An influential highway group has called for replacing the flat tax on gas with a percentage tax, according to the Wall Street Journal. They want to replace the current 18.4 and 24.4 cent taxes on gasoline and diesel, respectively, with more flexible 8.4% and 10.6% tax rates. At current gas prices that would [...]
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October 16th, 2010 | Tags: gas tax, Stephen Smith | Category: infrastructure, Transportation | 6 comments |
 printable viewDespite my issues with how new transit projects are implemented in America today, I’m generally happy to see them built. Even though they’re flawed, heavily-subsidized government creations, they make upzoning more palatable and can later be sold off and privately managed. There’s a lot I’d do differently, but on net I think most [...] October 15th, 2010 | Tags: airports, mass transit, Oakland, Shanghai, Stephen Smith | Category: infrastructure, Transportation | 34 comments |
printable viewA lot of fuss has been made by urbanists about how important the ARC transit tunnel under the Hudson is to curbing sprawl in North Jersey, but frankly I’m not convinced that more commuter rail into Manhattan is the cure for what ails New Jersey. The state’s fundamental problem is its reliance on [...] October 11th, 2010 | Tags: commuter rail, New Jersey, nyc, Philadelphia, Stephen Smith | Category: infrastructure, sprawl, Transportation | 5 comments |
printable viewby Stephen Smith Among urban planners, libertarianism gets a pretty bad rap. Melissa Lafsky at the Infrastructurist goes so far as to call libertarianism “an enemy of infrastructure,” and dismisses entirely the idea that private industry can build infrastructure with a single hyperlink – to a poorly-written article on New Zealand’s economy written over [...] August 25th, 2010 | Tags: libertarianism, reason, Stephen Smith | Category: Economics, infrastructure, Jane Jacobs, Transportation | 26 comments |
printable viewMaybe the delay in posts led you to believe the Rothbard Series was complete. The good news is that there are a few more posts to go, and the ones coming up next should be the most interesting to urbanists. If you haven’t kept up with our discussion, Murray Rothbard’s classic For [...] October 19th, 2009 | Tags: emergence, For a New Liberty, Free-market, Murray Rothbard, Private Roads, private streets, privatization, railways, standardization, Transportation | Category: infrastructure, privatization, Rothbard The Urbanist, Transportation | 4 comments |
printable viewIn the comments of my most recent post, insightful commenter, OldUrbanism pointed out some items that need attention: The last two factors, legal costs associated with eminent domain and opportunity costs of land, are in fact often included in typical project cost estimates for both public and private projects. The former is fairly [...] September 6th, 2009 | Tags: correction, Ed Glaeser, Jane Jacobs, reason, robert moses, Sam Staley | Category: infrastructure, Jane Jacobs, Transportation | One comment |
printable viewI 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 [...] August 31st, 2009 | Tags: airports, boondoggles, carbon, CATO, construction, cost-benefit analysis, high speed rail, highways, Matthew Yglesias, Randal O'Toole, ryan avent, Transportation, tyler cowen | Category: Economics, Environment, Free-market impostors, infrastructure, Transportation | 18 comments |
printable viewAt Streetsblog, Ryan Avent presented a scorching attack on the most notorious free-market impostor – Randal O’Toole: Taking Liberties With the Facts for his consistent hypocrisy: The Cato Institute’s Randal O’Toole gets under the skin of many of those interested in building a more rational and green metropolitan geography, but in many ways [...] June 4th, 2009 | Tags: gas tax, Highway, Randal O'Toole, subsidization, Transportation | Category: Free-market impostors, infrastructure, sprawl, Transportation | 65 comments |
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