The problem is indifference. The powerful don’t use public services and don’t work for the government. They work in finance and other high paying professions, live in suburbs and increasingly work from home. Government employment is not respected and increasingly left to immigrants and the poor. Nobody in power cares and it shows.
I left NJ when Christie cancelled the tunnel project. I had graduated a few years before and the predicted improvement of the commute for my particular line that changed in Newark was pretty dramatic. Especially when considered over a 3 decade career. This stuff matters. Landed in the Philly burbs in a town with zero transit, but incidentally we're in the corridor identification program and there's a chance I'll end up with a station a quarter mile away from my house.
The New York congestion pricing plan deserved to die. Congestion pricing worked in London because part of the money was spent building up much better bus service throughout the center. The New York plan did nothing at all on those lines: it was simply a tax from which all the money (charged off-peak as well as peak) was to be shoveled into MTA's ongoing capital program, which is based on very different priorities. It would have done nothing at all to improve transit, as it simply displaced the state's responsibility for adequately funding the MTA's ongoing capital needs. The plan did nothing to put the MTA on the path to more efficient project delivery, so once the income stream was bonded out, the MTA would be back in crisis yet again in a few years.
In my comments and also in my news feed, I see that some people look on this as a setback for reduction of net CO2 emissions! Of course if successful it could have meant fewer cars entering Manhattan (w/o, because of a design flaw, discouraging driving within Manhattan), but the climate change benefits are miniscule in relation not the congestion reduction benefits, even taking account of the design flaw, it is hard to know where this idea came from. The analysis of how a second best tax on congestion coud also be a third best tax on net CO2 emissions is best left to someone's Ph D thesis.
I may be misconstruing something here and if so, I apologize in advance. But I think twice in this article you seem to be encouraging democrats in NY to use gerrymandering as a tactic. If I didn’t misunderstand, I would say I was …. surprised… to see you take this position. I admit my bias is that gerrymandering is always wrong and has created a decent amount of the issues we face in politics today. Would love to read your perspective on this further. Thank you.
It should be noted that contempt for the government is an example of horseshoe theory where the right and left curve around and actually become more like each other. Lefties and righties desperately want to discredit the government so that they can replace it with their dictatorial version of doing what is right. You can't get a new government unless you disparage the current version into the ground first.
I will reluctantly stipulate that some transportation systems are “public goods” and do not lend themselves to the discipline of a private company operating in a competitive marketplace (You could certainly have competing bus lines and taxi/ride sharing companies though multiple parallel subway tunnels would be problematic). But then, what is the system of infrastructure governance that will drive cost-effective priorities and efficiency? Contractors and unions will always have more political influence than taxpayers and fare payers.
At the very least the “Metro” business model needs to change. For example, if you tied the amount of public funding to the amount of fares collected, you would create the institutional incentive to focus on efficiency and customer service.
This comment is a request for help that is mostly unrelated to today's post but somewhat inspired by the reference to Jed Kolko on what kinds of research are helpful to policymakers.
My daughter, an economics major who will be a senior at UC Santa Barbara in the fall, has a summer internship with the "California Policy Lab" (https://www.capolicylab.org/careers/cpl-undergraduate-summer-institute/), where she will get the opportunity to do independent research over the summer using the UC Consumer Credit Panel (https://www.capolicylab.org/data-resources/university-of-california-consumer-credit-panel/), a "new dataset of anonymized consumer credit information, created for the purpose of studying consumer financial well-being and identifying trends among California households related to credit, debt, income, and mobility."
I'm wondering if anyone here has suggestions for interesting and useful questions she could study over the summer. She has been most interested now in issues related to homelessness and/or health policy, but I think she is most interested in doing research that folks might actually find useful. So if anyone has suggestions they would be welcome.
Another way to ask the question. If you had ten weeks over the summer with access to this data, what questions would you study?
I would be interested in intergenerational debt patterns. Does a parent’s use of debt affect their children’s, and how does that vary by income.
