NO MIRACLE, ONLY PREPARATION.

Rideshare users bore the brunt of World Cup’s opening-night travel mess. Organizers say the plan worked.  The XXVIII International Eucharistic Congress this wasn't.

The World Cup’s opening night in New Jersey ended with hundreds of fans stranded outside MetLife Stadium in East Rutherford past midnight, wandering the grounds in search of rideshares that couldn’t reach them.

On Sunday, the organizers responsible for getting them home said the plan worked.

Uber, the local World Cup host committee and NJ Transit each framed Saturday’s result as a qualified success — while pointing in different directions to explain why fans were still waiting for rides three hours after Brazil and Morocco played to a 1-1 draw.

The host committee called its transportation efforts “very successful,” according to a source with knowledge of the planning, while acknowledging “some issues getting people back late.”

When the process is the most important product, that's the way things go.

NJ Transit moved 21,578 fans by bus and rail in 90 minutes — a number the agency trumpeted on social media Saturday night but one that fell well short of its own target of up to 40,000 riders.

The source close to planning said NJ Transit proved its “efficiency” but said part of the reason for the clogged traffic was more people didn’t use the agency‘s rail or bus options and turned to other forms of transportation.

”Absolutely,” the source said when asked if the NJ Transit passenger shortfall created a domino effect. “The fact the host committee was able to move 16,000 people on school buses in and out of there because there was more congestion on the roads is pretty effective.”

The host committee pushed back on the characterization of the night as a transportation disaster, noting that the stranded fans numbered in the hundreds — a fraction of the roughly 80,000 in attendance.

But the scenes at the Meadowlands racetrack, which served as the designated rideshare pickup area, told a different story for the people living it.

Fans reported waiting more than an hour after drivers who accepted their rides couldn’t reach the pickup zone. By 10:15 p.m., stadium workers told fans that no more Ubers were being allowed into the area.

Look, we're not talking about a quarter-million pilgrims making a day trip to St. Mary of the Lake, or four hundred thousand passengers at The Pennsylvania Station during the War.

A few more tilts, including the 19 July final match, will take place at the Meadowlands.

SIXTY YEARS TO GET FROM SKOKIE TO HARMSWOODS.

Perhaps the only thing longer than a forever war or a negotiation with Iranians is the procedural wrangling over restoring a few miles of rapid transit track through the Skokie Valley.

Please indulge me my sarcasm.  "Yellow Line extension in Skokie could take ‘decades’ but CTA is studying it."  It's more accurate to say that the studying has already been going on for close onto seventy years.  What today's flatlanders understand as the "Yellow Line" is the first segment of North America's first high speed electrified railroad, which continued to Deerpath and onward on existing tracks to Milwaukee.  And yes, I've taunted Chicago officialdom for studying a relatively short restoration of service at a pace that would please neither Charles Yerkes nor Samuel Insull.

When the North Shore filed for abandonment in 1958, Chicago Transit Authority (public ownership came in 1945) considered purchase of the high speed line as far as Waukegan. North Shore's own ridership studies had a plurality of the commuters boarding at Dempster Street with relatively light loads north of Briergate. As the Transit Authority has a large maintenance facility along the North Shore just west of the drainage canal in Evanston, it was relatively inexpensive to buy only the North Shore property from west of that facility to Dempster. But no sooner was the North Shore gone than some people wanted it back.

Getting even the next section, to somewhere near the Old Orchard mall, which somehow still exists as a mall, has been newsworthy for years. "Sometime in the late 1980s a friend, in making conversation, asked if I was aware the Transit Authority wanted to extend the Skokie Swift to Old Orchard. My reaction: it used to go to Milwaukee. Surprised reaction. No surprise."  At the time, there were a few more people still living who had ridden the North Shore Line.

TRANSPORTATION MIRACLES REQUIRE PREPARATION.

Reason contributors, including Liz Wolfe, have a troubling blind spot where road socialism is concerned.  "New Jersey Transit is preparing backup ferries to help with demand as fans try to make it to the World Cup. I kind of love how they assume public transit will buckle under the pressure."

Not-a-tall.  I heard one senior law enforcement official describe the World Cup as "multiple Super Bowls" in multiple cities in three countries over six months.  Let's bear in mind that the National Football League unaccountably scheduled a Super Bowl for the Meadowlands, and more people than New Jersey Transit anticipated rode the trains.  Lesson learned.

