon of dominance and supremacy taken out in
spectacular fashion for the cost of a phone call and lettuce truck.
These terrorists known as the naftaistas not only will never be caught
but their ties to their rouge nation masters in Ottawa will never be
traced. Eco-extremists cheer as the fences come down and the free
range tumbleweeds are finally released to resume their natural migration
patterns. Eventually a minor splinter group of the governors own Green
Party affiliation is blamed. The Bakersfield Dozen (there are 13
conspirators) as they are called eventually win freedom when Supreme
Court Head Justice Lance Ito overturns their convictions when it is
learned that the lettuce found at the scene was not only non-union but
non-organic. The Greens are absolved. President Clinton says she is
pleased and only wishes her mom and dad the former Presidents would
stop feuding long enough to let her appoint them both to the Court so
more such legal ground could be broken before the next election cycle
where it is Jenna Bush's turn to be President.


Back to the present day; Anybody wanna buy this choo-choo?

Transit Alternatives

If we gave out addictive drugs on the corner of the worst urban
neighborhooods we'd be accused of pandering to those least able to make
good life choices. BUT when we hand out transit in the same manner,
well then we are doing good. Here's my plan with Volvos to end transit
addiction.

100,000 Volvo Station Wagons would cost about a billion dollars and
deliver the same number of passenger miles as the MTA with its' billion
dollar budget. Sure road traffic would increase 4% but we'd also take
2300 buses off the road and gain hundreds of miles of new general
purpose lanes that are currently bus only.

The lease payment on a 2004 V70 crosscountry retails for $469/mo. x12
x100,000 = $562,800,000 so we have enough to give them $300/mo expenses
as well. $300/mo buys 1500 plus miles of operating expenses. Hey, and
did I mention? We get to buy another 100,000 more next year! Every
year until top of the line nearly new safe fancy station wagons are so
common that people won't bother to "own" them they'll just leave them
around.

Alright, forget that last sentence, I got carried away. Not really
because extremism in freeing the poor from dependency is no vice.

Any bets that instead of top of line 2003 XCs we can get brand new
stripped vehicles with fleet discounts for less than $300/mo? More
like $200/mo but I don't need a sharp pencil to get every decimal place
when a broad brush will do. I'll leave the careful figuring to the
accountants.

Anyway those 100k Volvo station wagons driving 14,500 mi/yr with an
average of 1.6 passengers will total 2.3 billion passenger miles driven
normally. For comparison that's about 50% more passenger miles than
the LAMTA delivers. If instead we wish to replicate transit perfomance
those 100k vehicles need only drive 26 miles per day to match the LAMTA
system.

There are less than 600,000 transit "customers" so about 400k Volvos
would
cover the entire transit using population. To buy those 400k would take
a few years so we'll either
have to phase this in or sell off the MTA transit assets and go the
liquidation route.

Anyway let's do this right with additions to the fleet of Volvos with
some Ford Escorts and mandatory chauffeur service (to keep the MTA
employees working if nothing else). This is necessary for the mobility
dependent who cannot drive and cannot be the .6 part of the 1.6 average
occupancy.

Did I mention?, we are talking about providing transportation to the
masses for less TOTAL cost than operating costs ALONE are running now.
That's the magnitude of inefficiency and dependency and bueauracracy we
are discussing. This plan provides better mobility at less cost and
saves additional billions in capital expenditures.

There are problems of course. FI, How much space is taken up autos?
More in urban areas but less than you might think. According to the
FHWA and NPTS, the average auto has dedicated to its' use about 110
lane feet parking and roads. That makes my 100k Volvos liable for 2700
acres of pavement. A patch 2.2 miles on a side spread out over the
LAMTA service area. We need those 155 lane miles anyway to meet the
areas' unmet demand and under may Volvos for the Masses plan deleting
transit frees up lots of new r-o-w and money to pay for it.

Question: And what about all the people who ride transit because they
are unable to drive?

Yes! Needs testing. Very good. Back to my Ford Escorts with Escorts.
Needs testing for the small number that aren't covered by the free cars
program can easily be handled by demand service even at their high
costs. Just because I'm exposing most transit users as ungrateful
freeloaders don't mistake that for a lack of compassion for societies
most needful.

Transit Economics

Trinsit ridership is down and costs are up, way up.

The Laffer curve describes taxes not transit revenues. Transit revenue
is an entirely unique animal. Neither taxation nor market economics
apply. For instance, decisions to purchase new or repair capital
equipment is influenced by FTA rules of reasonable life and matching
funds not which choice is either locally or globally cost effective.

It is even misleading to imply that transit agencies have goals of
either optimizing revenue, service or efficiency. Transit agencies are
pulled in many directions and hemmed in by many rules that forbid those
common goals.

Oh and it isn't the economy either. If so we would see a reduction in
AADTs. Caltrans' traffic counts are on the web
and would indicate a big drop if there were such a corresponding drop
in VMT:

http://www.dot.ca.gov/hq/traffops/saferesr/trafdata/index.htm

Take one I-280 at I-880 as an example (chosen because its well away
from big road improvements):
Year AADT
2000: 201,000
2001: 201,000
2002: 197,000

Another example 87 at 280:
2000: 128,000
2001: 133,000
2002: 133,000

Clearly the transit implosion we are experiencing is not a mobility issue.

What about price? Transit price is entirely divorced from costs and lags
any increases so were price the issue ridership should be rising.

People are "tired" of transit. They increasingly place higher value on
those things transit cannot deliver.

