CA disease, DC danger, Ashby, rail, peak oil, toll roads, free buses, and more
Smaller misc items and some of my recent Opportunity Urbanist posts:- In catching up with my badly backlogged newsfeeds, I found several items on the Antiplanner of interest:
- A ranking of states by both personal and economic freedom, where Texas scored very highly on both.
- A developer claims that Houston is too competitive and, despite our reputation, is not actually all that "developer friendly" because of the difficulty of making profits in such a competitive environment. In most other cities, substantial regulations create "barriers to entry" that limit developers to a small oligopoly with the resources to push through the regulations, and the lack of competition substantially boosts their profits
- How the 'Prius Effect' undermines the environmental case for light rail
- AP/Cato and Glaeser sum up the problem with high-speed rail: the costs are more than double the benefits even with generous assumptions. Hat tip to Barry.
- Just passing along without comment or endorsement: a former MIT prof gives the arguments against peak oil theory in the NY Times.
- Joel Kotkin has a piece on the dangerous rise of the powerful centralized capital (DC) over everybody else, including major commercial centers like NYC and Houston ("Rome vs. Gotham"). Hat tip to Holmes, who suggested Francisco D’Anconia’s “Money” speech in Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand as commentary:
“When you see that trading is done, not by consent, but by compulsion--when you see that in order to produce, you need to obtain permission from men who produce nothing--when you see that money is flowing to those who deal, not in goods, but in favors--when you see that men get richer by graft and by pull than by work, and your laws don't protect you against them, but protect them against you--when you see corruption being rewarded and honesty becoming a self-sacrifice--you may know that your society is doomed.”
- Houston on U.S. News' "America's Best Places to Find a Job 2009"
- CNN notes that foreclosures are slowing in Houston, that we're extremely affordable, and that future housing risk here is very low.
- Bob Poole at Reason analyzes the past, present, and future prospects for private toll roads in Texas.
- NYC ran a free transit bus experiment, and found substantial speed improvements because of faster boarding times: 24%, meaning a bus could make four runs in the time it currently takes to do three - which of course would be helpful for handling the extra demand due to free service. Since the farebox is typically only small percentage of overall transit revenue, this would be a relatively small loss for a big gain in service. More on the pros and cons of free transit here. Hat tip to John.
- How the 'Prius Effect' undermines the environmental case for light rail
- The cost-benefit case against high-speed rail
- The muddled Ashby mess
- Texas must avoid the 'California disease'
Labels: development, economy, environment, high-speed rail, home affordability, land-use regulation, Metro, mobility strategies, rail, rankings, toll roads, transit
posted by Tory Gattis @ 4:21 PM
9 Comments:
I love Ayn Rand.
Should be required reading for all school kids.
The personal freedom ranking is hogwash. It ignores the right to an abortion because it's politically controversial, but includes the right to carry concealed weapons.
I don't think the right to abortion varies by state. It's a federally protected right, so it wouldn't be relevant to state rankings.
In practice, it does vary by state. In New York, there are no abortion restrictions beyond the federal ones. In Mississippi, there are mandatory waiting periods, mandatory counseling, and parental consent laws, and due to government harassment there's only one clinic left in the entire state.
But my point is not about abortion law. It's that by defining freedom differently, you can make the results appear the opposite of what the Cato study says. A liberal would pick different personal freedom issues: abortion law, GLBT rights, sanctuary cities, civil rights enforcement, police brutality, capital punishment. Even the economic freedom issues are debatable, even excluding leftist thought: a neo-liberal would not mind minimum wages or unions, but would instead focus on how much red tape there is for starting a business and how much the government subsidizes industries; those would probably not be as favorable to the South as the list of freedoms important to a libertarian.
Not a Cato study. This is George Mason University. It does allow you to download the spreadsheet and tweak the weightings to come up with your own rankings.
http://www.statepolicyindex.com/?page_id=143
The study still fails to include variables that are important to many people, e.g. anyone who's not a native-born white male. I can't decide to focus on indices like "Immigrant rights," "racial inequalities in sentencing," and "abortion rights," because they're not even offered as options.
Think of it as the equivalent of a push poll commissioned by a Democrat that asked people which issues are important to them, but only included traditional Democratic strengths like health, education, and social security; if you really care about taxes, you're out of luck.
The point about what makes a city "developer friendly" or "business friendly" is a great one. It is maddening to see people who know little to nothing about business or competition assert indict our system for favoring developers above others when competition and low barriers to entry are just about the least business-friendly conditions imaginable.
Even the latest BP "Tiber" Lower Wilcox discovery in the Deepwater GOM will only delay global oil peak slightly. Giant oil fields are not enough, we need to find several new entire Saudi Arabias.
It's not exactly true that competition is business-unfriendly. It's unfriendly to established big business, and friendly to small business. In most cases it's also customer-friendly, which is the point in the first place.
Post a Comment
<< Home