It is not, however, the World Cup, or the Super Bowl, or New Jersey Transit that concerns me.  Rather, it is a centennial.  "In 1926, the North Shore Line built a much larger temporary station, and borrowed rolling stock from the Chicago Rapid Transit Company, for a one-day International Eucharistic Congress at Mundelein.  A rainstorm provoked an early departure for many pilgrims, and the railroad handled it."

In less than ten score years, Chicago went from "mission" territory to birthplace of a Pope.  Strictly speaking, the aforementioned XXVIII International Eucharistic Congress took place in Chicago and at St. Mary of the Lake seminary, then east of a village called Area (pronounced a-REE-a) and subsequently renamed for George Cardinal Mundelein, who made no small plans.  Neither did the seminary, now known as the University of St. Mary of the Lake, not to be confused with the California university that keeps turning up in intercollegiate sports tournaments.  Nor did Samuel Insull, whose country farm was near the seminary.  For that matter, the cardinal offered the Vatican the use of St. Mary of the Lake as emergency quarters during the War.  The Pope might not have had any divisions, but he was no coward.

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.

AN INTERURBAN RETURNS TO HOME RAILS.

Well, a short stretch of rail close to its old home rails.

The Village of Villa Park is working with Illinois Prairie Path, labor unions and two railroad museums to give new life to a piece of west suburban transit history.

The Chicago Aurora and Elgin Railroad was an electrically powered interurban rail line that connected much of west suburban Kane, DuPage and Cook counties to the Loop. Passenger service operated between 1902 and 1957, and freight service ended two years later. Most of the railroad’s right of way, including the portion that went through Villa Park, was converted into the Illinois Prairie Path walking and biking trail.

Now, Villa Park plans to bring one of the old CA&E railcars, known as Car 321, to the former train station near the intersection of Ardmore Avenue and Central Boulevard. Union laborers would restore the exterior to its original condition and rehab that interior so it can be used to host community events. The village plans to build a short stub track to mount the railcar on, and a shed to protect it from the elements.

The Roarin' Elgin shut down late enough into the emergence of a railway preservation movement in these United States that there were interested buyers of cars for preservation, and its inability to attract sufficient capital to completely replace its fleet of wooden cars with steel cars meant a substantial roster of wood cars of relatively low scrap value were available to preservation enthusiasts.  At one time, the seven cars numbered 315-321 all remained in preservation.  Car 318 was the casualty of a rough shunt on Penn Central en route from Indiana to Wisconsin and became a parts donor to sister cars in the Illinois Railway Museum collection.  Car 315 is being rebuilt at the Rockhill Trolley Museum in Pennsylvania in closer to as-built condition, meaning revealing the stained-glass arched upper sash windows that many an interurban covered over to make the car look more streamlined, and Car 316 has received a similar backdating at the Fox River Trolley Museum.  Car 319 returned from an Ohio mobile home park to the Illinois Railway Museum a few years ago, and it often runs in the Roarin' Elgin wood car train.

SPEED, FREQUENCY, PROXIMITY.

Florida's Brightline have a "death train" tag they probably don't deserve.

Federal agencies have investigated the Brightline incidents and produced no firm conclusions about why they have happened so often. The company, sometimes called “Frightline” on the local news, has not been found responsible for any of the deaths. How could it be responsible for people driving around lowered gates or walking into the clearly delineated path of a train? Yet there must be some explanation for the unusual number of fatalities.

Local newspapers likewise raise the alarm.

Since [fall 2017], the death toll has climbed at an extraordinary rate. Brightline trains have killed 182 people, significantly more than publicly known, an investigation by the Miami Herald and WLRN, South Florida’s NPR member station, has found. Reporters spent a year combing federal rail data, local medical examiner records and police incident reports to count the dead. Brightline officials did not dispute the finding.

The reporting team found that Brightline has failed to urgently address the train’s dangers, blamed victims for the high death rate, and, as fatalities climbed, turned to the public to pay for safety upgrades. Even then, critical life-saving measures, including fencing along the tracks and suicide-crisis signs, haven’t been installed due to years-long delays in the release of federal funds.

Local governments and regulators have added to the problem. Deaths have spiked in parts of South Florida where train horns were intentionally silenced after cities and counties demanded “quiet zones” so as not to bother people living near the tracks. But federal regulators have allowed the train-horn bans to stay in place, and cities have resisted closing treacherous railroad crossings.

