PEOPLE DIE WHEN GOVERNMENT MESSES UP.

Object to more government action, though, and somebody will carp, "You must want people to die."

Sometimes, no matter what action governments take, people die.  Consider Strong Towns contributor Patricia Tice asking, "What if There Had Been No Interstates?"  Based on a small sample, New Hampshire with its contrarian traditions and understanding the ways federal matching funds ensnare politicians, things look pretty good.

The first 16-mile segment got built quickly, but that was a coastline connector that reinforced existing transportation patterns. As they started pushing in toward the center of the state, progress slowed dramatically. By the time they got past Manchester and headed toward Concord, sections got built as local concerns were addressed, but it was slow-walked. The Franconia Notch project dragged out well into the 1980s. Ultimately, they stretched the implementation across nearly 50 years for a bare-bones system.

Well, this is North of Boston, where "You can't get there from here" is a tradition.

DIVIDE THE RISKS AND MULTIPLY THE TRANSACTION COSTS.

Institutions that make possible the separation of risks in order that each be priced separately, for instance the risk of a cargo being lost at sea separated from the risk that the cargo doesn't command a remunerative price when it arrives, have long contributed to a broader prosperity.  "We thus take for granted the slicing and dicing of risks to ships, even if there no longer is a Lloyd's coffeehouse with a bell that rings to announce a sinking, and we understand foreign-exchange hedges against loss in the value of the cargo on delivery."

A LAMENT FOR ROAD SOCIALISM.

Strong Towns contributor Ryan Puzycki rebuts claims that Austin's unbuilt light rail line is evidence transit is useless.

For more than a century, American policy has systematically favored the automobile. It is not entirely unreasonable, given the long history of state-funded roadways and municipal control of city streets, that roads are seen as an unquestioned function of government. Many transit systems, by contrast, were originally private, always regulated, increasingly constrained, and eventually absorbed as they were “outcompeted” by government roads. The collapse of private transit, and its subsequent strangulation, is considered a natural outcome — as if this was not engineered by policy.

That highways are considered politically neutral is itself ideology masquerading as common sense. Transit is treated as “socialism on wheels” while highways are the American way: a big-government, government-funded, deficit-financed free-for-all. Yet these highway socialists still argue that transit should “compete in the marketplace.”

But there is no marketplace for transportation. Transit competes with highways in the same way that the Washington Generals compete with the Harlem Globetrotters: the Globetrotters always win.

Never mind for the moment the way the rent-seeking of railway promoters in the nineteenth century gave the Good Roads movement (which started with bicyclists!) an opportunity to seek their own rents.  We're now at the stage of road socialism where the highway builders run out of other peoples' money.

Interstate highway projects are eligible for up to 90% federal funding, meaning a state may contribute as little as ten cents on the dollar, with the rest drawn from a trust fund kept alive by general revenue transfers that every American taxpayer finances. So Governor Abbott’s claim that Texas is building transportation “without local tax increases” is narrowly true: Texas is building highways through nationalized inflationary deficit-spending, seizing private property unilaterally, and handing cities the bill for the damage. The professed fiscal conservatives who lecture Austin and other cities about responsible spending perpetuate the largest federally subsidized transportation entitlement in American history and call it freedom.

This is not a free market in transportation. This is not fiscal conservatism. It’s central planning for cars, paid for by everyone, yet accountable to no one.

Until the real debt ceiling crashes in, which might be sooner than you think.  Interstate highways and junk bonds, bought for a dime on the dollar.

SOCIALISM FOR CARS AND PLANES.

Not so much, though, for Florida's Brightline, which has borrowed heavily to build its concept fast passenger railroad between Orlando and Miami.

Brightline took on far more than just labor and rolling-stock costs.

It bought right of way in one of America’s most expensive real estate markets; built nearly 170 miles of new track alongside an active railway corridor; constructed stations in downtown Miami, Fort Lauderdale, West Palm Beach, and Orlando; installed modern signaling and grade crossing safety systems; and navigated several years of environmental review, litigation, and regulatory approvals.

