I am going to be at this Monday and Tuesday of next week, as a discussant on a paper about transport and land development.
Lincoln Institute of Land Policy:
"Infrastructure and Land Policies: The International Land Policy Conference
Date(s): June 4 - 5, 2012
Time: 8:30 AM - 5:00 PM
Location(s): The Charles Hotel, Cambridge, Massachusetts
Tuition: FREE
Participation in this program is by invitation only."
I wrote more about Accessibility Futures : @ | streets.mn.
Herbie the Love Bug appeared in quite a few films. While Herbie was good, Christine was less so, and is one of many possessed vehicles appearing in literature, film, and TV. The most famous is probably Butterfly Lightning McQueen. The headlights and radiator of the car are a natural anthropomorphizing feature as the eyes and mouth. Most such vehicles however lack the senses of smell and sound.
The movie Cars, and its knockoffs (e.g. Little Cars), and spin-offs (Cars Toons) dominate the animated genre. But they did not invent it.
Other shows with anthropomorphic vehicles include:
Sodor has a few off-track vehicles, mostly trucks and tractors, while Sir Topham Hatt's car is not anthropomorphized. So nothing from the land of Thomas today.
KurzweilAI shows the press release from Volvo: Volvo’s autonomous cars travel 124 miles in Spain in ‘road train’
[This is interesting technology, I am glad they got it to work technically. I still want and expect autonomous robot cars.]
A podcast makes today's Linklist: Horace Dediu on The Critical Path #40: Awaiting the Big Bang:
"This week, Horace follows up on his discussion of automobiles and road infrastructure by talking about how road networks were rebuilt in European countries to accommodate cycling. That leads to hints about the challenge of re-building energy infrastructure to support new power train technologies. Finally He and Dan also analyze comments made by Tim Cook at the recent D10 conference about Apple TV and disruption of the entertainment industry."
Colin Harris @ streets.mn: Open Streets 2012 is Back:
"Following the inaugural Open Streets Minneapolis event in June of 2011, Minneapolis residents will have another opportunity to explore and enjoy their neighborhood streets without the presence of motorized traffic on June 10th, 2012. Open Streets events (based on the Ciclovía from Bogotá, Colombia) bring together families and neighbors to bike, walk, socialize, play and shop in their communities in a safe, car-free environment."
Recently published, and summarized in CTS Research E-News: Using accessibility to evaluate future planning scenarios:
"Understanding the interdependent relationship between transportation and land use is important for planning the future growth of cities. Recognizing how this relationship affects accessibility—the ability of people to reach the destinations that meet their needs and satisfy their wants—can help policymakers and planners make decisions that optimize a city's efficiency, livability, and economic competitiveness.In a study funded by the Minnesota Department of Transportation, researchers from the Department of Civil Engineering compared a set of planning scenarios for the Twin Cities metropolitan area using accessibility as a performance measure. Associate Professor David Levinson, undergraduate research assistant Paul Anderson, and graduate student Pavithra Parthasarathi used the scenarios to evaluate the accessibility of various land use and transportation network combinations.
The researchers analyzed the accessibility of 60 different scenarios, including combinations of six land-use scenarios and 10 highway and transit networks. The land-use scenarios included existing 2010 conditions, projected 2030 conditions, and various combinations of centralized and decentralized population and employment conditions.
Highway networks used in the scenarios included 2010 conditions, projected 2030 conditions, an ideal freeflow network with no congestion, and a hypothetical diamond lane network that added high-occupancy toll lanes to all freeways inside the I-494/694 beltway. Transit networks ranged from 2010 conditions to projected 2030 conditions to a 'retro' network that added all 1931 rapid transit streetcar routes to the 2030 network.
In terms of land use, results show that centralized employment and centralized population had the highest accessibility across all networks, resulting in more access to jobs and labor as well as shorter commute times. The researchers found that fully centralized growth produced about 20 to 25 percent more accessibility than the projected 2030 scenario, depending on the accompanying transportation network.
Of the transportation networks, the researchers found that the freeflow network had the highest accessibility—20 percent more than the projected 2030 network—followed by the diamond lane network.
At first, the researchers say, it would be easy to choose the land use and transportation network combination with the highest accessibility as the future planning goal. However, the scenario of centralized population and employment on a freeflow network—while ideal for accessibility—is not likely to be cost-effective or feasible under current conditions.
