Out of Control

The latest This Is True newsletter turned me on this great story of a local police idiot.

An insurance company sent a small private fire crew to protect some homes it insured that were threatened by a wildfire. Control freaks at the PD were not happy--"That sounds ridiculous to me," said Kim Rogers, a Ketchum Police Department spokesman, " I mean, this is a Forest Service fire, not a private fire."

Heaven forbid the insurance firm or residents don't leave their fate in the Forest Service's hand, but actually try to protect their property.

Another great article on the antiquated air traffic control system in the United States. Contrary to what most people would expect, the skies are far from being open or a free for all. In fact, most flights follow very limited highways in the sky.

Yet one fundamental shortcoming in the nation's air-traffic system has gone little discussed: the federal map of routes, largely unchanged since the 1950s, that airplanes are required to follow.

Just like rush-hour freeways on the ground, the nation's airways, particularly on the East Coast, have become choked with traffic. Block one with a small thunderstorm and jets sit on the ground waiting for hours because there's no room for them on other routes.

Just as people are starting to see congestion pricing as a solution for airport capacity shortages (it's hard to believe that this is still considered radical for roads in some quarters), perhaps congestion pricing for these "highways of the sky" may be a good idea. Perhaps a system of escalating user fees for the more clogged air routes could solve this. See Reason's work on this here.

. . . the John Birch society flames you for calling bullshit on some of their crazier ideas.

The op/ed that got them so excited here.

In DC its time for that staple of American farming---pork. Despite the higher food costs we all pay and the environmental damage wrought by doing the wrong crops in the wrong places, our crazy agricultural policies march on. And subsidies are at its heart.

My favorite joke about it is: "I saw an employee at the Agriculture department clearing out his desk today. He had to go, his farmer died."

Tracy Mehan has fun article on ag policy silly season it here. He opens with the joke:

"How does a farmer double his income?"

"Get a second mailbox."

My favorite part of the article is:

Apologists for the status quo make three arguments. First, everybody does it. Second, we have the votes in Congress. Third, all this federal largesse is necessary to protect the safest, healthiest food supply in the world. The reader can judge the first and second claims, possibly recalling the fundamental moral lessons your mother told you when you were young.

As to the third, the answer is quite simple. If you withdrew federal subsidies you would have fewer, more efficient, more productive farmers -- not less food.

Corpus Christi is remains one of two cities to which EarthLink remains committed, the other being Philadelphia, which stands as EarthLink’s highly visible entry into muni wireless. At the Public Technology Institute conference I report on below, Oscar Martinez, assistant city manager, disclosed some details of the 10-year EarthLink contract, stating that part of the success is understanding the culture of business, which can be much different from a government operation. “You must understand the goals of your partners and how they fit into the city goals.”

Under the terms of the Corpus Christi-EarthLink partnership:

-- EarthLink paid Corpus Christi $5.3 million for the 147-square mile city network built and financed by the city’s municipal gas and water utility for $7 million.
-- EarthLink pays the city a franchise fee of 5 percent of revenues to pay for right-of-way and other costs associated with network maintenance.
-- EarthLink pays $237,000 per year for use of the city’s fiber optic backbone to backhaul wireless network traffic.
-- EarthLink provides 10 free hot spots within the city, although not at airports and convention centers.
-- EarthLink must optimize the network to provide access to 95 percent of Corpus Christi Households
-- Corpus Christi is committed to paying $450,000 this year in wireless network services from EarthLink, although if the city fails to reach that plateau in 2007, the payments will be credited toward billings next year.
-- EarthLink will provide 100 hours a month of maintenance as part of the agreement. Above that limit, maintenance is billed at $200 per hour.
-- EarthLink must provide wholesale access to its network, but is permitted to charge prevailing market rates.