The upfront capital costs, running into the billions, were financed through private loans at commercial interest rates. That debt, which is now strangling the company, results from a system rigged against trains.

When you fly, you use infrastructure built and maintained by the government (at various levels), including airport terminals, runways, and air-traffic control systems. When you drive, you’re using a highway system that cost more than half a trillion public dollars to build—plus tens of billions, annually, to maintain. And to be clear: The federal government covers roughly half of those costs from general tax revenues—not gas taxes.

With Brightline, there is no equivalent public backstop. The company built the tracks, paid for the land, financed the stations, and carries the full capital cost of its infrastructure—borrowed at market rates—on its balance sheet.

It's not that the air traffic control system or the Interstate Highways are any model of Public Excellence, and the hoops Amtrak or the Commuter Rail authorities have to jump through to add service are that much more favorable.

Unfortunately, the essay, a policy brief from the High Speed Rail Alliance, looks to the wrong place for relief.  "Tell Congress: It’s time to reconnect the country with high-speed and regional rail!"

No.  Tell Congress to privatize the airports and air traffic control system, end the "essential air service" subsidies and all the other rents to general aviation enthusiasts and the owners of executive jets, and privatize and allow tolling on the interstate highways and the remaining Universal System highways.

THE ROAD TRIP TRADITION.

Never mind those temporarily high motor fuel prices, "America's Love Affair With the Road Endures," according to Salena Zito.

Since the first American road, the Lincoln Highway, opened in 1913, Americans have found that their relationship with their nation and the roads that connect us north, south, east, and west is almost patriotic in concept.

Whether you are on the road for hours or days, whether you stay in your home state or visit multiple others, there is a breadth of history, scenery, and experiences that connect all of us, whether we stay ensconced with our families in our cars or stay in campgrounds with a community fire ring, or at a motor lodge, or if you just take a day trip to the local state park. One of the most interesting things we could do this summer is take a road trip, large or small, to experience the country for the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence.

Ah, yes, the Lincoln Highway.  "Not far from Cold Spring Shops headquarters is the first seedling mile of the Lincoln Highway, an attempt by early twentieth-century entrepreneurs to build a paved highway from coast to coast.  The effort was as much an attempt to lobby for federal funds as it was to improve the roads."

SILLY, MEANINGLESS WORDS.

Streetsblog's Kea Wilson has long taken up the cause of getting around by anything other than a motorcar.  Which is fine.  Using the Student Affairs vocabulary polluted by fake psychiatry is not.  She goes there all the same.  "Meet the NIMBY’s Toxic Cousin: the NOMS (Not On My Street)," with the sub-headline, "Are neighborhood 'car supremacists' taking over our community meetings — and what do we do about it?"  That might get the Streetsblog set nodding their heads and stroking their hipster beards.  It does little to change minds, and the point of holding a community meeting might be to ... offer information and persuasion to shape transportation policy.

SUBURBANIZATION IS A SOCIALIST DISASTER.

That might not be what Grant Ennis, Brent Toderian, and Tom Flood had in mind when they wrote "The One-Hour City Conspiracy" for Streetsblog, positing "Too many people are forced into car-dependent lives, with more health harms, more crashes, more noise, more air pollution, more social isolation — and less space for everything good our streets should be giving us."

Read on, though, and note Your Tax Dollars at Work (I remember the signs hailing the a-building next section of Interstate 94 in that way) with Technocratic Overreach and Government Spending as far as you can pedal a bike.

WHAT'S YOUR ALTERNATIVE?

Earth Day always brings out the sort of people who would like to scold us for being prosperous.  Carbon Outfront! by Lloyd Alter identifies those things we most deserve to be spanked for.  "Our planetary boundaries are being breached by cars and cows."  The author confesses to "spitballing."  Read his conclusions though, and ask yourself whether he wants the ongoing energy crunch to continue or not.