Instead, the researchers say, these study results could be used to help prioritize future investments and land-use strategies based on how accessibility-effective they are—how much accessibility they deliver per dollar of investment.
A final report on the project, Using Twin Cities Destinations and Their Accessibility as a Multimodal Planning Tool (MnDOT 2012-05), is available on the CTS website."
Reason: Lessons From the United Fruit Company - Reason.com discusses the new book by Rich Cohen, The Fish That Ate The Whale: The Life And Times Of America’s Banana King.:
"There is the efficiency. Zemurray got started in the banana business by figuring out how to distribute ‘ripes,’ the freckled bananas that were thrown away as useless discards before Zemurray figured out the logistics of fast-moving rail distribution."[United Fruit was also one of the early investors in RCA, as they held key radio patents, which were crucial for banana distribution.]
NY Times: As Apps Move Into Cars, So Do More Distractions
[All the more reason to take the driver out of the loop]
Tim Lee @ Ars: Four signs America’s broadband policy is failing
Bryan Caplan @ Econlog: A Signaling Theory of Suboptimal Telecommuting, :
"A fascinating senior paper by Georgetown undergraduate Alexander Clark suggests that the answer is yes. Clark's story: Workers physically commute for signaling reasons. Employers can monitor your productivity better when you actually come to the office. Workers who telecommute put themselves on the slow track to success - if they can even get hired in the first place. To bolster this thesis, Clark analyzes the American Time Use Survey using the employer learning-statistical discrimination (EL-SD) framework. He finds that the labor market does indeed take longer to reward telecommuters for their hard-to-observe abilities. "[Not only does telecommuting signal sloth, there is at least one survey cited which shows telecommuters don't work as many hours per day.]
A selection process for a local university identified the factors in the attached image as most important. I don't know how the list was formulated.
#1. Vehicular Access. Near the bottom, Pedestrian access. At the bottom, airport access.
LA Times: Plan for, autonomous, or self-driving cars passes California senate hurdle.
From JW: Green Car Congress: Google’s technology campaign for autonomous driving:
"Search engine giant Google is looking for partners within in the auto industry to help launch one of the most significant applications of artificial technology over the next several years, the self-driving car.In a keynote address to the SAE 2012 World Congress on 25 April 2012, Anthony Levandowski, Business Lead for Google’s Self Driving Car Project provided an overview of Google’s autonomous vehicle program and requested that the auto industry partner with Google on the implementation. (Levandowski joined Google in 2007 to launch StreetView—Google Maps with Street View lets you explore places around the world through 360-degree street-level imagery.)
We’re not perfect; the technology is nowhere near ready. We want to set expectations low but we want to encourage dialogue on how we want to move the technology forward.—Anthony Levandowski
‘For some, driving is a distraction.’ —Allen Taub, former GM VP, Global R&D
Levandowski shared that 32,788 people were killed in the US last year in auto accidents and 90% of those accidents were related to human error. Multi-tasking while driving is only increasing to the extent that people view driving as the distraction. Twenty percent of the food consumed in America is eaten in cars. Google believes that a future state with having computers drive cars can ‘remove a gigantic chunk’ of the US fatalities.Approximately 1.5 million people/year are killed in auto accidents globally. Google is involved because the company has a strong technical legacy and the company likes to take on problems where the ‘solutions have a high impact on humanity that involve challenging technical problems’.
In addition to the safety impact, Google believes your brain should be able to engage in activities other than driving.
It is a bug, not a feature, that you need to drive all of the time…What if I gave you a pill that allows you to get 10% longer life without any side effects …given how much time we spend in a car, a self driving car is that pill.—Anthony Levandowski"
SA: Why America's Love Affair with Cars Is No Accident: Scientific American:
"The change in American public opinion from thinking of cars as wildly dangerous vehicles to having a 'love affair with the automobile' was no accident. Instead, it reflected a serious push by the car industry to change people's psychology. Automobiles had to win the battle for hearts and minds before they could take over streets where people had once swarmed."[Peter Norton's Fighting Traffic is well worth reading.
K.L writes:
I know from reading your blog that you are a bit keen on anthropomorphized transportation. This week I stumbled upon an old cartoon celebrating the 50th anniversary of the Wuppertal Schwebebahn from 1951. The "Laughing Schwebebahn" is not only smiling, but it also has wings. It's from Das Beste von der Schwebebahn in 50 Jahren (http://www.worldcat.org/title/beste-von-der-schwebebahn-in-50-jahren/oclc/8757312).
