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Reduced Congestion is Good for Drivers
I don’t know what’s most strange about this Matt DeBord post on Felix Salmon’s congestion pricing piece in Wired, his insistence on making every policy discussion into a tribal battle between Team Car and everyone else, his bizarre suggestion that...
Who Needs This Goose and its Golden Eggs?
Let me just make one more point concerning Metro and its funding shortage. Currently, the plan seems to be to hike fares and reduce service. This will seriously degrade the rider experience on and the utility of Metro. Since it will encourage...
VMT Post-script
Dave Roberts has a nice piece up at the Prospect reviewing two books on driving, which includes this passage: Moreover, all USVs [urban small vehicles] will be GPS and Internet-connected. Think of the location–specific services an iPhone offers,...
More on VMT
It’s interesting to me that so many people find the idea of a VMT tax to be clearly ridiculous. At present, federal gas tax revenues are insufficient to cover spending on highways (to say nothing of all transportation needs), and spending on...
In Defense of a VMT
Matt writes: I’m a supporter of higher taxes, so if I were a Senator and someone was bringing a vehicle miles traveled tax to the floor I suppose I’d be prepared to support it. But the sporadic bouts of enthusiasm for this idea are really...
Paper of the Day the Second
Is here: Recent concepts as megaregions and polycentric urban regions emphasize that external economies are not confined to a single urban core, but shared among a collection of close-by and linked cities. However, empirical analysis of...
Creative Funding
From Bloomberg: Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa said his goal to speed up construction of 12 transit projects and ease congestion in the second-biggest U.S. city requires “creative” funding help from Washington. Villaraigosa is pushing a...
Money for Something
What if for one year — just one year — we allocated as much money for infrastructure as we did for defense? What if? Well, this year, that would mean devoting $680 billion to investments in infrastructure. That’s more than $200 billion more than...
The Need to Cut Emissions
Will Wilkinson quotes me arguing that geo-engineering should be our last hope, for use after other plans, including emission cuts, have failed, and he writes: I’ve thought the matter through, but I still don’t understand this ordering of...
If the Grass Looks Greener, It’s Important to Understand the Nature of the Fence
One of the things about politics is that solutions always seem easier to implement and more promising before they stand a real chance of being implemented. People who have for one reason or another fallen in love with the idea of a carbon tax watch...
In Praise of the Olympics
Matt writes: New York Times article about the Obama administration’s involvement in Chicago’s 2016 Olympic bid once again reminds me of how crazy all the Olympic-related lobbying seems. Is there any reason to think these events are actually...
Whence the Suburbs?
Liberal bloggers appear to have gotten results, and Tyler Cowen has recently been blogging on metropolitan development. On the whole, his posts are pretty interesting reads, though urbanist readers won’t find much new there. Tyler has also...