The Thousand Sided Bubble Die

A little web research reveals tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of predictions of a housing bubble. Every single one of them is wrong. There is no housing bubble. In economic and QoL terms I am reminded of a bad joke. Several actually. In the mean time every one of the dozens, perhaps even hundreds of predictions of continually rising housing prices is absolutely correct and near universally disdained.

What's going on here? A track record of being right for a decade gets one marginalized while an unbroken record of abject failure generates an aura of godhood. Obviously a million people are flipping a coin every month. First month 500,000. 250k, 125k, so that a hundred or so flips later a very few look smart and all the rest complain this can't continue.

We Have An Answer

On Sept 8th I asked:
Is anyone taking bets on how long before the vultures start picking at
the corpse and proclaiming that this is a historic opportunity to show
just how sustainable a new city built on Smart Growth principles could
be?

We have an answer:

http://www.csmonitor.com/2005/1012/p01s01-ussc.html

Within days of hurricane Katrina, urban planners, architects, and engineers flocked to the city to get a first look at the potential. If their efforts seem uncoordinated, their goals are lofty. Many planners and politicians don't want to merely re-create New Orleans, but to make it better - socially, culturally, economically, environmentally, and physically.
...
Other planners toss out ideas for change that are more physical: replacing the freeway network that looms over the downtown with a boulevard system, for instance, similar to what San Francisco did after the 1989 earthquake. Or developing better public transit.

"They should get the streetcar system back to where it was at the end of World War II," says John Norquist, former Milwaukee mayor and president of the Congress for the New Urbanism, who also suggests the freeway transformation.
----

$200 billion to "replicate" what's been not working for 50 years in a place that is more exposed to re-losing the effort than any other random place that could be chosen. Worst case of OPM I've ever seen. [Other People's Money]

Let's just think about $200 billion. That's a MILLION $200,000 houses. The problem being houses don't pay the salaries of urban planners and spending all the money on things like adequate housing for the masses leaves nothing for pet projects like tearing down freeways or building transit or high density mixed use experiments.

The Home Mortgage Deduction Myth

The Home Mortgage Deduction is -not- a subsidy. The HMID serves to remove the difference between business and private property treatment. Were the HMID to be reduced it would only serve to push the rich into complex tax avoidance schemes involving shell businesses holding title and the rich merely occupying the residence.

As long as the home mortgage interest deduction is viewed as a subsidy and not as the extra tax anti-investment burden it truly is there can be no rational housing policy debate.

The implication behind all this is that there exists outside of stated and revealed preference data a "correct size" for a residence. I'm as unwilling to presume such an arbitrary number as I am to presume the correct number of children. Face it, the two differ only in degree not kind. This is the steep part of the slippery slope that started with CAFE standards and gas guzzler vehicle taxes. People don't even blink at those anymore to the point that no doubt some will respond in anger.

McMansions are indeed a burden on neighborhoods and sometimes municipalities but they are burdens directly attributable to several new urbanist preferred outcome distortions and not some emotional gut response to any perceived excess. Tax policy isn't the problem or solution. West Germany used to tax propety based on the number of rooms, this led to homes with no closets which were classified rooms. The same avoidance schemes are the only predictable outcome of trying to control housing form.

Housing is a hybrid of both consumable product and investment and thus defies absolutist
claims of either characteristic. Any further attempt to seperate the two will also devolve into a game of tax avoidance. As much as the current no limits deduction is unfair it is also less unfair than any other possible alternative.

Kunstler the Hustler

James Howard Kunstler, one of the two most curmudegeonly net denizens known is at it again. This time he is preaching to the choir: http://www.kunstler.com/spch_petrocollapse.html

Kunstler's one note blanket condemnation of the Grand Cotean Dystopia is getting boring. The prediction is always the same; some long ignored fatal flaw in the American Lifestyle is going to rise up and smack us silly. Which fatal flaw he picks depends arbitrarially on the time and place. Of course for a "petrocollapse" summit the flaw would be his claim of energy dependence of the suburbs. In the past decades it has been any number of other things and there's little doubt that if he were invited to a "finalcialcollapse" summit it would surely be the housing bubble that will bring us down.

Knustler viscerally hates many aspects of modern American development patterns but rather than discuss those characteristics he chooses instead to blanket attack the lifestyle choices of people who have been as uniformly correct all these years as he has been wrong. $5 gas isn't going to send the masses back to the ghettos. The difference between $3 and $5 gas is like $1200/year. Painful but still only the difference between an $1800 an $1920 mortgage. People do this housing math all the time and decide to locate away from the CBD where their $1800 gets more QoL than close in and a $1920 mortgage would buy. It isn't the -amount- of transportation or even just energy the suburbs consume but the total cost. Those costs are measured in money -and- BTUs -and- time. $5 gasoline will decimate transit and temporailly inhibit POV mobility. Transit use falls in tough economies and $5 gas will not help the economy.

Inflation especially hurts transit. As the costs of $5 gas as passed on this will disproportionately impact transit which typically has costs outpacing inflation by 3-4 times. Public funding will also dry up in a poor economic environment where people are unwilling to vote for more taxes. Over time $5 gas will shift POV choice to models that have lower operating costs and generate lower fuel taxes thus widening the gap beteen POVs and transit for those with a choice. Those with choice in transportation are the same who exercise choice in residence location. Those more efficient vehicles will still need the same infrastructure thus the smaller Highway Trust Fund money will increasingly go more to roads and less to transit subsidies. The consequences are obvious, $5 gasoline will decimate transit.

