Oh the cuts!!

The big news in the US is how the Republicans leading the House of Representatives are refusing to accept a budget that doesn't cut spending sufficiently, whereas Obama and the Democrats are portraying it as some great social mission to hit abortion and the like.

The truth is that the Republicans are doing what they were elected to do - to cut the deficit.

The proposed cuts are less than 4% of the budget deficit (2% of the total budget) according to Reason Magazine.

4%!

Consider that the UK government is seeking to abolish its structural deficit (deficit not attributed to reduced tax revenue and higher welfare spending because of recession) within five years.  4% needs to be closer to 20% to make a difference, and Obama and the Democrats wont even accept 4%.

The Cato Institute has a more ambitious plan that should be the least that is adopted, as this would abolish the budget deficit and set a path to start rolling back the US national debt, as well as lowering taxes.

The question I wonder is why anyone on the left thinks they can evade reality by building debt mountains for future generations to confront - or more importantly, why they think this is moral?  Do they think "if only we could confiscate the wealth of the rich" or are they so stupid to think they can have their heads in the sand?  If they "don't know any better" or are "just guessing" then it isn't good enough.  If they DO want to confiscate wealth, then just admit it, and show themselves up to be the violent crooks they want to be.  The same crooks that didn't want banks to collapse, didn't want motor manufacturers to collapse, didn't want ANY businesses to collapse, so used other people's money to pay for it.

Auckland Council heading for more congestion

That's if you take the latest report from INRIX and see the comparison between lower density US cities and higher density European cities, and the effect on traffic congestion.

New Geography reports that "the added annual peak hour congestion delay in the United States is roughly one-third that of Europe".

It follows a report last year that indicated that intensification of development in Sydney is exacerbating traffic congestion and local air quality.  It is logical, of course, that having more people in the same area will mean even if a greater proportion don't drive that there is more traffic and more exposure to vehicle emissions.

Given the Green Party, the Auckland Council (and indeed Wellington, Christchurch, Tauranga and most other urban councils in New Zealand) and the Ministry for the Environment all endorse what is variously called "Smartgrowth" "New Urbanism" "intensification" and the like, you might wonder why they don't look at such evidence?

What it means is that the attempt to intensify Auckland's development within urban growth limits and so-called "Transit oriented development" is counterproductive.  Well it would be clear if the point of intensification was clear.  It isn't, you see.  It isn't about reducing traffic congestion, because if that was the primary goal then a whole raft of measures would be proposed that are not about land use, but around the supply and pricing of roads.  It isn't about reducing emissions, because if that was the primary goal then measures would be taken to clean up the vehicle fleet and reduce congestion.  No, it is something less direct and far more utopian - it is about long term changes to the urban form of the city.  I was told this directly by a manager from the MfE some years ago - it is about changing the housing and employment patterns so that - eventually - people would cluster their living near railway stations and their employment near railway stations.  It is a railway fetish based on the notion that railway transport is the most economically and environmentally efficient.   The problem is that a railway can't deliver this unless it moves large numbers of people regularly - in Auckland it doesn't even start to do that.

Take the Western rail line, which Auckland Transport blog reported carrying around 305,000 in the month of February 2011.   Wow.  Except that figures from just two years ago on the North Western Motorway, between Newton Road and St Lukes indicate 123,000 vehicles on an average weekday.  With an average occupancy of say 1.2, that means around 147,000 people, per day.  Even if you divide the whole of the rail patronage among weekdays only, you get 15,260 per day, just over a tenth.  Bearing in mind that there are other roads carrying traffic parallel to the railway (New North Road and Great North Road), that means the railway is carrying one tenth of the people of the road.  

Now the railphiles are getting all excited about record patronage of their heavily subsidised services, but ignoring the price of this.  Len Brown is factually incorrect when he claims tram lines were ripped up in the 1950s so motorways could be built.  In fact, tram lines were being ripped up after the war because they lost so much money it wasn't economic to replace the wornout track, so trolley buses were put in place (which in turn faced the same fate from the 1970s).   The trams were owned and operated by Auckland City Council, the motorways (which didn't start getting built until after the trams were virtually all closed) by the Ministry of Works.

However, note the pattern for patronage.  Rail patronage has climbed 276% between 2002 and 2010, but bus patronage only grew 8.5%.    Why?  Well bus patronage fell two years in a row (2004 and 2005) by a total of 10%, whilst in the same year rail went up 53%.  Bus patronage dropped marginally again in 2007, but in effect by 2008 there were less trips by bus than in 2002.  Bus patronage recovered almost exclusively because the North Shore busway was such a stunning success.  

That doesn't mean rail hasn't attracted more than people from buses, it has generated new trips, and has no doubt taken some people out of cars - it should, it has cost taxpayers over $1 billion so far.