Brightline is the nation’s most dangerous passenger train, reporters found, killing someone every 13 days of service, on average. In addition to those deaths, 99 people have been injured. In at least 101 cases, the train crashed into vehicles, but no one was hurt.

The most recent Federal Railroad Administration trespassing casualties, for 2025, report 153 deaths in California, 85 in Texas, 65 in Florida, and 47 in Illinois.  Brightline attract attention as in the past ten years, what was a freight-only railroad has become the route of numerous passenger trains running at up to 79 miles per hour through thickly-settled areas.

Many train tracks are elevated to cross above roadways. Others are sunken down to cross beneath them. But the Brightline’s track intersects flatly, or “at grade,” with the roads on much of its route, including the part that runs through central Miami.

Many states have undertaken grade-crossing-elimination projects over the past half century because they make train routes dramatically safer. On the Amtrak route between Washington, D.C., and New York City, the highest-trafficked stretch of train track in the country, there are no grade crossings. The last one was eliminated in the 1980s.

There are 331 grade crossings along the Brightline route in South Florida.

Florida's geography precludes building a trench for the Florida East Coast, and an elevated line through thickly settled areas is unlikely to appeal to local residents, if infrastructure history is any guide.

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.

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.

SOON WE'LL BE SLIDING DOWN THE RENT GRADIENT OF LIFE.

An Ed Driscoll post at Insta Pundit dips into Culture War themes, but you can put a Thünen ring around the meming.

Unironically doing the meme pic.twitter.com/OkvK0HY8Ec

— Nemesis 2026 (@Nemtastic1) February 11, 2026

The underlying regional economic analysis is simple enough.

Look, this is not difficult.  Note, there is no shortage of housing per se, there is what the authors refer to as a shortage of "affordable housing," and they persist in their delusion that if you pass a law that makes housing "affordable," there will be affordable housing.  Sorry, no.  On Manhattan, and in San Francisco, and anyplace else where there are serious agglomeration economies favoring high-value-added work, the real estate on which those rent-stabilized apartments sit will be seriously expensive.

When the rent gradient comes for your neighborhood, maybe you have a platform to engage in grievance-mongering.  If you're novelist Naomi Jackson, you surely do.

“I once lived in a Black mecca. But by the summer of 2022, my toddler son and I were often the only Black folks on the playground in Bedford-Stuyvesant, a fact that felt both alienating and surreal,” the novelist Naomi Jackson writes.

Jackson was born in Crown Heights to… pic.twitter.com/aZD8o4wYbN

— New York Magazine (@NYMag) February 11, 2026

As Captain Ed's post notes, had any author who does not enjoy protected status written the following, the cancel mob would be all over her and she'd likely not place another novel with a major publishing house.

My formative years were in Flatbush, which is called “Little Caribbean” even though it becomes less and less Caribbean each day as new Asian, Latino, African, and African American residents move in, making the communities where I grew up feel both less familiar and more diverse. Even the name Little Caribbean, as effective and important as it is as a marketing tool, makes me mildly nauseous each time I encounter it on a lamppost or a street sign; it seems to commemorate a community that doesn’t quite exist anymore.

In that Brooklyn, in the late 1980s, all the kids were, like me, the children of Caribbean immigrants. One would still occasionally see a Black Pentecostal church parade on a Sunday afternoon — white-turbaned women, drums and a horn section playing loud gospel music. In that Brooklyn, I squirmed as my stepmother stopped on nearly every block to greet a neighbor; on Saturdays, when our family’s kitchen was closed, we ordered jerk chicken and festival from the now-defunct Danny and Pepper’s or boiled crab and corn from Mr. Chin, the Chinese Jamaican man who cooked his victuals in a Dutch pot on Rogers Avenue and surprised me when he spoke in patois one day.

That's the nature of the neighborhoods with cheap housing.  Milwaukee's Old South Side used to be Milwaukee's Polonia, and thrifty homeowners would start by building a one-story shack, later they'd jack it up to put additional rooms underneath, and they'd build what the local vocabulary referred to as a "back cottage" later.

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.

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.)

NO, THE BIG CITIES ARE INSUFFICIENTLY SAFE.

Consider Chicago.