See wikipedia for more.
I am guessing this category (anthropomorphic monorails) is smaller than others, but please send in any other examples.
I get to talk about Flying Cars and Transportation Technology for about 8 seconds in this 3:40 Greater MSP video: The Future of Greater MSP’s Cultural and Physical Environment
(Just don't call it the Twin Cities anymore)
((The interview was ~ 30 minutes, I talked about lots of other cool things as well, they just survive on the cutting room floor))
NYT: Big Data Troves Stay Forbidden:
" In the future, he said, the conference should not accept papers from authors who did not make their data public. He was greeted by applause from the audience.In February, Dr. Huberman had published a letter in the journal Nature warning that privately held data was threatening the very basis of scientific research. 'If another set of data does not validate results obtained with private data,' he asked, 'how do we know if it is because they are not universal or the authors made a mistake?'"
In the "be careful what you wish for department" ... NYT: George Lucas's Plans in Marin:
"But after spending years and millions of dollars, Mr. Lucas abruptly canceled plans recently for the third, and most likely last, major expansion, citing community opposition. An emotional statement posted online said Lucasfilm would build instead in a place 'that sees us as a creative asset, not as an evil empire.'If the announcement took Marin by surprise, it was nothing compared with what came next. Mr. Lucas said he would sell the land to a developer to bring 'low income housing' here."
TOLLROADSnews: Traffic congestion dropped off 30% in 2011 INRIX says - weak economy, higher gas prices :
"2011 saw a dramatic drop in traffic congestion in the US - 30% fewer hours wasted in congested traffic according to INRIX, the nation's leading provider of traffic data. The 2011 improvement is only outmatched in the years since INRIX has been measuring congestion by the financial crisis year of 2008, when congestion dropped 34%. In 2009 congestion was up 1% and 2010 saw a 10% regrowth of congestion. "[I call 'Bullshit'. There may have been a methodological problem they are calling a trend.]
Wired: SpaceX In Orbit - Successful Launch of Falcon 9 Rocket :
"CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida — The second time’s the charm for SpaceX. This morning at 3:44 a.m. EDT the company’s Falcon 9 rocket lifted off Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral. After a faulty valve led to an aborted launch on Saturday, today’s successful flight marks the third of the Falcon 9 rocket, the second flight of the Dragon capsule, and the first flight for a commercial spacecraft bound for the International Space Station (ISS)."
Kottke: Douche parking: "I can't tell if the app featured in this video is imaginary or not, but it's a great theoretical solution to the problem of douche parking. Douche parking is basically parking like a douche, and is way more prevalent in Russia than in the US. The Village feels publicly shaming is the best way to deal with douches. Unfortunately, one trait of douches is an inability to be shamed."
Matt Kahn @ Environmental and Urban Economics: New UCLA Research Suggests that Men Should Not Bike:
"A study by researchers at the UCLA School of Nursing has found that serious male cyclists may experience hormonal imbalances that could affect their reproductive health. "
Now at streets.mn: Cross-subsidies:
"We subsidize transit to spur development. We subsidize development to spur transit ridership."
Eric Jaffe @ The Atlantic Cities picks up on John Calimente's recent JTLU article: The Secret to Tokyo's Rail Success :
"In other words the railway itself was just a sideline attraction. This is no accident. As John Calimente reminds us in the latest issue of the Journal of Transport and Land Use [PDF], a major reason Tokyo's private rail lines are so successful is that they've diversified the business beyond transportation into real estate holdings and retail outlets. At the end of the day this means both profitability for the company and better transportation for city residents. Calimente writes:Government regulation of fares coupled with limited subsidies for railway operations pushed the private railways to innovate and diversify into a wide variety of related businesses, most notably real estate. Due to their long-term interest in the communities they built along their rail lines, the private railways provided valuable social benefits through public transportation while still pursuing profits. High quality, frequent rail service to dense, mixed-use, safe, pedestrian-friendly developments has allowed Tokyo to achieve enviable rates of public transit usage and given Tokyoites the freedom to view automobile ownership as a lifestyle choice rather than a necessity.Take, for instance, the Tokyu Corporation. Established in 1922 as a regional development company, Tokyu today is a massive "rail-based conglomerate" of nearly 400 companies that employs 30,000 people, only a tenth of which work directly for the railway. Beginning in the 1930s Tokyu surrounded its hubs with commercial and retail buildings and sold land near its intermediate stations to universities at good prices, to create reliable residential (and thus passenger) corridors.