Oh, and an unobvious counterpoint; transit saw its' highest usage in 40 years at exactly the same time gasoline was at its' lowest inflation adjusted price ever. Real transit advocates should be pushing for cheap gas but their emotional desire to punish autos in a misguided belief in a zero sum game and will instead continue to shoot themselves in the foot. As to the housing bubble; The housing bubble is a good thing. It is a voluntary mechanism to raise municipal revenues and assures more efficient use of existing housing stock thus reducing sprawl and stimulating the economy. Besides regular people are not hurt when the bubble bursts, speculative investors and people who make poor housing decisions are hurt.

Take my county, May prices are only 16.8% year over year higher. Quite a "cooling" from the more recent 25% each of the previous 4 years. But that's only 900 (less than 1%) homes in the last year. All the rest of the homes are looking at being worth 40%-600% more than their purchase prices. A 20% even 30% pop only theoretically hurts a few hundred and only if they cannot wait before selling in the meantime they are supposedly enjoying a home they were happy to purchase for the same price so they are still whole. The people most at risk are ARMs holders and the public transportationreliant. These and other unusual and risky financial instruments are disproportionately being used in places with high costs and generally high congestion and transit use. Not a correlation or causation just an association.

When the ARMs start twisting it is the cenurbs that will see the greatest impact not the exurbs. Transit costs typically increase much faster than general inflation and marginal ridership decreases in poor economies. $5 gas is a triple hit to transit ridership; higher costs, higher marginal costs, fewer riders. What this means is that Kunstler has the entire end of suburbia as we know it exactly wrong. Higher energy prices will spur new energy efficient construction and demand for less congested (more) freeways and erode support for the cenurbs as jobs move to where the people live not vice versa.

SmUGGIE - San Buenaventura

In their infinite wisdom the City of San Buenaventura has decided that artists are a public policy concern and as such deserving of special treatment. Thus they have threatened Emminent Domain to force out one owner unwilling to accept their "offer" that was subsequently increased by 50%. thus they have removed public parking from streets that have previously accepted Federal funding (illegal). and they are subsididizing high density mixed-use artistsloftscand studios. Despite Californias Constitutional Ammendment XXIV requiring a public vote, this was purely a council action. I can't wat until bloggers are declared artists so i can move in.

Happy Anniversary - SOAR

Yes, I continue to support SOAR. The law did only one thing. SOAR
requires a 50% plus one public vote for rezoning open space or
agricultural land uses. 50%+1 is a LOWER threshold than the previous
3/5ths Board of Supervisors process. No land uses were changed, no
property rezoned, no new limits or restrictions enacted. Ventura County
continues to be a high growth area so any claims of "strict growth
limits" are unfounded.

SMUGGIE - Oxnard's Riverpark

A great big slap on the back and palm grease under the table to Oxnard for one of the most egergious abuses of public trust in the Riverpark developement fiasco. A $750 million planned developemnt community, Riverpark has gotten subsidies, emminent domain assistance and exemptions from the Constutionally required public vote and CEQA compliance.

Acronym Du Jour - CLODs

Chicken Little Oil Depletionists

New New Orleans

What to do?

That solution would be free market flood insurance. Any guesses as to
what that would cost for houses 3m below sea level in a hurricane zone
protected by the promises of a city and state like New Orleans and
Louisiana?

The fair answer is for the nation to rebuild to whatever level of safety
is deemed appropriate and then insist on the same personal
responsibility we expect of auto drivers, namely mandatory private
insurance.

To avoid accusations of playing favorites; earthquake zones like my own
should be treated likewise. This does, however, raise the issue of the
burden "winter cities" place on the nations' resources. The price of
gasoline is so very high for so much of the nation solely because of the
impending refinery changeovers to heating fuels this time of year.
Should we allow people to remain in Buffalo, NY or should we evacuate
them at gunpoint as winter approaches?

The magnitude of the disaster was amplified by the suppression of market
forces.

"Compassionate Conservatism" has been hijacked and turned into a
meaningless rallying point to stir up the progressives. True
compassionate conservatism would have long ago facilitated the
remodeling of New Orleans along more sustainable patterns.

Energy vs. the Exurbs

Why suburbs?

Crime, school quality, congestion, environmental quality, taxes, stated
and revealed preference, hobbies and sports, pets, gardening, privacy,
investment, ...

Note; I can do the same for the many reasons some people choose
urban living; cultural venues, transit, higher educational access, job
constraints, stated and revealed preference,...

The last time we bought a house the bank didn't like the fact that we
owned all our vehicles and so basically assumed we'd be making two car
payments when figuring our disposable income. Point being the
distortions in the housing market are not favoring the suburbs. Ever
hear of the redlining practice called LEMs? There is another factor;
the recent run up in prices. I start with my situation as a perfect
example. I bought in 1995 for $220,000. Today's price, $1.4m. Yeah,
weird. So anyway I effectively pay 1/6th of 1% annually as property
taxes. Were I to be given this house outright, at today's price, my
property taxes would be $1200 per month. I cannot relocate to a
different but equivalent home because of the tax consequences. Think
of it reversed. My personal travel budget makes it desirable to
commute $1000 worth (direct costs and my time value) rather than move
closer to work just because of rising POV ownership costs. The transit
advocates also forget that transit costs continue to spiral away faster
than even the recent POV price increases. It is only a matter of time
before transit pricing reflects the current situation. The cities are not
immune nor even comparatively less effected by energy costs and
people making housing choices know this. [The only exception being
NYS that apparently uses 40% less energy per capita than other Metro or
exurban place in the nation. That is just too much of an outlier to be
anything other than an accounting error in the reporting.]

Primary residence location choice is complex, varied and constantly
changing. To simplistically try to toss it off as being mortgage plus
transportation costs is a disservice to any intelligent reader.