Yes, often in those districts that keep voting Democrat, in part because no other political party has offered a better value proposition.  Enterprise zones, less restrictive zoning, and no broken windows, anyone?  I mean, stopping crime is one of those eighty-twenty issues, and those fifteen square miles of privilege aren't as safe as they once might have been.

Meanwhile, the federal immigration authorities are openly playing to disaffected Chicago cops in recruiting additional officers, the city and state are going broke with no printed Biden bucks on offer, and Young Voices writer Ed Tarnowski offers the simple truth.  "The American City Cannot Blossom in Lawlessness."

American cities are failing to keep residents safe and make metropolitan living broadly desirable. America is the wealthiest nation in history – our cities should be beacons of innovation, creativity, and human potential. And while most of our metropolises face many roadblocks that restrict thriving urbanism, one thing is clear: The American City cannot blossom in lawlessness.

It’s a common pastime in urban circles to poke fun at those who fear city life. And often, those fears are exaggerated, frequently shaped more by sensational media than lived experience. City dwellers take pride in their neighborhoods and know they are typically not the war zones often portrayed on cable news and in clickbait articles.

Nevertheless, Americans should never settle for “not a war zone” as the standard for where they work, live, and create. Concerns about crime and disorder are valid; statistics make that clear. Until they are meaningfully addressed, trust and a sense of safety will remain out of reach. People cannot be expected to embrace public spaces if they are constantly worried about harassment, or worse, threats to their lives and families.

That's standard stuff in conservative circles.  It's refreshing to find the same sentiments from Noah "Noahopinion" Smith.

For many years, I’ve been involved with the urbanist movement in America. I want to see my country build more dense city centers where people can walk and take the train instead of driving. That doesn’t mean I want to eliminate the suburbs; I just don’t want to have San Francisco and Chicago and Houston feel like suburbs. If we have dense cities and quiet suburbs, then every American will get to live in the type of place they want to live in. Currently, the only dense city we have is NYC.

But I think my fellow urbanists are often a bit naive about what it’ll take to get more dense, walkable city centers in America. They often act as if car culture is an autonomous meme that just happened to develop in America, and that real considerations like violent crime played no role in driving Americans — both white and nonwhite — out of urban cores in the 20th century.

A fair amount of research around the world shows that shows that fear of violent crime keeps a lot of people from using public transit. Urbanists can shout all they like about how driving is far more dangerous than taking the train or bus, but telling people what not to be afraid of has a very poor track record as a method of persuasion. Air travel and terrorism are both examples where dangers that are out of people’s control are scarier than dangers people feel they can avoid, such as car accidents. We devote huge societal resources to minimizing the risks of plane crashes and terrorist attacks, and if we want more Americans to embrace life in dense cities, we’re going to have to do the same with the risk of crime on public transit.

Consider, dear reader, that "dangers people feel they can avoid, such as car accidents."  My intuition suggests that a lot of car crashes, to use Strong Towns's preferred locution, occur on weekends at bar-closing time, and motorists have agency to time their trips to avoid the more dangerous roads, intersections, and times of day.

MANAGING EMERGENCE IN THE NEIGHBORHOOD.

When there are no visual cues to drive slowly, people don't drive slowly.

Posting speed limits?  That's a fool's errand.

Too many streets, though, give drivers all sorts of clues that it's OK (not legal, not safe for kids, dogs, or basketballs) to go fast. There's a neighborhood speed limit of 25 governing the streets serving Cold Spring Shops headquarters, and yet the street in front of headquarters provides a convenient, relatively free of parked trucks, shortcut from the townhouses to the mile road. I'm not saying it's an expressway, and yet an early evening on my deck with a radar gun might be instructive.

All over northern Illinois, the neighborhood speed limits are at odds with the visual cues.

Eric Olson explains the phenomenon to readers of DeKalb's Daily Chronicle.

After driving long enough on a regular basis, people tend to develop a kind of intuition about what the speed limit should be in an area just by surveying how many lanes there are, what kind of pavement there is, how many stoplights there are, whether the road is in the country or in town.

What intrigues him is the proposal by Sycamore authorities to reduce the speed limit on a stretch of road that's signed for 45 yet winds around in such a way as to appear more safe at 40 or so.  What's more commonly the case in Illinois is roads that provide visual cues to go faster.  Such roads, which perhaps might better be described as stroads, have speed limits that appear to be too low.

