WILL TRAINS RETURN TO THE BAY BRIDGE? The Transbay Terminal in San Francisco is to be demolished. The San Francisco terminal of California's proposed high-speed rail line will take its place.

Officials said the new Transbay Transit Center was expected to serve 45 million passengers annually and house nine transportation systems, including the state's high-speed rail line and bus lines from San Francisco Municipal Railway, AC Transit, SamTrans, Golden Gate Transit and Greyhound.

The bus ramps in the current configuration of the existing terminal once carried tracks. Sacramento Northern interurbans, Key System rapid-transit cars, and Southern Pacific multiple units used those ramps, and the lower level of the Bay Bridge, to reach inland cities. Will the design of the new station permit such construction should a high-speed line to Sacramento or onward to Reno or Portland make sense?

GENERAL ZAROFF IN SPACE. I toyed with making, but didn't make time, to catch the latest Predators when it first played the area. My hunch about the movie was correct, however.

Yes, the latest (fourth!) sequel to 1987's "Alien" knockoff "Predator" is also the umpteenth version of the Richard Connell story "The Most Dangerous Game," which was first filmed back in 1932, starring Joel McCrea and a young actress named Fay Wray, shortly before her famous run-in with a large ape.

Further research discovers that Ms Wray and some of the other cast of King Kong were simultaneously producing The Most Dangerous Game. Economies of scope and sharable inputs exist, even though those terms didn't become current in economics until the late 1970s. Movie producers taking liberties with the print version of the story is also an old phenomenon.

DISTINGUISH AN INTERNAL IMPROVEMENT FROM CORPORATE WELFARE. On a July trip to the North Country, I noticed a southbound-only entrance ramp being built allowing access from the Whistling Straits golf course to Interstate 43. The course on occasion hosts the PGA Championship and other major golf tournaments. Might be interesting to look for the Justification of Project statement for that ramp sometime.

HARPER'S ANTICIPATES RUSH LIMBAUGH? In July of 2009, the magazine cover read Barack Hoover Obama. The radio talker has been using that nomenclature a lot recently. The comparison is diffusing.

In fifteen to fifty years, The American Economic Review and other journals will have the opportunity to publish work that might clarify whether the fiscal stimulus and other reforms of the last year or so were insufficient given the severity of the recession (the Harper's position, loosely) or introduced excessive uncertainty among consumers, investors, and entrepreneurs (the Limbaugh position, even more loosely).

WORKING CONDITIONS MATTER. A George Leef post at National Association of Scholars notes the social waste of content-free degrees at non-profit universities.

Ah, but you’ll find lots of kids drowning in their student loan debts who went to public colleges and universities as well. Those schools are just as eager to lure in warm bodies to fill the dorms and school coffers, just as eager to keep them enrolled even if they are learning little, and just as eager to slap educational credentials on them and send them into a job world that many will find as hospitable as Antarctica.

Never mind the effect on faculty morale that administrative efforts to boost retention must have. Or perhaps those universities are implementing the low-cost, limited-content McDonald's model that some would like to see more widely diffused. Can you say formula for greater social stratification?

THE CASE FOR MCDEGREES. Richard Vedder tries to make it.

McDonald's became the most successful food chain in the world by selling standardized products of high quality in huge quantities. They were successful by keeping the number of items they sell at a small number, by offering goods of the same quality at every location, and by having thousands of restaurants and gaining economies of large scale operation.

The same thing is true about other products, such as automobiles and computers. A small number of companies dominate the market making a few standardized products and selling them in huge quantities. It is even true in retail trade—Wal-Mart became extremely profitable exploiting economies of scale.

But what about higher education? Does bigness increase success? Of course, measuring success is harder in a sector where most providers do not have a clear "bottom line." But most of the successful names—the Harvards, the Stanfords, the Northwesterns, the Dukes—are of moderate size and not growing much over time. They see disadvantages to expanding, such as by growing existing campuses or adding new ones. That is true for many of the great state universities as well. There is only one "University of Virginia" or "University of Georgia," for example. Even those schools with multiple campuses, like the University of California, are located in usually no more than 10 or 20 sites. And there is no indication that multiple campus schools like the University of Texas, State University of New York, the California State University system, etc., are more efficient or produce better outcomes than single campus schools with much smaller total enrollments.

There is one huge exception to this rule: For-profit higher education exhibits enormous economies of scale. The University of Phoenix has hundreds of thousands of students (more than any other school) and makes huge profits. Newer schools (Bridgepoint Education comes to mind) typically lose money in their first years and show ever growing profit margins as enrollments grow. Bigness breeds and augments success.