The -issue- is as simple as it is clear even if the reasons are complex.
The recent rise in energy prices
is not going to cause any of the land use or transportation shifts urban
planners and transit advocates wish. Energy is still far too little a
portion of the total cost of living to start becoming a plurality
consideration when choosing housing. No matter the cost it doesn't seem
that there will ever be enough of a clear consumer benefit to influence
suburbanization trends. Due to decades of modernization of suburbs and
disinvestment in most urban places traditional cities are at significant
infrastructure disadvantages. One aspect of that is the ongoing false
accounting that pretends transit expenditures are a form of investment.

Just like cost effectiveness, energy considerations are just not one of
the many legitimate reasons to advocate for urban patterns or transit.

Cole v. Cote Round Last Observations

A few additional mostly lexigraphical observations.

> No love for tunnels
> By Rick Cole
>
> September 24, 2005
> >
> > DECADES AGO, a gadfly candidate for Los Angeles mayor promoted a quick fix
> > for smog: Drill tunnels through the San Gabriel Mountains and use giant
> > fans to blow the dirty air out the other side.

Guilt by association. BTW the concept is still a good idea. A nuclear
plant in Sunland can be designed to focus cooling tower convection
rather than using the traditionally dissapating configurations. Basin
air quality would measurably improve in addition to providing badly
needed power. By my calculations the savings in air quality penalties
would make this idea better than free.

> > Amazingly, a similar scheme is
> > currently getting serious consideration and not from crackpots. This time,
> > three massive freeway tunneling projects are being studied by regional
> > transportation leaders.

Amazing is how Mr. Cole switches from air quality to congestion without
the intellectually honest admission that congestion causes pollution.
...
> > Each of the tunnel options purports to fill gaps in the region's freeway
> > network.

"Purports?" Purports? What an incredibly ill used word. There are gaps
and these tunnels fill gaps. No honest advocate of rational
transportation policy would ever stoop so low. Calling into question
the reality is no way to make the fantasy look better.

> > The city of Palmdale is pushing a highway hole through the San
> > Gabriels to Glendale.

City of Palmdale == sprawl, bad, roads cabal. Nope, it isn't the Cit of
Palmdale that is pushing for the tunnel. In FAct the tunnel is
ultimately a bad thing for the Antelope Valley as increased connectivity
to LA would slow its' burgeoning independence as a freestanding urban
area. It turns out that "El Pueblo de Nuestra Senora la Reina de los
Angeles de Poriuncula" owns a lot of land up there and wants to build an
international airport up there. Los Angeles wins, Palmdale gets the
shaft.

...
> > And at least six Orange County cities back a tunnel under the Cleveland
> > National Forest to ease commuter trips to cheaper housing in Riverside
> > County.

Funny thing is as City manager of San Buenaventura Mr. Cole is proposing
several radical measures for the purposes of reducing commute trips and
increasing affordable housing. Sauce, goose, gander. The difference
being that the OC cities have evidence that their ideas have merit.

> >
> > The fallacy of these boondoggles isn't that the stupendous environmental,
> > engineering and financial obstacles will doom them. The problem is that
> > they are colossally bad ideas.

Appeal to emotion. After all if the the environment, engineering and
financing are off the table what's left? Classic attempt at preemption.
Turns out that there are very, very few environmental issues with these
projects. One of the reasons they are so attractive.

> > Let's pretend for a moment that the federal pork fairy were to grant the
> > fervent wishes of the tunnel boosters.

Ohhhh, there's a wish he probably will regret. Right now all we put in
tunnels is transit. Poof, back to the reality Mr. Cole presumes; let's
make it real by cancelling all underground transit spending. Be careful
what you wish for. Especially when you are wont to conflate
transportation and transit.

...
> > There's one catch, however. In the past, sprawl just undermined our
> > environment and quality of life.

Sprawl, the "N-word" of public planning policy.

...
> > Experts dispute how high and how quickly gas prices
> > will rise. But no one questions that they will increase.

In the last week since Mr. Cole scribbled this sceed prices have gone
down. Next week they will probably go up but only the truly godlike can
say with certainty. Classic attempt to preach from a self assumed
position of superior knowledge.

...
> > Southern California needs to grow up not out.

Soundbite ideology. Note that the most recent high rise project
anywhere near Ventura County was vehemently opposed personally by Mr.
Cole. Its' failing? It was 500 feet over the Sanbuenaventura city
limits in Oxnard.

Cole v. Cote Round 3

> No love for tunnels
> By Rick Cole

...
> > The moment the ribbon is cut on new mega-projects, sprawl and
> > "induced demand" start filling them up.

Mr. Cole needs to read the literature and history of this particular
urban myth in addition to rereading the Hansen study above.

Sure. It's easy to induce demand for a subsidized anything. Just tie
another porkchop to the ugly kid and you'll get more dogs to play with
her. Induced demand is a misunderstood term. The Sierra Klub has a new
rant on the subject;

http://www.sierraclub.org/sprawl/transportation/seven.asp

They are so desperate they also use the Hansen/Huang SoCal study.

Induced demand is not diverted traffic.

Induced demand is not natural growth.

Induced demand is not unmet transport capacity.

Induced demand is not time shifting nor increased flow.

Then a few years ago some UC researchers revisited Hansen:

[This is from the professional journal "Transportation" (ISSN
0049-4488), Volume 29, No. 2, Dated May, 2002 - published by Kluwer
Academic Publishers of the Netherlands - I read from the paper copy of
the journal, NOT off the Web.

