Our friend the Antiplanner appears in this N&O article on North Carolina’s request for $5.3 billion in fed money for a high-speed rail network:
“I think it’s going to be a high-risk, high-cost project,” said Randal O’Toole, a senior fellow at the libertarian-oriented Cato Institute. “I don’t know why taxpayers should be asked to pay for this.”
O’Toole said the trains would carry a tiny share of the region’s travelers and would not cut pollution or conserve oil in an era when new fuel-economy standards will require cars to average more than 35 mpg. He said the chief beneficiaries will be freight railroads.
Illinois and California, with strong political connections in Congress and the White House, are top contenders for big shares of the stimulus money, he said.
“Unless Congress appropriates a lot more money, I don’t see North Carolina’s chances being very good,” O’Toole said from his home in Oregon. “Especially when you’re asking for more than half of that $8 billion.”
I took a minute to peruse Antiplanner’s blog and came across a very interesting post discussing The Ideal Communist City. Antiplanner notes —maybe you could’ve guessed —– the “rhetoric in this book sounded very familiar: suburbs were evil, driving was evil, and government-imposed density was the solution.”
Check it out for yourself, but I’ll go ahead deliver the punch line and let you draw your own conclusions —- after the Berlin Wall fell and East Germany was liberated, Halle Neustadt residents began buying cars and moving to the suburbs.