Pretty good plan: Tokyu's seven main rail lines and branch line now carry about a billion riders a year. That's the most of any private railway in Japan, as of 2006, according to Calimente. That year Tokyu generated $2.63 billion in revenue en route to $587 million in profits. Rail fares brought in about a third of that figure, real estate holdings reap another third, and retail about a fifth."
[This is from the recent special issue on Value Capture.]
Walk Score has put out: Most Bikeable Cities
Just for the record:
Minneapolis - 79
Portland - 70
Their map is here:
I am not sure how exactly they decided this, but we do have our Bike Accessibility data online for your mapping pleasure.
Brendon sends me to MPR Minneapolis moving toward single-sort recycling
[We have been cheering in our household for a week. We will regain at least 18 square feet of space. I can soon reduce the number of streams identified here. ]Wikimedia blog: Welcome to the world’s first Wikipedia Town
Fast Company: J. Crew CEO, Apple Board Member Mickey Drexler Reveals Steve Jobs' iCar Dream, Confirms "Living Room" Plans:
"'Look at the car industry; it's a tragedy in America. Who is designing the cars?' Drexler said. 'Steve's dream before he died was to design an iCar.'"
Several folks have sent me to Wired's take on the paper discussed in the SciAm article I linked to earlier: World's Subways Converging on Ideal Form
Alex @ Getting Around Minneapolis discusses the rerouting of buses in St. Paul in response to the Central [University Ave.] Corridor Green Line … St Paul transferring
[My #8 bus is getting absorbed by the 67. The rider will be pleased the route now goes farther (actually there are 172 average daily rides over 50 daily bus trips, and they run a full size bus) and hopefully has a higher frequency (it can't be lower). The #2 is still crazy from a circuity perspective.]
SR sends me to Betabeat, which discusses Zimride: Nine Startups Tried to Teach Brooklyn Bowl How to Share Last Night :
"Next, former Lehman Brothers employee John Zimmer came up to pitch Zimride even though he really didn’t need to. The San Francisco based startup just got funded for $7.5 million. Mr. Zimmer explained that 80 percent of the seats in cars on America’s highways are unoccupied. That’s why he founded Zimride, which allows users to find a driver with empty seats and book a ride just like you would a bus, train or plane ticket.Zimride is a social marketplace for drivers and riders who can see each other’s profiles and decide if the ride is one they’re willing to take. If it takes off, Mr. Zimmer believes Zimride will help take cars off the road, reduce traffic wait times and help people make new friends. In fact, Zimride has been the catalyst for more than one relationship already—but please guys, it’s not a dating site."
Karl Smith @ Modeled Behavior: More on Self-Driving Cars :
"When I said that by 2035 we could have 3 times as many cars as human beings, obviously that was a prediction about the predominance of Autonomous Vehicles (AVs). I think we should begin to retire self-driving/driverless car, as it will eventually sound as hokey as horseless carriage.In part this is because it attempts to define a thing in terms of a paradigm that will no longer be familiar. Yet, it will also sound hokey because it suggests that AVs are basically like today’s cars but with no driver. That suggestion is likely to appear comical in retrospect.
My guess is that the majority of AVs will not only, not carry passengers but not interact with humans unless they explicitly need something that only a human can provide, such as specialized repair or maintenance.
The majority of AVs will live in their own world, interacting only with other AVs and a vast array of infrastructure as they form the backbone of a human-less global supply chain. They will pick up goods from the point of production and ship and sort them all the way to the final consumer without ever meeting human in between.
They will likely be the most powerful force for globalization we have ever seen."
Via MEK: political science job rumors: Can you be a top-5 polisci department without rapid rail?
Via BS: LATimes: An electrifying freight solution on the 710? Siemens working on it:
"Los Angeles may be one of the first global cities to adopt a new electric freight trucking system, unveiled by electrical engineering giant Siemens Corp. last week at the 26th Electric Vehicle Symposium, or EVS26.The new technology, called eHighway, is a highway electrification system that uses overhead electrical wires to transmit energy to freight trucks in select vehicle lanes, similar to modern-day streetcars."