The abstract (only) can be found at URL
http://www.kluweronline.com/issn/0049-4488/current - you have to pay
to read the whole paper.

The title of the paper is "Revisiting the notion of induced traffic
through a matched-pairs study."

Authors are Mokhtarian, Samaniego, Shumway and Willits]

The study used 18 pairs of roads in California as the basis
for analysis.

Here is the fatal paragraph of the paper near the end:

"There are clearly factors that have induced the California public
to drive more, on a daily basis, over the period we have studied.
These factors include population growth, demographic changes (such
as the entry of more women into the workforce), economic changes
(rising incomes, falling real costs of fuel), shifts to the
automobile mode from other modes of travel, and land use changes.
The impact of this inclination to drive more seems, however, to be
distributed quite evenly across improved and unimproved highways. Our
study finds no support for the claim that capacity expansion generates
traffic disproportionately on account of the expansion itself. The
increased traffic on California highways may have more to do with
factors like population growth and the life-style changes of
Californians than it does with whether or not a couple of lanes are
added to a particular highway."

Estimates of this effect vary. One study showed that, over
time, a 10 percent increase in road capacity led to a 9 percent
increase in travel, while other research finds that these changes
in demand may have a smaller effect.

Where the reference is:

Robert Cervero. Road Expansion, Urban Growth, and Induced
Travel: A Path Analysis, Journal of the American Planning
Association, Vol. 69, No. 2 (2003).

But actually the Cervero paper is a survey of the literature and you
guessed it, the 9% induced demand for a 10% increase in capacity is the
old Hansen and Huang paper that upon real analysis actually reveals
that increased roads capacity in the areas studied decreases demand.
Given that they looked at SoCal this is entirely believeable. By
reducing congestion trips can be chained and equivalent trips take less
time thereby allowing drivers to optimize route selection.

Let's look at the 3 largest regions of California (1996):

population Lane Miles DVMT
per 1000 per
persons person

Los Angeles 12.2 mill 2.1 21.6
San Franscisco/Oakland 3.9 mill 2.3 20.8
San Diego 2.6 mill 2.3 21.7

Ave of regions >500k pop 123.6 mill 3.3 21.4

See the problem? California urban areas have 50% fewer lane miles per
person than the AVERAGE urban area. Can you say latent demand? Notice
also that there is little difference in DVMT. Not as car crazy as most
think eh?

My take on the entire subject;

IIRC the range of non-consensus was from 3% to 10% of measured VMT on
new capacity could be called "induced" but that this number went lower
when it was realised that the predictions weren't good enough to
account for 3%-5% accuracy in the model. Calling the component that
came from unknown or modelling errors "induced" is not any more
accurate than calling it anything else. Subtracting out the 3-5%
unknown that frequently gets added on to "induced traffic" generation
takes that 3-10% number lower. How much lower? Who knows, that is
exactly the point.

"Induced traffic" isn't as important as many seem to believe; not
because they don't see more traffic but because they can't identify
which traffic is induced anymore than someone could predict fluid flow
by looking at a single molecule of water. Modelling or measurement
don't work that way, they breakdown when the phenomena being observed
approaches the error level of the measurement. .

Cole v. Cote Round 2

Examples of pork:

> No love for tunnels
> By Rick Cole

> ...funded by the pork-laden federal
> > transportation bill recently signed by President Bush.
>

Update of the kind of pork Mr. Cole is talking about:

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2005/09
/21/MNGDMER7HE1.DTL

Nancy Pelosi listed this transportation pork in her district:

-- San Francisco Transbay Terminal, Caltrain extension -- $29 million.
-- Doyle Drive replacement -- $8 million
-- Muni's Islais Creek bus yard -- $5 million
-- Van Ness Avenue, San Francisco, improvements -- $5.6 million
-- Trails and bikeways at the Presidio and Golden Gate National
Recreation Area -- $5 million
-- Illinois Street bridge, port of San Francisco -- $3.2 million
-- Muni's program of providing real-time arrival information for trains
and buses -- $2.5 million
-- City CarShare, a nonprofit that provides cars on an as-needed basis
-- $1.6 million

2/3rds is non-roads and large chunks of the roads projects are non-roads
related.

Cole v. Cote Round 1

Sept 24, 05 LATimes OpEd with my comments interspersed:

No love for tunnels
By Rick Cole

September 24, 2005
>
> DECADES AGO, a gadfly candidate for Los Angeles mayor promoted a quick fix
> for smog: Drill tunnels through the San Gabriel Mountains and use giant fans
> to blow the dirty air out the other side. Amazingly, a similar scheme is
> currently getting serious consideration and not from crackpots. This time,
> three massive freeway tunneling projects are being studied by regional
> transportation leaders. Two are funded by the pork-laden federal
> transportation bill recently signed by President Bush.


For someone so very concerned about "pork" Mr. Cole seems remarkably
one-sided in his criticism. His complaints about certain highways
projects no matter how justified pale in comparison to the pork doled
out to transit projects in the very same legislation. It must be
understood that the entirety of Mr. Cole's position is easily
summarized; "Cars are icky." What sounds below like a reasoned
discussion of transportation issues facing Southern California is in
fact nothing more than the unreasoned appeal to emotion we've come to
expect from the so called Smart Growth, transit cabal of would be social
engineers.

>
> Each of the tunnel options purports to fill gaps in the region's freeway
> network. The city of Palmdale is pushing a highway hole through the San
> Gabriels to Glendale. An aide to L.A. County Supervisor Mike Antonovich calls
> it "a sorely needed link that will provide incredible pollution relief and
> traffic mitigation." The head of the Los Angeles County Metropolitan
> Transportation Authority is pitching a tunnel to solve the 50-year stalemate
> over plowing the Long Beach Freeway through South Pasadena.