Indeed, and thus the bizarre phenomenon that the same two-lane section road might be signed anywhere from 25 to 45 in otherwise similarly settled areas, while the stroads and boulevards might be posted from 35 to 55. This week, DeKalb posted a stretch of a section road still in farm country that was 55 down to 45, and the stretch that was posted 45 is now 35.  For all the attention anyone is paying to the change.

EMERGENCE CAN NOT BE NUDGED.

Regular readers know why.  I never lack for opportunities to riff on that phenomenon, though, particularly when people who think they have the answers neglect the laws of conservation in economics.  "For decades, a misleading narrative about mental illness among the unhoused obscured the true source of the crisis: hyper-commodified housing."  That's Ben McCarthy in The (Misnamed) Progressive.  As is often the case, the problem is not too much "commodification," it is too little.

[E]lected officials and the coalition of policy advocates behind them argue that untreated mental illness and substance use are a core cause—if not the core cause—of skyrocketing homelessness in the United States. Unhoused people, the narrative goes, are primarily homeless because they have failed to accept treatment and can no longer be easily forced into it. In fact, the primary cause of homelessness is a nationwide shortage of affordable housing. Millions of units of government-subsidized housing from decades past have been lost even as market-rate housing grows astronomically more expensive.

In casting the problem as an epidemic of individual pathology rather than one of political economy, these leaders have ignored the obvious economic reality: The rise of homelessness has resulted primarily from the hyper commodification of housing. In New York City and much of the United States, urban studies scholars Peter Marcuse and David Madden write in their book In Defense of Housing, “housing is becoming ever less an infrastructure for living and ever more an instrument for financial accumulation.”

The truth is that [New York mayor Eric] Adams’s and others’ rhetoric surrounding mental illness and homelessness stems from a decades-old misleading narrative that has fundamentally distorted the public discourse around both housing and mental illness alike. As private equity firms have purchased hundreds of thousands of rent-stabilized apartments in New York City over the past twenty-five years, this false narrative has served the interests of a political class beholden to the entire real estate industry. In doing so, it has caused real harm to some of the most vulnerable New Yorkers by attempting to decouple their material conditions from the economic and political forces that shape them.

Look, this is not difficult.  Note, there is no shortage of housing per se, there is what the authors refer to as a shortage of "affordable housing," and they persist in their delusion that if you pass a law that makes housing "affordable," there will be affordable housing.  Sorry, no.  On Manhattan, and in San Francisco, and anyplace else where there are serious agglomeration economies favoring high-value-added work, the real estate on which those rent-stabilized apartments sit will be seriously expensive.

Two principles of land use immediately emerge.  First, [the highest value added activities]have a ceteris paribus advantage in bidding for any parcel of land.  Second, activities that encounter higher transportation costs lose advantage at greater distances.  Thus, in the two-century old model, dairy products command a high price and spoil (we're before mechanical refrigeration or railroads, recall) quickly, thus those will be closest to the city, but dairies will be out-bid by timbering or cornfields or ranching.

Introduce mechanical refrigeration and railroads and motor trucks, and the highest bidders for land might be factories or restaurants or households.  The principle is the same, though, the value of a parcel of land will be one at which a householder is indifferent between locating there, or locating somewhere else.  The model as modified still predicts falling land values at distances from the city center.  Thus, we'll see additional margins along which people might substitute, such as suffering the transportation costs but being able to live in a bigger house: easier for a faculty member at Cornell than it might be at Northwestern or at Stanford, where faculty qualify for housing subsidies.  The underlying principle is the same: in equilibrium a householder will be indifferent among the bundles of location and housing type offered.  Because that equilibrating tendency leads to similar houses clustered together, providing temptations for builders to put down cookie-cutter developments, Wise Experts think they can dictate neighborhood form with zoning codes.  That works until new price incentives emerge.

But will we ever see a central business district that generates so much in the form of locational rents, in the presence of so small a transportation cost, for knowledge or financial industries (and there are reasons to suspect that it will be knowledge or financial industries, not manufacturing) that the service businesses get priced out, and the only land devoted to housing of any kind is at a distance, as appears to be happening in San Francisco, but not yet in Chicago?

If I remember correctly, New York's "rent stabilized" apartments stabilize the rents for the duration of the tenancy or until the property changes hands.  Thus, the current residents of those apartments might be people who landed on Central Park West and thought they were Aaron Judge, and they're making a good living in finance or broadcasting or entertainment, squatting, if you will, on the affordably priced rentals.  The logic of the land rent gradient, though, suggests that at the passing of those tenants, or at sale, those properties are worth a lot more than the capitalized value of those stabilized rents.