Kotaku: Toyota Just Turned the Nintendo DS into a Navigational System
How Do You Put a Price Tag on a Brand New City? - Jobs & Economy - The Atlantic Cities: "The infant nation of South Sudan has a big construction project in mind. Officials are hoping to build a brand new city to act as its capital. The cost of the project was recently estimated at $940 million."
OK, cost of 1 stadium in Minneapolis to serve 8 games a year to replace existing stadium > cost of capital of entire country.
Susan Fecht @ SciAm: Track Record: Do Major Urban Subway Networks Evolve along Similar Patterns?:
"No two subway systems have the same design. New York City’s haphazard rail system differs markedly from the highly organized Moscow Metro (above), or the tangled spaghetti of Tokyo’s subway network. Each system’s design is the result of many factors, including local geography, the city’s layout and traffic distribution, politics, culture and degree of urban planning."
Nice summary of recent research by Roth, Kang, Batty, and Barthelemy "A long-time limit for world subway networks" in Journal of the Royal Society: Interface (which might be behind a firewall if you don't have library access)
I am interviewed in the SciAm article.
From February: GTI/UTC Lunchtime Lecture Series - Dr. David Levinson - YouTube: "Network Structure and Travel Behavior"
(57:22)Abstract: Transportation networks have an underlying structure, defined by the layout, arrangement and the connectivity of the individual network elements, namely the road segments and their intersections. The differences in network structure exist among and between networks. This presentation argues that travellers perceive and respond to these differences in underlying network structure and complexity, resulting in differences in observed travel patterns. This hypothesized relationship between network structure and travel is analyzed using individual and aggregate level travel and network data from metropolitan regions across the U.S. Various measures of network structure, compiled from existing sources, are used to quantify the structure of street networks. The relation between these quantitative measures and travel is then identified using econometric models.
Kottke: Fantastic time lapse map of Europe, 1000 - 2005 A.D.
In Vancouver, Buzzer Blog: New wayfinding signage is going up around the region
Massive Tornado, Can it Happen Here? [MPR succumbs to Sweeps Month] If you're stuck in traffic, you have no good choices"
A local Car Dealer (Walser) is encouraging trading in used cars for bikes (and cash). The campaign is here: New Wheels
The Scholarly Kitchen: The Emergence of a Citation Cartel :
"In a 1999 essay published in Science titled, ‘Scientific Communication — A Vanity Fair?’ George Franck warned us on the possibility of citation cartels — groups of editors and journals working together for mutual benefit. To date, this behavior has not been widely documented; however, when you first view it, it is astonishing.Cell Transplantation is a medical journal published by the Cognizant Communication Corporation of Putnam Valley, New York. In recent years, its impact factor has been growing rapidly. In 2006, it was 3.482. In 2010, it had almost doubled to 6.204.
When you look at which journals cite Cell Transplantation, two journals stand out noticeably: the Medical Science Monitor, and The Scientific World Journal. According to the JCR, neither of these journals cited Cell Transplantation until 2010."
KSTP has a story on Fighting Rush Hour featuring MTO Director John Hourdos
David King @ Getting from here to there: NO TAV: Anarchists Debate the Merits of High Speed Rail
Matt Kahn @ Environmental and Urban Economics: John Quigley: A Giant in Urban Economics: "UC Berkeley's John Quigley passed away this weekend. "
[John Quigley was on my Ph.D. oral exams committee.]
At the STREET - Simulating Transportation for Realistic Engineering Education and Training website, we have a new model, ANGIE:
"The Agent-based Network Growth model with Incremental Evolution (ANGIE) models the growth of road networks in several scenarios such as road networks in an artificial grid-like city and the Minneapolis Downtown Skyway network. The philosophy inherent in these models is that accessibility affects road network growth and vice versa. The examples aim to illustrate that different values of accessibility at individual locations can lead to different network topologies."
The model is what we used on two papers:
We welcome feedback.
A web-based mapping system for Ancient Rome: ORBIS:
"For the first time, ORBIS allows us to express Roman communication costs in terms of both time and expense. By simulating movement along the principal routes of the Roman road network, the main navigable rivers, and hundreds of sea routes in the Mediterranean, Black Sea and coastal Atlantic, this interactive model reconstructs the duration and financial cost of travel in antiquity."
