My overall comment is this: Europeans understand they exist in a high cost environment so they squeeze out the inefficiency to be competitive. They focus on value-added design and on efficiency in planning and scheduling. We don’t.
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17 February 2012
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9 February 2012
great many people are affected by an individual’s decision to drive in NYC. I have shown elsewhere that a single car round-trip into the Manhattan Central Business District generates external costs on the order of a hundred dollars, just in terms of other road users’ lost time.
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8 February 2012
Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Wastefulness
The Republican presidential campaign recently produced a couple of characteristic bits of what Americans, for lack of a better word, call “news”: Newt Gingrich declaring that New Yorkers “live in high rises and ride the subway” and thus don’t care about gasoline prices; and Tea Party “activists” in Virginia, Florida and Maine convinced that smart-growth initiatives are — wait for it — a UN plot!
When gas was cheap, grasshoppers like Gingrich were singing about how stupid we urban ants were to live in relatively small spaces—to be “packed” into our apartments as they put it, with rote derision. And the subway? It has never been considered a great luxury or comfort, not by those who ride it or those who don’t. The subway is a great efficiency.
Now that the eternal winter of our fossil fuels is palpably at hand, the grasshoppers are starting to change their tune. The wiser ones will “pack” themselves into some kind of urban community. The followers of Gingrich will keep loudly enjoying their luxuries while blaming everyone else for rising costs, until one day they find they can’t afford to live—anywhere.
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13:41
After all, where would be if it didn’t take nearly as long to rehab one of the original IRT stations as it took to build an entire subway line from City Hall to 145th Street?
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1 February 2012
A study of coal’s effects on Kentucky’s budget in 2006 found that it contributed $528m in revenue, but its on-budget costs—training, support, repairs to the roads, R&D for the coal industry—totalled $643m. A study in West Virginia in 2009 also found the coal industry a net cost to the state.
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28 January 2012
A particularly worrying downside is that to come up with the funds, Albany might be forced to starve roads and bridges in other parts of the state, or even transit in and around NYC — not in a “one-shot,” but year in and year out.
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17:01
I’ve run some numbers, and they’re so disturbing that even I’m not sure how much credence to give them. But with the fast-tracking of the jumbo-sized, jumbo-priced rebuild, I felt it was less risky to put them out than to sit on them.
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15:20
Cost of Tappan Zee Mega-Bridge Could Cause Tolls to Triple
A toll increase of that magnitude — in the $10 ballpark — would almost certainly send “demand” (the number of car and truck crossings) into a tailspin. That in turn could necessitate another toll hike to ensure that bondholders stay paid and set up another round of the downward spiral — the same whirlpool that nearly swallowed dozens of utilities a few decades ago.
The history of utilities collapse brought about by the expense of nuclear power, given at the beginning of the post, is interesting in itself. I had no idea that happened, I just assumed nuclear was subsidized to the the point that its outsize costs were not felt by consumers and private operators.
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2 November 2011
it’s an outrage that such a project could cost $65 billion. The tunnel-heavy Shin-Aomori extension of the Tohoku Shinkansen cost $4.6 billion for 82 km, a little more than half the proposed per-km cost of the new business plan – and Japan is a high-construction cost country.
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24 March 2011
these casinos could have been major drivers of rail expansion in the area, but instead they were boosters of the road infrastructure