The city did not antagonize the private sector, but did its best to work with it, acknowledging upfront that their vendors and suppliers—EarthLink, Tropos Networks, Northrop Grumman, National Metering Services, not to mention the dozens of hardware and software companies that the various city departments have turned to provide equipment to work with the network—are in this to make a profit. Corpus also uses Verizon Wireless’ high-speed cellular data network as a back-up.

While this is only the first year of service and time will tell if Corpus Christi sees the return on investment it hopes, the city got off on the right foot by not pretending that the economics of broadband networking were somehow vastly different because it was a municipality and not a commercial company (as opposed to, say Lafayette, La.; Provo, Utah; Ashland, Ore.; and San Francisco, to name just four).

Anywhere municipal wireless is discussed, Corpus Christi, Tex., comes up. Even as cities around the country pull the plug on projects, analysts look to this south Texas city of 300,000 to understand exactly what went right.

The answer might turn out to be respect for both the private sector and the complexities of information technology. As such, Corpus Christi may turn out to be the exception that proves the rule that muni WiFi and broadband is incredibly difficult to pull off.

Corpus is nearing completion of its 147-square-mile network. It is just one of two cities where its private sector partner, EarthLink, has agreed to remain (the other is Philadelphia, its inaugural system, where sticking around might be a matter of pride).

Speaking at a conference last Thursday called “WiFi Done Right Part 2,” organized by the Public Technology Institute (PTI), a Washington-based non-profit organization promoting ideas in urban planning, officials ranging from the city manager to the chief of police sketched a picture of a wireless network that was conceived not as an end in itself, but as an element in a much larger information technology overhaul designed to improve city operations through strategic application of digital technology and large-scale networking. “Our focus was not on the digital divide and not on delivering service into people’s homes,” said George “Skip” Nowe, Corpus Christi city manager.

The New York Times weighs in on the proposed fare increase for New York’s transit system. They suggest that the state and local government pump more money into the transit system to keep the fare increase to a minimum using a very common rationale for low-cost public transit

Keeping fares affordable is critical in a city where so many riders have low incomes.

However, New York City public transit is as close to an egalitarian public transit system as you will find (certain exceptions not withstanding). Using fares to subsidize the poor will also subsidize rich New York investment bankers who take the subway along side them.

An alternative proposal to keep the costs down for the poor is to give them a tax credit for their public transit monthly passes (as tried in Canada, albeit without any income criteria for credit claimants).

At least the NYT acknowledge the role of congestion pricing as the long term solution to New York’s traffic problems.

No mincing words here. Professor and libertarian thinker Tibor R. Machan weighs in on how the European economic history colored Monday’s ruling against Microsoft by the European Court of First Instance.

“Given the history of how most people in Europe had gained their wealth and economic dominance, namely, through politically and militarily backed conquest of and expropriation of resources from millions of subjects—the real exploitation of the feudal, not capitalist, era that gave credibility to Karl Marx’s theory of exploitation—it is perhaps understandable that many in Europe and elsewhere around the globe believe all wealth comes from malfeasance…

“The achievement of wealth through market processes is relatively new in human history and only taken to be the norm by most people in the United States of America and a few other places.”

Read the full comment here.

Given the title and subhead of this blog, here’s something that fits right in.

In Trends in Telecommunication Reform 2007: The Road to Next-Generation Networks, The International Telecommunication Union reports that since 1990, 123 ITU member countries had a private or privatized national incumbent, and several other countries have announced their intention to privatize.

Count this as one of the legacies of the late Milton Friedman. Just 25 years ago, the conventional wisdom was that telephone service was a natural monopoly. Even in Western European democracies, governments ran the phone company. In the U.S., AT&T operated for profit, but it operations were heavily regulated and its monopoly was largely preserved by policy. Long distance competition was just opening up back in 1980, when I was a cub reporter, but competition with a local telephone incumbent was still unimaginable.

The graph below, taken from the report, shows the percentage of ITU countries that have competition for various services.