Andrew Adamatzky and Andrew Ilachinski have an Op-Ed in the NY Times: The Wisdom of Slime:
" it’s worth remembering that the highway system was created by mere humans, using only human intelligence. To find out if it’s optimally designed, we need to consult a higher authority. Namely, slime mold."
[I have blogged about slime molds before].
CNU20 is underway, there are lots of posts emanating, see
Erin Chantry @ At the Helm of the Public Realm: Looking Forward: New Urbanism and the New World
Chuck Marohn @ Strong Towns Blog: CNU 20, Day 2
Sam Newberg alias Joe Urban: CNU – Elitist or Grassroots Urbanism?
[The retrospective reflection is so bright, you gotta wear shades]
Nokohaha: Tooling Around Minneapolis ’02
"That’s the busy intersection of Fourth and Nicollet in 1902. Minneapolis City Hall and Hennepin County Courthouse was still under construction and gas buggies had to share the road with bicycles, horses and street cars."
I got quoted last weekend in the Oregonian about peak travel: Columbia River Crossing needs $900 million from Washington and Oregon, but how to raise it remains elusive:
"David Levinson, a University of Minnesota professor who studies transportation issues, argues that the trend is long-term and is as much cultural as financial.Teens, historically the most avid drivers, are waiting longer to get their licenses and are driving less, pushed by higher costs and also tougher rules for young drivers, stronger enforcement of drunk driving laws, even technology. Another theory: smart phones and the Internet have supplanted the car as a central platform of young people's social lives.
Cars themselves have also changed. Some don't burn a drop of gas or pay a penny in gas taxes. Others use less, due in part to tougher federal mileage standards. 'It's official government policy to drive down gas tax revenue,' Levinson said. "
Giant Freakin Robot: Faux Vintage Travel Posters Invite You To Tour The Solar System
Chicago Tribune: Peapod unveils virtual grocery store aisle at CTA's State/Lake tunnel
Tim Lee writes in Forbes: Why The Bay Area Should Have 11 Million Residents Today - Forbes:
"Today, the Bay Area has about 7 million residents. In a free housing market, the population of the San Francisco Bay Area would have been growing rapidly over the last two decades. For example, between 1900 and 1920, the growth of the auto industry helped the population of the Detroit metro area nearly triple, from 540,000 people to 1.4 million people. If the San Francisco Bay Area had grown that fast since 1990, it would have about 16 million people today."
Having lived in the Bay Area for half a decade, I don't doubt there are housing restrictions in some municipalities. There are many municipalities. Some would welcome development. Other just demand more side payments. Where is the boom in the East Bay? In the East Bay development is more welcome than the Valley. Where are the hordes clamoring to live in Oakland? Why have the bad neighborhoods areas not been gentrified? Why are existing zoning caps not reached (with buildings torn down and rebuilt more intensely). Because, the demand is too weak.
The so-called economies of agglomeration are just not large enough to justify side payments, or they would be made, or overcome social problems constraining gentrification.
Those 4 million come from somewhere. Maybe they come from Phoenix or Dallas or Houston or Atlanta (or of course everywhere?), but then those places have the infrastructure, land, and housing stock, where if the demand were lower would just see lower land prices, not less people (mostly).
Maybe some development would not have been built there. But that development (i.e. roll back the last 10 years of US development for 2 million housing units, reallocate that to the Bay Area, as is implied in the article) and most of that would be single family houses that would be unbuilt. Preferences for 2 million single family homes cannot physically be satisfied in the Bay Area, so residents would thus face a far worse housing situation than preferred.
We have a friend from Minneapolis we nicknamed "Pre-Millenium Man", since in the early 2000s he wanted to live the hipster dream of San Francisco in the 1990s, and he did move to the Bay Area and works in software development. Nothing stopped him. He undoubtedly bid out someone who did not care to live there quite as much. So the people who are bid out contribute much less to the economies of agglomeration than the average person who is there (their wages reflect willingness to pay for housing, and are determine by their productivity). Adding 2 million marginals to the pool won't increase the total productivity as much as the average person today, and will reduce average productivity. It will worsen the aggregate productivity elsewhere. There are diminishing economies of agglomeration, and increasing negative externalities with larger populations.