Somewhere in those paragraphs, Professor Vedder, despite noting that it's difficult to define success, apparently makes volume or profitability stand in for success. Perhaps in another 20 or 30 years the graduates of Phoenix and Bridgepoint will be well-represented in the ranks of the Forbes 400 and heading Fortune 500 companies and holding high elective office. Until I see that evidence, however, I will maintain that emulating the midwestern land grants is the way to go for the state universities. (That lack of evidence of better outcomes in, for example, the California State University system compared with Berkeley or Stanford is likely evidence of access-assessment-remediation-retention at work in the system.)

Why are the traditional universities so different from both the McDonald's/Wal-Mart model, and the model of the large proprietary schools? The for-profit schools have a clearly defined bottom line—profits—that is maximized by doing two things: cutting costs and increasing revenues. Traditional universities often deliberately limit their revenues by turning customers away, and, unlike McDonald's that accepts any customer than can pay, the Harvards of the world increase prestige by rejecting more customers.

I have agreed with Professor Vedder on one point: that the prestige institutions create excess demand by quoting lower sticker prices in order to appear more selective. That strategy, however, can be more profitable, it's a variant on price discrimination by a monopolist. It's also a strategy practiced by trendy restaurants and nightclubs ... I'll show my age by invoking the famous Studio 54 of New York City disco fame. There is a parallel to what's going on in higher education.

To keep costs down, both McDonald's and the University of Phoenix offer a relatively modest number of products and produce them efficiently in a highly standardized way. The traditional universities teach thousands upon thousands of courses, most of them unimportant either to learning skills or understanding and advancing Western civilization, but are taught because the employees want to teach them. They are not standardized because that would be a violation of academic freedom, allegedly.

Maybe it is time traditional universities learn something from both McDonald's and the University of Phoenix (and Bridgepoint, Kaplan Higher Education, Corinithian Colleges, etc.). Why not do what Vance Fried proposes, and offer an $8,000 or $10,000 full cost per student university, offering a limited but adequate number of courses to give a solid education and even some vocational skills, but cut out all the rest?

Shall we tell Delmonico to cut out the steaks?

AVOIDING THE STRAIN. Amtrak's Cascades service allows Washington state residents to bypass road construction.

Monday, about a dozen people strained to hear the familiar horn as they awaited the 1:03 p.m. train to Seattle. Becky and Sean Brennan of Renton had taken their first train to Kelso due to a death in the family and seem to be hooked.

"We like how convenient and fast it is. It's two to three hours without traffic and five hours with traffic versus two hours from Tukwila to here," Becky Brennan said. "We'd talked about it and we really enjoyed it. If we can do it again, we will."

The Brennans said taking the train saved them gas money. But round-trip tickets for two to Kelso from Tukwila likely took a bigger bite out of their pockets than driving, even though a one-way ticket from Tukwila to Kelso can be as low as $39 on a weekday afternoon.

Still, her husband noted that Amtrak is a good way to avoid traffic, which "is insanity" between Seattle and Tacoma this summer due to highway projects.

Construction congestion induces additional ridership on Chicago's Metra. I'm pleased to see the inducement working elsewhere.

Sharon Parris of Everett has taken the train here every six weeks for six years to visit friends.

"Most of the time I take the train, I prefer it to driving," she said while awaiting the Seattle-bound train to arrive in Kelso Monday.

"There's not the hassle of traffic. The commute can be fast or it can be slow. With the train, you don't have to worry about it."

Jim and Lina Grace of Kelso said they have been riding Amtrak for 30 years. Monday they took the train to Seattle, then planned to train to Leavenworth in North Central Washington for their 30th wedding anniversary. "We're not frequent flyers. We take it on special occasions," Lina said.

Kelso City Councilman Dan Myers is a major advocate for increased train travel. He said Monday the volunteer All Aboard Washington group started staffing the train depot in August and the response is "overwhelmingly positive." The volunteers greet travelers, answer questions and announce incoming and departing trains.

"People repeatedly said they are so glad someone is there. We help them with where to go and how to buy tickets and with schedules. We answer a lot of questions," Myers said.

"We're trying to raise awareness of train travel as a good alternative and think we have. My wife and I have taken the train to Portland to go shopping and it's a great way to go."

With the recent cri de coeur of a Jet Blue cabin attendant, and Time offering 20 reasons to hate the airlines, a mode of transportation that does not involve waiting in line for ticketing, security, embarking, and debarking has its appeal. You don't have to deploy an escape slide to unload quickly, either. Simply note the door where you see a uniformed crew member. (On the Northeast Corridor, all doors open at high level platforms.) And in construction season, there's something called a Form B order that when used properly lets the train go through the work zone at track speed.