I taught my students about planetary boundaries because I realized I was too carbon-brained and wasn’t giving them enough information about many of the other problems we face. But after a week of thinking about them, I realize how interrelated they all are, and they almost all come back to the problems caused by cars and cows, both of which are directly or indirectly products of the fossil fuel economy.

I know it is a simplistic view of things, but we may see it play out in real time if this stupid war continues and the cars have no fuel and the cows have no feed.

Then I suppose we'll all live like it's 1825.

INFRASTRUCTURE IS THEIR LEAST IMPORTANT PRODUCT.

In Transportation for America, Corrigan Salerno asks, "This Congress is focused on how federal dollars go out the door in the next surface transportation reauthorization, and it looks like states might win big time. But with a track record like theirs, why shouldn’t Congress consider who else might use their money better?"

Nobody?

With the vast majority of funding flowing directly to them, State DOTs are, in effect, in charge of the federal highway program. If they are to claim credit for successes, they need to be held accountable for their failures. While local-led planning and project delivery could get things wrong just as much as state DOTs do today, they may also end up being more accountable to the priorities and nuances of communities, based purely on their proximity. When your city or county misspends money or fails to take care of obvious needs, it’s a lot easier to hold them accountable than a faceless, faraway, typically unelected state transportation agency.

As an indication of just how far away they are from thinking about outcomes, one of AASHTO’s top talking points revolves around how good they are at spending other people’s money quickly.  Obligation rates, meaning simply the speed at which federal dollars are spent by a recipient, do not imply any measurement of success based on outcomes. If anything, the use of obligation rates as a metric should be scrutinized. What are you getting for that spending? Are results improving at unprecedented rates? Or are DOTs just prioritizing funding any investment as fast as possible?

In the manner of anything governmental, one requires a list of acronyms. "DOT" refers to state departments of transportation.  "AASHTO" refers to the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials.  That "and transportation" is a recent addition, as the acronym used to be "AASHO" which offers opportunities for all sorts of mischief.

None of which matters.  County road commissioners and state departments of road building are competing to get federal matching funds, which is to say, the local rent-seekers get to wet their beaks and future generations are on the hook to repair or replace it, which means hoping some future Member of Congress will write that project into some future porkulus.

IF ONLY THERE WAS A QUICKER WAY HOME.

The Green Bay Packers just put up two touchdowns on the Bears.  Oh, sorry, the Major League Baseball season opened in Milwaukee, with the Brewers allowing the White Sox a home run in the first and a home run in the ninth and otherwise battering Pale Hose pitching, 14-2.  And as I type, the Milwaukee traffic reporters are talking about all those people trying to get home.  Oh, did I mention that Interstate 94 is being widened in the vicinity of the Stadium.  Construction delays they'll never get back.  Wait, isn't that a line from "Take Me Out to the Ball Game?"

Now, look closely at this partially-colorized photograph, showing Milwaukee County Stadium, which the county built with the hopes of attracting a Major League Baseball team.

I forget the timing of the construction of Milwaukee County Stadium: it was there a few years before the Braves decamped from Boston, and this event took place before the outfield bleachers were built.  Focus, dear reader, on the embankment in black and white back behind the third-base grandstand and parking lot.  Two electrified tracks last operated by The Milwaukee Rapid Transit and Speedrail Corporation, and the substantial girder and truss bridge carrying trains over the Menominee River and The Milwaukee Road's main line.  And Speedrail had hoped to hang on long enough to be able to cash in on ball game traffic, as well as on passengers headed for the new Milwaukee County Zoo, a-building not far from where the electric cars ran.

That was not to be.

The photographer did not yet know that this photo, taken Labor Day of 1950 in downtown Hales Corners, was of the last run of duplex streetcar 39-40, which was wrecked in a fatal collision on a return working with the special train.