The gradual introduction of long distance and wireless competition in the U.S., coming at a time when Friedman’s free market ideas were being sparked worldwide via the Reagan and Thatcher policies, showed the world the innovation and growth that could occur when government steps aside. Ironically, the latest political fad has been to re-nationalize: witness Hugo Chavez, current darling of the progressive set, whose government took over Venezuela’s CANTV after more than a decade of success in private hands. Guess it will be back to the days of five-year waits for phone lines.

For its part, the ITU report credits much of the expansion of next generation telecom services to privatization and competition.

“The objectives of privatization are to improve efficiency, productivity, and service quality, as well as to raise capital, improve management expertise and further develop the network,” the report states. “In addition, many countries have found that competition is often more fair when the state avoids being both a market player (as owner or part-owner of the incumbent) and a referee at the same time. Privatization sends the signal that policy decisions and regulations will be fair to all players.”

The entire report is available for SF 100 ($84). The executive summary and a sample chapter can be found here.

A headline news article on Yahoo! this morning points out that there are more parking spaces in Tippecanoe County, Indiana than there are residents. The horrors of suburban sprawl.

However, I have a feeling these results are pretty misleading because Purdue University is located there. This means that the number of "residents" of the county is probably underreported because of the transient student population. Also, Purdue probably gets lots of people coming in from around the state for sports events and they need, you guessed it, parking. Take a look for yourself.

It's pretty tough to separate drivers from their cars, but China's going to try:

China will initiate its first-ever nationwide "no car day" this weekend in an effort to promote environmental health and alleviate increasingly gridlocked urban roads, state press said Monday.

Residents in 108 cities will be urged to take public transport, ride bikes or walk on the nation's first "no car day" on Saturday, the China Daily reported.

"The move is an attempt to raise residents' awareness on energy saving and environmental protection because the country's cities are plagued by traffic congestion and pollution," the paper said.

It did not say why the Ministry of Construction, the sponsor of the activity, chose a Saturday to hold the event.

Government officials and state-run enterprise employees in some cities would be encouraged not to drive, while other urban centres would ban government-owned cars from taking to the roads altogether, it added.

A week-long campaign to publicise the government's goal of getting 50 percent of the nation's urban residents to use public transport instead of private cars would also be initiated, it said.

Article here.

Mexico City has a long history of yanking keys from drivers. Officials figured that would have to cut pollution and boost transit ridership. They underestimated their constituents.

RELATED: Paris vs. SUV

Not the John Edwards version.

In a TCS Daily interview, author/economist Philippe Legrain takes on the notion that America is being yanked apart by language:

I devote a whole chapter of the book to considering Samuel Huntington's argument that Latino immigrants are splitting America in two and find little evidence to substantiate his thesis. To quote just a few facts, census figures show that only 4.2 million of those born in the US - a mere 1.8% - speak Spanish at home and English less than very well, while only 1.2 million of the 232 million people born in the US - one in 200 - speaks Spanish at home and has poor or no English.

...

Huntington also claims that "Many Mexican immigrants and their offspring simply do not appear to identify primarily with the United States." But while only one in three foreign-born Latinos describe themselves as American, this rises to 85 percent among their US-born children - and 97 percent among the US-born kids of US-born Latino parents.

Bonus bit about immigrants with relatively high levels of education:

I certainly agree that the US immigration system is absurdly restrictive in granting visas to highly skilled foreigners, and that US companies suffer, or shift operations overseas, as a result. If you think that Google, Yahoo!, eBay were all co-founded by immigrants, and that nearly half of America's venture-capital-funded start-ups were founded by immigrants, keeping out foreign brainpower is a remarkably stupid policy.

Whole interview here.

RELATED: You know the deal with those immigrants

The things that some people try to associate as being caused by suburbia never seem to stop.

Free Exchange over at The Economist website is discussing the role of government policy in influencing fertility. They argue that if governments want to influence people to have more children, they should spend more on roads to foster a suburban lifestyle.

I would conjecture that causality is exactly the opposite: people with children sort themselves into suburban areas and not that suburbia makes people have more children. The effect is similar to how fat people sort themselves to suburban area as shown in this study.