WAS TROTSKY THE FORESTRY COMMISSAR? During the Cold War, Trotskyist factions of the old Socialist International used to twist themselves into pretzels to distinguish their hopes for true socialism from the reality in the Evil Empire. With no Stalinist bureaucracies to denounce, the story changes.

The city’s vast working class and impoverished elderly population, who live without air-conditioning and have neither the financial means to leave nor anywhere to go, have been left to suffocate.

Had the Communist Party been in power, this description of the effects of the smoke of the nearby forest fires in Moscow would no doubt have been occasion to denounce the state-capitalists of the Stalinist usurpers. The state capitalists, however, act more like crony capitalists these days.

In the Moscow area, burning peat bogs are the cause of the suffocating smoke in the city. These swampy areas were drained during the Soviet era in order that the peat could be used as fuel and the land turned over to agriculture. Since the collapse of the USSR, however, the peat bogs have not been maintained and are no longer monitored for fire danger. Once peat ignites, it is difficult to extinguish because the substance smolders underground for long periods of time.

According to a group of Russian scientists who recently published a sharply critical assessment of the government’s forest policy and its response to the wildfires, even flooding the area with water is not a guaranteed solution because as much as 25 percent of peat is bitumen coal. This substance absorbs water and continues burning.

Are we seeing a substitution of oil for peat? In the forests, however, there's a clear breakdown of responsibility.

The wildfires and the severe public health crisis they have created in Russia’s capital are a direct product of government policy. In 2007, at the behest of then President Vladimir Putin acting on the behalf of powerful logging and manufacturing interests, a law was passed that disbanded Russia’s 70,000-strong forestry service and semi-privatized the country’s forestland.

Under the new forest code, responsibility for maintaining the forest—including fire protection—is transferred to private entities holding the land under lease. These companies, solely interested in making as much money as possible, do nothing to maintain forest roads, monitor fire danger, or provide resources in case a wildfire breaks out. While on paper the companies are subject to government oversight, in reality officials are bought off and look the other way.

Those forestlands not under lease are technically the responsibility of regional governments, which also do nothing to maintain and protect forestland.

What we are seeing, dear reader, is an imprecise definition of property rights. Logging companies with full ownership of tree plantations understand that maintaining firebreaks and fire-fighting equipment and training loggers as firefighters is cheap insurance. (To the best of my knowledge, wildfires in the western U.S. generally start on public lands, not on tree farms.)

As the present wildfire disaster has unfolded, there have been various news reports of firefighters encountering impassable fire roads, water supplies choked with weeds, and broken down emergency response vehicles.

Sounds like more than a few big cities in the U.S. What's the Russian phrase for ward-heeler?

During the Soviet period, there existed a developed system for monitoring forestlands and preventing wildfires that consisted of thousands of local observation stations manned by workers specially trained to identify fires and immediately alert authorities. The principle under which the system worked, which demanded enormous manpower given the enormity of Russia’s forests, was that the sooner a fire could be identified, the smaller it would be and the greater the likelihood of containment.

Perhaps so, but given the pollution of Lake Baikal and the draining of the Aral Sea and the productivity follies that led to Chernobyl, I wonder if there isn't a false consciousness in the Fourth International.

WHAT IS THE SOUND OF ATLAS, SHRUGGING? Bruce Heiden, writing for the National Association of Scholars, notes that faculty working conditions matter.

The notion that tenure is a costly luxury that professors have imposed on universities, and that administrators need flexibility to “quickly reallocate resources,” completely overlooks the kind of resource university faculty members are and the cost of producing them. The AAUP’s academic freedom argument also distracts attention from this important aspect of faculty work and compensation. Professors do not grow on trees, and university administrators—let’s call them bureaucrats—cannot quickly respond to ephemeral needs by shaking one tree instead of another, because the trees are not there to shake.

Professors are not an abundant natural resource, nor are they a mass produced commodity whose supply can be easily adjusted to meet the market demand at a given time. They are produced by investors who strive to make rational economic decisions and manage costs just as university bureaucrats do. If the producers of university faculty members don’t foresee an adequate return, they’ll invest their resources in producing something else. University bureaucrats won’t be able to “quickly reallocate resources” when producers don’t have the capacity to fill their orders for the equipment.

It takes a while for this dynamic to work, particularly in disciplines where the producers of professors consider themselves above the market, but work it will.

As universities degrade the condition of faculty work—its independence, security, and respect—they are degrading the career and diminishing its attractiveness to producers.

Indeed. It takes a long time, however, and a lot of frustrating trips to the job meetings, to get the message to headquarters that its idea of an adequate pay package and a commensurate job description is flawed.