That was the end of Speedrail, although some of the right-of-way was available for streetcar service to the stadium.

That curved retaining wall on the southeast corner of Calvary Cemetery is still there, over seventy years on.  I have noted before that no Milwaukee team has won a World Series since the streetcar to the stadium went out of service.  I'm not sure whether the expansion of the expressway, which runs just to the left of the photo, will encroach on any of the trees or of those electric transmission towers, which are still in place with no streetcars or interurbans to run under them.

But I want to end this post on a cheerful note.  There have been too many gloomy posts of late.

THE FAILURES OF ROAD SOCIALISM.

Kea Wilson's "What If The Rising Costs of Car Dependency Were As Visible As Gas Prices?" in Streetsblog is a couple weeks early to be an April Fool post.  There is imaginative editing of gas station signs and message boards to accompany a secondary headline reading "Gas station billboards remind U.S. residents every day that driving is getting more expensive. What if they told a different message about the high costs of our autocentric transportation system?"

SNOW CLEARING MAKES DRIVERS LESS VIGILANT.

Well, why not?  Automobiles go faster because they have brakes, and safety appliances make drivers less vigilant.  So, too, with snow clearance.

Perversely, aggressive winter road treatments with salt—beyond their documented harm to the environment, infrastructure of all kinds, and human health—also appear to make us less safe by converting icy conditions into wet ones. Not because of the treatment itself but, I believe, because it diminishes the natural traffic-calming effect of snow and ice. It shifts us from cautious drivers in slick conditions—who simply cannot drive too fast for those conditions—back into ordinary drivers on over-designed roads.

Chuck Marohn of Strong Towns has previously written about the increase in traffic injuries and fatalities that occurred during the COVID-19 pandemic, and how the actual cause of increased danger was reduced congestion and therefore greater freedom to drive at unsafe speeds on roads that were designed to prioritize speed over safety. I believe these statistics about winter driving reflect the same phenomenon. As with crashes in congested traffic, winter weather crashes, while possibly more frequent, tend to occur at slower speeds and are correspondingly less deadly.

Winter weather causes all of us to drive carefully and patiently, alert for the unexpected. It reduces the illusory margin of safety provided by wide lanes and excessive shoulders. Just as snow throws leafless trees into stark relief against a background of white, so it also exposes the dangers of conventional roadway design.

That's not a surprise.  "The safer people perceive their cars to be, the more risks they take with them."  But fitting passenger automobiles with a spear on the steering column to encourage less aggressive acceleration and braking, or using cosmetic curves, trees, the full suite of traffic taming methods, all of which produce fewer crashes and longer travel times, are not easy policies to sell.

PREDATORY SPEED TRAPS?

Reason discovers one.  "Brookside, Alabama, made national news in 2022 after investigations revealed it was bankrolling itself through predatory traffic enforcement."

Advantage, Cold Spring Shops?  "Financially strapped suburbs shaking poor people down with all sorts of niggling fines (a Strong Towns theme)?"

CAPTURED BY RENT-SEEKERS.

In the fall of 2017, I took advantage of the off-season hotel rates to explore the rapid transit projects of the Cities.  Those included the Northstar commuter line, running between the baseball stadium in Minneapolis and a parking lot in Big Lake.  My impressions:  "Most laid-back commuter train I've ever seen. Train pulls into Minneapolis and probably half the passengers on the upper deck just sat there. I will confess to getting a bit antsy, even though I let the Chicago mob detrain before I leave my seat, that's usually a wait of two or three minutes."

The coaching stock was laid out in the German regional train fashion, with grouped seats facing tables, mostly used for electronic devices rather than a low-stakes card game.

And now the service has shut down.  "Doomed From the Start" according to Charles "Strong Towns" Marohn.

In 2001, a county commissioner named Peter McLaughlin came to my graduate transportation class to pitch a project called Northstar Commuter Rail. He was one of the central political figures behind the effort, and his presentation reflected that. He talked about coalition-building, federal funding formulas, and the work required to align the two. What he didn’t talk much about was how the system would function as transit.