Don’t expect a baby boom to coincide with highway spending.

As usual, Joel Schwartz cuts through the smog.

The ban on Internet gambling that passed last year could create a heap of trouble between the U.S. and the World Trade Organization.

Antigua and Barbados are pressing their WTO complaint that the ban violated the treaty because it effectively favors U.S. gambling interests over non-U.S. companies that house gaming servers in their countries. And the U.S. Trade Representative is not finding it as easy as he thought to simply state that Internet gambling is not covered by the treaty.

Turns out it just might be part of entertainment services covered by the treaty. And twice, in 2004 and 2005, the WTO ruled against previous U.S. attempts to curtail online gambling by preventing U.S.-based banks from processing transactions with gambling sites.

Although it does not seem likely the ban will be overturned anytime soon, another WTO ruling unfavorable to the U.S. could mean a fine between of up to $10 billion, according to Mark Mendel, attorney for Antigua in the WTO proceeding. And although a trade dispute over Internet gambling may seem trivial, international trade officials are watching the dispute closely and treating it seriously.

Got a whole lot of money that’s ready to burn
So get those stakes up higher!

Market failure – two words heard when discussing the spread of broadband to small cities and less densely populated areas.

Market failure – the chief reason municipal broadband activists give when citing the need for government to fund infrastructure projects like Utah’s UTOPIA. There are some areas of the country, they say, where private investment won’t go. There are some areas of the country, they say, that offer no profitability to attract enterprises. The government, dammit, must step in.

Oh, really?

In catching up with my e-mail alerts, I came across “Zayo Plans Broadband Success in the Boonies” by Carol Wilson in Telephony OnLine. Seems like one entrepreneurial start-up sees opportunity in small markets.

Zayo Bandwidth is getting its start with the acquisition of a series of regional fiber networks, and founders Dan Caruso and John Scarano have lined up $225 million in funding from major venture capital firms, including Battery Ventures, Centennial Ventures, Columbia Capital, M/C Venture Partners and Oak Investment Partners. Caruso and Scarano are both veterans of ICG Communications and Level 3 Communications and are strategically positioning their new company to cover areas they believe are not well-served today.

The initial two acquisitions are PPL Telcom, an Allentown, Penn., company that serves the Northeast via a 4600-route-mile fiber network and Memphis Networx, a 200-route-mile fiber network serving that metro area. In addition, Zayo has definitive agreements in place to buy Indianapolis, Ind.-based Indiana Fiber Works (IFW) and Minneapolis, Minn.-based Onvoy.

“Our strategy is to acquire unique fiber-rich assets throughout the country to create a company that provides large bandwidth responsibly, quickly and reliably,” Scarano said in an interview. “We are being selective in the markets we invest in. Where we are buying the assets, there is limited deep metro competition. We generally do not have assets in NFL cities, but mostly in Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities that have ties to NFL cities. By investing in those areas where incumbents have not invested and where other competitive carriers have largely not invested, we will be able to keep up with the bandwidth demands of businesses in those areas.”

For those who have followed the muni broadband controversy, the fact that one of Zayo’s first investments was in Pennsylvania, where state legislators passed legislation preventing municipal government from setting up competitive broadband operations, is particularly significant. And in Tennessee, municipalities face stern tests and voting requirements before they can set up broadband operations. Opponents said these laws would lead to entire regions missing the digital era. Free marketers said laws like these, in keeping governments out of the market, would make states more attractive to a new generation of broadband investors.

Let me know when Zayo hits Utah.

Hello all! I’m Ben, the newest Reasonoid here. An article in the WSJ (subscription required) caught my attention today. Arlington, Texas is the largest city in the nation without any public transit. Bus service may soon be introduced, yet opposition still exists:

"A mass-transit system should not be a charitable operation," says Warren Norred, the president of Norred Sales and Engineering in Arlington, who helped spearhead the campaign that defeated the most recent bus system at the polls in 2002.

