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Month August 2009

HSR Urbanists: “We Are All O’Tooles Now”

I probably won’t make any friends today, but now I’ve read one too many urbanist (many who’s ideas I usually respect) use unsound logic to support high speed rail. This argument often includes something like this: “…and furthermore, highways and airports don’t come close to paying for themselves, therefore high speed rail need not meet that hurdle either.” Here’s some examples of the typical contradiction many usually-reasonable urbanists are making when arguing for high speed rail- Ryan Avent in an article plagued with this pseudo-logic: Government is going to build more capacity. Given that, what is likely to be the best investment, all things considered? Available alternatives, as it turns out, are not all that attractive. Roads do not appear to pay for themselves any more than railways do. Receipts from the federal gas tax come close to covering federal highway expenditures, but gas is used on highways and non-highways alike, indicating that at the federal level, highways are subsidized. and: I respect Mr Cowen very much, but I think it’s long past time we stopped listening to libertarians on the issue of whether or not to build high-speed rail. Who will ask whether road construction remotely passes any of the tests they’re so prepared to push on rail? And if we begin charging an appropriate fee on drivers to maintain existing roads and reduce congestion, what do they all think will happen to land use patterns and transportation mode share? Some have emailed to ask me why I dislike Randal O’Toole so much.  The main reason is because people like Avent will always be able to point to the government highway-lover from CATO and rashly proclaim all libertarians have forever lost credibility when it comes to transportation and land use.  Of course, Avent’s narrow-mindedness on this topic deserves contempt […]

Rothbard the Urbanist Part 5: Diversity and Discrimination

This 5th installment of the Rothbard Series dovetails well with the most recent post on segregation by guest blogger, Stephen Smith, as well as a post back in July over at Austin Contrarian.  If you haven’t kept up with our discussion, Murray Rothbard’s classic For A New Liberty can be downloaded free from Mises.org as pdf, web page, and audio book, and you can read the first four parts: Rothbard the Urbanist Part 1: Public Education’s Role in Sprawl and Exclusion Rothbard the Urbanist Part 2: Safe Streets Rothbard the Urbanist Part 3: Prevention of Blockades Rothbard the Urbanist Part 4: Policing In the comments of the first post of this series on public education’s roll in segregation, the discussion delved into the topic of discrimination.  Bill Nelson and I shared our thoughts on discrimination by co-op boards, while another guest inquired about my statement, “elitist institutions often exclude others to their own detriment”  (Rothbard’s words further below make a similar case)  I also referred the guest to a great article on the economics of discrimination and a snippet from an article discussing how private streetcar companies fought discrimination: The Market Resists Discrimination The resistance of southern streetcar companies to ordinances requiring them to segregate black passengers vividly illustrates how the market motivates businesses to avoid unfair discrimination. Before the segregation laws were enacted, most streetcar companies voluntarily segregated tobacco users, not black people. Nonsmokers of either race were free to ride where they wished, but smokers were relegated to the rear of the car or to the outside platform. The revenue gains from pleased nonsmokers apparently outweighed any losses from disgruntled smokers. Streetcar companies refused, however, to discriminate against black people because separate cars would have reduced their profits. They resisted even after the passage of turn-of-the-century laws requiring […]

Zoning as a Tool of Class Exclusion

In regards to zoning, Discovering Urbanism has a nice post up about early 20th century urban planner Charles Mulford Robinson and his planning textbook.  It includes the following corrective to the notion that zoning originated as a way to separate polluting industry from places of residence and commerce: There’s a common narrative about how zoning unfolded in America. First, planners needed to find ways to separate dangerous and unhealthy factories from the places where people lived. Once the legal basis for this tool was secured, it was eventually employed to separate businesses from residents. The final stage of zoning was to segregating different kinds of people from each other. That’s how we reached where we are today. However, the Robinson textbook indicates that this progression was, if anything, reversed. In reality, residences at the time couldn’t be separated much from industry, because many of the working classes had to be within walking distance from their jobs. On the other hand, some of the very earliest uses of zoning were explicitly intended to separate “exclusive” neighborhoods from the lower classes, whether by requiring minimum densities or barring anything but detached single-family housing. Originally posted on my blog.

Urban[ism] Legend: Traffic Planning

Mathieu Helie at Emergent Urbanism posted a link to a interesting game created at the University of Minnesota. Mathieu explains it better than I can: The game begins in the Stalinian Central Bureau of Traffic Control, where a wrinkly old man pulls you out of your job at the mail room to come save the traffic control system. You are brought to a space command-like control room and put to work setting traffic lights to stop and go. Meanwhile frustrated drivers stuck in the gridlock you create blare their car horns to get your attention, and if their “frustration level” rises too high you fail out of the level. As the road network gets as complicated as four intersections on a square grid, the traffic becomes completely overwhelming and failure is inevitable, but the old man reassures you that they too have failed anyway. OK, you’ve played the game? If not, don’t go further until you have. Now that you’ve played the game and failed to control traffic, compare that top-down system with this amazing video a friend sent to me from Cambodia. You’ve gotta see this: Man, I love this video! I must have watched it a couple dozen times. I keep expecting a crash, in what to me (only being familiar with top-down planned traffic systems) looks like complete chaos. Yet pedestrians, bikes, motorcycles, scooters, rickshaws, and cars all make it to their destinations safely, and probably quicker than in the system in the game above. It must be similar to how capitalism must seem chaotic to people who have always lived in planned economies. Don’t mistake me as an advocate of a world without traffic signals. I am quite certain that some sort of traffic signaling would likely emerge from a free-market street system. But, my bigger […]

Rothbard the Urbanist Part 4: Policing

I apologize for the extended delay between posts.  Personal (newborn) and professional priorities have prevented me from having the free time I once had. Unfortunately posts will probably continue to be sporadic until things settle down a little. We are now at Part 4 in the multi-part series delving into the urbanist-friendly ideas in Murray Rothbard’s classic For a New Liberty.   (available free from Mises.org as pdf, web page, and audio book)  In case you missed them, here are the first three parts: Rothbard the Urbanist Part 1: Public Education’s Role in Sprawl and Exclusion Rothbard the Urbanist Part 2: Safe Streets Rothbard the Urbanist Part 3: Prevention of Blockades As we continue through Chapter 11 of For A New Liberty, Rothbard continues to make valid points regarding safety and policing in a fully private-landowner system.  This passage is notably interesting in its discussion of the successes of private railroads.  Whether competition in the private street market would create a vibrant marketplace similar to the early days of the railroad is an interesting topic for discussion.  I’d tend to agree with Rothbard, but of course some imagination is required to envision such a radically different society: There is of course nothing new or startling in the principle of this envisioned libertarian society. We are already familiar with the energizing effects of inter-location and inter-transportation competition. For example, when the private railroads were being built throughout the nation in the nineteenth century, the railroads and their competition provided a remarkable energizing force for developing their respective areas. Each railroad tried its best to induce immigration and economic development in its area in order to increase its profits, land values, and value of its capital; and each hastened to do so, lest people and markets leave their area and move to the […]

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