In many fields the supply of high quality faculty has already shrunk. The only reason this isn’t remarked upon more widely is that quality in higher education is defined downwards, just as it is in other bureaucratized enterprises.

The cost of professors only seems high now because years ago capable young people who could have done many other things were attracted to academic careers. University bureaucrats and half-cocked economists don’t have to compute the cost of luring a professional from another field to spend ten years or more becoming a researcher and teacher in an academic discipline. If short-sighted efficiencies discourage production and interrupt the supply, will these experts explain the cost of hiring a faculty member who doesn’t exist?

Amen. Go read and understand. And note: a smaller pool of potential faculty is likely to be a pool less interested in implementing the latest administrative fads that detract from serious teaching and scholarship.

COMMON AND JOINT COSTS.

Charles Schwartz contemplates the decline of the University of California.

There are two great missions of a first-rank public research university:

-to provide top quality undergraduate education for all qualified students, exposing them to great ideas from all over, imparting high-level skills for the job market, and making them capable citizens and leaders.
-to provide top quality academic research, and related graduate student programs, in the pursuit of basic knowledge across the spectrum of human endeavor.

Who should pay for these two important functions? It used to be that the State of California paid for both through generous taxpayer funding for faculty salaries, departmental staff, and the institutional infrastructure of buildings, laboratories, libraries and so forth. It was called the "I&R Budget" (Instruction andResearch).

As the research mission expanded over time, a significant proportion of the cost came to be paid for by external sources, especially grants from the federal government. Such "sponsored research" is well-monitored and accounted for. But it does not cover all research activity, by any means. The state still covers the rest and it is buried in the "core academic budget".

The search for new knowledge is an expensive business. Yet it is unequivocally a public good, the advances in knowledge being of great value for both the economy and the progress of modern civilization. The research mission of the university can, therefore, only be viewed as something that should be paid for by the whole of society, for the benefit of the whole of society.

What about undergraduate education? Is it a public good or a private gain? There are sharp differences of opinion on this. To many people, UC students are a privileged group who are gaining a private benefit through their access to higher education. Therefore, the argument goes, they should bear the cost, rather than having the general taxpayer shoulder the burden.

But this raises a fundamental question: what is the actual cost of an undergraduate education in the University of California? That turns out to be a more difficult thing to answer than one might suppose.

Any reckoning of the actual cost of an output produced under conditions of common and joint costs is going to be difficult, and ought not be attempted at home. (That's leaving aside the public good properties of basic research, many of which have private benefits that can be appropriated by patent or copyright in a sum sufficient for inventors and entrepreneurs to conduct the work. It's also leaving aside whether the marginal benefits to education accrue primarily to the early grades.)

The official accounting by the UC administration concludes that student fees now cover 30% to 40% of the average cost of education (this is the source of the numbers quoted by the Howard Jarvis group, above). But the official calculation includes the full cost of faculty research throughout the academic year. It is, therefore, a badly distorted figure.

To correct this, one must disaggregate the accounting reports according to the two basic functions of the university. This idea raises the hackles of administrators and faculty alike, not just at UC, but at research universities across the country. The common practice is to hide all of the cost of faculty research not covered by sponsored research grants under the misleading heading of expenditures for "Instruction."

My own calculations, separating those cost components by using data from a faculty time-use study, lead to the conclusion that, as of 2007, undergraduate student fees at UC had reached 100% of the actual cost of providing their education. And fees have since risen by 30 percent!

There is a sharp conflict here to be resolved. If the administration's number is accepted, then taxpayers might well be right to complain that they are subsidizing UC students. If my number is more correct, then undergraduates (and their families) are already paying the full cost (or more) for their UC education. This is true whether or not we agree on the public good of a UC education.

If I am right, then it is up to the state government and taxpayers to assume full responsibility for funding the university's research mission and to stop pushing the cost of that research - which is a benefit to all - onto the tuition bills of students. This is a direct challenge to the Board of Regents and their hired executives.

Let's see if I get this right: if a faculty member is working on research during the summer rather than teaching summer classes, or doing some research during the academic year without benefit of a grant (and the research reassignment that sometimes accompanies the grant) that's somehow stealing from the students?

What happens to the money that the university takes in from undergraduate tuition and fees? This is the largest pot of discretionary revenue that our administrators collect, but there is no way to find out how they spend most of it. I have made repeated requests for data, but no one has an answer. It turns out that tuition money at UC is thrown into the mix with state appropriations, and it is spent without regard to its relation to undergraduate teaching. One recent controversy surrounds the practice of pledging student fee revenue as collateral whenever the university sells bonds to finance construction projects on the campuses.