Different question would be what does debt look like for men and women before and after divorce, possibly correlate that with custody, alternatively correlate it with judicial orders —- do judges tend to favor men or women or neither in divorce settlements.
Since I am the only one who has answered so far. You might want to post in the evening thread.
I can nearly guarantee you that any Fortune 2000 company has a pretty good idea of what their price elasticity is when they decide to raise prices on any of their products/services. It seems to me that there is likely a ton of elasticity research, it just is not academic in nature. How hard would it be to pay some economists to go aggregate it?
Well, I know of several companies that have real data, and just assumed that most companies would, but maybe I am thinking too much about digital goods, where it is quite easy to identify users that do NOT buy and differentiate them from users that do.
"Everyone is happy except for anti-sprawl ideologues who are angry that improved road capacity generates “induced demand” and more people commuting from further flung Virginia exurbs.
This is probably true, but from a normal person’s point of view, it’s part of the reason for doing it."
Hi Matt Y, this was a really interesting piece and I agree with a lot of it, but I really, really wish you didn't contrast "anti-sprawl ideologues" with "normal people," like it's somehow abnormal and wrong to notice that sprawl is really bad for the environment and people's health (all that sitting on your ass while driving your car everywhere is bad for you).
Yes, I understand that Americans love them some suburbs. I understand that suburbs have many good qualities. Some are intrinsic to suburbs and would be impossible to recreate in cities, like lots of square footage per person and big backyards for people who love gardening (such as my in-laws). Others are due to sh*tty local governance in the US, like, "we move to the suburbs to escape from urban crime" would not be an issue if city governments were better at fighting crime.
Just, I want more people to live in cities, I want cities to be *attractive* to more people, and I don't want to be called an ideologue because of this.
In all fairness, I have to recognize that I am unusual. I grew up in an apartment building in a big city in Poland, so to me, a big city is what feels normal and natural. Now I live in a suburb, because my husband and I got great jobs in academia, and there are literally no walkable neighborhoods within at least a 10 mile radius of where our jobs are (it's SoCal, Jake!). It's suburban living that feels kind of unnatural to me, in that it's both too rich in some ways (all that space/person feels extravagant) and too poor in others (I have to drive an hour to go to a fine arts museum instead of hopping off the light rail a stop early on my way home from work).
Also, because I grew up in Poland, I just don't have the same kind of baggage re: cities that natural born Americans have. In Poland of my childhood, we didn't have homelessness, we had very little crime (all the crooks were in the government, ha ha), we didn't have drug addicts shooting up in public parks, the occasional guy who passed out drunk in the street would be picked up swiftly by the police, and, finally, we were all white, so we didn't have the horrible racist dynamics of "ew, the Black people are in the city, let's all move to the suburbs."
Is your desire for more people to live in cities just a matter of thinking “I love this, more people would too if they had a chance”, or is your desire that more people should live in cities because it’s the right and moral thing to do? If the latter you’re an ideologue, if the former you’re a nice person.
Isn't there an option where you think both and so you are a nice ideologue? I also grew up in a city, albeit in a less dense part of a city. I then lived in a much more dense part of that city during school and now live is a part of the city that is moderately dense. However, I commuted to a public high school in a suburb for complex reasons and so got to see a lot of suburban life as well.
It was my experience that people who lived in the suburbs had very distorted views of city living and imagined it as much more crime ridden, gritty, and isolating that is actually the case. In every urban neighborhood where I have lived, I have felt safe even out alone at night, I have experienced only mild property crime and seen some public drug use that was distressing because the person doing it seemed to be hurting but didn't actually hurt me. All the actual violent crime that I have experienced which has all been gender based violence happened in high school in the suburbs. I have known my neighbors as well or better in the city than I saw was the case with my classmates in the suburbs. Those neighbors were much more culturally diverse and I think that greatly added to my quality of life.
So I think people would probably like city living more if they gave it a chance. I know lots of friends who live in the suburbs who would prefer to live in the City but cannot afford to. I have no friends in the city who would like to move to the suburbs but that is probably because that move is frictionless.
