In recent years, three states have legalized or decriminalized jaywalking: Virginia and Nevada did so in early 2021, and California legalized jaywalking at the start of 2023. The traditional argument for anti-jaywalking laws is that they protect pedestrians from themselves, by limiting their … [Read more...]
Agenda: Dynamic congestion pricing for autonomous vehicles
Autonomous vehicles work. They are already replacing full-time service drivers in Uber, Lyft, and taxis.https://twitter.com/aarmlovi/status/1857439087843516481Delivery vehicles might come soon. Corporate fleet vehicles. And the big jump, of course, will be when they're available as … [Read more...]
Congestion Pricing: Traffic Solver or Sin Tax?
The goal of congestion pricing is not to penalize car trips but to smooth demand over a more extended time to reduce congestion. Unfortunately, many new congestion pricing schemes seem designed to ban cars rather than manage demand for car trips.This article appeared originally in Caos … [Read more...]
Urban Planners Overregulate Private Lots but Neglect the Design and Regulation of Public Spaces
Because there are no market signals that could identify the best and highest use of street space, it is the role of urban planners to allocate the use of street space between different users and to design boundaries between them where needed.This article appeared originally in Caos … [Read more...]
Do People Travel Less In Dense Places?
Every so often I read something like the following exchange:"City defender: if cities were more compact and walkable, people wouldn't have to spend hours commuting in their cars and would have more free time.Suburb defender: but isn't it true that in New York City, the city with the most … [Read more...]
traffic and development
One common NIMBY argument is that new development is bad because it brings traffic. As I have pointed out elsewhere, this is silly because it is a "beggar thy neighbor" argument: the traffic doesn't go away if you block the development, it just goes somewhere else.But my argument assumed that … [Read more...]
Will congestion pricing hurt cities?
In a series of recent posts, Tyler Cowen has taken the view that congestion prices in major downtowns are a bad idea. This is what one might expect of a typical New Jerseyan, but not a typical economist.The writing in these posts is a bit squirrelly (or is it Straussian?), but as best I can make … [Read more...]
Louisville and density regulation
Lydia Lo and Yonah Freemark have an interesting new paper ? EditSignon zoning in Louisville on the Urban Institute website. They point out that of the land zoned for single-family housing, 59 percent is zoned R4, requiring 9000-square-foot lots, which means no more than five houses per … [Read more...]