Yes, money is fungible. Professor Schwartz, however, is getting into unfamiliar waters here ... does he want to focus on research, or does he want to identify the hidden subsidies to athletic facilities or buildings for student services? Perhaps California universities operate under constraints that allow them to borrow money for capital projects, including athletic facilities and administrative offices, but not for operating expenses. He chooses, however, to make a different point.

The allocation of university funds between research and instruction is only part of the problem we face at the university. Another is the sharply rising administrative overhead, which pushes costs upward - as noted by the letter writer to the Chronicle.

Administrative bureaucracy has grown at an alarming rate. I collected data from official UC sources and found that over a recent decade student enrollment had increased by 33%, university employment had expanded by 31%, and the ranks of management had more than doubled, up by 118%. This excess represents an added cost of roughly $600 million to the university's budget. When presented with this data, top officials have failed to give any credible response. This bureaucratic bloat is likely the result of administrators feathering their own nests with too many vice-chancellors and deputy assistants. To faculty, it certainly appears that there is too much staff and glitter at the top, while the core of academic departments are left to starve.

Moreover, executive compensation at the university has been a never-ending scandal. While the total amount of money involved here is not so large, the practice of treating university administrators like corporate executives has outraged many people both inside and outside of academia. Even within the faculty there has been a scramble for higher salaries by playing the game of soliciting offers from wealthy private institutions. This siphons off money from basic needs and creates internal tension, especially with poorly paid junior faculty. For my generation, the old practice of uniform salary scales and steady promotion on merit was instrumental in making UC one of the world's great centers of learning.

You can't have it both ways. An administration that is reluctant to pay its star faculty -- including the up-and-comers in competitive disciplines -- is an administration in which the stars and the up-and-comers are going to seek offers elsewhere. The dean or the provost cannot kid himself or herself that a post at Berkeley (or Columbia or Wayne State or anywhere else) is somehow sufficient honor that the honoree will not be so crass as to accept an offer somewhere else.

An unrelenting chorus of obeisance to the gods of "the market" has seriously eroded the time-honored virtues of the university. Universities are not corporations operating for a profit, putting out products called "science", "innovation" or "degrees." They are collegial bodies of faculty pursuing knowledge and teaching under the watchful eye of their peers. They are communities of the young seeking to learn from the wisdom of teachers before they go out into the world. They are motivated by a remarkable (if always imperfect) degree of selfless pursuit of ideas for their own sake and for the good of humankind.

Adam Smith: "I have never known much good done by those who affected to trade for the public good."

To "captains of industry" it is natural that top executives are responsible for the success of any enterprise and therefore deserve large monetary rewards. But a university is not like that. Presidents and Chancellors do not decide what courses to teach and how to teach them; they do not decide what research projects to pursue and how to do that. It is the thousands of professors operating independently and in concert with their peers, who make those decisions. The role of university administrators is to keep the plumbing in working order and to see that the bank accounts are well-managed - necessary work, but not deserving of extravagant salaries.

Note, however, the formal and informal networks, and markets for ideas, that influence those professors' choices of course content and research projects.

There are two fundamental reasons for defending public universities against the corrosions of market logic and erosion of state funding. The first, following our greatest thinkers, from Thomas Jefferson to John Dewey, is that a well-educated citizenry is vital for good government. It is a public good America cannot do without. Money making cannot be the only order of business for a democracy.

The second purpose of public education is to provide opportunity to all qualified students regardless of background and financial status. For generations, our great public universities have been an antidote to the poison of an immanent aristocracy, by providing broad avenues to advancement for our most talented youngsters. The great danger today is the growing gap between a wealthy elite and the rest of us, whether through excessive executive compensation, Wall Street bonuses, or stock speculations.

If these public universities are choked off - either by becoming mediocre schools or by becoming more and more exclusive - then we will have lost a major counterweight to the rule of privilege and a principal foundation for the future of the Republic.

Note that these paragraphs do not depend on the allocation of joint and common costs of research and teaching. They do, however, depend on market tests. The popularity of the U.S. News rankings reflects in part the decision of far too many public universities to pursue enrollments irrespective of whether the matriculants are, as Professor Schwartz puts it, qualified students.

PUBLIC CHOICE AT WORK. In an echo of the late Sen. William (D-Wisc.) Proxmire's Golden Fleece Awards, Senators McCain and Coburn identify eight North Carolina funded research projects as wasteful economic stimulus. The newspaper article notes much of the standard tension between what some people perceive as the obscure and recondite and what the researcher perceives as useful and meritorious. The issue, as Betsy's Page points out, is whether sponsored research, which ordinarily involves a competitition among research proposals called for by a specific government project, ought to be treated as economic stimulus.