The blocked completion of the Long Beach Freeway is indeed approaching
50 years. What is truly amazing is the level of hypocrisy necessary for
the opponents to continue this fight. Which side of the fight should
the environmentalists be on? The one that saves 7000 gallons of
gasoline and 4.8 tons of pollutants? You'd be wrong. The freeway
completion would have been doing this every DAY from opening day if
allowed to be finished.

>
> And at least six Orange County cities back a tunnel under the Cleveland
> National Forest to ease commuter trips to cheaper housing in Riverside
> County.
>
> The fallacy of these boondoggles isn't that the stupendous environmental,
> engineering and financial obstacles will doom them. The problem is that they
> are colossally bad ideas.

"Colossally bad" in Mr. Cole's opinion. And poorly reasoned opinion it
is. The -reason- for such extreme projects is -precisely- because of
severe environmental and fiscal restraints imposed on our highways. A
freeway through the Cleveland Forest instead of a tunnel would be
cheaper but interfere with one of the few remaining large open spaces in
the region. The poor planning practices being advocated by Mr. Cole
being the reason there are so few such place left. It wasn't "sprawl"
that generated tight neighborhoods, inadequate highways and cities
without greenbelts. Mr. Cole needs to be reminded that planners all
over Ventura County objected to the SOAR ordinances that passed so
overwhelmingly 10 years ago.

>
> Let's pretend for a moment that the federal pork fairy were to grant the
> fervent wishes of the tunnel boosters. What would we gain? Go back as far as
> the yellowed newspaper clippings of the 1920s and the answer is always the
> same: congestion relief. The scale and costs of projects grow ever more
> Pharaonic, yet harried motorists continue to be gridlocked by empty promises.

Empty promises indeed. LA has half the freeway network originally laid
out and has half as many freeway miles as most US metropolitan areas.
Small wonder there's the most congestion, we have the fewest roads.
Apparently simple math is beyond the emotional appeals of the social
engineer.

>
> You'd think Southern Californians would finally wise up. Remember when the
> interchange of the 5 and the 405 in Orange County was widened to 26 lanes?
> Even that record-breaking "gridlock buster" is clogging up. A landmark study
> by UC Berkeley, based on 18 years of data for 14 California metro areas,
> concluded that added trips quickly engulf "improved" roadways, reproducing
> the original congestion. The research showed that every 10% increase in
> capacity spurred an average 9% increase in traffic within four years.

Mr. Cole needs a new reference. The "study" he refers to is the
infamous Mark Hansen and Yuanlin Huang, "Road Supply
and Traffic in California Urban Areas," Transportation
Research A, Vol. 31, No. 3, 1997, pp. 205-218

What the data show but the conclusions ignore is that
adding roads capacity to areas of large unmet demand has a
-negative- effect on induced demand. This may seem, to the
dilettante especially or in the case of Mr. Cole willfully
unreceptive, to be counterintuitive but makes perfect sense
after careful analysis. In places with large unmet demand
and concurrent congestion (like Southern California) people
start behaving sub-optimally for transportation efficiency.
With adequate roads capacity these people are able to
return to best practices.

> The
> moment the ribbon is cut on new mega-projects, sprawl and "induced demand"
> start filling them up. New suburban rooftops spawn shopping centers, schools,
> businesses and infrastructure, fueling even more outward population
> dispersion. That's how we grew into a region of 18 million people spread
> across six counties.

Mr. Cole fails to note that the Los Angeles megaopolis is also the
-densest- urban area in the US. The ills he so willingly blames on
"sprawl" are in fact the obvious, negative and predictable consequences
of size and density.

>
> There's one catch, however. In the past, sprawl just undermined our
> environment and quality of life.

Again Mr. Cole falls back on tired old catch phrases. Problem is no
actual data support the claim of undermined environment and declining
quality of life in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary.
This particular assertion is well known in the transportation and land
use community as being associated with would be social manipulators
(benevolent and for our own good of course) of Mr. Cole's ilk.

> In the new era of pricey oil, it threatens
> our region's survival.

Contrary to the myths promulgated by the New Urbanist Transit
Supporters, Southern California is very typical of most urban areas in
the US with respect to energy consumption. Contrary to the myths
promulgated by the End of Oil alarmists the cost of energy is neither at
all time highs nor particularly expensive relative to either the
national economy or family income. These types of alarmist
prognistigations are nothing more than a lame attempt to incite panic
and foster demand that "somebody do something." Invariably that
somebody is a Smart Growth, New Urbanist, Chicken Little Oil
Depletionist and the something is govenrment intervention and even
prohibition of the transportation and land use preferences of the
citizenry.

> Experts dispute how high and how quickly gas prices
> will rise. But no one questions that they will increase.

For the record these kinds of preemptively prohibiting discussion of
open issues are typical of the Global Warming crowd and other agenda
driven advocacy positions. There are most certainly wide differences of
opinion as to the price of gas in both the near and long terms. No
expert is worthy of the title if they have stopped questioning whether
energy prices will rise.

> U.S. oil production
> peaked in 1986, making us steadily more dependent on foreign crude.

Mr. Cole's fact file is in sore need of correction. US oil production
peaked in 1970. This level of rigor is typical of those seeking to
inflame in order to advance a secondary agenda.

> Most
> industry analysts predict that the global production peak is just ahead or
> may already be in our rearview mirrors.