I also think that a dense urban environment with walkable neighborhoods supported by public transit is more environmentally sustainable. I think racially integrated neighborhoods are more culturally vibrant but also more supported of racial equity than racially homogenous suburbs. I also think that urban living often is more supportive of small businesses that are less economically exploitative and provide a lot of opportunity for cultural enrichment and social connection that are supportive of good civic practices and good emotional and social health. So, yes, I think more people should live in cities because it is the more right and moral things to do.
I think the objection to the idea that makes me an "anti-sprawl ideologue" is that those sort of labels only seem to flow one way. There doesn't seem to be a similar term for folks who are advocating for careless expansions of suburbs because they think that lifestyle is inherently superior.
A tension I kind of see is that congestion pricing advocates present congestion pricing as harming nobody but a few rich suburbanites, but if it affects so few people how is it going to raise tons of revenue and radically shorten commutes for everybody else by removing lots of cars from lower Manhattan? Can all of this be true?
(As a New Jerseyan who takes the bus into Port Authority every day (but never drives in) congestion pricing doesn't affect me, but I was curious to see whether it would make the trip quicker.
Matt, A whole article could be written on how unending paperwork and legally mandated training classes are hurting different professions. I have first hand knowledge about this in hospitals where many of our best doctors are retiring early. Recently I have also seen how these requirements are hamstringing senior people in the investment industry. Government mandated classes that could be accomplished in 3 days are taking 3 weeks of time. Is it only Blue states or is it all over our Country?
As someone who grew up in the Raleigh area, there’s a reason Cary a suburb of Raleigh Is sometimes referred to as the containment area for relocated Yankees.
Did the Tariffs Trump put on European goods and Biden kept make the purchase of Lightweight EU trains too costly? Just wondered because they would be so much more efficient and comfortable and would cause less wear & tear on the tracks.
Maybe if congestion not tax revenues was the focus we could start with putting tolls on all bridges entering manhattan and see its impact
The problem is indifference. The powerful don’t use public services and don’t work for the government. They work in finance and other high paying professions, live in suburbs and increasingly work from home. Government employment is not respected and increasingly left to immigrants and the poor. Nobody in power cares and it shows.
I left NJ when Christie cancelled the tunnel project. I had graduated a few years before and the predicted improvement of the commute for my particular line that changed in Newark was pretty dramatic. Especially when considered over a 3 decade career. This stuff matters. Landed in the Philly burbs in a town with zero transit, but incidentally we're in the corridor identification program and there's a chance I'll end up with a station a quarter mile away from my house.
The New York congestion pricing plan deserved to die. Congestion pricing worked in London because part of the money was spent building up much better bus service throughout the center. The New York plan did nothing at all on those lines: it was simply a tax from which all the money (charged off-peak as well as peak) was to be shoveled into MTA's ongoing capital program, which is based on very different priorities. It would have done nothing at all to improve transit, as it simply displaced the state's responsibility for adequately funding the MTA's ongoing capital needs. The plan did nothing to put the MTA on the path to more efficient project delivery, so once the income stream was bonded out, the MTA would be back in crisis yet again in a few years.
In my comments and also in my news feed, I see that some people look on this as a setback for reduction of net CO2 emissions! Of course if successful it could have meant fewer cars entering Manhattan (w/o, because of a design flaw, discouraging driving within Manhattan), but the climate change benefits are miniscule in relation not the congestion reduction benefits, even taking account of the design flaw, it is hard to know where this idea came from. The analysis of how a second best tax on congestion coud also be a third best tax on net CO2 emissions is best left to someone's Ph D thesis.
I may be misconstruing something here and if so, I apologize in advance. But I think twice in this article you seem to be encouraging democrats in NY to use gerrymandering as a tactic. If I didn’t misunderstand, I would say I was …. surprised… to see you take this position. I admit my bias is that gerrymandering is always wrong and has created a decent amount of the issues we face in politics today. Would love to read your perspective on this further. Thank you.
