Sunday, August 04, 2013

Support Uber, more on Engineering City USA

Just a couple quick items this week:
"More surprising, perhaps, is the second city on our list: Houston. The world energy capital is home to 59,000 engineers — second most in the U.S. after the much larger Los Angeles metro area — and has a concentration of 22.4 engineers per 1,000 employees. Although it does not match the Bay Area in elite engineering schools, Houston is home to Rice University and the University of Houston, both highly regarded, and, perhaps equally important, a strong sub-structure of trade and technical schools that feed into the engineering pool. 
Key here is the energy industry, which is far more technology-dependent than many might believe. Houston is arguably now the country’s most important emerging city, with the largest job growth of any major metro area. Not only can engineers make money there, unlike in Silicon Valley, they can also afford to buy a house."
"No big economic region outperforms Houston, a metropolitan area of more than 5 million people that boasts arguably the strongest big-city economy in the nation. Not only the global hub of the energy industry, it also boasts the nation’s largest medical center and has dethroned New York City as the nation’s leading export center."
Anybody who's a regular reader of this blog should know that it goes without saying that I support Uber in its quest to loosen up Houston's restrictive taxi regulations, increase competition, and lower prices, just as the Chronicle wisely does.  And just as I would have been embarrassed for Houston if we had allowed United to stop Southwest from international competition at Hobby, the same will be true here if by some strange twist of politics we end up allowing the taxi companies to protect their monopoly here.  Houston is a free market city - let's be sure to act like it.

Taking a short vacation to cooler climes next weekend, so probably no post next week.

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1 Comments:

At 3:08 PM, August 08, 2013, Blogger Michael said...

>>Although it does not match the Bay Area in elite engineering schools, Houston is home to Rice University and the University of Houston, both highly regarded,

Rice is an elite engineering school. Period.

 

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