RTD’s Death Spiral

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Denver’s Regional Transportation District (RTD) has entered what is known in the transit industry as the Transit Death Spiral. Ridership has fallen 7 percent since 2015. This reduces the funds available to operate RTD buses and trains, so RTD has cut service and increased fares to be some of the highest in the nation.  read more »

Chinese Sci-Fi Writers Give Us A Glimpse Into China’s Dystopian Present And Future

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A thoroughly scientific dictatorship will never be overthrown — Aldous Huxley

In contemporary China, it’s hard to know what people outside the party dictatorship think about the future. As in the former Soviet Union, often the best guide may be not in the controlled media or cowed academia, but in the speculative wanderings of writers.  read more »

The Cure for Inequality is More Laissez-Faire

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That means less cronyism and more competition.

“Inequality is not necessarily bad in itself: the key question is to decide whether it is justified.”____ Thomas Piketty in Capital in the Twenty-First Century.

Piketty’s words read like a premise that is only half right, followed by a problematic corollary. Reasonable people will agree that some inequality is not only “not necessarily bad” but also very desirable and very necessary in order to stimulate the economy’s entrepreneurial and innovative spirits. Further, if some inequality is desirable, how much is enough and how much is too much? And who gets to decide?  read more »

A Sprinkle of Stores – Wrestling With Jacobs’s Uncertainty

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In her 1961 book, Jacobs made daring observations about how the “good city” works. A good number of passages in the book dealt with safety, such as the following:

“The basic requisite for such surveillance [of the street] is a substantial quantity of stores and other public places sprinkled along the sidewalks of a district; enterprises and public places that are used by evening and night must be among them especially. Stores, bars and restaurants, as the chief examples, work in several different and complex ways to abet sidewalk safety.”  read more »

San Bernardino Slams Brakes On Big Solar

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The San Bernardino County’s Board of Supervisors slammed the brakes on big solar projects and highlighted a challenge California could face if it seeks to eliminate the use of fossil fuels.  read more »

Los Angeles Rail: Ridership Decline Estimated at 42 Percent

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The Reason Foundation has just published an important review of transit in Los Angeles County, by transportation consultant Thomas A. Rubin and University of Southern California Professor James E. Moore II. A total of four reports have been released, under the title A Critical Review of Los Angeles Metro’s 28 by 2028 Plan. Links are provided at the end of this article. More reports are to follow.  read more »

The City Of Dallas Needs A Homebuilding Boom To Ensure Economic Success

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While the North Texas economy is booming, the core city of Dallas faces challenges bedeviling other cities: a dwindling middle class, bifurcation into neighborhoods of haves and have-nots, and an emerging home affordability problem.  read more »

California's Message: You Built That, Now Get Out!

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The people who build our homes increasingly can no longer afford them. As the state elite and their academic cheering crew celebrate our progressive boom, even the most skilled, unionized construction workers, notes an upcoming study, cannot afford to live anywhere close to the state’s major job centers.  read more »

The State of Jefferson

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Last year a neighbor began flying a State of Jefferson flag on the side of his house that faces mine. I had no idea what it represented, so I looked it up. Short version: the 23 rural northern counties of California want to break away from the rest of the state so they can do their own thing.  read more »

INRIX 2018 Congestion Scorecard

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INRIX has released its 2018 traffic congestion numbers for more than 200 urban areas around the world. Unfortunately, the company changed its methodology from previous years, so the numbers aren’t comparable. It also isn’t clear how INRIX ranks congestion.

For example, the INRIX web page notes that, “In 2018, Bogota drivers lost 272 hours due to congestion — more than any other city in the world.” Yet Bogota is ranked number three behind Moscow (where drivers lost 210 hours) and Istanbul (where drivers lost only 157 hours).  read more »