It should be noted that contempt for the government is an example of horseshoe theory where the right and left curve around and actually become more like each other. Lefties and righties desperately want to discredit the government so that they can replace it with their dictatorial version of doing what is right. You can't get a new government unless you disparage the current version into the ground first.
Nature of the beast.
I will reluctantly stipulate that some transportation systems are “public goods” and do not lend themselves to the discipline of a private company operating in a competitive marketplace (You could certainly have competing bus lines and taxi/ride sharing companies though multiple parallel subway tunnels would be problematic). But then, what is the system of infrastructure governance that will drive cost-effective priorities and efficiency? Contractors and unions will always have more political influence than taxpayers and fare payers.
At the very least the “Metro” business model needs to change. For example, if you tied the amount of public funding to the amount of fares collected, you would create the institutional incentive to focus on efficiency and customer service.
This comment is a request for help that is mostly unrelated to today's post but somewhat inspired by the reference to Jed Kolko on what kinds of research are helpful to policymakers.
My daughter, an economics major who will be a senior at UC Santa Barbara in the fall, has a summer internship with the "California Policy Lab" (https://www.capolicylab.org/careers/cpl-undergraduate-summer-institute/), where she will get the opportunity to do independent research over the summer using the UC Consumer Credit Panel (https://www.capolicylab.org/data-resources/university-of-california-consumer-credit-panel/), a "new dataset of anonymized consumer credit information, created for the purpose of studying consumer financial well-being and identifying trends among California households related to credit, debt, income, and mobility."
I'm wondering if anyone here has suggestions for interesting and useful questions she could study over the summer. She has been most interested now in issues related to homelessness and/or health policy, but I think she is most interested in doing research that folks might actually find useful. So if anyone has suggestions they would be welcome.
Another way to ask the question. If you had ten weeks over the summer with access to this data, what questions would you study?
I would be interested in intergenerational debt patterns. Does a parent’s use of debt affect their children’s, and how does that vary by income.
Different question would be what does debt look like for men and women before and after divorce, possibly correlate that with custody, alternatively correlate it with judicial orders —- do judges tend to favor men or women or neither in divorce settlements.
Since I am the only one who has answered so far. You might want to post in the evening thread.
Thanks ML!
And I actually didn't know there was an evening thread but will try there as well.
So what does everybody think? She'll end the "pause" right after the election or is it dead?
RE: Elasticity
I can nearly guarantee you that any Fortune 2000 company has a pretty good idea of what their price elasticity is when they decide to raise prices on any of their products/services. It seems to me that there is likely a ton of elasticity research, it just is not academic in nature. How hard would it be to pay some economists to go aggregate it?
Do they have real data, or an intuitive understanding of their market that lets them estimate that?
My experience is that it’s the latter, but if they’re competent their estimates are good.
Well, I know of several companies that have real data, and just assumed that most companies would, but maybe I am thinking too much about digital goods, where it is quite easy to identify users that do NOT buy and differentiate them from users that do.
"Everyone is happy except for anti-sprawl ideologues who are angry that improved road capacity generates “induced demand” and more people commuting from further flung Virginia exurbs.
This is probably true, but from a normal person’s point of view, it’s part of the reason for doing it."
Hi Matt Y, this was a really interesting piece and I agree with a lot of it, but I really, really wish you didn't contrast "anti-sprawl ideologues" with "normal people," like it's somehow abnormal and wrong to notice that sprawl is really bad for the environment and people's health (all that sitting on your ass while driving your car everywhere is bad for you).
Yes, I understand that Americans love them some suburbs. I understand that suburbs have many good qualities. Some are intrinsic to suburbs and would be impossible to recreate in cities, like lots of square footage per person and big backyards for people who love gardening (such as my in-laws). Others are due to sh*tty local governance in the US, like, "we move to the suburbs to escape from urban crime" would not be an issue if city governments were better at fighting crime.
Just, I want more people to live in cities, I want cities to be *attractive* to more people, and I don't want to be called an ideologue because of this.