Rather than make bus service a “charity,” there is scope for making bus service more like a business. Arlington could auction the right for bus companies to serve the area, even in sparsely populated suburban areas. Arlington is a good “blank slate” to innovate in public transit rather than imitate the largely failed models of public transit in other U.S. cities.

But at least they aren’t trying light-rail.

Some nice quotes on the benefits of smartly-regulated medical marijuana dispensaries from today's San Mateo County Times:

Since Oakland introduced medical cannabis regulations in 2004, "the dispensaries have been so problem-free and crime-free that citizens who aren't participating hardly even know they exist," said Barbara Killey, an assistant to the Oakland city administrator.

Killey, who oversees the permitting and regulation of the city's dispensaries, would rather the federal government legalize medical cannabis so that pharmacies could sell the drug.

"Since that's not really a current option, then I think dispensaries are the next best alternative," she said.

The collectives pay business taxes to the city, draw people to the community to shop and even reduce crime in their neighborhood because of the security they hire to protect their operation, said Killey.

... San Mateo's mayor agrees that patients are better served by cooperative or collective dispensaries which can offer medical cannabis in exchange for money.

Forcing patients to grow their own medicine is "a very primitive way" of providing medicine, he said.

"What if we decided that you could have all the aspirin you wanted as long as you grew the birch trees?" he said.

Reason's report on medical marijuana dispensary regulation in Los Angeles earned a mention in the LA Daily News a couple of weeks back.

On Sept 27th PRI will be hosting an event that looks pretty fun. Full info here.

SiCKO and Its Malcontents: Health Care on Film
*Michael Moore's Sicko shows the U.S. system leaving millions of Americans behind and allowing insurance companies to profit by denying care to patients, while people in Canada, Cuba, and Britain receive quality care free of charge.

*American film-maker Stuart Browning interviews Canadian patients for his Free Market Cure video series and comes to the opposite conclusion: Canadian patients wait in long lines for care and have poor access to the latest technology and medicines.

*Les Invasion Barbares, Oscar winner for Best Foreign Language Film in 2004, documents the struggles of a cancer patient fighting bureaucracy and union power in a Montreal hospital.

Do these films provide an accurate or complete picture? Clips from SiCKO and the Moving Picture lnstitute will serve as a launching pad for a discussion of health care system failures, domestic and foreign, by a panel of three experts from Canada, Britain, and the U.S.

Join Reason, U.S. Secretary of Transportation Mary Peters, Fox News Channel's Judge Andrew P. Napolitano, MTV's Kurt Loder, SEC Commissioner Paul Atkins, Lynn Scarlett, deputy secretary of the U.S. Department of Interior, former Congressman Dick Armey, Nobel Prize winner Vernon Smith, and numerous others at "Reason in DC" at the Ritz Carlton, October 26th and 27th. The event will also feature a launch party for Reason.tv, Reason's new video journalism project featuring The Price Is Right and Power of 10 host Drew Carey. For registration details and more information, please click here.

A light regulatory hand will be critically important to ensuring landline telephony alternatives remain available, so says Eli Lehrer, a senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, in a new paper, “Keeping the Voices Alive,” that looks at changing wireline technology.

The copper platform is dying, says Lehrer, and it's critical that regulators allow new technologies, including voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) and “device-based” telephony, such as Ooma’s $399 device which, once purchased, the manufacturer claims, allows consumers to make unlimited calls without incurring service fees, to grow without hobbling them with regulatory mandates heldover from a past era.

But to truly open this environment, regulators must get past the notion that copper-based service is the standard by which all service should be measured, he says. This attitude, says Lehrer, risks creating mandates for calling technologies that do not fit their inherent nature.

CNET’s Declan McCullagh thinks so. Here he blogs on 10 reasons why the issue has faded from the tech agenda.