Leave aside whether the federal government should be funding such studies in the first place. The real question is whether these projects were good targets for stimulating jobs. Of course they weren't. If they worthwhile they should have been funded out of regular funding for scientific grants. But there is no way that these projects belonged in a emergency stimulus that was supposed to fund jobs. They have nothing to do with jobs regardless of the graduate students who got some money out of them. The stimulus was sold to us as the plan that would provide jobs. But it never had anything to do with jobs. It was just to shovel out a whole bunch of money to a variety of projects sitting out there that hadn't been funded through the regular budgetary process. If someone got a job out of these projects, it was pure happenstance.

In another fifty years, a researcher might be able to estimate the multiplier of the stimulus project, and with some creativity, determine the extent to which that multiplier was reduced by the trading of favors, including relatively small expenditures on university research, in order to get the bill passed. (The exemption of Nebraska from certain expenditures to get the health reform passed is the same phenomenon, on a larger scale).

DIGITAL PHOTOGRAPHY MAKES AMATEURS LOOK GOOD. A large, black, backlight object would cause me no end of trouble, even with 25 years of practice with Kodachrome 64 and the Canon AE-1. But one of the laws of ferroequinology holds that steam locomotives will invariably present themselves with the sun in the wrong place.

Illinois Railway Museum, 1 August 2010.

Solution: turn the flash on. That automatically changes the exposure. Then use the exposure-manipulation software on the computer to crop and tweak at home. Not publicity-photo grade, but acceptable under the circumstances.

Side benefits: no waiting for the photos to return from the camera store (or latterly, Wal-Mart, the last business in DeKalb County trading with the Kodachrome lab); no toxic chemicals used in tweaking the image, no waste of paper with trial exposures in the enlarger.

THE DOWNSIDE OF NOT OFFERING SPECIAL ADMISSIONS TO LEGISLATORS? The latest issue of Passenger Train Journal follows recent developments in the politics of running a passenger train between Dubuque and Chicago by way of Galena, Freeport, Rockford, and either Belvidere or Genoa. The Belvidere routing is currently under development, although the people of Genoa and DeKalb aren't done lobbying yet. Journal editor Mike Schafer, a Northern Illinois University graduate, weighs in.

The war between Genoa and Belvidere flashed again, with Genoa crying "foul" while NIU's weekly [summer only] newspaper, The Northern Star, blasted the headline "Railroaded!" across its front page along with an editorial that huffed about the campus now being bypassed by Amtrak. At least my alma mater is passenger-train aware; but better that it use its clout to get Metra service extended 15 miles from Elburn right to the NIU campus.

I'm not sure what clout the university has, particularly with passenger-allergic Union Pacific using its easy access to The Junction restaurant as reason to park trains across the street from campus. Until Metra service touches some other part of DeKalb County, getting The Overland Route to run scoots to DeKalb will forever be ten years away.

IT'S NOT ABOUT IDEOLOGY, IT'S ABOUT COMPETENCE. Susan Estrich, who managed Michael Dukakis's 1988 presidential campaign, pays Our President a backhanded compliment.

The president may not be in any position to rescue Democrats, but his absence from the campaign trail - particularly if he's playing golf and hobnobbing with rich donors instead - will be viewed (and advertised by Republicans) as an invitation to send him a message he doesn't want to hear.

On the other hand, the Republicans also have their problems. The middle may be up for grabs, but by whom? The devil you know or the one you don't? In tough times, do you go with someone who is unknown, inexperienced and maybe a little bit too far off the beaten track?

The best hope for Democrats from Joe Sestak to Harry Reid is not the president but their opponents. I don't think "tea partiers" are racist, but I'm not sure they're all qualified for the offices they seek. Maybe I'm old-fashioned, but in tough times, even more so than in good times, it makes sense to have someone who knows what they're doing, whether you're hiring someone to fix the pipes or fix the country.

Let me know if you see Joe the Plumber riding around in a tank.

HARRY TRUMAN, YOGI BERRA, AND FRENCH LINEN. A recent issue of The Pennsylvania Railroad Technical and Historical Society's magazine, The Keystone, has some fun with Eurostar's winter difficulties, noting, in addition to the troubles the GG1s encountered, and their fixes, that perhaps Eurostar's designers might have studied the much-maligned Metroliners.