In all fairness, I have to recognize that I am unusual. I grew up in an apartment building in a big city in Poland, so to me, a big city is what feels normal and natural. Now I live in a suburb, because my husband and I got great jobs in academia, and there are literally no walkable neighborhoods within at least a 10 mile radius of where our jobs are (it's SoCal, Jake!). It's suburban living that feels kind of unnatural to me, in that it's both too rich in some ways (all that space/person feels extravagant) and too poor in others (I have to drive an hour to go to a fine arts museum instead of hopping off the light rail a stop early on my way home from work).
Also, because I grew up in Poland, I just don't have the same kind of baggage re: cities that natural born Americans have. In Poland of my childhood, we didn't have homelessness, we had very little crime (all the crooks were in the government, ha ha), we didn't have drug addicts shooting up in public parks, the occasional guy who passed out drunk in the street would be picked up swiftly by the police, and, finally, we were all white, so we didn't have the horrible racist dynamics of "ew, the Black people are in the city, let's all move to the suburbs."
Is your desire for more people to live in cities just a matter of thinking “I love this, more people would too if they had a chance”, or is your desire that more people should live in cities because it’s the right and moral thing to do? If the latter you’re an ideologue, if the former you’re a nice person.
Isn't there an option where you think both and so you are a nice ideologue? I also grew up in a city, albeit in a less dense part of a city. I then lived in a much more dense part of that city during school and now live is a part of the city that is moderately dense. However, I commuted to a public high school in a suburb for complex reasons and so got to see a lot of suburban life as well.
It was my experience that people who lived in the suburbs had very distorted views of city living and imagined it as much more crime ridden, gritty, and isolating that is actually the case. In every urban neighborhood where I have lived, I have felt safe even out alone at night, I have experienced only mild property crime and seen some public drug use that was distressing because the person doing it seemed to be hurting but didn't actually hurt me. All the actual violent crime that I have experienced which has all been gender based violence happened in high school in the suburbs. I have known my neighbors as well or better in the city than I saw was the case with my classmates in the suburbs. Those neighbors were much more culturally diverse and I think that greatly added to my quality of life.
So I think people would probably like city living more if they gave it a chance. I know lots of friends who live in the suburbs who would prefer to live in the City but cannot afford to. I have no friends in the city who would like to move to the suburbs but that is probably because that move is frictionless.
I also think that a dense urban environment with walkable neighborhoods supported by public transit is more environmentally sustainable. I think racially integrated neighborhoods are more culturally vibrant but also more supported of racial equity than racially homogenous suburbs. I also think that urban living often is more supportive of small businesses that are less economically exploitative and provide a lot of opportunity for cultural enrichment and social connection that are supportive of good civic practices and good emotional and social health. So, yes, I think more people should live in cities because it is the more right and moral things to do.
I think the objection to the idea that makes me an "anti-sprawl ideologue" is that those sort of labels only seem to flow one way. There doesn't seem to be a similar term for folks who are advocating for careless expansions of suburbs because they think that lifestyle is inherently superior.
A tension I kind of see is that congestion pricing advocates present congestion pricing as harming nobody but a few rich suburbanites, but if it affects so few people how is it going to raise tons of revenue and radically shorten commutes for everybody else by removing lots of cars from lower Manhattan? Can all of this be true?
(As a New Jerseyan who takes the bus into Port Authority every day (but never drives in) congestion pricing doesn't affect me, but I was curious to see whether it would make the trip quicker.
Matt, A whole article could be written on how unending paperwork and legally mandated training classes are hurting different professions. I have first hand knowledge about this in hospitals where many of our best doctors are retiring early. Recently I have also seen how these requirements are hamstringing senior people in the investment industry. Government mandated classes that could be accomplished in 3 days are taking 3 weeks of time. Is it only Blue states or is it all over our Country?
As someone who grew up in the Raleigh area, there’s a reason Cary a suburb of Raleigh Is sometimes referred to as the containment area for relocated Yankees.
Did the Tariffs Trump put on European goods and Biden kept make the purchase of Lightweight EU trains too costly? Just wondered because they would be so much more efficient and comfortable and would cause less wear & tear on the tracks.