Isn't rent control marvellous?  In stabilizing the rents in the face of locational agglomeration economies, public policy makes the buildings themselves so valuable that only private equity can buy them.

YOUR LUXURY BELIEFS GET PEOPLE KILLED.

I've long feared that there are suburbs and small towns one flash-mobbed convenience store away from going sundown.

It might be that one knife attack on the rapid transit will have the same effect.  Free Press contributor Kat Rosenfeld builds that case.

Until the aforementioned security footage from that night was released—footage that shows not just the moments leading up to [Iryna] Zarutska’s murder, but the horrifying aftermath as Brown stalks up and down the car leaving a literal trail of blood in his wake—the story oddly flew under the radar. It did so for the same reasons that it’s now become a flashpoint in the online discourse about crime, disorder, and public safety in American cities today.

For conservatives, this incident seems a slam-dunk indictment of the progressive attitudes toward policing and criminal justice that emerged in the wake of the 2020 police killing of George Floyd—and accompanying policies that make it virtually impossible to keep serial offenders off the streets. Commentators on the right have noted, correctly, that Brown had a history of violence, a lengthy criminal record, and well-documented mental health issues; he never should have been on the train that night, and if not for having been released pending trial for his most recent offenses by a sympathetic judge, he wouldn’t have.

The greater issue is a cultural one: a growing frustration with what often feels like limitless tolerance for public disorder and antisocial behavior—and with it, a sense that one must not only avoid discussing these things to remain a liberal in good standing, but actively pretend they don’t exist.

Can you think of a better indictment of luxury beliefs?  Suggest that maybe some people ought be in prison or the insane asylum for a long time, and risk not being invited to the next wine tasting.

The problem with this taboo around certain uncomfortable truths about public disorder is that when you make discussing those truths a thing that is Simply Not Done by decent progressive people, you leave the field of discourse wide open to the kind of person who cares about neither progressive politics nor decency. That is where we are now.

Good liberals, for instance, would rather die than address the fact that Decarlos Brown Jr. is not just homeless and mentally ill but black, as people who perpetrate this kind of violence disproportionately are. In lieu of a thoughtful, data-driven conversation about why this might be and how to solve it, discussing this fact is now the gleeful and exclusive purview of trollish accounts.

Catch the False Dilemma, dear reader?  It is simple enough to have a thoughtful, data-driven conversation about the way luxury beliefs don't work out, on the rapid transit or in the streets, that establishes the indecency of progressive politics.  Ms Rosenfeld sort of gets it.  "Nowhere is that clearer than in a well-intentioned attempt to give the mentally ill more agency that instead resulted in vastly fewer people accessing the care they desperately needed."

BACK TO SCHOOL.

Yes, there are lots of Eventful Things going on.  Those can wait for next month.  We'll close out August, and the summer season, with the University of Wisconsin Marching Band playing their way off a heritage trolley.

Enjoy the long weekend.  Find yourself a preservation railway and ride it.

THE STROAD IS THE CULPRIT.

We first noted the folly of North Carolina officialdom charging parents with child neglect when Reason's Lenore Skenazy called attention, as we'd expect Reason contributors do, to the excesses of the Nanny State.

The children involved in a fatal car crash were attempting to cross what is effectively a limited-access highway in Gastonia.

The "1000 block of West Hudson" is Hudson west of Lyon, and if the kids were headed from a residence southeast of that corner to the store on the northwest corner, they might have been hard-pressed to find a crosswalk along Hudson, let alone a sidewalk on the south side of Hudson.  Standard car-brain infrastructure, undoubtedly someone, somewhere, figured that nobody would be walking there.  Nobody bothers to walk there, no injury accidents to document in order to provide crosswalks or sidewalks, no crosswalks or sidewalks.  Then a kid goes there.  Thus, Gastonia; thus, downtown Springfield, Massachusetts.

There's more thinking to do about the "level of service" obsession of road planners.  Many of the exurbs that began as neighborhoods for people with disposable income have been left behind for a variety of reasons.  "[N]eighborhoods that might have been zoned in all earnestness for automobile owners to have become neighborhoods where car ownership is not necessarily a given for the new residents."