Still, count me among the skeptics. I agree that the Bush administration, the 700 MHz auction set-aside and the reticent Congress, contributed to the issue's cooling from feverish pitch from just a few months ago, but a Democrat in the White House may embolden Congressional members like Rep. Edward Market (D-Mass.) and Sen. Byron Dorgan (D.-N.D.), who have so far seen one of their pet issues beaten back.

Surfin’ on a Sunday afternoon.

The Progress & Freedom Foundation’s Adam Thierer has an excellent op-ed in
The City Journal that answers a recent cri-de-coeur from the Parents Television Council as to “Who Killed Family Hour?”, long regarded as the 8 to 9 p.m. time slot for TV broadcasters (although, as Thierer points out, it was more of a broadcaster convention and was never mandated by the government).

“The answer: parents like me! Armed with all these new viewing options and technologies, parents, not broadcasters, now determine the content of the family hour and when it will take place. We no longer have to sit down at 8:00 each night to be spoon-fed our daily dose of family-friendly fare. For example, in our home, my wife and I have designated one television for most of our children’s video consumption, and we use a DVR to amass a large library of programming that we believe is educational, enriching, and appropriate. We can catalog and archive dozens of programs and supplement them with VHS tapes, DVDs, and computer software. When we allow our children some TV time, we know that they’ll be able to watch our preferred episodes of Dora the Explorer, Go Diego Go, Blue’s Clues, and The Wiggles.”

I had to chuckle when I read that, because at the time my 4-1/2 year old son was watching a DVD of an episode from Gerry Anderson’s great Thunderbirds series, which he chose as a reward for good behavior. And as in Adam’s household, I can probably count the hours of actual TV that my son has watched “live” off the cable box, as in being transmitted that very minute, on two hands. Earlier, I had remarked that I used to watch the Thunderbirds when I was his age. “Did you have a lot of episodes to choose from?” he asked. “No,” I said. “We didn’t have DVDs. You had to watch the Thunderbirds on a certain day at a certain time or else you missed your chance to see it.” His only response was a pained look of what appeared to be incomprehension, incredulity and a trace of abject pity.

I get it. That's the way I look when I read PTC complaints about the scarcity of choices parents have for children’s viewing.

The FCC is considering banning agreements between cable companies and owners of condominiums and apartment buildings, according to USA Today.

This looks like another attempt by the commission to “manage” competition, rather than let the free market play out.

Leaving aside the question as to whether cable service agreements even fall within the FCC’s regulatory purview, the FCC needs to decide on what set of principles its going regulate the business.

The 700 MHz auction rules notwithstanding (more on that later), from what we know, Chairman Kevin Martin is part of a majority of the commissioners who agree with the what free-marketers have said about network neutrality—that the government should use caution because network neutrality would prohibit business agreements that have as much a chance as benefiting consumers as harming them. Point being that consumer “harm” is purely speculative and we have yet to see a concrete example of blatant abuse of market power grow out of the not-quite-neutral nature of the current Internet access business.

Yet the FCC is disregarding this principle when it seeks to dictate the way how a property owners, associations and representatives of large groups of cable consumers can purchase services. Contrary to what the U.S. Telecom Association is telling the commission, the fact that owners of multi-dwelling housing (read apartments and condos) can enter into a multi-year exclusive arrangement with one service provider is not anti-competitive. It’s just the opposite. A condo or rental building, because they deliver so many customers, is an attractive target for all service providers. As such, owners have enormous leverage. This is exactly the environment competition and deregulation is supposed to create!

I had the privilege yesterday of testifying before the Utah State Legislature’s interim subcommittee on Government Competition and Privatization. The subcommittee, which is doing some large scale fact-finding on privatization issues (Reason’s Geoff Segal took a turn at a session earlier this year), devoted the morning to looking at municipal broadband, particularly Utah’s two highly visible projects, UTOPIA and iProvo.

UTOPIA, short for Utah Telecommunication Open Infrastructure Agency, is an organization made up of 14 member cities who have agreed to support a statewide fiber optic backbone that sells wholesale bandwidth to commercial service providers, cable and Internet access companies, large end-users and real estate developers.

