Archive for December, 2008
The Price is Often Wrong
A critical point from my man, AC — proper road pricing is an absolute prerequisite for proper transit pricing. That doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t consider increasing fares on lines and times experiencing crush capacity. But to use price rationing for transit while most of the region’s congested roads are entirely free doesn’t make a [...]
The South is Different
Matt’s pretty much the best blogger out there, but this isn’t quite right: This is, of course, but a small slice of the larger southern politics tradition which has always insisted since the end of the Civil War that cheap labor and a low-tax, low-service, high-inequality social and economic system are the key to prosperity. [...]
Build What When
Urbanists and transit fans can be histrionic. It’s true. And that’s coming through loud and clear from the urbanist blogosphere, which is currently very, very upset that Obama hasn’t led off every speech on stimulus with a rousing call to abandon our automobiles and connect every town with over 500 people to a high-speed maglev [...]
SUPERTRAIN
It begins: Congressional transportation leaders plan to announce today that the federal government is seeking contractors to build a new $30 billion to $40 billion high-speed rail line between Washington and New York that would be used exclusively by passenger trains. Amtrak‘s current Northeast Corridor rail line is shared with freight and commuter trains, which [...]
I Like My Rebates Lumpy
Ezra discusses the potential for a near-term cap-and-trade plan and writes: If you wanted to use the tax to change behavior rather than fund investment, however, you’d have to make it much larger, and then you’d probably want to look at ways to offset the impacts on low and middle income households. Luckily, the CBO [...]
Green Rules
Last week, TOW linked to this interesting study from the Federal Transit Administration. It computes and compares emissions and energy use per passenger mile across different transportation modes. Transit does very well against personal automobiles (as you’d expect, but as is often denied by the Wendell Cox-es of the world). So too does transit perform [...]
Google FAIL
I’m trying really, really hard to understand why WMATA might not want to participate in Google Transit. And I’m failing. This is incredibly boneheaded. There are no words. Go read Greater Greater on the subject, and sign their petition.
Dry Powder
However one feels about the merits of an automaker bail-out, it’s important to recognize the political opportunity cost of pushing one through. Legislators spent two weeks of a special session trying to make this happen — using time, energy, and political capital which might have been spent on something else. Still worse, they failed, which [...]
NoVa Asks
Following up on my query below (where are the stimulus requests for the Washington region?) BeyondDC reports that Northern Virginia submitted most of its projects as a regional request from the Northern Virginia Transportation Authority: In total, NVTA suggested $2.4 billion in projects, broken down into three categories: Projects ready-to-go within 3 months, 6 months [...]
Plans
The Overhead Wire directs us to a list of Ready-to-Go infrastructure projects from the US Conference of Mayors. It’s kind of fun to click through, but I’m hoping it’s not exhaustive. As far as I can tell, Washington hasn’t asked for a thing, as haven’t Arlington, Bethesda, or a host of other jurisdictions in the [...]