The entire rationale for housing regulations is to reduce negative externalities, both perceived and real. If we lived in a world where those externalities were otherwise internalized, great, communities would be much more willing to allow more development, as the negative spillovers would not exist. We do not yet live in that world.
I know the Bay Area (thinks it) is the most important place in the world, delivering us the future. I know that future would just be so much worse without famous investments like Pets.com. Real productivity is created there, but so is crap. A much better strategy would be to stop wasting so much effort on duplication, drivel, and so on, and incentivize those competent software developers to make things that are worthwhile. If people can no longer find good investments, or can no longer distinguish between good investments and crap, perhaps the economies of agglomeration have been exhausted.
Conrad deFiebre @ MinnPost: Rough road ahead for Minnesota drivers:
"'Misaligned funding incentives' The authors, Matthew Kahn of UCLA and tough-minded transportation engineer David Levinson of the University of Minnesota, fault the feds for 'misaligned funding incentives,' a lack of cost-benefit analysis and 'mispricing of use.' Their solution: radically reform federal highway progams to direct all current fuel taxes away from new construction and instead use them to 'repair, maintain, rehabilitate, reconstruct and enhance existing roads and bridges.' They call that step 'Fix It First.'But what about growing areas that really need new roads? The next part of Kahn and Levinson's plan, 'Expand It Second,' calls for a Federal Highway Bank that would offer states construction loans 'contingent on meeting strict performance criteria and demonstration of an ability to repay the loan through direct user charges [read: tolls] and capture some of the increase in land values near the transportation improvement.'
Those would be tough pills to swallow, sure to be loudly opposed by any driver or landowner asked to pay more for the direct benefits of new public investment. The hit could be softened, however, by Kahn-Levinson's final proposal, 'Reward It Third.' If a new construction project met or exceeded performance targets such as on-time completion or environmental improvement, the bank would collect a reduced interest rate on the loan, resulting in lower tolls or less value capture from adjacent properties.
There's plenty of sense in these ideas to correct the incentives and pricing around highways, even if a few oxen get gored. While the current federal highway program encourages new infrastructure at the expense of maintaining what we have, the rate of return on these greenfield projects has been declining for decades. That's because the most economically efficient facilities have already been built, even if they're often left to crumble. Furthermore, some studies have shown that road repairs produce more jobs and economic bang for the buck than new construction.
Congress is currently negotiating new a federal surface transportation bill, nearly three years after the last one expired. We've had nine temporary extensions since then, with no change in policy. The prospects for reforming the program along Kahn-Levinson's lines range from slim to none this time. But eventually we'll have to come to grips with the accelerating disintegration of the world's greatest highway system and its negative effects on our economy, our job and cultural opportunities and even our pocketbooks.
Conrad deFiebre is a Transportation Fellow at Minnesota 2020, a nonpartisan, progressive think tank based in St. Paul. This article first appeared on its website."
Continuing on our series of anthropomorphic vehicles (Trains and more Trains), Helicopters, Planes, and Boats), and Tom Vanderbilt's different, artistic link to cars, we have the genre of the construction vehicle.
There is of course Bob the Builder, Jack and The Pack from Sodor, and the new multi-ethnic Chuck and Friends.
Bob started off with stop-motion animation, but that is a lost art form, and new episodes are CGI. Jack and his Pack was aimed to be a Thomas and Friends spin-off when they first showed up in Series 6 (2002), but the company that owned Bob and the company that owned Thomas merged (HiT Entertainment (originally Henson International Television, named for Jim Henson), which owned Bob the Builder, acquired Gullane which owned Thomas), and no need for the in-house competition. HiT was recently acquired by Mattel.
My son had a Chuck dump truck (his grandfather likes to give him dump trucks), and I just found on Netflix that the character has been cartoonified by Hasbro. Hasbro lost the contract to make Bob toys in 2005.
Which is more pure, a toy turned into a cartoon (a la Chuck), or a cartoon turned into toys (a la Thomas (which of course originates as a book))?
See also Dumpy the Dump Truck
Strib: No-frills air carrier is filling in gaps :
"Meet Great Lakes, a no-frills newcomer that believes there's a lucrative opportunity in connecting rural America with bustling airports like MSP. The Wyoming-based airline is in the midst of adding more than a dozen new cities to its local roster, with the Twin Cities serving as its hub for 20 percent of its destinations."It provides "essential air services" with big government subsidy.