UTOPIA’s recent agreements with the final group have touched off questions, especially since in pursuit of them UTOPIA has stepped up recruitment of “non-pledging” members. “Non-pledging” members agree to allow UTOPIA’s network to connect into local facilities, but they do not have to commit sales tax revenues to the project if it needs extra money. As the price for not pledging sales taxes, UTOPIA officials explained, the consortium will not extend its fiber backbone to points all over town. UTOPIA parses this condition as if the town were sacrificing something.

Aside from conjuring a variation on a famous Groucho Marx quote, suggested by the title above, this “non-pledging” member category is incredibly self-serving.

Reason is hiring.

Do have TV/film production skills, research skills, any skills?

Check out the listings here.

If illegal immigrants aren't allowed to do certain jobs then employers will raise wages and hire American citizens, right?

Maybe employers will hire robots instead:

With authorities promising tighter borders, some farmers who rely on immigrant labor are eyeing an emerging generation of fruit-picking robots and high-tech tractors to do everything from pluck premium wine grapes to clean and core lettuce.

Such machines, now in various stages of development, could become essential for harvesting delicate fruits and vegetables that are still picked by hand.

...

Mechanized picking wouldn't be new for some California crops such as canning tomatoes, low-grade wine grapes and nuts.

But the fresh produce that dominates the state's agricultural output and that consumers expect to find unblemished in supermarkets is too fragile to be picked by the machines now in use.

The new pickers rely on advances in computing power and hydraulics that can make robotic limbs and digits operate with near-human sensitivity. Modern imaging technology also enables the machines to recognize and sort fruits and vegetables of varying qualities.

"The technology is maturing just at the right time to allow us to do this kind of work economically," said Derek Morikawa, whose San Diego-based Vision Robotics has been working with the California Citrus Research Board and Washington State Apple Commission to develop a fruit picker.

Article here.

Related: Alex Tabarrok explores similar themes here; How soulless "workers" might take jobs from miners, fighter pilots , surgeons, and prostitutes.

Still waiting for Lou Dobbs to take on those job-stealing, wage-depressing robots.

In their book, The Road More Traveled, and in their Reason magazine article earlier this year, my colleagues Ted and Sam describe the transportation planning dysfunction that has taken hold in so many metro areas: automobility and congestion relief are not high on the priority list because planners are preoccupied with policies designed to get people out of their cars. Since people like to drive and have not proven amenable to playing along with the planners' charade, our public policies and spending priorities in many metro areas are just making traffic worse (i.e., "planned congestion" is the inevitable result). For a refresher, here's Ted and Sam on the Met Council, the transportation planning body for the Twin Cities:

During the next 10 years, the Met Council is planning to invest $4.2 billion in the highway system and $1.4 billion in transit facilities. In other words, the region's primary transportation planning agency has decided to spend 25 percent of its budget on mass transit. But transit accounts for just 2.5 percent of all trips in the region, whether they're for pleasure, taking kids to school, going to the supermarket, or commuting to the office. Less than 5 percent of the Minneapolis-St. Paul region's population uses public transit to get to work, and that share is declining: According to U.S. Census statistics, the number of passengers using mass transit increased slightly in absolute terms between 1990 and 2000, but its market share fell by 12 percent.

The Met Council hopes to double bus capacity by 2030 and greatly expand its light rail line and commuter train system. It also intends to boost transit use from 74.9 million passenger trips per year to 150 million by 2030, even though the current trend projects virtually no growth in use and even though transit lost market share from 1990 to 2000, according to the Census Bureau's decennial data. The Met Council expects 574,625 new jobs to be created in the area by 2030. But even though the vast majority of Minneapolis-St. Paul's population travels to work by car, the planners improbably expect per capita road use to decline. [...]