The Metroliners were built with cooling air intakes between the belt rail and side sill. This location proved to be problematic for two reasons. First, their proximity to the slipstream of air, bearing road dirt, developed at high speed, caused failures from ingested contaminants that found their way to numerous sensitive electrical components. Second, and perhaps more important, that stream of cooling air was not really cool, having come from under the cars, where it had been heated by the same equipment (main transformers, brake grids, traction motors, ignitrons, thyristors and blower motors), that it was destined to cool. This resulted in over-temperature failures and thermal degradation of the entire propulsion system. Because of this condition a major upgrade was undertaken, and 34 of the Metroliners were fitted with cooling air intakes on the roof (among other modifications), where cooler and cleaner ambient conditions prevailed. Having apparently learned an important lesson, nearly all [electric multiple units] built since that time for [Northeast Corridor rail transit authority] service have had their air intakes on the roof.

The Eurostar difficulties of the winter of 2009 seem to be of a similar nature, but with asynchronous motors (no commutators) and modern insulation the failures wer more likely due to melted snow water in the stream of cooling air ingested by the solid state power and control electronic devices.

See Robert B. Watson, "The Eurostar and GG1 Winter Failures," The Keystone, 43, 1 (Spring 2010): 13-15. The article includes a photo of a Eurostar locomotive, which devotes more of its side to intake louvers than an Erie-built does, and a sidebar illustrating Tornado pulling a relief commuter train when an ice storm took the Southern Electric's third-rail lines out of service.

FOSTERING INEQUALITY. University Diaries sees the consequences of traditional higher education emulating the upstarts.

For years she’s chronicled the onlining and general cheapening of American university education, but there’s no stronger argument against the degradation of our degrees than a good look at the burgeoning, squalid for-profit sector. Aggressive recruitment of tons of students in order to make lots of money from them; overwhelmingly online offerings taught to people whose identity you cannot even verify; low standards of instruction and little expectation of serious work; not even an effort to offer face-to-face classroom instruction; the replacement of the higher thought implicit in the phrase higher education with information-bullets — we have seen the future, and it is us.

"To obtain promotion, ability must be shown for greater responsibility", from the Book of Rules. Entry level credentials do not necessarily prepare the holder to show that ability.

SKYTRAINS. It's the diamond jubilee for the DC-3 and its military cousin the C-47. One DC-3 is still in commercial service, in Canada.

"This was the first plane that made commercial airline travel possible," said John Tegtmeier, a retired American Airlines pilot who is in Oshkosh with the Flagship Detroit Foundation. "Before then they had to rely on air mail contracts to make money."

DC-3s could carry 21 passengers - seven more than the DC-2 - and airlines could finally make a profit flying humans instead of just cargo and mail. Still, in the late '30s when the Flagship Detroit was flying, a Dallas-New York plane ticket cost $260, which meant only the rich could travel by air. This week AirVenture visitors can walk through the Flagship Detroit for $3.

That profit for carrying passengers was then, and still is, illusory.

CATER TO THAT EXCESS DEMAND. A Forbes financial advice column questions the wisdom of buying your children an expensive degree.

Start while your child is still in high school, and look for local community college classes he or she may be able to take before graduation. Consider your in-state public college; tuition will be much lower, and your college student can continue to live at home instead of paying for room, board and other expenses somewhere else.

Yes, provided the nearby community college or branch of the state university hasn't sold out to the access-assessment-remediation-retention model or committed academic fraud in the name of first-generation, commuter, non-traditional students.

Together with your child's school counselor, look for grants, jobs, work-study programs and other ways to pay for college--this is a great opportunity to teach him or her about money, and how to graduate with the least amount of debt.

This strategy generates lobbyists: at one time a student could make expenses at a residential state university with a full-time summer job and a part-time campus job. Legislatures have changed their appropriations in a way that has raised tuitions and fees. Expense-preference behavior by administrators raising money for beer 'n circus hasn't helped.

PEOPLE RESPOND TO INCENTIVES. When fuel and tire taxes and general revenue funds aren't enough to pay for the roads, congestion pricing is the logical policy response.

Already plagued by the nation's third-worst traffic congestion with little hope of building a way out of gridlock, Chicago-area motorists need to seriously consider whether they're willing to pay more to avoid traffic jams, transportation experts say. A new study by the Metropolitan Planning Council and the Illinois Tollway suggests it's time for Chicago to embrace "congestion pricing."

The strategy imposes the supply-and-demand model on traffic conditions. Expressway motorists pay a fee - or a premium toll on the tollway -- to use a particular lane or lanes during peak-demand periods. The fee would vary, depending on traffic -- maybe about $5.39 for [law student Mario] Reed's commute on the inbound Stevenson -- and lane usage would be "managed" to guarantee steady traffic flow.

"The public understands that unpredictable traffic conditions make everyday driving like a game of roulette," said Joseph Schwieterman, an urban transportation expert at DePaul University. "Congestion pricing is about the only weapon we have in our arsenal to encourage more efficient use of our expressways [and tollways]."