The frequent fliers who flew too much - Los Angeles Times. Matt Yglesias writes:
Back in 1981, American Airlines needed cash. Interest rates were sky high, so rather than borrowing the money, they hit upon a weird idea: sell lifetime passes good for unlimited first-class air travel for $250,000. Add a companion pass for $150,000 more. The resulting program, the AAirpass, turned out to be a huge disaster brilliantly chronicled over the weekend in the Los Angeles Times. Losing millions of dollars a year on its highest-use members, American has in recent years been employing investigators to try to find instances of rule violations that let them cancel members' passes.I absolutely love this story because it illustrates so much about the business and economics worlds. It highlights the fact that there are a lot of ways to engage in "hidden borrowing" and that this kind of hidden leverage is often very costly. It illustrates the importance of avoiding adverse selection if you want to succeed. And most of all, it illustrates that over and above the structural issues facing the notably unprofitable U.S. aviation industry there also seems to be a problem of systematic mismanagement and repeated blunders.
Amtrak to Use iPhones to Streamline Service - NYTimes.com:
"Old-school train conductors are finally ready to give up their hole punchers to try something new: the iPhone.Amtrak, the government-owned corporation that oversees the nation’s railroad train services, has been training conductors since November to use the Apple handset as an electronic ticket scanner on a few routes, including from Boston to Portland, Me., and San Jose, Calif., to Sacramento."
Ars: Google gets license to test drive autonomous cars on Nevada roads:
"On Monday, the Nevada Department of Motor Vehicles approved Google’s license application to test autonomous vehicles on the state’s roads. The state had approved such laws back in February, and has now begun issuing licenses based on those regulations.The state previously outlined that companies that want to test such vehicles will need an insurance bond of $1 million and must provide detailed outlines of where they plan to test it and under what conditions. Further, the car must have two people in it at all times, with one behind the wheel who can take control of the vehicle if needed.
The Autonomous Review Committee of the Nevada DMV is supervising the first licensing procedure and has now approved corresponding plates to go with it, complete with a red background and infinity symbol."
The Prospect Park Newsletter sends me to Pete LeBak ... :
"Pete LeBak's barber shop is a neighborhood institution in Prospect Park. He's been here over 31 years. Light rail is going in on University Ave. now, and the work has wiped out the parking in front. Access is daunting folks; traffic has slowed to a trickle. So business has cratered. By the way, that's 'Bug' (short for Ladybug) on the floor in her usual posture. She's about 110 in dog years. Neighbors and friends are trying to get Pete some press and spread the word to help him make it through the construction gauntlet. Pete was fixing to move out, but he thought back on the 31 years he'd been there, all the friends he'd made, and it got his back up. Longtime customers stopped by to beg him not to go. So now he's fighting to stay. We're rallying the troops."[the external cost of transportation construction is non-trivial]
Reason says: New Light Rail Ridership Falls Short by More Than Half:
"Los Angeles’ brand new $930 million Exposition light rail line is carrying so few riders and bringing in so little revenue that it will, at best, take 65 years for the train to earn back its capital investment (not including ongoing operating costs). If the project completes its next phase and establishes an at-grade train that runs through heavy street traffic from Downtown L.A. to the city of Santa Monica, it will not pay for its construction for 170 years. "
Daniel Teridman @ CNET: Hindenburg disaster 75 years ago abruptly ended zeppelin era:
"Yet the Hindenburg accident, as dramatic as it was, only put a sudden exclamation point on the already seemingly inevitable end of the era of the great zeppelins. In the years leading up to World War II, airplanes were already beginning to supplant the giant airships as a much more efficient and economical way to cross oceans."
KurzweilAI: Robot cars get ready to roll:
"Manufacturers such as Ford have announced that autonomous vehicles are the future. Bill Ford, executive chairman of the Ford Motor Company, recently said that the company sees ‘the introduction of semi-autonomous driving technology, including driver-initiated ‘auto pilot’ capabilities, and vehicle platooning in limited situations’ as early as 2017.In the longer term, from 2025 onwards he believes we will see the ‘arrival of smart vehicles capable of fully autonomous navigation, with increased ‘auto pilot’ operating duration, plus the arrival of autonomous valet functions, delivering effortless vehicle parking and storage.’"
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