Tyler Cowen directs us to a new blog at the NY Sun called “Culture of Congestion.” I have a pretty good idea what Tyler thinks about urban development issues, and I know where the Sun generally comes down on such things, so I kind of knew what it was going to be like. And I was right. It’s a shallowly economic, libertarian take on traffic and cities, highlighting lots of counter-intuitive ideas that appeal to the Kotkins among us but which don’t really stand up to close examination.

Examples! CoC author Sandy Ikeda writes:

To pick just one interesting finding, the population density of Los Angeles in 2000 (6,720 persons per square mile) is actually higher than that of New York City (5,309 per square mile). You can find those data here. This has been adjusted for urbanized-area definitional changes that were made after 1990 to make 2000 census data compatible with it; otherwise the raw population per square mile in NYC does exceed that of LA by a considerable amount. (Unfortunately until I’ve found Cox’s specific method of adjustment, I’ll have to take this with a grain of salt.)

Or, hey, don’t take it with a grain of salt. Now, I can’t find Mr Cox’s specific area calculations, but while his population statistics purport to include the Riverside metropolitan area, the numbers he uses almost certainly rule this out (there is no way the LA-Riverside metro area had only 14 million people in 2000). If he’s not including the entire Riverside exurban area, than this specific comparison is meaningless.

Of course, it’s pretty meaningless anyway. Yes, the New York area is sprawling, but a simple examination of averages tells us very little about the real densities involved here. New York packs 10 million people into an area roughly the same size as the City of Los Angeles, which holds fewer than 4 million. The rest of LA’s population is probably more densely settled than New York’s (being surrounded by mountains will do that to you), but that’s primarily because some small subset of New York economic agents are willing to endure ungodly commutes. The last 1 million people in the New York region probably add a third to its total land area, significantly reducing the computed population density.

Moving on: CoC later examines subway fares in New York and says:

But my point here is this: Isn’t arguing that “those who use the system shouldn’t have to pay for all of it” the same as saying “those who don’t use the system at all should have to pay for some of it”? Naturally, the representative wouldn’t put it that way because it exposes the true nature of the transaction, but that’s essentially what he was asserting (at the top of his voice). So a teacher in Fredonia or a bus driver in Buffalo winds up subsidizing my subway ride to my dentist on the Upper West Side.

One could counter that the subsidy is not for me but for the low-income worker who would have to struggle too much to afford a fare that reflected the full cost of his ride. Perhaps, but does that really justify taxing someone who gets virtually no benefit from the system, who might herself be among the working poor, to cover a portion of his (and my) costs? How is that fair?

Let’s set aside, for the moment, the fact that the New York City metro area almost certainly subsidizes road construction, along with lots of other stuff, for the rest of the state. Ms Ikeda calls herself an economist, so I’m going to use a word she should know and understand: externalities. There are plenty of relevant ones here to choose from–carbon emissions, congestion, the spillover effects of density in NYC that help make the city an economic juggernaut–all of which indicate that the state should, in fact, be subsidizing transit. I don’t know what the point is in writing about this stuff if you’re going to ignore all the important economic insights involved.

And what I especially hate is that there are vital economic criticisms to be made of the way we build our cities. It is a damnable shame that dense urban areas build so little new housing. What I don’t get is the mindset that’s alive to this economic insight, but which then shuts off analytically when other important points are made.