At the time, commuter rail sounded exciting. I went into the class curious. I left unsettled.

During the lecture, I asked some basic questions about viability. Why would the line stop in Elk River instead of continuing to St. Cloud, the major regional center north of Minneapolis? McLaughlin’s answer had nothing to do with ridership, service, or making the system work. It had everything to do with where the politics and the funding allowed the project to go.

This was long before Strong Towns. I didn’t yet have the framework to name what bothered me. I just knew that if the goal of the presentation was to convince me this was a good transportation project, it had the opposite effect.

Northstar opened in 2009. Today, it’s widely regarded as a failure. Ridership never materialized as promised, service was steadily scaled back, and last month the state shut the line down, once its obligation to repay the federal government for the grant funding expired.

Mr Marohn was asking the right questions.  There have been many Strong Towns posts dealing with highway improvements over the years, and the ones that go bad, and there are many, tend to be the ones where there's funding available for a specific sort of improvement, such as an overpass or a diverging diamond interchange or a cluster of rotaries and getting the money is more important than, oh, keeping pedestrians and bikers safe and reducing the severity of motor vehicle collisions.

WHY URBAN POLICY ADVOCATES FAIL.

Last fall, we noted an essay by Streetsblog's Hayden Clarkin, who was not a fan of making motorists miserable, and might have recommended that advocates of a certain stripe lose the smug.

His colleague Alex Burns didn't get the memo.

The Trump Administration continues to dismantle federal climate policy, and Biden-era goals are drifting increasingly out of reach. As the federal government of the world’s second-biggest polluter abdicates responsibility, state and local governments must accelerate the decarbonization efforts. This is especially true for the transportation sector, the country’s biggest emissions source, as state and local governments are key decision makers on highway and transit spending.

Unfortunately, even states that have pledged to take climate seriously are failing to reduce transportation emissions at the rapid pace that is needed. At the root of this failure is an unwillingness by policy makers to inconvenience drivers and meaningfully depart from a car-dominated transport system. As progress on climate goals falters, it is time for state transportation leaders to come to terms with an inconvenient truth: climate goals are not feasible without a swift and methodical reallocation of road space away from cars.

"Unwillingness by policy makers to inconvenience drivers."  As if defenders of the status quo or advocates of the proposition that the private automobile confers freedom of movement don't already think of urban transit advocates as a convex combination of smug and depriving people of their freedoms.  Moreover, Mr Burns's essay does nothing to disabuse people who think of bicycle lanes and road diets as deliberately taking road space away from cars.  Those are Desirable Features and Governments Aren't Doing Enough.

Supporting policy actions have focused on improving multimodal transportation options and promoting denser, walkable, urban land use. Projects that significantly impact cost and convenience for car drivers have been largely off-limits.

Nowhere in his essay, though, do we see any mention of treating the roads and parking spaces as productive assets and pricing them accordingly.  Those policies impose costs but might improve convenience.  Can't have that, the streets have to be narrowed.

COME UP WITH A BETTER VALUE PROPOSITION.

Passenger Rail advocate Theo Anderson thinks he's being provocative.  "You Really Expect Me to Drive to Louisville?"

I was on a Chicago L train recently, staring at a picture of a glass of bourbon, when I blurted out: “That’s crazy.”

An ad for Louisville, running along the top of the railcar, provoked the outburst. The tag line said “Short Drive. Tall Pours.”

It makes sense to pitch Louisville as a getaway destination for Chicagoans. It’s a fine city. It has an “urban bourbon trail” that the city’s tourism website calls it a “curated collection of local bars and restaurants,” with “some of the city’s largest collections of Bourbon and in most cases even Bourbon-infused cuisine.”