However, you see this is what intensification is about.  It is about moving the mountain to mohammed so to speak.  Most people in Auckland don't live within a coooeee of a railway station, so said Helen Clark.  Building railway lines closer to them would be ridiculous (although look at the Think Big plans for the North Shore, even without the electrification opened, they want more!), but changing planning rules so that new housing is about living on top of or close to railway stations - that's what they want.

People wont divert long distances to go to a railway station, but making them live near them - that will solve the problem!!  Then Auckland will be like Copenhagen or Paris or Stockholm (or whatever quaint European holiday city the fantasisers imagine Auckland could be)!   The actual impact is higher housing prices, less homes that people want and worse congestion because, even if a few more people ride trains at peak times, the rest of the time almost everyone still drives.

The whole SmartGrowth, intensification policy is quasi-religious - the evidence does not demonstrate that it delivers improvements in terms of transport outcomes, let alone housing or environmental outcomes.  It is simply a tool to try to make new urban railways seem more viable - but it fails on all counts.

The wisdom of Islam

Deep inside me there has been a burning desire to find faith and find a purpose that is beyond myself, and which goes beyond the tainted lurid pursuit of money and personal satisfaction.

I have found it, in the wisdom of the Koran.

For years I have excoriated this religion, but have been quite wrong, indeed blasphemously insulting to those who have found the voice of God through his blessed prophet the most merciful Mohammed.

As such I have decided to resign from my employment and to plan a trip to Mecca, and pursue a new career to spread the word of Allah to those who have been misguided in their ways.  

For it was only the realisation of the pernicious toxin of our culture upon my heart and soul that caused me to recognise the wisdom of these teachings.  You may join me in my faith, and be my brothers (sisters you should listen to your father or find a husband who will keep you on the righteous path), or you will be my enemy until you convert and see the path to glorify our short time on earth before we enter paradise.

I see all in a new light, the aural pollution of so-called "music", the visual pollution of the totems of the abandonment of the soul through reason, and the dressing of women as whores and harpies to lure men to the path of satan and attract new converts to their lives of prostitution.   The relegation of the beautiful Arabic language to second place to that of the pagan languages of English, French and others, and the desecration of our holy lands by the peoples chosen to taunt us and betray us.   Those who read the first and second books of the Prophet but not the latest and greatest.  Their internecine wars told us all we needed to know - that there is nothing to be learned from Judaism, Christianity or atheism - except the means to defeat them all.

So on April 1 I beseech you all to read the Koran, visit a Mosque, sacrifice your mind, your life and dedicate it all to the worship of Allah, to the glory that comes from death and the celebration of the destruction of all the creations of the infidels.  For if it all fails, on April 2 things may just change back!

"Smartgrowth" is about trains

I've written extensively on this topic over the years - the crying waste of taxpayers' money being poured into little more than a dream, an ill-informed belief that Auckland's transport woes would be solved by an electric (now underground) railway.  It hooks into the same belief by planners that Auckland has to embrace the so-called "smartgrowth" or "new urbanism" philosophy, which is little more than a form of Soviet-style central planning and control upon the city - which has itself failed miserably in every New World city that has embraced it (and not delivered wonders for the old world ones either).

Not PC has been rightfully pointing out the fallacies behind this dogma, which at its essence is a belief that more people should fit into the same space, and that human aspirations for bigger homes, bigger gardens and more living space should be restricted ever increasingly, by stopping cities growing out, but encouraging them to grow up.  

I heard much propaganda around this when I was dealing with Ministry for the Environment and several planners in Auckland councils a few years ago.  They wanted in-fill development, they wanted high rise, they basically wanted less bedrooms and more people in residences.  Is that what you want?  It doesn't matter, because it is "good for the environment".  Why?  It almost entirely comes down to transport.

Planners in "new world cities" (cities outside Europe) have long bemoaned the predominance of the private car for most trips in cities and in particular most commuting trips.  Cars, you see, are bad because they clog up roads, emit nasty fumes and it is "unsustainable" to keep building new roads to meet demand (or new car parks).  (They ignore that cars today have the cleanest emissions than ever, but that is a diversion).   So do they ask questions as to why there is traffic congestion?  The simple fact that road use is priced the same regardless of demand, the fact that taxes collected from road users are frequently not allocated based on demand, but on politically driven imperatives?  No.  The planners are uninterested in economics, for they largely do not understand them.   They don't think that maybe peak time commuting would change if it cost more to drive then (and a lot less to drive at other times), they don't think that there could be innovative ways adopted by commercial road owners to get more capacity out of networks (e.g. intelligent systems for cars to operate in convoys in close formation).  No, they have a pet love affair with one thing only - mode shift - and it isn't to walking or cycling or even buses, it is trains.