Mr. Cole uses careful words to avoid the ridicule so deserving of the
concept unnamed but described above. Its called "Peak Oil" and has been
predicted to be just ahead or already in our rearview mirrors for more
than 30 years. The problem with these kinds of predictions is that
eventually they will be correct and the proponents will think they are
visionaries. When other religious views of future apocolypse exhort
people to repent and change we label them crackpots, zealots, charlatans
and cultists. The problem with peak oil is that it happened 40 years
ago and they missed it. The Chicken Little Oil Depletionists failed to
understand that's when we "ran out" of $8 oil. Today it looks as if we
have run out of $30 oil but somehow have all the $60 oil the worlds
needs. With current technology we will never see $100 oil because so
many alternatives become viable before prices rise that much.

> Demand is soaring. Our appetite for
> Hummers may fade, but China is projected to overtake the U.S. in guzzling oil
> within a decade.
>
> The Southern California Assn. of Governments calls for $115 billion in
> transportation spending between now and 2030. Three-quarters will go just to
> maintain what's already built the rest for projects already approved.

Unmentioned in that total is where the money comes from and where it is
spent. There's also a little bit of loose talk when it comes to calling
things like transit subsidies "maintaining" what's built. Far from it.
The LAMTA, for instance, spends less than 12% of its budget on roads and
more than 80% on transit which carries less than 2.5% of all trips. It
is wholly dishonest to call those distorted spending priorities
"mantainence."

> To
> cover those staggering bills, it projects barely $120 billion flowing from
> already strapped local, state and federal sources. With a population expected
> to grow by 5 million over that time, it's obvious that every spare nickel
> should go to projects that reduce our dependence on cars, not to goofy ideas
> that will deepen it.

What's obvious is that the leopard has finally shown his spots. We are
not a car dependent society and Southern California is no more car using
than the rest of the nation. Mr. Cole wants us to abandon what has
proven to work in favor of more of what has proven to fail. He calls
adding roads capacity in the most underserved roads area of the country
"goofy." He has to use words like that because he has no science to
back it up. Instead the Transit Oriented Development Lovers would have
you believe that by acting like Los Angeles and spending on a
vanishingly small portion of a fraction of all travel we can avoid being
like Los Angeles. How "goofy" is that?

>
> Southern California needs to grow up not out.

Los Angeles is the densest and most congested urban area in the nation.
This is not coincidence. The Smart Growth agenda is not rational, it
tries emotions and misrepresentation to do exactly the opposite of what
has proven to work not because of some altruistic desire to improve
quality of life but because of a deep seated hatred of modern urban form
and a frustrated desire to direct.

> Some critics question whether
> L.A. Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa (in his new role as head of the MTA board)
> can fulfill his vision of completing the region's rail network. Yet his goal
> represents a far more attractive future than the tunnel vision behind more
> suburban sprawl. Our best bet is to link transit investment to smarter land
> use, not indulge in profligate pipe dreams.

There's a phrase that needs to be stricken from the language; "transit
investment." Transit is NOT an investment. Transit does not even come
close to covering operating costs and never actually costs less than
EVERY other alternative ever studied. The $7.5 million Ventura County
spent on the Montalvo Metrolink station alone would have paid for the
road improvements to CSUCI that we so desperately need but like I said
the would be social engineers are planning for us to be like Los Angeles
in every respect. That's why we pay more than the cost of a luxury
automobile for every passenger using Metrolink at Montalvo so that these
same people can have their $70,000 jobs remain in downtown LA.

>
> RICK COLE is a former mayor of Pasadena and now the city manager of Ventura.
> His views are his own.

If anyone believes Mr. Cole's views are not influencing the planning and
development of San Buenventura I've got a tunnel I want to sell you.
Actually Mr. Cole and his staff are the one's selling a tunnel. Ann
Diagle has stated that she wishes she could bury the 101 Freeway and
cover it over with transit oriented development. Good thing these are
the people protecting us from and speaking out against goofy ideas.

New Weather Urbanism

“For too long, we’ve allowed uncontrolled sprawling temperatures to dictate
how we live. No more. From now on, we will be actively encouraging a more
compact range of temperatures for our city – ideally between 60 and 80
degrees Fahrenheit,” he said. “And the afternoon thunderstorms? We’re
definitely going to reign those in.”

More at:

http://houstonstrategies.blogspot.com/2005/04/houston-embraces-new-weather-u
rbanism.html

Take the Quiz

Classic example of the Charette process shown here.

http://www.nwf.org/nationalwildlife/article.cfm?issueID=74&articleID=1058

Where they had an emissions calculator including:

What kind of car/truck do you drive?
compact car with highest fuel efficiency standards: add 2 points
SUV: add 5 points
light truck: add 6 points
full-sized car meeting minimum efficiency standards: add 3 points
hybrid electric car: add 1 point
fuel cell or hydrogen car: add 1 point
I don’t own a vehicle: add 0 points

Well gee I was unaware transit didn't use any energy at all but then I was
unaware that a light truck had 6 times the impact of a hybrid. A light
truck is typically 20mpg and a hybrid 50mpg. Not even 3 times.

But then this is what a Charette is all about. Getting to a preordained conclusion.

More of the Same Will Fix It

This is soooo funny! Planners screwed up and pushed for too much density.
The result was all the housing ended up looking the same. The planner solution for
too much uniformity? STANDARDS! They don't even listen to what they spout.
Never even remotely occurred to them to reduce regulation.

http://deseretnews.com/dn/view/0,1249,600125879,00.html

"The "stack 'em and pack 'em" philosophy of city planners has
left longtime residents wondering where the city's hallmark
open space and scenic views have gone."