That’s great. But it’s crazy to call the nearly 300-mile, five-hour car trip to Louisville a “short drive.” It’s even crazier that you can’t take a train from Chicago to Louisville. There’s barely even service from Chicago to Indianapolis. You can take an Amtrak train twice a week and arrive downtown in the middle of the night.

To be fair, Indiana is the main source of this insanity. The state’s governor cut the $3 million annual subsidy for Amtrak’s Hoosier State line in 2019, which killed the only usable train service between Indianapolis and Chicago. But even that train ran just three days a week.

Sadly, Indianapolis has never been serious about offering passenger-train service, despite being right in the heart of the most railroad-dense region in the nation and 200 miles from Chicago—with a major research university, Purdue, halfway between.

In a related post, he makes the argument that there's no "convenience" in being able to drive from Chicago to Indianapolis, let alone to continue to Louisville.

Cars are superior to trains and transit, so the theory goes, because they offer freedom. But a couple of times a year, when the bus doesn’t work out, I actually drive the Chicago-Indy route. It’s then, when I’m behind the wheel, that the madness and absurdity of this idea becomes horribly clear.

You can set your own schedule, sure. But cars subvert freedom in so many ways. The loan payments and the cost of gas, repairs, and insurance, for starters. And then the endless stresses of the road. The stretch of Interstate 65 that connects Indianapolis and Chicago ranks 58th of the 100 “most loathed” highways in the U.S. The whole route is jammed with semi trucks. And northern Indiana is especially prone to wind gusts. Lanes are often closed for repairs and construction for long stretches. And that’s the least of it, in some ways. Because getting to I-65 means navigating the stop-and-go traffic on the highways that wrap around Chicago.

When you’re stuck in Chicago traffic or, even worse, going 75+ mph in a narrow construction zone, pinned between concrete barriers on one side and a semi on the other, you have to wonder: If we can’t make trains work here, can we make them work anywhere?

I confess that whenever my travels take me anywhere that involves Indianapolis, it's easier from DeKalb to proceed by way of Interstate 39 south from Rochelle and via Interstate 74 southeast from Bloomington.  That gripe he makes about the semis on Interstate 65 (my bypass routing gets its share as well, there are a lot of fleet operators who don't mind going a few more miles around to avoid the tollways) could be material for a separate stock-taking post, about the railroads leaving the retail intermodal money on the table.

All the same, I'm not sure Passenger Rail advocates make a case for more trains by appealing to their own experience.  Over the Festive Season, the latest issue of Trains hit the Cold Spring Shops mailbox, with an article about the busiest Amtrak stop in Iowa.  That would be Osceola, which is a convenient, by Iowa standards, drive from Ames (Iowa State University) and Des Moines (the state capital).  Chicago and North Western gave up on Ames sometime after 1960, while the Rock Island Line was finished west of the Quad Cities early in the 1970s.  That article noted one friend of Amtrak who admitted to prefer the one slow, not reliable, California Zephyr, for Chicago trips rather than endure the fatigue of driving and the traffic jams and parking charges.  Another noted that a coffee shop in the station would make more sense — there currently is none — with a few more trains on the route.  Yes, up to Amtrak day, there was the overnight Denver Zephyr and a long-distance day train, the former Nebraska Zephyr for and from Lincoln, and frequency and connectivity matter.

That noted, I call for Passenger Rail advocates to come up with a better value proposition because "avoid the strain, take the train" was a losing argument sixty years ago.  Yes, that was an actual tagline.  Note when those trains serving Ames and Des Moines quit.  Our British cousins had a comparable slogan.  In those days, WGN Radio had a traffic helicopter or two (eventually aerial spotters of traffic jams proved to be expensive and hazardous to pilots) and a few of their rush-hour reports were sponsored by Chicago and North Western, operating their air-conditioned, Bi-Level Commuter Streamliners.  Their tagline: "Go North Western, it's the very best way to go."  One of the messages had a patter song about the joys of being stuck in traffic.  "Brake.  Accelerator.  Brake.  Accelerator.  Pound your fist upon the dashboard."  For all the good it did.  Your Northwest Side Grabowski could be listening to the WGN traffic reports, and, indeed, watch the Commuter Streamliners rush by while he was doing the brake-accelerator-pound sequence during rush hour on the Northwest Expressway.  And yet he, and all the other Northwest Side Grabowskis, would be right back in the traffic jam the next day, and the next.