You can see it in the Auckland Transport Blog, which has permeating throughout it this philosophy, a glorification of urban railways, a less interested concern in buses and a sneering hatred for the car and almost absent interest in roads at all or serious economics.   You see the blog administrator is a planner and he carries the philosophy he has been taught.

The main problem the railevangelists have is that one of the main reasons the car dominates is because with lots of people living in fully detached houses on sections, there aren't enough people within walking catchments to justify their pet dream - railways.   Railways need lots of people wanting to go to and from the same places at the same time.   New world cities don't have that, they have a lot of people heading in the same direction, but at both ends there are widely differing origins and destinations.   Urban rail projects in new world cities inevitably are not financially viable, because demand, especially off peak, isn't remotely enough to cover the costs of operating the services.

The planners want to change this.  They want you living on top of a railway station, or near it, or within walking distance at least.  With others.  So you might be in an apartment block, or in an adjoining block.  You see you need to live near lots of people doing that to make it "work" (not for you, the planners).   Want to build a new home outside urban limits? No.  That would be immoral, you might drive, you wont be supporting "your railway", and you never know where it might end, cities might sprawl forever!!

Of course it is nonsense.  The "smartgrowth" planners want you to have less living space, and consequently more noise, more shared spaces and to be near a railway so you drive less, then there will be less traffic, less pollution, less congestion and all will be better - except you wont be living where you want, because you can't afford the remaining low density homes (which are priced out of reach because supply is constrained), and traffic patterns wont have changed because you can't force businesses to locate where you want them.  They locate where it is best suited or they leave altogether or never start up.  Congestion wont have changed because the real issue is the price and supply of road space, which the planners have no interest in (other than a more recent interest in using road pricing to fund their rail fetish and penalise the bad cars). 

So yes, it is all about justifying the rail project.  It isn't about your needs at all.  If you want to see how effective it is in addressing transport needs you need look no further than Portland, the pin up city of the Smartgrowth evangelists, where public transport mode shares dropped.

So if it is about trains, wont they deliver wondrous dramatic improvements to travel around Auckland?

Well as I've said before:

- Only 12% of employment in Auckland is downtown.  The railway only exists on two main (plus one secondary and one small branch) corridors, more than half of those commuters wont be served.  On top of that the assumption is 28% of Aucklanders will live within 800m of a station by 2016, so maybe at best 4% of Auckland commuters will be served by the railway.  What about the other 96%?

- The average difference in travel time on roads will be less than 1km/h.  Whilst some rail users will transfer from cars, the effect will be hardly perceived by other road users. As a congestion busting strategy it will be an abject failure.  Largely because most people don't live near railway stations or work near them, which of course is why planners want to price you out of living away from them.

- Most of the trains will lie idle most of the time.  Over one billion in "assets" will be grossly under-utilised most of the day, and all weekends.  Only for two hours every rush hour will they all be used, mostly in one direction, for maybe three trips each, before being stabled to do nothing until a repeat performance in the evenings.

- Majority of rail users wont be motorists.  They will be existing rail users, existing bus users, people who rode with others in cars or people who wouldn't have travelled in the first place.  Maybe around a quarter would have driven, so it is a big subsidy to pay for people who would have used public transport anyway.

- Rail pushes out commercially viable buses.  Until the massive expenditure in rail, maybe half of bus  services in Auckland were unsubsidised and commercial.  Meeting the needs of those paying for them.  With heavily subsidised trains, these have been put out of business and the passengers ride trains without having to pay for more than a third of their operating costs.

- The money poured into the infrastructure can never be realised.  The Auckland rail network was valued by Treasury at a maximum of around NZ$20 million in 2001. It is having around NZ$1 billion poured into it.  Even if by some miracle it doubled in value, it is still a monumental destruction of wealth.  Even those who benefit directly from it are unwilling to pay fares to operate the trains, let alone contribute towards those mammoth fixed (and now sunk) costs.  

Right now, the railevangelists are demanding action on an underground rail loop because they believe Britomart will be congested after electrification, which hasn't even been completed yet.  They want planning for a North Shore railway when even the busway isn't remotely close to capacity.  

Electrification will happen, but it will prove to be a disappointment.  Yes rail patronage will go up, but so what?  Until rail passengers fully pay the operating costs of this dud, it will be a net economic drain on Auckland.  Parking, fuel and congestion charges shouldn't be used to prop it up.

However, roads do need to be treated differently.  The motorway network should be commercialised and sold, and the new owners allowed to charge whatever they like.  Then roads would not be so congested, money would be available to fix bottlenecks and maybe, just maybe, the rail network might prove some value.   Don't bet on the planners even considering this - for they are blinded by the lights of trains being good, not by achieving objectively determined results.