Sprawl Fights Global Warming

http://home.eircom.net/content/unison/national/6115409?view=Eircomnet

Exerpt:
DUBLIN's urban sprawl has saved it from the heatwaves which are affecting other European capitals, one of the country's leading climatologists said yesterday.

Instead of stewing in tropical temperatures Dubliners have been spared the worst effects of global warming by an accident of urban planning.

SmUGGIES

Announcing a new award for the most egregious use of public money to promote urban form. Smart Growth Incentives or SmUGGIES for short.

SmUGGIE #1 goes to the City of Los Angeles for $290 million to revitalize the Staples Center area which itself was supposed to be the rvitalization component.

It's the End of Oil as We Know It (and I feel fine)

* "Hurry, before this wonderful product is depleted from Nature's
laboratory!"
--advertisement for "Kier's Rock Oil," 1855
* ". . . the United States [has] enough petroleum to keep its
kerosene
lamps burning for only four years . . . "
--Pennsylvania State Geologist Wrigley, 1874
* ". . . although an estimated two-thirds of our reserve is still
in the
ground, . . . the peak of [U.S.] production will soon be
passed--possibly
within three years."
--David White, Chief Geologist, USGS, 1919
* " . . . it is unsafe to rest in the assurance that plenty of
petroleum
will be found in the future merely because it has been in the past."
--L. Snider and B. Brooks, AAPG Bulletin, 1936

The latest REAL measurements can be found at:

http://www.eia.doe.gov/cabs/

Sick of oil out of the ground? Rapeseed, sunflower/safflower, algae, the
list is long before we even start fiddling with the genes. We only use oil
because it's all over the place, cheap and easy. For instance, whale oil is
really good for lubricating the chain on my motorcycle so that it doesn't
yank so much.

Kunstler v. Cote

Recently James Howard Kunstler spoke at the "Petrocollapse Summit" and
in typical Kunstler fashion used the occassion to savage the suburbs.

Kunstler's one note blanket condemnation of the Grand Cotean Dystopia
is getting boring. The prediction is always the same; some long ignored
fatal flaw in the American Lifestyle is going to rise up and smack us
silly. Which fatal flaw he picks depends arbitrarially on the time and
place. Of course for a "petrocollapse" summit the flaw would be his
claim of energy dependence of the suburbs. In the past decades it has
been any number of other things and there's little doubt that if he
were invited to a "finalcialcollapse" summit it would surely be the
housing bubble that will bring us down. Knustler viscerally hates many
aspects of modern American development patterns but rather than discuss
those characteristics he chooses instead to blanket attack the
lifestyle choices of people who have been as uniformly correct all
these years as he has been wrong. $5 gas isn't going to send the masses
back to the ghettos. The difference between $3 and $5 gas is like
$1200/year. Painful but still only the difference between an $1800 an
$1920 mortgage. People do this housing math all the time and decide to
locate away from the CBD where their $1800 gets more QoL than close in
and a $1920 mortgage would buy. It isn't the -amount- of transportation
or even just energy the suburbs consume but the total cost. Those costs
are measured in money -and- BTUs -and- time. $5 gasoline will decimate
transit and temporailly inhibit POV mobility. Transit use falls in
tough economies and $5 gas will not help the economy. Inflation
especially hurts transit. As the costs of $5 gas as passed on this will
disproportionately impact transit which typically has costs outpacing
inflation by 3-4 times. Public funding will also dry up in a poor
economic environment where people are unwilling to vote for more taxes.
Over time $5 gas will shift POV choice to models that have lower
operating costs and generate lower fuel taxes thus widening the gap
beteen POVs and transit for those with a choice. Those with choice in
transportation are the same who exercise choice in residence location.
Those more efficient vehicles will still need the same infrastructure
thus the smaller Highway Trust Fund money will increasingly go more to
roads and less to transit subsidies. The consequences are obvious, $5
gasoline will decimate transit. Oh, and an unobvious counterpoint;
transit saw its' highest usage in 40 years at exactly the same time
gasoline was at its' lowest inflation adjusted price ever. Real transit
advocates should be pushing for cheap gas but their emotional desire to
punish autos in a misguided belief in a zero sum game and will instead
continue to shoot themselves in the foot. As to the housing bubble; The
housing bubble is a good thing. It is a voluntary mechanism to raise
municipal revenues and assures more efficient use of existing housing
stock thus reducing sprawl and stimulating the economy. Besides regular
people are not hurt when the bubble bursts, speculative investors and
people who make poor housing decisions are hurt. Take my county, May
prices are only 16.8% year over year higher. Quite a "cooling" from the
more recent 25% each of the previous 4 years. But that's only 900 (less
than 1%) homes in the last year. All the rest of the homes are looking
at being worth 40%-600% more than their purchase prices. A 20% even 30%
pop only theoretically hurts a few hundred and only if they cannot wait
before selling in the meantime they are supposedly enjoying a home they
were happy to purchase for the same price so they are still whole. The
people most at risk are ARMs holders and the public
transportationreliant. These and other unusual and risky financial
instruments are disproportionately being used in places with high costs
and generally high congestion and transit use. Not a correlation or
causation just an association. When the ARMs start twisting it is the
cenurbs that will see the greatest impact not the exurbs. Transit costs
typically increase much faster than general inflation and marginal
ridership decreases in poor economies. $5 gas is a triple hit to
transit ridership; higher costs, higher marginal costs, fewer riders.
What this means is that Kunstler has the entire end of suburbia as we
know it exactly wrong. Higher energy prices will spur new energy
efficient construction and demand for less congested (more) freeways
and erode support for the cenurbs as jobs move to where the people live
not vice versa.