The net result? Without road improvements, highway congestion is expected to increase from 28 hours annually per traveler in 2001 to 40 hours in 2030. With the improvements, congestion should "moderate" to 37 hours in 2030. Congestion would be 32 percent higher than in 2001, rather than 42 percent higher without the improvements. "Just to keep pace with these [highway] needs," the council's 2030 Regional Development Framework says, "would add $4.7 billion to current plans for the next decade" above the currently planned spending. [...]

To make "more effective use" of the road system, the Met Council believes it has to get people out of their cars. That's unfortunate, especially since the agency admits congestion is many residents' "No. 1 livability issue." The council is spending 25 percent of its transportation funds on a solution that, at most, might improve the quality of life for 5 percent of the population, and it will do nothing for people like Sue. Even transit users might not be better off, since they will be spending more time commuting than if they used a car. Drivers will definitely be worse off. They will be spending much more time stuck in traffic in 2030 than they did in 2006.

If Minneapolis has one of the best planning agencies, what are the others like?

I guess that we'll know about Baltimore soon enough. A current stir over Baltimore's metropolitan transportation plan offers an insight into the politics at play behind these sorts of planning decisions. So let me get this straight--in a metro with a 2.1% transit market share, the planners are suggesting that 29% of spending be set aside for transit projects, and the transit advocates are up in arms because it's not at least 50%?? I was still choking on the 29% figure--eerily reminiscent of the Twin Cities example--when I read that transit advocates wanted even more. This is so pathetically dim-witted that it would almost be laughable--if these weren't real tax dollars, real lives, real mobility, and real prosperity at stake.

I had a piece in Sunday's LA Daily News:

"YOU'VE got to use public transit," Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa declared. "You can't keep on pointing to someone else and saying it's their responsibility."

Imagine the credibility and public-relations points Villaraigosa could have racked up uttering those words while commuting on a bus to City Hall. But instead of being the "eco-friendly transit-riding mayor," Villaraigosa rides an SUV to work.

Yet many Angelenos probably sympathize with the mayor. "Give me a first-rate transit system, and I'll use it," they might say. Until that system arrives, they support new transit proposals, like the $5 billion "subway to the sea," while continuing to drive everywhere.

But what would it say about the practicality of mass transit if the mayor of the city with the nation's best subway system also took an SUV to work?

More here.

Related: Do transit board members ride transit?

Most people think if a band or song gets played more on the radio, they sell more albums. That always made sense to me. But the provocative economist Stan Liebowitz has a different take in "Don't Play it Again Sam: Radio Play, Record Sales, and Property Rights."

If you have a sick fascination for screeds on all that is evil in the private sector and markets, not to mention whitey and the federal government, you can't beat this.

This interesting article by Rex Roy starts with the baseline look below at what lies beneath gas prices. He goes on to discuss many theories and myths about what drives gas prices. Worth a read.

Many factors contribute to the price of a gallon of gas. The good news is that, in general terms, the equation is simple. These are the four main components that determine the price you and I pay:

Crude Oil + Refining Process + Retail Sales/Distribution + Taxes = Price

These components, however, don't contribute equally to the price at the pump. Here's a look at each component and its role in the retail pump price:

*Crude oil -- 57%
--Finding the crude oil
--Getting the crude oil out of the ground
--Transporting the crude oil to the refinery
--Maintaining a reserve capacity of crude oil
--Profit

*Refining the crude oil into gasoline -- 18%
--Producing special blends of gasoline to meet local clean air government regulations
--Transporting the gasoline to the gas station
--Profit

*Selling the gasoline at a station -- 11%
--Operational costs
--Marketing costs
--Profit

*Taxes, federal and state -- 20

A new study from the AEI-Brookings Joint Center for Regulatory Studies finds:

Once we correct for the endogeneity of usage, our models predict no statistically significant increase in accidents from mobile phone usage, whether hand-held or hands-free. Our results call into question previous cost-benefit analyses of bans on mobile phone usage while driving, which typically assume that such bans will have a salutary effect.