Vandals and thugs are children of the Labour philosophy

UK Uncut, a radical leftwing protest group, has been exposed for what it really is - a bunch of young angry violence prone thugs who, as usual, misuse the term "peaceful protest" for "vandalism, trespass and intimidation".

It is they that formed the backbone to the breakaway protests in London on Saturday, and the cover for the so-called anarchists who went on a vandalism and trespass spree across London's West End.  I say "so-called anarchists" because if they really were anarchists, they wouldn't have wanted the Police to step in had the owners of the premises they trashed used force to defend their properties.

UK Uncut are an odd bunch, you see they want more government (not exactly aligned with anarchists then) and want more tax, so the government can spend more money, presumably on them. UK Uncut is waging war on successful British businesses because it wants to strongarm them to pay more in tax - not that any of them are alleged to be breaking the law - but UK Uncut doesn't think these businesses should arrange their affairs to minimise tax.  The philosophy being that when businesses make profits, the state is entitled to take part of that.

I can't quite understand how anyone, particularly groups of students can get excited about getting businesses to pay more tax, like they worship the state as big mother, which has weaned them and gives them what they want.  It's so anti-aspirational as to be pathetically sad.

Tim Worstall of the Institute of Economic Affairs has fisked this lot with ease, showing the economic illiteracy of UK Uncut.   UK Uncut assumes bizarrely that British companies would remain if taxes were raised dramatically, it assumes that when companies pay more tax that somehow that means that "rich fatcats" lose - when many of the companies have shareholders which are pension funds and the like, with profits shared among thousands of shareholders.   Full details of the fisking here.

However, the mob who vandalised are more than just disenchanted idiots.  They vandalised the Ritz Hotel because they were "anti-rich", they occupied the exclusive department store Fortnum & Mason; Mason because it is upmarket (one wit said "Proper Tea is theft", as Fortnum & Mason has an excellent tea section).  Banks including ATMs were wrecked because they just oppose banks.  Didn't matter that the banks attacked in some cases were not bailed out.   In fact nothing mattered other than trashing the property of businesses they had an ill-conceived prejudice against.  Nice.

However desperate the TUC and Labour are to distance themselves from these thugs, there is a more fundamental underlying point.  Whilst neither entity provoked or encouraged the vandalism (and both are embarrassed by it), the simple truth is that they all share the same philosophy - a fundamental hatred of entrepreneurial success and a belief that the property of others is not sacrosanct.

Both Labour and the TUC perpetuate the myth that the recession is entirely the fault of "the banks" and that "the banks" must pay - they blame the budget deficit on the banks, when it is palpably not true.   Labour had been running large deficits for years, only the collapse in tax revenue has made it more rapidly unsustainable.   

Labour and the TUC want to tax banks more, vandalise them in a far more civilised way, without sticks and stones, and make Britain even less attractive for the financial sector.   They want more of your money, they want to give the money to those who haven't earned it, they want to spend it on monopoly state run health and education services, regardless of whether they meet your needs - because government is good, government always knows best.

They hold the same empty belief that capitalism doesn't really work, that the reason the world isn't the way they want it is because people trade, people make money, people produce goods and services and sell them to people who are willing to pay, employ people who are willing to work, and that life isn't fair!  They belief there aren't equal opportunities (there aren't, the Khmer Rouge tried to fix that), that everyone has a right to a job (a right provided by whom?) and that the "rich" make money off the back of the poor.

It is the same belief that other people owe you a living, an education or health care.  The idea that if other people have property or money, then you have a right to some of it.  It is moral cannibalism, the idea that the mere existence of someone gives them unchosen obligations to give the fruits of their labour, effort, exchanges and mind to others who demand them.   It is the Marxist myth - from each according to his ability to each according to his needs.  The cleverer you are the more of that is demanded from others, and what you get back is just 'what you need'.

The only way this can be imposed is by force, by violence.  The anarchist protestors are willing to do this directly, the politicians and unionists will use the state to do it (and already do).

The best response to this is an unashamed defence of capitalism.  A defence of the principle that people should be entitled to set up businesses, make money, hire who they wish and keep the proceeds, as long as they don't use force or fraud to do so.  It is more than just pointing out that waging war on capitalists means they will leave, with their money, Zimbabwe like, and the looters and vandals will have nothing left.

UK Uncut is ridiculously stupid - if it got its way, businesses would flee the UK and so would wealthy entrepreneurs rather than be taxed. 

Of course if you are weaned on a state education that teaches you how wonderful the things are government does, and to be envy and hate filled about those who have more than you, then you're going to concentrate on hating rather than creating.

That's what you saw on Saturday in London.