THE INTERNAL IMPROVEMENTS DELUSION.

Two hundred years ago, the Erie Canal opened for business from Albany to Buffalo.  In his tribute to the canal, Pajamas Media contributor Rick Moran notes that once upon a time presidents looked to the Federal Constitution for the specific authority to spend money.

DeWitt Clinton tried to get financing from Congress for his project, which Thomas Jefferson called "madness." However, President James Madison believed that using federal dollars for a state project was unconstitutional and refused to sign the bill authorizing congressional funds.

America's longest canal up to that point was 27 miles. Clinton was proposing the construction of a canal 13 times larger, much of it through wilderness, using Irish immigrant labor and, most astonishingly, without any trained engineers.

The original engineers were largely self-taught locals who designed and constructed the canal despite having never seen one before.

It got built, and although the original course has in places been filled in and elsewhere bypassed by subsequent expansions to create the New York Barge Canal, historic bits of it remain for your entertainment or edification.

SOME THINGS NEVER CHANGE.

I never lack for opportunities to reflect on the same things.  "Maybe the best thing for urban neighborhoods is for Wise Experts and their Urban Renewal to go away.  Those hero projects of the 1960s and 1970s tended not to turn out well."

URBAN ECONOMICS SHOULDN'T BE THIS HARD.

It isn't.

"Walkable urban areas are popular but have an affordability problem."  Well, yeah, you don't have to buy an indulgence any more to live next to the cathedral, but if you're able to make markets all over the world using contemporary information technology, and you want to walk to the office, isn't that going to make the rent gradient steeper?  "Remove the constraints, watch the reallocation to housing and office towers commence." So it is, yet again, and the poor and the ethnics are hardest hit.

It's an emergent phenomenon, and the sort of technocratic order the article suggests is not likely to work well. "To spur walkability and equitable access to walkable areas, cities can advance zoning reform, foster non-car transportation options, preserve and invest in affordable housing, and plan for walkable neighborhoods to be resilient to climate impacts, the report states."  The problem is, the preservation of the houses closest to the office towers is going to make precisely those houses more valuable, and the implicit transportation cost of walking, even with slow motor car traffic in cities, and even slower bus or rail transit, makes the rent gradient even steeper.

There's no end to the wishful thinking.  Consider "Could Charlotte transportation referendum price people out of their houses?"

THINKING REALISTICALLY ABOUT URBAN TRANSIT.

Streetsblog's Hayden Clarkin offers an instructive "What I've Learned From Getting Transit Wrong."  It's worth reading in full.  Let me highlight a few observations.  He first tackles a myth, "people choose not to ride transit."  Sorry, no.  "Years ago, I believed that if someone drove instead of taking the train or bus, it meant they were rejecting transit. That not riding was an active choice against it."

Look no further, dear reader, than any of the Chicago "expressways," several of which have rapid transit lines in the median strip (at the cost of stations the riders have to play Frogger to get to) and a few of which have a Commuter Rail line close alongside.  Those people who are stuck in traffic when the expressways aren't expressing aren't blind to those trains going past: rather, they'll put up with the traffic rather than whatever is less appealing about the L trains or the scoots.  As Mr Clarkin puts it, "Transportation isn’t a binary; it’s a marketplace. People weigh their options and pick what works best for them in that moment, whether that’s transit, a car, a bike, or walking."  He notes that Metro-North's New Haven line serves some of North America's richest suburbs, and people of means use it.  (We'll leave go for the moment the presence or lack of subscription club cars and bar cars.)