Proponents say the strategy creates incentives to travel during less-crowded times, encourages carpooling and transit use, and cuts wasted time and money from motorists stuck in traffic. Congestion-priced lanes also have been shown to improve traffic flow in adjacent lanes, backers say.

To some extent, traffic conditions are more predictably bad than Professor Schwieterman would have readers believe. The absence of congestion pricing, however, attenuates the incentive employers and workers have to negotiate start and end times at work other than the standard eight to 4.30.

The idea of imposing more tolls on area drivers will be a tough sell, some believe. Many still bristle at paying for an Illinois Tollway bureaucracy they consider self-perpetuating.

But DePaul's Schwieterman said, "Worsening financial problems have pushed our backs to a wall, so policymakers have an incentive to listen."

Experts say morning rush hour traffic is expected to increase by more than 12 percent over the next 20 years, and the region's economic competitiveness and quality of life are at risk unless innovative strategies are implemented.

In its draft comprehensive plan for the region, Go to 2040, the Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning sounded the call for congestion pricing.

The strategy is vital because the region's highway system can't match population growth and because state and federal governments can't be relied on for enough money for new roads, said Randy Blankenhorn, the agency's executive director.

New revenue is needed to maintain and build expressways. The study suggests that congestion-pricing the Kennedy's reversible lanes could provide more than $23 million a year.

"Is everyone going to be happy with paying more? No," Blankenhorn said. "But money isn't going to continue to drop down on us from Springfield and Washington. ... Infrastructure is not free. We want to make it fair and user-based. Users should pay for the system."

That includes, by the way, the over-the-road truckers who avoid the time-of-day tolls by using the remaining U.S. and the state highways, slowing traffic on roads they progressively destroy. And congestion pricing might help put Passenger Rail on the track to self-sufficiency.

Since travel does not morally require government intervention, the second issue is easier to understand. Like food, computers, housing, and the many other goods and services that Americans enjoy in abundance, roads should be built and maintained by the private sector — for profit.

Legislators in Richmond and Annapolis should consider selling existing roads in the metropolitan area to private owners, and leave future road projects to be negotiated between roadbuilders and area landowners. This would have immediate and unexpected positive consequences.

That's the Future of Freedom Foundation, taking a libertarian stance on the provision of internal improvements.

First, gridlock would very likely become a thing of past. At present, the use of roads is effectively “socialized,” with everyone paying virtually the same amount for the roads despite how often or when he drives. Like any other publicly owned commodity, overuse becomes the norm.

It's more accurate to say "like any common-property resource." There is a price that will ration the use of a road, or of a canal, or of a camping area.

Profit-minded road owners, however, would want traffic to move smoothly to avoid osing paying customers. During peak travel times, the price for driving could go up to reflect increased demand, essentially pricing large numbers of potential drivers out of the market, freeing up road space, and cutting down on traffic jams. Fewer cars would also mean less automobile pollution — and better air quality.

The rising price of travel would undoubtedly increase the popularity of mass transit systems, as well. People will still need to travel, but Metro rail and bus services would appear much more attractive. Carpooling, too, would gain popularity to offset rising driving costs, and bicycle paths could be further developed. Walking might even make a comeback! In addition, urban sprawl might be slowed as demand for more localized housing escalated to avoid expensive commutes.

Left unsaid is whether the transit authorities would be able to raise sufficient revenue.

With government in charge, nothing is likely to change — at least not for the better. The issue is politicized, so competing “interests” constantly jockey for control to impose their view on everyone else. Passionate factions form, making progress nearly impossible. Meanwhile, the traffic snarls continue and commuter tempers rise.

Instead, local commuters should begin taking individual responsibility for their use of travel resources. Road users shouldn’t be forced to subsidize rail travel, and passenger-rail advocates shouldn’t have to pay for roads to be built.

Highways in the Washington-area could run smoothly and efficiently, Metro could (finally) turn a profit, and air quality in the region could radically improve, and all without any tax hikes or political battles. Private roads are the route forward. All that’s needed is the political will; the free market will show us the way.

It's refreshing to read a libertarian argument about transportation policy that recognizes the highway lobby as just another collective of rent-seekers. Total privatization of the roads will, however, involve transaction costs: do we have to re-live the era of robber barons on the Rhine?

ENTHUSIASTIC ABOUT EATING. The Annunciation Roman Catholic Church of Green Bay announces its summer picnic.


I always get amused when people say booyah as an expression of triumph. Yes, the church may be trying to build enthusiasm. They're probably not advocating the use of one company's bass bait. Most likely, their picnic involves pot-luck in a pot. Get the largest kettle you can find, and a canoe paddle, and cull a coop of the stewing hens, and get cooking.